Their drivers paid good money for food. Outside universities and museums, the story of the Slave Trail lives in shards, broken and scattered. Then, hed send the group on an arduous 1,000-mile march to slave markets in Natchez or New Orleans or hed stuff them into one of the companys three massive ships to make the same journey by water. The negroes are happy, he says repeatedly. Few, if any, American high school or college students ever learn about the duo. At the peak of their business, the two men were moving roughly 1,000 people a year, historians said. He and his nephew, John Armfield, headquartered their operation in Alexandria, Virginia, and they began to trade. A reedy voice, gentle manners. I stop at one of the oldest, Belle Grove. Developing the exhibit, Greenwald and her team created a database of names of the enslaved who were shipped from the Eastern states to New Orleans. He expected another month on the road. Her name was Hermina. The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. An act of Congress is needed. I tried picking cotton right here, outside Natchez, and I never could pick 100 pounds, he says. It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush. 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,. Now I have five adult children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. My mother was sold from me: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in last seen ads. This article was published more than3 years ago. Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield. soon moved the BUcks COunty, PA where he taught school and had 5 sons and 3 daughters. After Swan Creek, McLishs Stand. 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC 10/12/98 It gave the Deep South a character it retains to this day; and it changed the slaves themselves, traumatizing uncountable families. Members of the Armfield family among the travelers were John, his wife, and their five sons-William, John, Jr., Robert, Isaac and Thomas and all their families. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. During the move to the Deep South, many slaves found themselves on steamboats winding down the Mississippi to New Orleans. 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. Born in 1797 to lapsed Quakers who farmed several hundred acres in North Carolina and owned a small number of enslaved people, Armfield spent his early adulthood pursuing a variety of unsuccessful ventures, including a small mercantile shop which he was forced to abandon after his affair. So it must be true. As the country marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Americans are being forced to confront the brutality of slavery and of the people who profited from it. In 1835, it was 4,723. The path of I-40 west roughly matches a turnpike that once ran 200 miles across the Cumberland Plateau. A clergyman who saw a march toward Shenandoah remembered that the gang members, having left their wives, children, or other near connections and never likely to meet them again in this world, sang to drown the suffering of mind they were brought into. Witnesses said Old Virginia Never Tire was one song all the coffles sang. In Winchester, the Winchester-. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. It hangs in the living room, above the sofa. Armfields marriage never yielded any children, and Franklins children with Hayes all died without producing offspring, according to Rothman, so the two men have no direct white descendants living today. It was like that. The two men launched the slave trading firm Franklin & Armfield and moved into the Alexandria townhouse today a museum in 1828. By 1835 this place was abuzz with long-distance traders. 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. Armfield did not want to pay for passage, not with his hundreds. No, I dont believe in revisionist history.. My purchasertold me that we must set out that very day for the South, he wrote. The Club at Fairvue Plantation opened in 2004, and hundreds of houses sprang up on half-acre plots. A clean back was a rarity, and it raised the price. Sarah & child $800Henry $800. We were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts, recalled Charles Ball, who marched in several coffles before he escaped from slavery. At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. Since 2007, a proposal to incorporate the site into the National Park Service has been creeping toward approval. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. Theres no indication anywhere in the record that they felt guilty over what they did., Rothman is one of a small handful now fighting to remember the two men who arguably served as the founding fathers of Americas domestic slave trade. While enslaved people waited in Franklin and Armfields holding pen in Alexandria, the two men most likely adopted classic techniques employed by slave traders to enhance enslaved peoples salability, McInnis said. The women they bought and sold were fancy maids, a term signifying youth, beauty and potential for sexual exploitation by buyers or the traders themselves. I am enveloped in darkness; but still, strange to say, I live upon hope, the friend of man.. 