Slavery in American was more brutal than slavery practiced around the world. Slavery in Africa itself was more like an indenture. Slaves could marry, own property, and their servitude had a definite term of years. African slavery was never passed from one generation to another. Slavery was not inherently racial in nature. In America the slave codes (laws) passed during the 1700's by the colonial assemblies made chattel slavery a legal institution separate from indenture, gave the slave owner the right to punish slaves even to kill them, allowed families to be split up by sales and declared that a child born to a slave became a slave itself.

Slavery in America followed the big cash crops. Sugar, tobacco and later cotton fueled the demand for labor which Portugese and English traders satisfied with slaves from West African outposts. In over 300 years European slave traders brought somewhere between 12-15 million Africans to the Americas. In 1860 the slave population of the south reached 4 million. Southerners lived in perpetual fear of slave rebellion and acted harshly to quell any uprisings.

African's and Native American Indians were enslaved to work the tobacco fields of Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas. The first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619. The sugar trade brought more slaves to the Caribbean. The 1790 census recorded 697,000 slaves and 50,000 free persons of colour in the United Sates with the overwhelming majority of the Africans in tobacco country.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, anti-slavery sentiment in the Northeast reached a high point. The economics of the tobacco trade had changed from a growth industry with insatiable new labor demand into a stable industry. Slavery was no longer needed. Philosophically slavery was anthithetical to the notion of freedom and many of the founding fathers took issue with its continuation. By 1790 there was significant movement under way to abolish slavery.

There would be a delay. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin making it possible for a laborer to process 50 pounds of cotton per day vs the one pound per day that he could process manually. Suddenly American cotton was the most valuable crop in the world. Railroads, steamboats and other infrastructure allowed the cotton export trade to explode over the next few years. Even with Whitney's Cotton Gin, cotton agriculture was highly labor intensive and fueled a resurgence of the slave trade.

After the Louisiana Purchase, plantations in Louisiana also began to produce sugar cane for sale throughout the United States. Etienne Bore's discovery of an improved refining process in 1790 had increased the profitability of sugar and brought even more slaves to Southeast Louisiana.

The New Orleans directory of 1805 lists 8,000 residents of the city. 3,000 white, 3,500 slaves and 1,500 free persons of color. This population doubled in 1809 with the arrival of large numbers of Hatian refugees. Between 1820 and 1860 more than 60 percent of the Upper South's enslaved population was "sold South."

New Orleans became the top cotton exporting port in the country and the top slave market. The New Orleans Cotton Exchange was one of the busiest marketplaces in the world. Louisiana plantations and especially the delta region of northeast Mississippi produced the cotton and shipped it via steamboat to New Orleans where it was transhipped to England's textile mills.

Cotton, "White Gold," drove the expansion of New Orleans making it the fourth largest city in the country by 1840. The Civil War, land exhaustion and the boll weevil slowed King Cotton until the Great Flood of 1927 and the Great Depression finished it off. Where cotton had once been king, welfare now reigns, especially in agricultural areas. Blacks emigrated from the fields to the cities. Many moved North where they discovered improved racial attitudes. Others endured the Jim Crow laws passed after the Civil War and moved to cities across the South including New Orleans.