New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square

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Fourteen years after the Louisiana Purchase, the city restricts the Sunday gatherings of enslaved and free people of African descent to a single plot of ground beyond Rampart Street. The measure is a restriction, and its effect on this Journey is the opposite of the South Carolina drum ban: by licensing the gatherings in one place rather than prohibiting them, it kept African ensemble drumming publicly audible in a North American city for another two generations. Observers of the following decades describe crowds in the hundreds and name the bamboula among the dances.

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