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. You see, blacks were better off coming to this country. Its been a long time. Sometimes, he finds it difficult to keep going. Oh, no. They probably would have had to kill me, with my temperament. She laughs again. In the deep archive of the Virginia Historical Society I discovered an extraordinary batch of letters that Waller wrote about the experience of selling people he had known and lived with for much of his life. Northern Shenandoah was wheat country then, with one in five people enslaved and hoeing in the fields. In the old days, there were few black people here, a lot of Quakers and the beginning of an antislavery movement. And then they were goneout to plantations in northern Louisiana, or central Mississippi, or southern Alabama. The people in them are well-dressed. Wallers testimony, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. Palladian manse, Empire franais, Tudor grand, and a form that might be called Tuscan bland. As he pushed his hands down the pike, Waller felt guilty about Sarah and Indian, he told his wife. Then she came to me and said, Aint you my child? Glenn recalled. Among the people who lived in these parts was John Randolph, a congressman and a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment. I shook my mothers hand and held it a little too long, and she suspicioned something, Glenn said. I say, your great-great-grandparents were enslaved persons. I was sold to Joseph Bruin, who took me to New Orleans. For reasons unknown, Franklin did not send Key through the burning gates of the Slave Trail, but made him stay in Tennessee. In the library at Yale I did a bit more unearthing and found a travelogue by a man named Ethan Andrews, who happened to pass through Alexandria a year later and witness the organizing of an Armfield coffle. Some carried small children. It worked like this: Relying on a network of headhunters spread across Virginia, Maryland and the District, Armfield would round up enslaved people, holding them in an open-air pen behind the house in Alexandria or sometimes in its crowded, filthy basement until hed amassed a sufficient number: usually between 100 and 200. There was also Mitchell, a boy of 10 or 11, and Foster, 20-ish and strong, his prize hand. In Louisiana the top prices could be had for a buck, a muscled man bound for the hell of the sugar fields. She was captured and enslaved 400 years ago. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered highway. You got the wrong person to ask about sparing your feelings, Boxley replies. Isaac Franklin, Armfields partner, kept house in Louisiana, but his thoughts were often in Tennessee. Looking for any information about the ancestors and descendents of John Armfield.I am descended through his daughter, Nancy Ann Armfield. He does not make small talk. He is bearded white and gray, and half bald. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield first met in 1824, when Armfield seems to have been at loose ends. Shoes with crepe soles. It is rare to have a glimpse of slaves enchained in a coffle, because the documentary evidence is thin, but Wallers march is an exception. It was designed by North Carolina's first registered architect, William G. Armfield. Take the Bible. At the center of the hotel was a rotunda 100 feet in diameterover which rises a dome as lofty as a church spire, a reporter for theMilwaukee Daily Sentinelwrote. He was not describing the Forks, a mile east of the nice part of town. Armfield had no wish to continue without his longtime partner. I made a vow that I was going to North Carolina and see my mother if she was still living. My ancestor James was dabbling in some slave dealing on these tripssmall amount, nothing big. The expectation of so many slaves was that their families would be annihilated, and so it became important to be able to forget. Armfield. I feel a certain detachment from it, I suppose. At the Forks, there were no auctions, only haggling. Ballard, Rice C. (Rice Carter), -1860. He is white, a face etched by too much sun. She was about sixteen, dressed in a cheap striped woolen gown, and bareheaded.. Can you put it aside? My mothers name was Matilda; she lived near Wilton, Va., and belonged to a Mr. Percifield. 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. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer, Franklin had written. When Hoyt and her cousins finally put the clues together, what they discovered horrified them: This family of educators, scientists and physicians was indirectly descended from Isaac Franklin,. He was born in 1789 to a wealthy planter family in Tennessee that owned a significant number of enslaved people, according to Rothman. 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. The journey ended, the business done, Waller headed home. In Staunton, the Visitor Center. One in particular gives the flavor. The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migrationa thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. And there, in an accident hardly repeated by any of the million on the Slave Trail of Tears, he found his mother. Kenneth Thomson opens the door to his house, which is clapboard and painted a pretty cottage yellowquaint, not grand. Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. Whether youre a lifelong resident of D.C. or you just moved here, weve got you covered. BY KATE PARRISH O n May 11, 1857, James Hervey Otey, the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, wrote to John Armfield asking for help. Franklin worked with a few partners over the years but connected with his longest-lasting collaborator the man who became his closest friend, confidant and nephew by marriage in the early 1820s. Especially for travelers, the markets were a rival to the French Opera House and the Thtre dOrlans. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? The companys agents sent people down to Franklin & Armfields slavepens (another word that has disappeared) in Alexandria, just nine miles south of the U.S. Capitol: seamstresses, nurses, valets, field hands, hostlers, carpenters, cooks, houseboys, coachmen, laundresses, boatmen. In my family, people looked after their slaves, he said. The slave-trade site it mentions, Masperos Exchange, was diagonally across the street from the sandwich place.. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. You see the names. There was one place en route, however, with a small slave marketAberdeen, Mississippi. Next came wagons with the young children and those who could no longer walk. Researching people who were slaves is like a mystery tale. The sound of Wallers letters homehe wrote some 20 of them on the Slave Trailis upbeat, a businessman sending word that theres nothing to worry about. My aim is to preserve every inch of dirt in this area, Boxley says. That applies to Southern history, to slave history. Franklin and Armfield each fathered at least one child with an enslaved woman, Rothman said. The paper started a column called Lost Friends, a page on which people called out for family that had disappeared on the Slave Trail. What to do or where to go I know notI am surrounded by difficulty, he brooded. Slaves for sale wore a uniform of sorts. 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. Several of Thomas Dabneys children lie beneath granite stones. And in Gallatin there is a church named after one of the Key family preachers. I put the car on the shoulder and walk into the woods to find the real Natchez Trace. Franklin disposed of their bodies in a bayou down the road. The women wore calico dresses and white aprons and a pink ribbon at the neck with hair carefully braided. But until recently, the Slave Trail was buried in memory. | READ MORE. Your Privacy Rights 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. Last came the women and girls. Franklin, meanwhile, stayed mostly in Natchez, Miss., and was responsible for selling their human cargo to plantations in the Deep South. Their good reputations persisted after retirement. It is a refrain among Southern whites who remain emotionally attached to the plantation daysthat one in 1,000 slaveholders who were black vindicates in some fashion 999 who were not. The words Virginia Negroes signaled a kind of brand, Greenwald says. You see, our history is often buried, she says. A plate of pokeweed yanked up from the field and put on the table is one way of saying a mess. Blair shifts metaphors. 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. No. I started following its footsteps, hoping to find traces of the Slave Trail of Tears. Daniels expression empties. Machines did not replace human hands until the 1960s. On the whole, things werent that bad. 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. To get rid of their attitudes.. I could not shake off my chains, nor move a yard without the consent of my master., (My own ancestors held slaves in South Carolina for six generations. And beneath the dome, with sunlight shafting down through windows in the apse, both auction stands did business simultaneously, in French and in English. He shakes his head. They came to the New River, a big flow about 400 feet across, and to a dock known as Ingles Ferry. The first polite questions appeared in newspapers in the summer of 1865, right after the Civil War and Emancipation. By the polite invitation of Mr. Ware, as he put it, I passed over a hundred miles with no white persons visible and got here to Natchez in four days. He trotted into town in early 1848, the dwindling gang behind him. I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. As plantations talk more honestly about slavery, some visitors are pushing back, In surviving correspondence, they actually brag about raping enslaved people who theyve been processing through the firm, said Calvin Schermerhorn, a professor of history at Arizona State University. As far as I am concerned I have had pain enough on the subject without being censured in this quarter.. Their location was also prime, perched so they could collect enslaved people from plantations across Virginia and Maryland and sending them on forced marches in groups of several hundred known as coffles or on tightly packed ships along the Atlantic Coast to the Deep South. Waller knew his family. A sudden, loud drone from every direction, the natural music of Mississippi. Other white men, similarly armed, were arrayed behind him. His brothers never got back into the slave trade, but Isaac really decides this is going to be his game: Hes good at it, he likes it, he can make money at it, he sticks with it, Rothman said. Call me Ser Boxley, he says. Nancy Ann Armfield was born 1732 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania to John Armfield and his wife. Isaac had a child by a black woman before he married, Thomson says. White. Armfield, meanwhile, purchased an old hotel in the Tennessee mountains and converted it to a luxury summer getaway for the wealthy. