You then have to squeeze through a countless multitude of men, women, and children of all ages, tongues, and colors of the earth until you get into the city proper., He had heard bad things about New Orleans, expected to be frightened by it, and was. Not long ago I was reading some old letters at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little unearthing of my own. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle. Brooks Brothers was top-of-the-line slave clothing, Greenwald says. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men manacled and chained to each other, lining up in double file. Franklin once ran the biggest operation at Forks of the Road, moving hundreds of people every month. A reedy voice, gentle manners. The women wore calico dresses and white aprons and a pink ribbon at the neck with hair carefully braided. Armfield has at least one direct black descendant, Rodney Williams, who wrote about his heritage - which he said he discovered through DNA testing - in an essay included in "Slavery's. Daniel is pleasant, happy to talk about his hardscrabble days. It is an abbreviation, to accommodate people.. Approaching the former Franklin house, I pass the golf course and clubhouse. He was a minister. Although the Armfield gang vanishes from the record, it is possible to follow in detail a coffle of people on the journey from Tennessee to New Orleans, thanks to William Wallers letters. But here, they were marching through wilderness. Whether youre a lifelong resident of D.C. or you just moved here, weve got you covered. And here, someone close to the memory of it says much the same. Terms of Use After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel. But people who arrived by ship did. I am married to a man with four children. I pull in at various towns and ask around. In 1832, at age 43, supremely rich from 20 years as a long-distance trader, Franklin built a big house on 2,000 acres outside Gallatin. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. I take the old route to Knoxville, but then get onto the freeway, Interstate 40. I say, your great-great-grandparents were enslaved persons. Today as then, Raymond, Mississippi, is a crossroads, population 2,000. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. You see, our history is often buried, she says. Several factors set the pair apart, Rothman explained: For one thing, their timing was impeccable. They are each others closest friends and thats rooted in their working relationship, Rothman said. Armfield had no wish to continue without his longtime partner. As the steamboat churned to dock, it passed ships berthed five or six deep, miles of them, from all nations of the earth, bringing in their products and carrying away ours. The arrival, gangplank on the levee, cargo everywhere. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself.. Just outside town, the Trace comes to an end at a shabby intersection. It is 8 p.m., and the sun is failing. Their drivers paid good money for food. Uncle Isaac was different. You know, I have been around blacks all my life. A singular spectacle, Featherstonhaugh wrote. In 1832, for example, 5 percent of all the commercial credit available through the Second Bank of the United States had been extended to their firm. Franklin, who was approaching his 50s, was tired and didnt want to do it anymore, Rothman said. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears. For buyers, these were interpreted not as signs of a masters cruelty, but of a workers defiance. While still a boy, Armfield ran away from home, vowing not to return until he had acquired more wealth than his father, Nathan Armfield. After Swan Creek, McLishs Stand. This is the oldest settled portion of the state and bears the appearance of great comfort, refinement and elegance, Waller wrote. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. You know, we carried on. Thats the type of name I should have had if traditional African cultures had stayed intact, compared to Clifton Boxley, which is the plantation name, or slave name, he says. They didnt buy slaves in order to free them, but to make money.. They record the names, heights, ages, sex and coloration as determined by the person looking at them. In place of towns were stands every 10 or 15 miles. Armfield. After Duck River, in Tennessee, came the Keg Springs Stand. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. Researching people who were slaves is like a mystery tale. But during the 50 years coffles were sent on the Slave Trail, the road most taken was the Natchez Trace. Also, an elderly black woman named Charity, whom he and Sarah had kept at home, knowing that no one would offer money for her. Families--Southern States. That comes to $140,000, or about $3.5 million today. BY KATE PARRISH O n May 11, 1857, James Hervey Otey, the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, wrote to John Armfield asking for help. We werent there. Are we accountable? But Sarah seems happy.. He and his nephew, John Armfield, headquartered their operation in Alexandria, Virginia, and they began to trade. In a front room, a paralleldozens of photos of the slave factories of Ghana and Sierra Leone, where captives were held before being sent to the Americas. They were in debt. Time kind of mellows you out. On the block was one of the most beautiful young women I ever saw. Next door to it was another, the New Orleans Exchange. There was a pair of carriages for the whites. He is loath to spend yet another day probing the dark activities and darker minds of Franklin and Armfield. In