NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) —The French Quarter is home to some very historic buildings and all of them have a story to tell. The St Louis Hotel existed from 1838 until 1915 and while it is no longer standing, it played a historic role in the struggle over human rights in New Orleans.
In 1810, the first U.S. Census of Orleans Territory, counted 7,585 free people of color residing in New Orleans. The Crescent City was a unique place of freedom for many with African Ancestry. However, there was a dichotomy at work, of two types of freedom.
From 1804 until 1862, New Orleans was the setting for the selling of over a 135 thousand people to be enslaved. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States at a time. In 1841, the St Louis Hotel was built at a place of luxury.
Jacob Williams is a Visitor Services Assistant at The Historic New Orleans Collection and says, “inside there were massive columns. There were fluted capital columns everywhere. There were 20 foot ceilings. As soon as you entered into the entrance on what is now St. Louis Street, you’d enter into a grand rotunda with a 20-foot oculus in the middle of it with frescos on the ceiling depicting all kinds of scenes of the American Revolution and democracy.”
Amidst the grandeur, the St Louis Hotel was the possessor of two faces. Today, the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel is on the very historic grounds where the St Louis Hotel once stood. A piece of the St Louis Hotel facade is still visible.
“There was a duality of the property. It was a place for residents to come visit, with businessmen coming to stay but also witnessing in the trade of thousands of individuals coming by way of the mid Atlantic. It would have been a striking juxtaposition of what would have been American democracy and the exact opposite,” says Williams.
The selling of the enslaved would happen in early spring. Ninety percent of the people sold would find themselves on either a sugarcane plantation or a cotton plantation. A few of them were sold into urban bondage to labor in the city.
“It was everywhere in New Orleans. It was a city built on the slave trade if I’m being honest. The epicenter of that trade in New Orleans, not arguably was in the St. Louis hotel,” says Jacob Williams.
New Orleans was the third biggest city in the country, with the second biggest port. Many a traveler, both free and enslaved would voyage the Mississippi River.
Jacob Williams says one of the visitors would be essential in the movement towards nation-wide abolition, saying, “Abraham Lincoln came on flatboat twice in 1828 and again in 1831. He later in his life remarked about the imprint the St. Louis Hotel had on him, seeing the public nature of the slave trade in New Orleans.”