City Archives, New Orleans Public Library

An estimated 1.2 million men, women, and children were sold by owners in the Upper South to speculators who took them to the Deep South. They represented a vast majority of the interregional movement of enslaved people. The traders' "stock" was bought individually or in small groups and was added to people coming from other areas, to form coffles that traveled by land or water to southern markets. The fourteen young people-including two children under twelve sold without their parents-listed in this manifest were transported by sea to New Orleans in November 1831. They came from various areas of Maryland and Virginia and represented fragments of families broken by sale from relatives and friends.