Louisiana sugar enslavers systematically sold children away once they reached ten.

Evidence

There are no oral histories from the Whitney Plantation to preserve the firsthand testimonies of those who experienced the harsh brutalities of life there. The museum’s archived inventory records of enslaved people at the time of Marie Azélie Haydel’s passing in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, suggest that the enslavers systematically sold children for profit, severing offspring from parents. According to Ashley Rogers, the Whitney’s executive director, of the 101 people counted, most were adult men, several were Creole-identified women, and 32 were young children, who could not be sold under Louisiana law unless accompanied by their mothers. “There were no children older than ten years,” she told me. “None.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 302

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inventory data showing no children over ten is devastating evidence of a systematic policy — the logic of the law (children can’t be sold without mothers) intersecting with the records to reveal the practice. Dense in what it implies.
• QUESTION: How exactly did the inventory-reasoning reconstruction work — is inferring systematic child-selling from the age distribution a historically accepted method?