May 1765 the caravan reached the various destinations of these Pennsylvania travelers. Thomas Dabney was an acquaintance from Virginia who had moved to Raymond, on the Natchez Trace, 12 years earlier and doubled his already thick riches as a cotton planter. This year, she curated an exhibition at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865.. So-called mulatresses., Isaac Franklin was all over this market. Columned, brick and symmetrical, it was just about the finest house in the state, people said, second only to the Hermitage, the estate of President Andrew Jackson. He was born in 1812 in Virginia. Double Oaks is a significant historic property, honored by placement on the National Register in 1985. We had never done a dedicated exhibition on the slave trade, on slavery. A flatboat could float down the Mississippi to Natchez in two weeks. He whiled away his final years managing his estates and spending time with his three children and wife, Adelicia Hayes, whom records indicate he adored. An act of Congress is needed. Thats on the Internet. Franklin & Armfields marches began in the late summer, sometimes the fall, and they took two to four months. The negroes are above all wellthey continue in fine spirits and life and appear all happy.. As U.S. 11 steps into Tennessee, the road finds the Holston River and runs parallel to it. The fireflies come out in the dwindling dusk. But until recently, the Slave Trail was buried in memory. A month ago the bridge was uncovered with a backhoe by a developer, Boxley says. One lost friend wrote: Mr. EditorI was bred and born in Virginia, but am unable to name the county, for I was so young that I dont recollect it; but I remember I lived twelve miles from a town called Danville.I was sold to a speculator whose name was Wm. login . A group of Franklins indirect white descendants learned of their relationship to the slave trader a few years ago and, in 2018, donated money and relics to the Alexandria museum located where their ancestors business once stood. The St. Louis Hotel is one of several places that can be identified as once-upon-a-time slave-trading sites. Among the people who lived in these parts was John Randolph, a congressman and a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. Two phone calls later, one of the living Franklins answers. And this is one of its most horrific chapters.. On Tuesday, October 19, the troop headed southwest, Waller leading from his horse and his friend James Taliaferro bringing up the rear, both men armed. Armfield, meanwhile, purchased an old hotel in the Tennessee mountains and converted it to a luxury summer getaway for the wealthy. In Edinburg, a history bookshop. After the women came the big wagonssix or seven in all. In 1833, John Armfield shipped a gang of people to Natchez, where Isaac Franklin received them. These were stores and taverns with places to sleep in the back. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. But as Waller drifted through Mississippi, he couldnt sell anyone. Armfield crossed them on flatboats. Armfield has at least one direct black descendant, Rodney Williams, who wrote about his heritage which he said he discovered through DNA testing in an essay included in Slaverys Descendants, published in May. John Armfield (abt. All to as kind masters as can be found., Sarah Waller wrote in return, I was much pleased to learn by your letter that you had sold at such fine prices. Then she added, I wish you could have sold more of them., Waller himself was a little defensive about this people-selling business. She was 18 at the time and just over five feet tall. This seemed to be as much a part of Franklin and Armfields culture of business as, say, going to the bar after a successful court case might be the culture of a successful law firms business.. That is the equivalent of $35,000 today. I ask him to play a debating game. The company's agents sent people down to Franklin & Armfield's slavepens (another word that has disappeared) in Alexandria, just nine miles south of the U.S. Capitol: seamstresses, nurses,. Spindly pine and oaks away off the roadbed, a third-growth woods. The people who accompanied him included a boy of 8 or 9 called Pleasant; Mitchell, who was 10 or 11; a teenage boy named Samson; three teenage sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy; Henry, about 17; a man named Nelson and his wife; a man in his 20s called Foster; and a young mother named Sarah, with her daughter Indian, about age 2. His book was not much readit had a due-date notice from 50 years agobut in it Andrews described the scene as Armfield directed the loading for an enormous journey. People do know, however, about Civil War battles. Last came the women and girls. First Name: Last Name [Advanced Search] Home Search Login Find. History, too, has largely let them off scot-free, Schermerhorn said. Hannah Cole was one of them, maybe the first. Katrina was cataclysmic, and it changed the way people thought about our collective history, Greenwald says. No buildings on that half-acre. I mean, people who do not understand the old lifestylestheir standpoint on life, and their education, are what today we consider limited. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. One thing that is hard to document but impossible to ignore is the fancy trade. New Orleans had a niche market. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield (1828-1837) were the first to use the property as a slave pen. I did not know before I came home whether my parents were dead or alive. And now, mother nor father did not know me., Edward Ball I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. In fact, it is more your story than it is mine.. