Work from Home: The Social Implications of Gendered Labor and Self-Purchase by Africans in New Orleans, 1769–1820

In Spanish and early national New Orleans, more than one hundred African-born slaves gained their freedom through legal manumission. Some were liberated by their own Creole descendants or by Black or white non-relatives. However, two populations are significant exceptions to this rule; for women from the Senegambia and Sierra Leone regions and for men from the Bight of Benin, self-purchase was a more common path to freedom. This paper examines what skills and economic activities these particular populations of West Africans employed in Louisiana and how they rebuilt their social and economic worlds in the wake of the Middle Passage. My paper suggests that these populations each brought their unique gendered notions of work and belonging across the Atlantic and that their African, as opposed to Afro-Creole, experience had a disproportionately large effect in shaping both enslaved and free black culture in early New Orleans.