Slavery & Incarceration in New Orleans

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In the spring of 1718, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded the city of New Orleans, La Nouvelle-Orleans, in what was then the French colony of Louisiana. There were of course, already people living in the area, the Chitamacha, but their numbers had been decimated by European diseases spread by their trading partners, even before the Chitimacha themselves had any direct contact with the French. In 1763, after the British defeated the French in the Seven Years War, the French ceded the colony of Louisiana, including New Orleans to the Spanish Empire. For nearly four decades, Nueva Orleans was under Spanish control. The 1795 Pinckney Treaty cleared the way for Americans to navigate the Mississippi River and to use the port at New Orleans to transfer goods to ocean going vessels. However, in October of 1800, Spain returned Louisiana to the French in the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, a move that panicked Americans. French First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte viewed the re-acquisition of Louisiana as a plank in his vision to rebuild the French Empire in the Americas. But his dream was short lived. By the fall of 1802, the French army was losing badly in their fights against the revolutionaries, and against yellow fever in Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti. Recognizing the imminent loss of Saint-Domingue, Napoleon gave up his plans for the Americas. In April, 1803, Ambassador Robert R. Livingston, and Special Envoy James Monroe were in France, attempting to acquire New Orleans from the French for $10 million, when French Foreign Minister Francois Barbe-Marbois, acting under Napoleon's orders, surprised them, with an offer to sell them the entire Louisiana territory, an area of more than 800,000 square miles, for $15 million. At the time, around 8000 people lived in New Orleans, around 4000 of whom were white, 1300 free Blacks, and 2700 enslaved. By 1809, over 10,000 Haitian refugees, both white and Black, had fled to New Orleans, doubling the population of the city and bringing their Caribbean culture. This flow of refugees wasn't the only effect of the Haitian revolution on the development of New Orleans. The Revolution also created widespread fear in the south, that enslaved people in the United States would rise up in rebellion as they had in Saint-Domingue. The Municipal Council in New Orleans responded to that fear by creating one of the first professional salaried police forces in the United States, in 1805. It was primarily tasked with pursuing runaway slaves and examining slave passes. In the same year, New Orleans began the operation of police jail, housed in the old colonial prison where captured runaway slaves were taken for corporal punishment and forced employment on chain gangs. A year later, in 1806, the territorial governor of Louisiana signed into law three policing bills. One required that jailed enslaved people labor on public works. The second was a vagrancy law, allowing for the jailing of vagrants, "idle and disorderly persons," who lacked,  "any property wherewith to maintain themselves." Third was an immigration law that disregarded the status of free Black refugees from Saint-Domingue, legalizing their incarceration as fugitive slaves to be forcibly employed on public works. The fear of insurrection was nearly realized a few years later, in 1811, when several hundred enslaved plantation workers in Louisiana rebelled, marching on New Orleans and burning sugar plantations on the way, in the largest attempted slave revolt in US history. Louisiana was admitted as the 18th state to the United States on April 30, 1812, and New Orleans grew rapidly, with over 100,000 residents by 1840. The city quickly outgrew its jail, and in 1935, a new prison complex, designed by city surveyor Joseph Pilie, opened, with two adjacent buildings, a parish prison for free prisoners, and a police jail for enslaved prisoners. The police jail was quickly filled. By 1830, enslaved people in New Orleans were committed to police jail at a rate of 32.2 per 100. On an average day, between one and 2% of the city's enslaved population was jailed. Most of those who were jailed were arrested for mobility crimes, that is to say for running away or walking around without a pass. However, some slaveholders used the police jail for so called safekeeping, leaving enslaved people in police jail for various reasons, including while they were traveling. Enslaved prisoners were whipped in the prisons. They also provided valuable labor to the city, working in literal chain gangs, on street construction, custodial service, even in disposing of corpses during epidemics. In January, 1861, Louisiana seceded from the United States. In spring of 1862, the Union Army captured New Orleans, which had been the largest slave market in the United States prior to the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, which went into effect on January 1, 1863, explicitly exempted New Orleans and the other union controlled parishes of Louisiana, as Lincoln tried to entice slaveholders in the region to pledge loyalty to the union. In September of 1864, though, Louisiana's new state constitution, adopted by the union controlled areas, including New Orleans, abolished slavery. In 1865, the 13th amendment the United States Constitution was ratified, outlawing slavery or involuntary servitude, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Louisiana, which has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the United States, still requires involuntary servitude by state inmates serving a felony conviction. In November, 2022, voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Oregon and Vermont outlawed slavery as punishment for crime. Voters in Louisiana rejected a similar measure by 20 points. At the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, incarcerated prisoners picked cotton at gunpoint for Prison Enterprises, the for-profit arm of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Joining me now, to help us understand more about this history, is Dr. John Bardes, Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University, and author of, "The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803, to 1930."

