Sublime

When the Haitian Revolution finally and completely ended in 1809, approximately ten thousand people left the island and came to New Orleans. This number included slaveholders, the enslaved, and free people of color (as they were called), those who were often mixed-race and of a higher status than their more African counterparts. Over the next few

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges.

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.