A Partial Transcription of Inward Slave Manifests

Port of New Orleans, Record Group 36,
United States Customs Service,
Collector of Customs at New Orleans
Microfilm Rolls 1-3, 12 of 25 Rolls (1818 to 1860)
Housed at the National Archives, Washington D.C.

Transcribed by Dee Parmer Woodtor, PhD and Alma McClendon

Background & Context

The domestic slave trade transplanted approximately 1 million slaves from what was called the Upper South (primarily Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, District of Columbia, North Carolina) to what was once called the Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, Western Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas) between 1808, the year which the United States effectively abolished the importation of slaves and 1865, the year the Civil War ended.

Most people think of slave traders moving slaves overland in coffles. However, there was another method of transporting slaves, and that was by the coastal waterways from as far North as Boston along the Eastern Seaboard all the way to New Orleans, a trip that typically took four to six weeks. The coastwise manifests, Record Group 36 of the United States Customs Service, document this aspect of the transshipment of slaves. Though the coastwise manifests constitute one of the most underutilized sets of records by African American genealogists, these records, are well organized by ports and dates and can be easily searched, though it would be a time consuming effort. They have not been microfilmed with the exception of the coastwise manifests for the port of New Orleans, Inward and Outward Bound.

( read and view the records)