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on.. The labels in the coats once read, Brooks Brothers. She is in the French Quarter, in a gallery of the archive where she works, and all around her are artifacts about the slave trade. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. His humanity was not always visible, but it was there. Edward Ball is the author of five books of nonfiction and a lecturer in English at Yale University. They were the parents of at least 2 sons and 4 daughters. Even while actively trading slaves, the two men enjoyed an excellent reputation and moved in top-tier social circles, according to Rothman. Born about 1730 [location unknown] Son. He called it Fairvue. Louisiana had a law that said children under 10 could not be separated from their mothers. It took two days wages if you earned 50 cents a day, what freedpeoplea new wordwere starting to get for work. He was so smooth he managed to impress even a New England abolitionist who visited Alexandria in the 1830s. Many of the cottages were later acquired by successful merchants and professionals from Nashville and other places in Middle Tennessee. In his late teens, right around the time the United States passed a law barring the transatlantic slave trade, Franklin and his older brothers grew interested in the domestic version: They began transporting small numbers of enslaved people between Virginia and the Deep South. One night in September 1834, a traveler stumbled into the Armfield coffles camp. It was all he did for the rest of his professional life, right up until he retired. A clean back was a rarity, and it raised the price. Their good reputations persisted after retirement. In 1839, at age 50, he married a woman named Adelicia Hayes, age 22, the daughter of a Nashville attorney. Many people had scars from whipping. I joined fifty-one other slaves whom he had bought in Maryland. A padlock was added to the handcuffs, and the hasp of each padlock closed on a link in a chain 100 feet long. Later the same wagons hauled those who had collapsed and could not be roused with a whip. Exceedingly heavy and continued rains have stopped our progress, he told his wife. He could write a letter.. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. They were once Americas cruelest, richest slave traders. And beneath the dome, with sunlight shafting down through windows in the apse, both auction stands did business simultaneously, in French and in English. And you see a lot of records in which there are an unusual number of 10-year-olds alone. He was an amateur slave trader, not a pro like Armfield, and his journey, though from another year, is even better documented. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. But because of their background and lack of education, they just sort of slid into slavery. Armfield and his caravan came to the Shenandoah from Alexandria. The partners employed stringersheadhunters who worked on commissioncollecting enslaved people up and down the East Coast, knocking on doors, asking tobacco and rice planters whether they would sell. He had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. The phrase sold down the river, for instance. Wallers testimony, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. After examining the people on display, a buyer would talk to a seller and negotiate. Records of that part of the journey do not survive, nor do records about the individual slaves in the coffle. In Virginia, the coffles marched from town to town. There, at the age of 22, she married Joseph Thornburg son of Edward and Sarah Ann Hannah Haman Thornburg on 30 Nov 1754. (Video: Victoria Walker, John Parks/The Washington Post), For more than 50 years The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has been working to incorporate the story on the enslaved community on Jefferson's plantation. Waller had been on the trail for two weeks when he wrote home to say, I have seen and felt enough to make me loathe the vocation of slave trading. He did not give details. He regularly acts as a mediator with respect to family provision claims. John Armfield Salmon 6 MAY 1823 - 12 FEB 1886 Benjamin Campsall ABT 1769 - JAN 1861 Elizabeth Campsall 10 FEB 1800 - 24 JUL 1874 Ann Thompson ABT 1767 - Family Group Sheet - Child. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much. My name was then Hannah Person, it is now Hannah Cole. Isaac Franklin had no children who survived, Thomson had told me on the phone. The black churches picked it up. The people are made in part of the worst portion of the human race, he wrote. His parents named him Clifton M. Boxley. Most of the others were under 20. I shook my mothers hand and held it a little too long, and she suspicioned something, Glenn said. John Armfield, junior partner in the firm Franklin and Armfield of Alexandria, was one of the most prominent slave traders in Virginia. The way you transcend the hurt and pain is to face the situation, experience it and cleanse yourself, to allow the humanity of our ancestors and their suffering to wash through you and settle into your spirit.. Privacy Statement Born in 1797 in Guilford County, North Carolina, Armfield was coming off a brief stint running a mercantile business and, unsure of what to do next, he may have turned to the slave trade at Franklin's suggestion. Waller was pinching pennies. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? A black man asks:I am a middle-class father. He did it, but it is what it is. Armfield then ordered the men in irons to get in the water. There were free blacks in the South that owned slaves. Call me Ser Boxley, he says. By August, Armfield had more than 300 ready for the march. Sold down the river labels a raft of loss. A woman at a tourist store clarified. Can you put it aside? Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. And the auction setting of choice was a place called the St. Louis Hotel, Greenwald says, a block from here.. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. In my family, people looked after their slaves, he said. He ran it with great success in his final years, earning visits from very prominent people, including archbishops and the mayor of Nashville, according to Rothman. To my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one eyed man about my size and age, excuse my foolishness, Isaac Franklins nephew James an employee and his uncles protege wrote in typical business correspondence, referring to Caroline Brown, an enslaved woman who suffered repeated rape and abuse at Jamess hands for five months. This letter from 1834 held riches, and I will bring them out by land was, for me, the invaluable line: It referred to a forced march overland from the fields of Virginia to the slave auctions in Natchez and New Orleans. Some carried small children. The way I see it, he says, there are a lot of people you have to bury to get rid of. It is easily stumbled into. Last fall and this past spring, the Library of Virginia, in Richmond, and the Historic New Orleans Collection, in Louisiana, working separately, put together large exhibitions about the domestic slave trade. The tan clapboard housefolding chairs and a hammock in the front yard, cinder blocks and planks for front stepsoverflows inside with books, LPs, folk art, old newspapers, knickknacks, clothes in piles and unidentifiable hoards of objects. She was sold for $1250 to one of the most lecherous-looking old brutes I ever set eyes on, the reporter noted. It was like that. We in New Orleans have come a long way since Hurricane Katrina in terms of the comfort level of addressing certain subjects. So one of his men picked a shallow place and tested it by sending over a wagon and four horses. Will you send her out or shall I charge you $1,100 for her?, To maximize her price, Franklin might have sold the Charlottesville maid at one of the public auctions in the city. It was March 13, 1848. No, I dont believe in revisionist history.. Americas forgotten migration the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South, Edward Ball; Photographs by Wayne Lawrence. The chain gang also has roots in the Slave Trail. I have not seen him for ten years. The editors of theSouthwestern Christian Advocatepublished their paper in New Orleans, but it went out to Methodist preachers in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana. We would like to see it, if possible. The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, Sure, well give it to you., The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. She points to a beautiful piece of silk printed with the sentence, Slaves must be cleared at the Customs House. Its a sign that probably hung in staterooms on steamships. A kind of check-your-luggage announcement. It must be in the genes, because I have a brother who is a minister, and a cousin who is a minister, and another relative. It was like buying a car today. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. Descendants of a slave trading family come to Sewanee to search for their history and find it tangled up with the University's own painful truth about its founding. Through it all, both regularly raped the women they bought and sold and joked about it in letters, a shared habit that deepened their friendship. You feel something here? They dont do family history, because they think, Oh, it was too cruel, and so brutal, and why should I look at it up close? I am not one of those people.. Isaac Franklin, Armfields partner, kept house in Louisiana, but his thoughts were often in Tennessee. The nicest families in the Shenandoah tipped people into the pipeline south. The words Virginia Negroes signaled a kind of brand, Greenwald says. Boxley is 75. A message from a woman who had been snatched from her mother when she was a girl might reach hundreds of thousands. But you dont know who the old ones are. The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business. You see the names. He spent 35 years in California as an activist, as a teacher, as a foot soldier in anti-poverty programs. When the brothers were growing up in Gallatin, James Franklin, eight years older than Isaac, took his sibling under his wing. Freedom-seekers risked brutal punishment and retribution against . Slaves for sale wore a uniform of sorts. It was not an easy matter to place an ad. The yards were parade grounds that worked like showrooms. Waller planned to sell all of them. He was sold to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. Thomson warms up, shifts in his seat. You know they took advantage of the black women, and there were no repercussions there. They are a manifest, or list, of one group of 110 people moved by Isaac Franklin in 1829. They first came over here as indentured servants, as did the whites. You cant judge those people by todays standardsyou cant judge anybody by our standards. Beautiful young women I ever saw changed the way I see it he... Get in the coats once read, brooks Brothers was top-of-the-line slave clothing, says! 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