Hi, John, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. John Bardes  11:22  
Thanks so much for having me.

Kelly  11:24  
So I want to hear a little bit about what got you into this particular subject, looking at incarceration and slavery in New Orleans. 

Dr. John Bardes  11:35  
Yeah, so I think in the, in my lifetime, the rise of mass incarceration in this country has just sparked a tremendous amount of interest in the history of the relationship between race and the prison. And so I, when I entered graduate school in history, I wanted to study that relationship by looking at where I thought the story started, which was emancipation during the Civil War. You know, a story had emerged, the historical interpretation had emerged that said that enslaved people really weren't policed or incarcerated very much before emancipation, because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. But it wasn't until after emancipation that southern communities began developing all these new penal systems and policing systems designed to re-entrap freed people and recreate something that resembled slavery in all but name right. So I very much I set out to tell that story by looking at how policing patterns and incarceration patterns in New Orleans changed with emancipation. And I thought I knew the story I was going to tell. Right. And I very quickly, in the archive found a completely different story, which was that with emancipation, incarceration rates and arrest rates in New Orleans actually fell dramatically. They actually plummeted, not because there was after the Civil War, there weren't efforts to to entrap freed people, because arrest rates and incarceration rates in antebellum New Orleans were so astronomical that enslaved people in antebellum New Orleans were arrested and jailed and sentenced to penal labor at some of the highest rates that people have ever been arrested and jailed anywhere in this country at any time. And that was something that really, really shocked me, that was a story I didn't expect to discover.

Kelly  13:43  
Could you talk some about the archives themselves? So it's often the case that we don't have a lot of detail, detailed archives for slavery, and the same is often true for incarceration, but you're able to find out a wealth of material here. So what are these records that you're able to pull from?

Dr. John Bardes  14:00  
New Orleans maintained a police department going back as far as 1805, and maintained specialized slave prisons going back as far as 1805. And both the police and the slave prisons maintained incredibly meticulous records, you know, daily intake ledgers, records of arrests, records pertaining to how enslaved people were deployed as penal laborers. It's just an incredible wealth of data, containing somewhere in the ballpark of half a million names of enslaved and free people who were arrested and jailed in the city before the Civil War. So, you know, there's obviously a lot that these records don't tell you, right. I mean, they don't tell you the actual experiences of incarcerated people, or what how they reacted to their incarceration or whether or not they believe they had actually committed the crime for which they were arrested. But by combining the arrest records with incarcerated people's own narratives, I was able to kind of flesh out what the carceral experience was like for an enslaved person in the antebellum city.

Kelly  15:15  
So you just mentioned how much data there is. What was your process in looking at data itself? You have a lot of charts and graphs and things in the book. Statistical analysis is in some ways important to this story. So what is your process of doing that, collecting all this data, figuring out how and when to include the stories and then also the statistics and numbers?

Dr. John Bardes  15:42  
The, for me, the kind of history that I really enjoy writing is history that combines statistical analysis with personal human narratives. I think you really need to have both. You need to have people's own stories, to give a sense of human connection for the reader to give a sense of what the person's experience actually was like. But if you only rely on on personal narratives and descriptive details, you can lose a sense of what was happening at a structural level. Right. So for me, it was very, very important to collect statistics, so that I could actually demonstrate the extent to which New Orleans was a police state, you know, the, the, so I could really kind of use numbers to show how high the arrest rates the police to population ratios, incarceration rates were in terms of actually collecting that data. So I went to the archive, and photographed 1000s of pages of arrest books, and then I transcribed it. And that probably took me about a year and it gave me carpal tunnel. You know, like it was like a, it was a totally insane thing to do I try you know, the first ledger book I tried to transcribe contained over 12,000 names of enslaved people brought to a slave prison. But it was only by collecting all that data that I was able to see structurally how this prison operated in the city, its role in the city's economy, and the incredible impact that these prisons had on the experiences of urban enslaved people.

Kelly  17:24  
You mentioned the year 1805, which is when this police system starts and the system of prisons for for enslaved people. So we are right on the heels there of the revolution in what is now Haiti. And you talk some in the book about the importance of that revolution and how it's sort of hanging over the heads of people in New Orleans. Could you expand on that and talk about how why that is an important piece of this history in understanding what is happening in New Orleans?

