A Black History Month special. Between 1849 and 1861, the state of Louisiana sold eleven children born in its penitentiary. This essay asks where the humanity was then, and where it is now. It is free to read and free to share.

Secret Horrors: Where Was the Humanity?

Louisiana State Penitentiary, 1833–1862. A Black History Month special by Theresa Hatchett.

Where was the humanity? And did it ever come back?

These are the questions that refuse to leave my mind as I examine the history of the Louisiana State Penitentiary between 1833 and 1862.

I look at the images of those cold prison walls. I imagine the women lying on thin mattresses, the children playing in courtyards surrounded by iron gates, and the mothers who knew that one day someone might come and take their children away.

And I ask myself: What kind of society creates laws that allow children to be born in prison, claimed as property, and sold away from their mothers?

What kind of humanity looks upon a ten-year-old child and sees a price instead of a person?

And perhaps the most disturbing question of all: If the state could profit from the suffering of enslaved women and their children, why are we still struggling to establish what is owed to the victims and their descendants?

This is not simply a story about slavery. It is a story about the law, the government, institutional responsibility, and the deliberate removal of humanity from people who were never less than human.

When the Law Became an Instrument of Cruelty

In December 1848, Louisiana enacted legislation allowing the state to claim children born in the penitentiary to enslaved women serving life sentences. When those children reached the age of ten, they could be sold at public auction on the courthouse steps.

Think about that. Ten years old.

An age when a child should be learning, laughing, playing, and discovering the world. An age when a mother should be thinking about her child's future, not preparing for the possibility that the government will take that child away.

Between 1849 and 1861, eleven children were auctioned under this system. Their combined sale price was recorded as $7,591.

Eleven children. Eleven human beings.

I cannot read those figures without wondering about the lives hidden behind them. What were their names? What did their mothers call them when nobody else was listening? Did they cry when they were taken away? Did they spend the rest of their lives searching for the faces they remembered from childhood?

Did any of them ever find their way home?

The records tell us that children were sold. They tell us who purchased some of them: six of the eleven were bought by penitentiary employees. They tell us the amounts paid.

But where are the records of the broken hearts? Where is the accounting for the years of separation, the stolen relationships, the fear, the humiliation, and the emotional suffering?

A financial ledger can record a payment. It cannot measure the destruction of a family.

Louisiana was the only slave state to pass a law mandating the auction of children born to enslaved women in prison. Figures from historian Brett Josef Derbes, "Secret Horrors: Enslaved Women and Children in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 1833–1862", The Journal of African American History.

One Child's Future Built on Another Child's Suffering

What troubles me even more is what happened to the money.

The proceeds from these sales were paid into Louisiana's public school fund, which educated white children only.

I find that almost impossible to comprehend.

One child was sold into bondage while the proceeds helped provide educational opportunities for another. One mother lost her son or daughter while another family could look forward to schooling and opportunity.

And the state presented this arrangement as lawful.

Where was the humanity in that decision? Where was the conscience of the lawmakers? Where was the moral responsibility of those who administered the prisons, advertised the sales, purchased the children, and accepted the proceeds?

We often speak about slavery as though it were merely a system of individual ownership. But here we see something more institutional. We see the machinery of government participating directly in the sale of human beings.

The state was not simply observing the injustice. It was organising and benefiting from it.

And that distinction matters when we begin to discuss reparations.

The Question of Humanity

When I ask, "Where was the humanity?" I am not asking whether the enslaved women and children possessed humanity.

Their humanity was never in question.

They loved. They feared. They hoped. They suffered. They dreamed of freedom. They formed families under circumstances designed to deny them control over their own lives.

The real question is what happened to the humanity of those who claimed the authority to own, imprison, and sell them.

How could a person stand before a mother and take her child? How could an auctioneer announce a price for a human life? How could officials sign documents authorising an act that any loving parent should have recognised as cruel? And how could an entire legal system give such actions the appearance of legitimacy?

We must remember that legality and morality are not the same thing.

A government may pass a law, but passing a law does not make an injustice righteous. A transaction may be recorded, but a record does not make the transaction humane. An institution may operate within the rules of its time, but that does not remove its responsibility for the suffering it causes.

The people who lived through these horrors deserved humanity then, just as their descendants deserve justice now.

Did Humanity Ever Come Back?

This question follows me beyond the prison walls and into the present.

When slavery was abolished, were the lives destroyed by enslavement restored? Were stolen children reunited with their mothers? Were the people who had been imprisoned and exploited compensated for their labour, their suffering, and their loss of freedom? Were families given back the wealth, land, opportunity, and security that generations of enslavement had denied them?

Emancipation was a necessary transformation, but freedom did not automatically repair the damage that had already been done.

A declaration of freedom could not return a mother's stolen years. It could not restore a lost childhood. It could not give back the wages never paid, the education denied, or the opportunities that had been deliberately withheld. And it could not erase the economic benefits accumulated by institutions and individuals through generations of exploitation.

So when people suggest that slavery belongs entirely to the past, I must ask another question.

How can an injustice be considered finished when the question of repair remains unanswered?

Reparations Are About Responsibility, Not Revenge

For me, the demand for reparations begins with a simple principle. When harm is caused, there is a responsibility to acknowledge it and make meaningful efforts to repair it.

