Beyond the Port: Slavery and the Atlantic Diasporas of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes

This paper uses East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, a landlocked hamlet situated north of New Orleans, east of the riverine West Feliciana Parish, and south of Mississippi’s Natchez District, to explore the intersection of slavery and global migration in the antebellum U.S. South. A republican revolution and the expansion of King Cotton together transformed that parish, one long inhabited by indigenous peoples, from an outpost in Spanish West Florida into the ground zero of Anglo-American expansion. Consequently, diverse enslaved persons from Africa, the Caribbean, and, increasingly, Eastern Seaboard labored in houses and fields even as increasing numbers of Anglo-American settler-imperialists and, later, European immigrants of Irish and Jewish ancestry migrated to the region. Historians generally appreciate the ways that nearby New Orleans and Mobile belonged to the larger circum-Mexican Gulf region, but the heterogeneity, migration, and multilingualism long associated with port cities and the Caribbean borderlands also extended into the interior of the rural South. This paper uses cemetery records supplemented by census and probate records, diaries, and newspapers to highlight the ways that the circulation of both free and enslaved persons into that small area simultaneously connected them to larger Atlantic diasporic communities even as it heightened local tensions over the future of slavery and nation. Even as diverse free persons took to the polls and newspapers to contest the future of immigration, bondspersons used resistance to challenge the future of slavery. Ultimately, the story of this small place contributes to ongoing efforts to illuminate the history of the antebellum South beyond black-white binaries and to situate the rural U.S. South within the Global South.