The Last Slaves of New Orleans

Late in 1865 and early 1866, a rumor percolated through the southern United States that freed people were being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Cuba and Brazil. A Congressional investigation turned up little hard evidence of widespread kidnapping and reenslavement, but it did bring to light the case of three slave children taken from New Orleans to Havana during the Civil War. Based on the author’s research in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Havana, this paper tells the children’s story and explains how they came to the attention of the national government. In doing so it links freed people’s intimate and local efforts to restore families broken by slavery and war to the national and international politics of slavery. The story of these “last slaves of New Orleans” reveals the mayhem of wartime emancipation, the fragility of freedom, and the logic behind newly freed people’s fear of being drawn back into slavery’s Atlantic vortex. The case provides a coda to the long history of North Americans’ involvement in illegal Atlantic slaving.