Dr. John Bardes  17:58  
The revolution in Haiti was very much the trigger that pushed slaveholders in New Orleans and in other southern port cities to start developing the first fully modern police forces and prison systems and to develop prisons designed exclusively for enslaved people. So the revolution in Haiti, then known as Saint Domingue, was a cataclysmic global event. It was the first successful slave revolt in the history of the Americas. And slave holders across the Americas were absolutely terrified that radicalism, promulgated by the revolution would infect, in their words, other enslaved communities, that enslaved people in the United States would be inspired by this rebellion, and would try to and would revolt against their masters also. So the solution that slaveholders in New Orleans developed was to turn to the state government to design an intense web of police and prisons that would prevent revolt and increase slaveholders' control over the people they held in captivity.

Kelly  19:15  
And what does that look like? I'm sure there are people listening who are thinking, what does it mean to go to prison if you are already enslaved? And of course, there were people at the time writing the same thing, "What would be the point in having prison?" So what does that actually look like? What are the reasons that people who are already enslaved are going to these prisons?

Dr. John Bardes  19:37  
So slave holders and public authorities in Louisiana put a lot of thought into how to design a prison entirely for enslaved people. This was also happening at an age when prison development was a very vogue topic of debate and discussion and you know, all across the United States and all across the world, people were debating how to create new prisons. They thought that prisons would be able to transform people into ideal citizens, that this would be a revolution in governance. This is the moment when the penitentiary starts to emerge for the first time. And so slaveholders in Louisiana were very much tapped into that conversation. And they wanted to think about how they could use these new developments in penology, and adapt them for the needs of, of slave society. So what they created was a prison that, in their minds, could transform resistant and rebellious enslaved people into, in their minds, the perfect submissive slave. This was a prison that would brutalize resistant people into submission and subservience. The actual, so the actual design of this prison, its guiding principle was humiliation, that it tried to force submission into people by publicly humiliating them, and also by sentencing them to exhausting penal labor. So the process but you know, an enslaved person bought it brought into this prison, you know, is tremendously brutal. They would be stripped entirely nude. They would be strapped to a whipping rack and given a standardized corporal punishment, administered by a professional jailer. Hundreds of people would be whipped on these prison whipping racks each day. They would be given a you know, prison uniform, they would be locked in, in cells, either in groups or with solitary confinement. And then during the day, prisoners would be organized into chain gangs, and would be sent out into the streets of New Orleans to build public infrastructure. On any given day in antebellum New Orleans, there were anywhere between 70 and 150 enslaved penal laborers, building public infrastructure, and then these slave chain gangs were tremendously important to the economic development of New Orleans. I mean, they built the city's levees, they built the city's wharves, they paved streets, they installed sewage lines, they were the city's only sanitation service. And these were the people actually cleaning the streets and and removing trash. The city, New Orleans grew astronomically during during the antebellum era. You know, by 1840, it was the fourth largest city in the United States. And I think that growth was entirely built on the backs of these enslaved penal laborers, these chain gangs of enslaved people.

Kelly  22:57  
So I have a mug that says history should make you uncomfortable. And this is exactly the kind of history that is extremely hard to read, for instance, you know, anything to do with slavery, anything to do with incarceration, you put the two of them together, you know, this is really hard. So I want to ask for you, as a researcher, as a writer, you spent years with this project. What's your process for writing about it? Do you need to do like self care? What what does that look like for you? Because even the you answering that question, I found myself like, choked up. And you know, so what, how do you deal with this?

Dr. John Bardes  23:37  
It's such an excellent question. This was a really hard book to write. And there were definitely times where I was overwhelmed by the scale of the violence I was reading. You know, when I when you look at a record book, a ledger containing the torture schedule for 12,000 people, you know, that's existentially horrific, right? It's hard to even wrap your brain around that. I don't think I'll write another book like this again, you know. I don't want to sit in that much sadness again, to be honest. I mean, the next book I'm working on, is seeking to be while also rooted in the in the antebellum South is seeking to be a much more uplifting story about how enslaved people and free Black people transmitted knowledge to one another and and formed a kind of a, a political consciousness by exchanging stories and abolitionist news and information. You know, that's dicey, that project is kind of a way of clearing my head after spending years in some very dark places. But yeah, it's I think it's I think it's really hard for any historian because on one level, a good historian wants to remain objective, but on the other level a good historian wants to empathize with their subjects because empathy is a pathway to understanding. So finding that balance between objectivity and empathy and really putting yourself in the position of somebody experiencing something as horrific as a slave prison, that is both necessary and exhausting work. I don't know, I don't know if that was a good answer.

