A Society Built Upon Enslaved Labor: Slavery in St. Louis

The St. Louis riverfront in 1852. Missouri Historical Society.

This is the first page of the National Park Service series The History of Slavery in St. Louis, from Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site.

A century of slavery

Slavery existed in St. Louis for 100 years. French settlers led by Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau founded the city in 1764, and relied on enslaved Black people to build streets and Catholic churches, farm, nurse, and keep house. Some had been born in Africa and forced across the Middle Passage. In the early colonial years roughly thirty percent of the city's residents were enslaved.

As St. Louis grew into a large city in the 1800s, enslaved people worked at every kind of job: on farms, in laundries and houses, on building sites and in restaurants, on the Mississippi docks and on steamboats. They worked long hours without pay in terrible conditions, were whipped by their enslavers, and suffered the permanent loss of family members sold at auction. The abolitionist William Wells Brown, enslaved in St. Louis as a teenager and young man, later said that "no part of our slave-holding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis."

The growth of slavery in St. Louis and in Missouri as a whole, 1810 to 1860. NPS.

The language of slavery

Scholars and activists have argued for more accurate language about enslaved people's experience, and the debate continues. The series uses person-centred terms that stress the humanity of those who suffered under slavery:

• "Enslaved person", not "slave": a person forced to work against their will under threat of violence, where "slave" implies property rather than a full human being.
• "Enslaver", not "slaveholder" or "master": holding a person as property was a deliberate choice, not something natural.
• "Freedom seeker", not "fugitive": those who ran were not criminals but people seeking freedom for themselves and those they loved.

William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown. Smithsonian Institution.

William Wells Brown (about 1814–1884) was enslaved in St. Louis for eight years. As a teenager he was "hired out" by his enslaver to work for others, among them, briefly, at the printing office of the St. Louis Observer, run by the journalist Elijah Lovejoy, who turned against slavery and was later killed for his views by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois. Brown also worked as a butler and waiter on Mississippi steamboats, seeing life in both free and slave states, and those journeys made him determined to be free. At 19 he escaped from a steamboat docked at Cincinnati, and evaded capture partly because Ohio had outlawed slavery.

He became a famous abolitionist, writer and speaker. His 1847 autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, made his name in America and Europe. He was the first known Black American to publish a novel (Clotel, 1853) and to write a play (The Escape, 1858), and during the Civil War he helped recruit Black soldiers for the U.S. Army. He remains a celebrated figure in American literature.

"The Settlement of St. Louis," by Fernand LeQuesne. Gateway Arch National Park/NPS.

The French artist Fernand LeQuesne's romantic painting of the city's founding celebrates the French for bringing "civilization" to the Indigenous people of the area, and leaves out the Black residents, enslaved and free, who were part of the settlement from the start.

Sources

• National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, "A Society Built Upon Enslaved Labor." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-society-built-upon-enslaved-labor.htm
• Next in the series: The Code Noir and the Missouri Compromise.
• Left out: the original dates Brown's work for Lovejoy's newspaper to around 1827.