In chapter one of the A City through Their Eyes series, The Life of a Historian explores how free and enslaved women used the colonial marketplace to their advantage. Starting from a familiar space, Congo Square (Place des Nègres), this post reveals that as entrepreneurs African women and women of African descent redefined the racial and gendered power dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans.
Women in the Marketplace of Congo Square:
Challenging the Racial and Gender Power Dynamics of French and Spanish New Orleans
A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color – Agostino Brunias, c. 1769
(Source: Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art)
The Marketplace that was Congo Square
Located at what is now Louis Armstrong Park in the neighborhood of Tremé, Congo Square has long been accepted as a place of cultural significance throughout New Orleans’ history. Most famously, many remember this public space as a site where free and enslaved Africans and people of African descent from the city and surrounding areas gathered on free Sundays.
The 1724 French Code Noir, a set of laws regulating the practice of slavery in French colonies, granted enslaved persons Sundays as a non-laboring day. While free days for enslaved persons was not an uncommon practice throughout the Atlantic world, historians Kimberly S. Hanger and Jerah Johnson suggest that practice in New Orleans was exceptional. According to both Hanger and Johnson, under “both French and Spanish rulers the colony’s purpose was primarily strategic” in that “neither wanted Britain to seize it.”[1] As production of agriculture and raw materials was not the primary colonial goal, staple crops and other essential goods were often scarce and not readily available. As a result, European colonists depended on the crops and goods enslaved people produced and sold on their days off. Johnson even argues “that slaves there came early to be recognized as having the right to use their free time virtually as they saw fit.”[2]
At Congo Square, then, free and enslaved Africans and people of African descent used their day off to take part in African traditions of dance, music, commerce, and sacred rituals. The lasting cultural influence of Congo Square can still be heard in jazz music today.
Dancing in Congo Square – Edward Winsor Kemble, 1886
Nonetheless, some historians have come to question the totality of freedom in Congo Square, especially after the United States acquired the city of New Orleans. In Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions, historian Rashauna Johnson argues that Congo Square “was a physical playground for imagined blackness that, like the slave markets…only steps away, gave free persons an opportunity to enjoy a curated and contained blackness.”[3] Within this curated and contained blackness, the power structure of New Orleans slave society still reigned supreme. In other words, the cultural expression of Congo Square served to associate blackness with enslavement, thus, strengthening the connections between free and white. Even still, Johnson writes “in Congo Square people of African descent reclaimed their bodies and created communities.”[4]
More importantly, and for the A City through Their Eyes series, Congo Square provided a space where enslaved women were able to sell goods and crops. The money they earned within the marketplaces of French and Spanish New Orleans gave free and enslaved women the political and economic power to shape their lives within a society intent on controlling their bodies absolutely.
Before Congo Square emerged as a site of African cultural expression during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it started as a market for enslaved people. From the 1740s and on, enslaved people flocked to this market space to sell and trade goods like fish and game or pecan pies and molasses candy. Buyers who often bought goods from the market included not only other enslaved people, but also white colonists, free persons of color, and local Native Americans.
Women, in general, played a prominent role in town markets, but African-American women became perhaps the most influential buyers and sellers of food in New Orleans.” – Ethnohistorian Daniel H. Usner in Indians, Settlers, and Slaves, 202.
While the Code Noir granted enslaved Africans and people of African descent Sundays off from labor, it also ” expressly forbade…slaves to own any kind of property, to conduct any kind of trade on their own account, to gather in large groups, or to hunt or sell goods…without written permission.”[5] However, both enslaved entrepreneurs and French colonial authorities recognized that enslaved entrepreneurs “provided much needed supplies to a city frequently, if not chronically, short of foodstuffs.”[6] So, even though illegal, because white colonialists were dependent on the market, enslaved women effectively forced white authorities to accept the political and economic legitimacy of their marketplace.
Even after Spain took possession of New Orleans, the market persisted but was still within this legal limbo of political and economic legitimacy. In fact, under Spanish rule, the market flourished as the economy improved and the population of New Orleans increased. Still, the power structure of New Orleans remained firmly entrenched in the hands of white colonialists.
Fortunately, however, the emergence of enslaved entrepreneurs dovetailed with the introduction of Spanish rule, thus, Spanish laws and customs governing the institution of slavery. As historian Kimberly S. Hanger notes, “it was in New Orleans that Spanish laws protecting slaves and free blacks and advancing their interests came to full force.”[7]
Plan of the City of New Orleans and Adjacent Plantations
(Copy and Translation from the Original Spanish Plan dated 1798, showing the City of New Orleans)
– Alexander Debrunner and Charles Laveau Trudeau, c. 1875
(Source: Library of Congress)
Under Spanish rule, then, “enslaved people found more opportunities to gain freedom” and “more opportunities to earn money for self-purchase as the economy improved.”[8]
The Political Power of the Purse
The economic power and wealth enslaved women earned from the marketplace allowed many to purchase their freedom. In fact, during Spanish New Orleans, self-purchase was among one of the most common and frequent ways enslaved women used to claim the rightful power over their bodies.[9] Some women even accumulated enough wealth to buy the freedom of their loved ones as well. For example, Margarite Trudeau, who as a businesswoman was able to purchase her freedom before acquiring enough money to free her son from bondage.[10]
African women and women of African descent continued their entrepreneurial lifestyles even after self-purchase. As free businesswomen, African women and women of African proved even more formidable. Their financial success even impelled white shopkeepers on occasion to petition the municipal council to enact market regulations for their benefit. Other times, white businessmen acknowledged the business acumen of black women that led to a few successful business ventures. For example, Antonio Sanchez formed a partnership with Maria Juana Ester, who previously as an enslaved entrepreneur had purchased her freedom. Together they owned and operated a retail business in New Orleans.[11]
Thus, as entrepreneurs, free and enslaved African women and women of African descent challenged the racial and gendered hierarchy of New Orleans, one purposely constructed to strip them of their autonomy.
Additional Resources
Louisiana Digital Library
“Free People of Color in Louisiana: Revealing an Unknown Past”
National Park Service – NPGallery Digital Asset Management System
Congo Square – National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
Jackson Square – National Register of Historic Places Registration Form
Cited Sources
[1] Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 6.
[2] Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early Afro-American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 32, no. 2 (Spring 1991), 124.
[3] Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 117.
[4] Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 121.
[5] Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square,” 129.
[6] Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square,” 129.
[7] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 5.
[8] Leslie M. Harris, “Urban Slavery,” Slavery, Abolition & Social Justice, http://www.slavery.amdigital.co.uk.utk.idm.oclc.org/Essays/content/LeslieHarrisEssay.aspx.
[9] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 28.
[10] Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 63.
[11] Kimberly S. Hanger, “Landlords, Shopkeepers, Farmers, and Slave-Owners: Free Black Female Property-Holders in Colonial New Orleans,” in Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 223.