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother. Thomson takes a half-second. I wouldnt have made it too well in slavery days, because I am the kind of person who just could not imagine you would treat me the way they treated people. Are we responsible for what the slave traders did? Literacy had been against the law for slaves, so few of the four million knew how to write. We in New Orleans have come a long way since Hurricane Katrina in terms of the comfort level of addressing certain subjects. As autumn gathered in 1834, the caravan that John Armfield handed over left Tennessee, bound for Natchez. New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. In 1833, the slave-trading firm of Franklin and Armfield was buying at least 1,000 people a year out of the Mid-Atlantic states and selling them in New Orleans and Natchez, where Isaac Franklin spent most of his time. Sarah Ann $675, Louisa $650. On holidays it is something, we have to rent a community center. People still come to show their money at Fairvue, like Franklin himself. Franklin once ran the biggest operation at Forks of the Road, moving hundreds of people every month. After Emancipation, now a freedman of about 20, Glenn remembered the name of his hometownRoxboro. I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. The gang headed down the Great Wagon Road, a route that came from Pennsylvania, already some centuries oldmade by the Indians, in the euphemism. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. No steamboats for this group. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. Franklin and his business partners, John Armfield and Rice Ballard, were the most important domestic slave traders in American history. Part of the reason theyre successful is they work well together: Each understands the others strengths, they trust and respect each other., We cannot be forgetting: Twilight marchers in Alexandria evoke the pain of enslaved thousands. There were free blacks in the South that owned slaves. 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. After 15 years at various Tennessee hospitals, and after 15 years selling makeup for Mary Kay Cosmetics (and driving a pink Cadillac, because she moved a ton of mascara), she now occupies herself with family history. Maurie McInnis, a historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia, who curated the Richmond exhibit, stood in front of a slave dealers red flag that she tracked down in Charleston, South Carolina, where it had lain unseen in a box for more than 50 years. It took two days wages if you earned 50 cents a day, what freedpeoplea new wordwere starting to get for work. Frederick County Visitor Center. People Projects Discussions Surnames I am fighting for our enslaved ancestors. The Wallers lived outside Amherst, Virginia, and owned some 25 black people and a plantation called Forest Grove. They record the names, heights, ages, sex and coloration as determined by the person looking at them. Now, I heard this more than 50 years ago from my great-grandfather, who was born in 1874, or two generations closer than me to the time in question. All the servants were black. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved from the Upper SouthVirginia, Maryland, Kentuckyto the Deep SouthLouisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. Thin and erect, a crease of a smile, vigorous dark eyes. Here the mountains thicken into the Appalachian South of deep hollows and secret hills. Hite expressed regret that he had to charge interest if buyers insisted on using credit. 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. This year, she curated an exhibition at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Purchased Lives: New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, 1808-1865.. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. A month ago the bridge was uncovered with a backhoe by a developer, Boxley says. But the tourist money is fairly recent. I ask a Nashville museum director, Mark Brown, for help in finding a member of the family in the here and now. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears. But here is a group with dozens, aged 10 to 12. Slave trading was a game. The men, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, were daring pirates or one-eyed men, a euphemism for their penises. Exceedingly heavy and continued rains have stopped our progress, he told his wife. They created a modern machinery to support the business of human trafficking.. Actually, Uncle Isaac sent her off because he didnt want her around after he married.. Boyd, Samuel S. Clay, Henry, 1777-1852. 