“On Board of a Vessel . . . or on Board of a Steam Boat”: Atlantic Slavery in Louisiana’s Florida Parishes

In September 1822, Josias Gray published a runaway slave advertisement in the St. Francisville Asylum. Gray sought the return of Henry Moore, a 30 year-old French-speaking sailor from Baltimore whom a New Orleans trader had previously sold to a Captain Walsh of Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Walsh then sold Moore to Gray, a prominent planter of the same region. Two days after Moore’s disappearance, his enslaved wife Lucy, also 30 and a Feliciana resident for at least 12 years, also ran away (perhaps to join her partner, though this is not certain). Gray suspected Moore would “try to get on board of a vessel to go to sea, or on board of a steam boat as a free man to shelter himself in the free states.” Moore’s bondage and his potential escape routes illuminate the history of the Atlantic World in rural Louisiana, encompassing port cities and rural plantations, vessels and steamboats, black sailors and the slave trades, slave marriage and antislavery resistance, the Mississippi River and Atlantic Ocean. This paper, part of a chapter in a larger book project, draws on newspapers, family papers, police jury records, among other sources to use the life and times of Josias Gray – his presence on the first page of local police jury records, settler domesticity with wife Joice Gray, asymmetrical if mutually beneficial relationship with freed woman of color Ann Maria, and death that dispersed a slave community of some 130 people – to show how planters and enslaved persons alike drew on Atlantic experiences, information streams, trade, and migration routes to create – and contest – a rural “Happyland” carved from Choctaw land and through African labor. In so doing, this paper meditates on the relationship between the local and the transnational, the rural South and Atlantic World.