Kelly  25:31  
I don't know if there is a good answer to the question. 

Dr. John Bardes  25:33  
It's a great question. Right.

Kelly  25:35  
So since you just mentioned about free Black people in New Orleans. I want to talk a little bit about that. New Orleans is such an interesting place to think about race in this antebellum time period. There are lots of, it's not just Black and white, there's a whole range of definitions of race. It's changing and shifting over time. Could you talk a little bit about the free Black population in New Orleans? How were they  experiencing this, you know, when they are not  caught up in the system when they are sometimes caught up in the system? What that looks like for them?

Dr. John Bardes  26:19  
Yeah, so New Orleans had the largest free population of color of any city in the Deep South. And this population was, although it had rich and poor members, on average, it was a well off population, consisting of many of many skilled artisans, of property holders, of scientists and teachers, and in some cases of large scale, wealthy, free slaveholders of color. And I was very interested in seeing how this population was policed. And what I found was that the privileges of class tended to protect wealthy free people of color from police harassment and prison violence, that locally born free Black trades people and land owners were generally not arrested during during the antebellum period in New Orleans, were not arrested at high rates. The people who were arrested at really high rates were free Black sailors and travelers who came into the city in search of work, you know, free Black steamboat workers, for example. That population, people who didn't have the protections of class or the protections of localism that were afforded to Louisiana's permanent population of free people of color, that that migratory menial population, police targeted them with impunity. So one of the things I found that really surprised me was that if you look at the records of the slave prison, about 10, to 15% of all the people in the slave prison are people who actually claimed to be free Black sailors and steamboat workers and migrant laborers seized on the pretense that they might be fugitive enslaved people, but insisting the entire time that they were incarcerated that they were legally free. And this went on for years. This was not an accident. But this was an intentional design that the New Orleans police went out and arrested Black sailors and migrant workers as though they were fugitive enslaved people and jailed them for weeks, months, even years in the slave prison system. So that was the dynamic before the Civil War. After the Civil War, this dynamic really changed and people who had been free and well to do before the Civil War, very quickly learned that their class protections no longer had the currency that they once had. And police in many cases, deliberately targeted, free Black, freeborn Black landowners and property holders, targeted them for harassment as a way of communicating to them that their class privileges would no longer protect them.

Kelly  29:30  
Another popular conception we have of the antebellum South that's really undercut by this narrative is the solidarity of the white people in the south and that there, whether they were landowners or poor whites that they were all sort of banded together against the Black population. And that's of course not true in much of the story that you're writing here of New Orleans. So could you talk about about that, and how class really factors in a lot into that as well, because there is policing, not just of course of Black people, but also very much of white people?

Dr. John Bardes  30:09  
Yes, New Orleans was a police state not just for the enslaved or for free Black migrant workers but also for poor white migrant workers and the white working poor who and white a new European immigrants all these all these impoverished poor white people who who pass through the city, they also were arrested and incarcerated at really, really high rates, although not as high as the rates that that Black people were arrested and incarcerated at. You know, if you New Orleans by the 1850s was, a  its arrest rate among white people was the highest of any major US city. And I think, you know, if you kind of step back and look at arrests of you look at what New Orleans was trying to accomplish, and look at how high the arrest rates were among poor white immigrants, among enslaved people, and among free Black sailors and travelers, a kind of a coherent picture starts to emerge where Louisiana's slave holders were firmly committed to the idea that mobile poor people were dangerous, and that the government had a duty, a responsibility to help the wealthy plantation elite subdue this autonomous itinerant mobile population, white or Black. That, you know, and I want to I want to be very clear, I'm not suggesting that poor white people and enslaved people wherever policed or harassed, to commence their degrees. I mean, of course, they weren't like always whiteness provided the white working poor with certain protections that were unavailable to free Black and enslaved people. But both poor whites and enslaved people were trying to navigate a system wherein the state believed it had an obligation and a duty to subdue them in the service of employers, to seize them, and bring them under submission, and help maximize their their economic productivity.

Kelly  32:42  
And that, of course, leads us to the question of vagrancy. So that makes up a large part of the book is talking about vagrancy laws, how they shift over time, who they're used against, and why. I was reading your book, especially a section on vagrancy, sitting in a coffee shop from which I could see people panhandling on the street. And you know, we still struggle with these issues, of course today. But we do not any longer have the same kind of laws on the books where you can be arrested just for not having a job or seeming like maybe you don't have a job. Could you talk about that concept and how it's used in New Orleans and throughout the South?