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. There, at the age of 22, she married Joseph Thornburg son of Edward and Sarah Ann Hannah Haman Thornburg on 30 Nov 1754. So as far as hating him, I dont have a strong dislike for him. Waller planned to sell all of them. Then came second thoughts, and more self-pity: I have not obtained as much as I expected, but I try and be satisfied.. Cookie Settings, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia, Illustrated map by Laszlo Kubinyi. The older I get, the more tolerant I become. So Ben Keys son Hilery Key, who was a slave born in 1833, and brother to Jack Key, my great-grandfather, was one of the 22 men who founded the Methodist Episcopal Church in this area. Then he remembers why he wanted to write the book. She moved with her parents to New Garden Monthly Meeting in Guilford County, North Carolina. Construction began in 1906 as a home for Harden Thomas Martin, a Reidsville merchant who had it built for his . They say there were no feelings here.. In the morning during winter, the high selling season, black people were marched in circles in front of the dealers shacks. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. There is no branch of trade, in this part of the country, more brisk and profitable than that of buying and selling negroes, a traveler named Estwick Evans wrote about Natchez in the early 19th century. His slave pen appears on old maps, labeled negro mart.. The men made it across. Enslaved persons--Correspondence. Thomson warms up, shifts in his seat. You have Robert H. Elam operating in the site over there. No, thats not true, says Erin Greenwald, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. The display was weirdly silent. Cookie Policy If you squinted, you could see pinholes in it. We are only accountable if it is repeated.. But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. Theyre the ones who turned the business of selling humans from one part of the U.S. to another into a very modern, organized business no longer just one trader who might move a few people from one plantation to another, said Maurie D. McInnis, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the cultural history of slavery. I mean, just gung-ho., Thomson gets up and walks through the house, pointing out the ample Franklin memorabilia. They developed cruel stratagems to boost their bottom line: For example, they designated less space per person [on their ships] than the trans-Atlantic slave trade vessels did, Schermerhorn said. Near a school playground in the middle of Raymond, I find the Dabney family graveyard, surrounded by an iron fence. Waller reached Mississippi by that November. Among them were the field hand Nelson, plus his wife; a man called Piney Woods Dick and another nicknamed Runaway Boots. Other coffles came from the direction of Richmond. She points to a document from the steamerHibernia, which arrived from Louisville in 1831. Who was my mother, says Florence Blair. 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. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on.. Franklin divided his retirement between a large mansion he built in Tennessee and several Louisiana plantations he acquired over the course of his career. But names and history contain shadows.). 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. Today the Great Wagon Road, or Valley Turnpike, is known as U.S. Route 11, a two-lane that runs between soft and misty mountains, with pretty byways. The abolitionist, knowing full well Armfields profession, nonetheless wrote: He is a man of fine personal appearance, and of engaging and graceful manners.. It was a part of life in those days. It is plain that in this branch of the Franklin family, the past cannot be unremembered. The phrase sold down the river, for instance. 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. But I recognize the melody, and let the song pass. She laughs, surprisingly. I had never seen so revolting a sight before, he said. She was sold for $1250 to one of the most lecherous-looking old brutes I ever set eyes on, the reporter noted. of [father unknown] and [mother unknown] He takes a seat at his melodeon, a portable organ that dates from the 1850s, and plays a few bars of period-appropriate music. These children were not 10. He and his young wife came with a colony of Quaker emigrants to Philadelphia in 1718. Nearly 450,000 people were uprooted and sent south from the state between 1810 and 1860. That was possible largely because of the traders willingness to be unusually cruel and heartless even for a business built around the sale of human beings as they committed atrocities they appeared to relish. This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jacksons Indian removal campaigns of the 1830s, which gave rise to the original Trail of Tears as it drove tribes of Native Americans out of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama. The previous year, Franklin & Armfield had moved their jail and slave market in Natchez to a site on the edge of town called Forks of the Road. As she talks and points out objects, I notice something I had never seen during many visits to this archive: black people. Ser Boxley was a big young man during the 1950s, raised in the straitjacket of Jim Crow. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. The negroes are above all wellthey continue in fine spirits and life and appear all happy.. 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