We accept this principle in ordinary life. If someone steals property, the victim may seek restitution. If an institution causes harm, it may be required to compensate those affected. If a government commits an injustice, we expect accountability.

Why should the organised enslavement, imprisonment, and sale of human beings be treated as an exception?

I am not asking today's generation to pretend that it personally committed every historical crime. I am asking whether institutions that inherited the benefits, authority, and continuity of earlier systems should also confront the responsibilities attached to that history.

In Louisiana, the documented sale of children from the penitentiary raises a particularly direct question.

The state authorised the system. Officials administered the sales. The public treasury benefited.

So where is the accounting today? What became of the financial benefit obtained through those transactions? Has anyone traced the descendants of the children who were sold? Has there been a formal acknowledgement of the specific harm inflicted upon those families? And what form of reparative justice could now recognise the suffering that the original records reduced to prices?

These questions deserve a serious answer.

Reparations need not be understood as a single payment intended to erase centuries of injustice. They may include financial compensation, historical investigation, public acknowledgement, educational investment, memorialisation, and measures designed to address continuing consequences.

But whatever form they take, they must begin with recognition that a wrong was committed and that the people who suffered were entitled to better.

The Victims Must Not Disappear from History Again

There is another injustice that concerns me.

We know a great deal about the governments, officials, enslavers, and institutions that participated in slavery. Their decisions appear in legal documents. Their property appears in registers. Their transactions appear in public records.

But the enslaved victims often survive in history only as fragments.

A first name. An age. A description. A sale price.

Sometimes there is no clear record of what happened afterward. And this silence creates another question.

If we do not recover their stories, are we allowing the system that treated them as property to determine how they will be remembered?

I believe historical research must go further. We should search for the children who were sold, identify them wherever records permit, investigate what happened to them, and reconnect their histories to the families and communities from which they were taken.

We should not invent the missing details, but neither should we mistake the absence of records for the absence of suffering.

Every one of those eleven children had a life beyond the auction notice. Every mother had a history beyond the prison register. Their humanity cannot be reduced to the amount someone was willing to pay.

The Unpaid Debt

When I consider the Louisiana State Penitentiary, I see more than an old prison.

I see an institution through which the state exercised power over enslaved people, their labour, their children, and their futures. And I see an uncomfortable connection between the wealth and opportunities created for some and the freedom denied to others.

This is why reparations cannot simply be dismissed as a demand to compensate people for something that happened a long time ago.

The question is not only when the injustice occurred. The question is who benefited, what was taken, what damage followed, and whether meaningful repair has ever been made.

If public institutions were supported through the proceeds of selling children, then surely that history deserves public investigation and acknowledgement. If families were torn apart by state authority, then surely their descendants deserve the opportunity to understand what happened. And if the state once placed a financial value on those children's lives, it should now be willing to confront the moral consequences of having done so.

No amount of money can replace a mother. No compensation can recreate a stolen childhood.

But the impossibility of complete restoration must never become an excuse to do nothing.

Justice does not require us to believe that every wound can be healed. It requires us to acknowledge that the wound exists and to take responsibility for what can still be repaired.

Where Is the Humanity Now?

I return to the image of the empty prison cell.

There is a thin mattress on the floor. A small piece of folded cloth. Light enters through the barred window.

The people are gone. But the questions remain.

Where did the child go? What became of the mother? Did they ever meet again? Did anyone ever apologise? Did anyone ever return what was taken?

And today, as we discuss reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, are we prepared to confront the full meaning of what those families endured?

I do not want history reduced to a collection of dates and statistics. I want us to recognise the humanity behind the records. I want us to understand that slavery was not merely an economic system. It was an assault upon human relationships, dignity, identity, and freedom.

I want the demand for reparations to be taken seriously, not as an attempt to rewrite history, but as an effort to address its consequences.

Because the question of justice does not disappear simply because the victims have died. Their descendants are here. Their history is here. And the institutions that shaped that history remain part of the society we live in.

So I ask again: Where was the humanity? And more importantly: Where is the humanity now?

If we can acknowledge that children were sold, that mothers were deprived of their children, and that public institutions benefited from those sales, can we also acknowledge that something is still owed?

Perhaps humanity begins to return when we stop defending the silence. When we stop treating historical suffering as an inconvenience. When we recognise that remembering is not the same as repairing. And when we finally accept that justice requires more than sympathy.

It requires truth. It requires accountability. And it requires a willingness to make amends.

The state recorded what it received for those children. History must now ask what is owed to them and to the generations who came after.

Until that question is answered, the story of the Louisiana State Penitentiary is not simply a closed chapter of American history. It remains an unfinished conversation about humanity, responsibility, and justice.

Did humanity ever come back, or are we still waiting for it to arrive?

The bell still rings for the eleven children. We say their story so it is never sold again.

Theresa Hatchett · theresahatchett.com · theresahatchett@urbanadventure.org.uk

Original work. Essay text and all images are the original work and intellectual property of Theresa Hatchett. © 2026 Theresa Hatchett. All rights reserved.

Sources

• Brett Josef Derbes, "Born in the Penitentiary: Women and Children Incarcerated in Louisiana, 1833–62", American Historical Association, 2017: AHA 2017 paper (link)
• Brett Josef Derbes, "Secret Horrors: Enslaved Women and Children in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 1833–1862", The Journal of African American History