#its the georgiamen thing all over again

[antebellumite]

Among slaveholders, the slave market existed in a different place and time. Far from being ever-present in cities like New Orleans, the slave market was a quarantined space, legally bounded by high walls to "prevent them from being seen from the street" and banned from many neighborhoods throughout the antebellum period. The state of Louisiana outlawed the trade entirely during the period of panic that followed Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, and the city of New Orleans (like cities across the South) taxed it at the same high rate as pawn shops, cock pits, and race tracks. Like the business they conducted, slave traders were marginalized, through rhetoric more than regulation: "Southern Shy-lock", "Southern Yankee," and "Negro Jockey" they were called, the sorts of insults that marked them as figurative outcasts from slaveholding society. When Daniel Hundley sat down to write the description of slave traders that would be included in his proslavery account, Social Relations in Our Southern States (186), he described the slave traders as a caste apart and assumed that they would be readily identifiable to even the most casual observer. In his description, slave traders looked almost as different from other southern whites as slaves did. "The miserly Negro Trader," Hundley assured his readers, "is outwardly a coarse, ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manners, with a cross-looking phiz, a whiskey tinctured nose, cold hard-looking eyes, a dirty tobacco-stained mouth, and shabby dress." You knew them when you saw them.

-- Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market