Dr. John Bardes  33:25  
Yeah. So vagrancy laws were the most important legal mechanism in the 19th century, for coercing, free labor. They existed throughout the United States and throughout Europe. And typically vagrancy arrest, vagrancy was the one of the most common reasons for which people were arrested in the 19th century. Vagrancy laws criminalized people who looked as though they might be homeless or unemployed. And so typically, these laws targeted mobile, poor people, who, in the eyes of the arresting officer weren't living up to their full laboring potential, you know, people who were working kind of odd jobs with strange hours, professional sex workers, people who were hanging out in bar rooms during the during the daytime, anybody who in the eyes of the police was an underperforming worker, and who was poor and shiftless. These were the targets of vagrancy laws. New Orleans had the highest vagrancy arrest rate during the antebellum period of any major city in the United States. New Orleans even had a much higher vagrancy arrest rate than London. Usually we think of London as like the city that epitomizes coercive, poor law. But actually, New Orleans was arresting people for vagrancy at leaps and bounds beyond what London was doing. So you know, antebellum New Orleans kind of had these two separate penal labor systems running side by side, where poor white people in the city were arrested for vagrancy at really high rates, and Black people, be they legally free or legally enslaved were arrested is for fugitive enslaved people at really, really high rates and the poor white people arrested for vagrancy are being sent to work houses where they're performing penal labor, basically indoor factories, and the people arrested, fugitive enslaved people, are being sent it's a chain gangs and are being tasked with building public infrastructure. And New Orleans was deeply relying on both these penal labor systems. With emancipation, authorities in New Orleans, basically tried to collapse these two penal labor systems together and began arresting, poor white, poor white people and freed people on vagrancy charges, bringing them to former slave prisons and sentencing them to chain gangs. And they basically decided that these slave chain gangs could be re reincarnated and repurposed as chain gangs for people convicted of vagrancy. This happened in cities throughout the south. New Orleans wasn't unique in making this jump from fugitive slave chain gangs to vagrancy chain gangs. And these vagrancy chain gangs really persisted throughout the south, and were absolutely vital to the construction of public infrastructure throughout the south, all the way through the Jim Crow era, all the way through the Civil Rights Movement, and all the way up to a 1970 US Supreme Court case, which ruled that vagrancy laws were unconstitutionally vague, throughout the country. And basically, that's why we, you know, people alive today have not encountered vagrancy laws  in the way that people throughout the 19th and early 20th century, encountered them. 

Kelly  36:57  
Let's bring this story into the present day. We of course, again, are in a time of mass incarceration, as you point out, not quite the levels that we saw in New Orleans before the Civil War, but still, you know, really high compared to the rest of the world. What can you find from your research that might shed light on the current crisis that we're dealing with and how we might think, going into the future about what a society should be, could be, should be doing?

Dr. John Bardes  37:32  
It's such an excellent question. Yeah, I think what I found disturbing and difficult while writing this book, was the we often imagine there being a division between torture and punishment. Right. And we imagine that slavery is really like the embodiment of the worst kind of physical torture we can imagine. And that the criminal justice system issues, punishments that are at least in theory, rational and structured. And looking at the history of slave prisons, and realizing that the torture of enslaved people could also be structured by a bureaucracy and be part of a government managed criminal justice system. That really collapsed for me this idea of a boundary between torture and punishment, that I think we need to be honest with ourselves and recognize that the task of our prison system is to inflict violence on people. Right, it is a massive bureaucracy bureaucracy tasked with inflicting violence at at incomprehensible scale. I am not saying that that means that we should entirely abolish that prison. I think most people would say that there are contexts in which in which people should have rights taken away. There are contexts in which people should suffer state penalties. But I think we should be honest with ourselves when we look at our criminal justice system, and we should recognize that this boundary between irrational torture and rational bureaucratized violence is a completely artificial one. Does that make sense? I don't know. I mean, I don't these are not fully formed thoughts, right. But but it it recognizing the history of slave prisons forces one to see the infliction of violence by the government in a new light.

Kelly  39:57  
Yeah, no, I that was definitely what came out for me as I was reading this and thinking through it. So there's much more in the book that we're not going to get to. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. John Bardes  40:10  
Yes, it's available through the University of North Carolina Press' website. And also it's available wherever books are sold, so on Amazon and all the various online platforms. 

Kelly  40:25  
Well, John, thank you so much for speaking with me and for writing such a thoughtful book. 

Dr. John Bardes  40:30  
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate this interview.

Teddy  40:53  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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