Joseph Heathcott, an urban-studies professor at New York’s New School who spent more than a decade studying and teaching in St. Louis, famously described the city as a “weird, borderland city.” He used the phrase to capture St. Louis as a place never fully North or South, yet deeply shaped by racial tension and contradiction.
That characterization also applies to the city’s complex relationship with slavery.
African captives were sold on the courthouse steps while “free” Blacks held trades, built neighborhoods and created what became a bourgeois Black aristocracy. Viewed through the cultural, political and spiritual trajectory of St. Louis at its founding, it is difficult to understand how the city veered so far from a path that once held the potential for more fluid racial interaction.
Black people were members of Pierre Laclède’s founding party in 1764, when he established the trading post and French village that would become St. Louis. Relations between enslaved Africans and their French masters were governed by France’s Code Noir, issued in 1685. Heavily influenced by the Catholic Church, the code prohibited requiring slaves to work on Sundays and holidays, discouraged the separation of slave families and recognized a moral code that legitimized slave marriages.
According to the 1799 census, St. Louis had 925 residents: 601 whites, 56 free Blacks and 268 enslaved Blacks. This unusual ratio persisted even after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory in 1803. By 1850, St. Louis counted nearly 80,000 residents, including 2,656 enslaved people and 1,398 free persons of color.
In most Southern states, enslaved people were prohibited from mingling with free Blacks. In St. Louis, however, enslaved and free Black residents often occupied the same spaces — walking the same streets, sharing news and sometimes worshipping in the same churches. Enslaved people with marketable skills were hired out by masters. Some used their own wages to buy their freedom.
St. Louis was no racial utopia. As American governance replaced French rule, many Code Noir provisions disappeared. The city enacted restrictive “Black laws” imposing tighter controls on Black life. Free Blacks faced housing restrictions and, like enslaved people, were barred from voting, obtaining public education or testifying against whites in court.
Yet slavery was less central to the city’s economy than in plantation-dominated regions. Rapid commercial expansion reshaped labor dynamics.
Why slavery struggled in St. Louis
During the 19th century, St. Louis emerged as a major hub of commerce and trade. Steamboats crowded the levee, unloading goods and supplies. Manufacturing and processing industries flourished, drawing waves of European immigrants.
The population grew from fewer than 20,000 in 1840 to more than 160,000 by 1860. Germans established thriving enclaves, while Irish immigrants, many fleeing famine, settled in dense near-north neighborhoods such as Kerry Patch.
The huge number of European immigrants made slavery less economically dominant.
For many employers, a year’s work from a free common laborer was cheaper than purchasing an enslaved worker. Competition became woven into the fabric of the city, where free Blacks, immigrants and hired-out enslaved laborers often competed for the same skilled and low-wage jobs.
The Black aristocracy
Amid these shifting dynamics, a distinct Black middle and upper class emerged. This network included craftsmen, property owners, entrepreneurs and influential fraternal leaders.
In his 1858 book The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, Cyprian Clamorgan — a free man of color — described this group as “a peculiar class,” the “elite of the colored race,” whose status derived from “wealth, education, or natural ability.”
Clamorgan, a barber, belonged to a profession that carried unusual economic and social leverage. Black-owned barber emporiums served prominent white clientele, creating rare spaces where information and influence circulated across racial lines. That legacy may help explain why barbershops remain centers of trust and community within Black culture.
Churches and community power
The Black church served as another pillar of stability and resistance. First Baptist Church, founded in 1818 by John Berry Meachum, became central to Black religious and educational life. Meachum, a former slave, was also an entrepreneur and abolitionist who established one of the earliest schools for Black children — famously operating from a steamboat on the Mississippi River.
Meachum and his wife, Mary, were later credited with aiding freedom seekers, some finding refuge beneath the cobblestone streets of Clamorgan Alley.
As the Black population expanded, churches and fraternal organizations developed systems of survival, advocacy and social mobility. By the early 20th century, Black Freemason lodges had become influential civic anchors.
St. Louis differed from many American cities of its era. Black residents were present at its founding and instrumental in its growth. The city’s early history was layered with paradox — proximity and division, opportunity and exclusion — underscoring Heathcott’s description of St. Louis as a “weird, borderland city.”
Sources for this story include Cyprian Clamorgan’s The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, the Missouri Historical Society, the City of St. Louis, the St. Louis Genealogical Society and historical reference materials.
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.