1803

The 1803 Louisiana Purchase, celebrated as expansion of American freedom, was simultaneously the expansion of American slavery. President Jefferson and Congress debated slavery's extension into the territory. The purchase ultimately provided the geographic space for slavery to spread west of the Mississippi, creating the sugar parishes of Louisiana and the cotton kingdom of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri over the following decades.

The 1803 Louisiana Purchase provided geographic space for slavery's westward expansion. It created the sugar parishes of Louisiana and eventually the cotton kingdom of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. The purchase extended what Jefferson called the 'empire of liberty' — and of slavery.

The Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 added 828,000 square miles to the United States, opening vast new territory to cotton and sugar cultivation — and thus to the expansion of slavery. Jefferson, who justified the purchase partly in terms of agrarian expansion, declined to act against slavery in the new territories. Louisiana's existing Code Noir was largely replaced with American slave law. The sugar parishes of Louisiana became notorious for the most brutal working conditions in North America; enslaved people there had the shortest life expectancy of any region in the South. The purchase also foreclosed the possibility of a free Black Haitian-allied presence in the Mississippi Valley.

South Carolina, the only state to do so, re-opened the international slave trade in December 1803, taking advantage of the Constitutional protection that ran until 1808. In the five years before the federal ban took effect, South Carolina's ports — primarily Charleston — received an estimated 40,000 enslaved Africans. Slave ships arrived from the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Senegambia. The trade was openly commercial; Charleston newspapers listed slave ship arrivals alongside cargo manifests. This last burst of importation was a deliberate effort to stock labor for the expanding cotton and rice economy before the federal door closed.

A group of captive Igbo people seize their vessel off the Georgia coast and walk into Dunbar Creek, choosing death over enslavement.