In the six decades prior to the Civil War, roughly one million people were forcibly removed from their homes and families and sent to labor in the cotton and sugar fields of the Deep South. They came by steamboat and sail, stagecoach and railcar, but mostly they came on foot. For those bound for the New Orleans market, the overland journey often spanned many weeks and hundreds of miles. Chained together day and night, enslaved men led the coffle. Women and children followed, with the entire group of what might be hundreds of enslaved people overseen by slave drivers on horseback. 

For the more than seventy thousand people who traveled to New Orleans from Alexandria, Baltimore, Petersburg, Mobile, Richmond, Norfolk, Galveston, and other ports, the voyage has been likened to a second Middle Passage. Slave traders with operations based in coastal communities (such as Hope Hull Slatter, who was based in Baltimore) sometimes allotted less space per person belowdecks than captains of vessels that had made the transatlantic crossing from Africa in centuries past.