Exceedingly heavy and continued rains have stopped our progress, he told his wife. New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. Local. 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,. If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. They were guarding 200 men and boys lined up in twos, their wrists handcuffed together, a chain running the length of 100 pairs of hands. You have to unearth it.. Many of their descendants own the cottages today. You cannot imagine it, he wrote home. 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,. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. 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. Terms of Use The drama of a million individuals going so far from their homes changed the country. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were two of the nation's most successful slave traders. I shall proceed to sell sixty slaves, of various ages, in families, Hite said. As far as I am concerned I have had pain enough on the subject without being censured in this quarter.. At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. I am drafted by the inactivity of others to do history work, he tells me. On holidays it is something, we have to rent a community center. My ancestor James was dabbling in some slave dealing on these tripssmall amount, nothing big. Ten years ago there was an old beer garden standing on this site, where whites watched football and drank, and there was a gravel lot where trucks were parked. The city bought the half-acre lot in 1999, thanks largely to his agitation. Franklin died in 1846 of intestinal issues. 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. He had a long dark coat and wore a mustache-less beard. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. Most slave traders at that time were considered common and uncouth, with no social graces. A magnificent Greek Revival courthouse stands next to a one-room barbershop with a corrugated metal front. The negroes are above all wellthey continue in fine spirits and life and appear all happy.. 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. Across the street, five historical markers stand on a naked lawn. John Armfield, slave trader and businessman, descended from North Carolina Quakers who were Loyalists during the American Revolution. 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. All the dealers pinned little scraps of paper on their flags to describe the people for sale., Virginia was the source for the biggest deportation. Wallers testimony, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. The original John Armfield, from whom all the Armfields of whom we know were descended, was born in the north of England in 1695. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears. You know, I have been around blacks all my life. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. Thomson is an antiques dealer, mostly retired, and an amateur historian, mostly active. Red flags fluttered down the streets in Richmond, on Wall Street in Shockoe Bottom, she said. Some museum curators know about it, too. Buyers looked at the people, took them inside, made them undress, studied their teeth, told them to dance, asked them about their work, and, most important, looked at their backs. The children were asleep in some tents; and the males, in chains, were lying on the ground, in groups of about a dozen each. Meanwhile, the white menwere standing about with whips in their hands.. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves.. The people are made in part of the worst portion of the human race, he wrote. Four or five tents were spread, and the large wagons, which were to accompany the expedition, were stationed where they could be piled high with provisions and other necessaries. New clothes were loaded in bundles. At the time, John Armfield was lacking in purpose: Shiftless and footloose, he had recently been chased away from a county in North Carolina for fathering a child out of wedlock, Rothman said. It would have been the easiest thing to do. There was a pair of carriages for the whites. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history. There is great demand for fancy maids, [but] I was disappointed in not finding your Charlottesville maid that you promised me. Franklin told the Virginia office to send the Charlottesville maid right away by ship. But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself.. I feel a certain detachment from it, I suppose. Boxley left Natchez in 1960, at age 20. For almost everyone, the break was permanent, the grief everlasting. He wore my old Virginia cloth coat and pantaloons on his march, as he told his wife, Sarah Garlandthe daughter of a congressman and a granddaughter of Patrick Henry, the orator and patriot. Her research is like a poke salad, she says, dropping a Tennessee-ism. The expectation of so many slaves was that their families would be annihilated, and so it became important to be able to forget. He was born in 1812 in Virginia. Franklin, who was approaching his 50s, was tired and didnt want to do it anymore, Rothman said. Genealogy for John Franklin Layfayette Armfield (1858 - 1910) family tree on Geni, with over 240 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? Isaac Franklin had no children who survived, Thomson had told me on the phone. I make a first estimate: zero. The slave trade was all Isaac Franklin ever knew. A few bring up their own ethnic lore. 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. It is an abbreviation, to accommodate people.. People are still talking about how the slave trade was marginal, slave traders were these ostracized dirtbags, and slaveholders only bought and sold people when they had to, Rothman said. Call me Ser Boxley, he says. I am president of the Sumner County Hysterical Society, he cracks, the only place you get respect for knowing a lot of dead people.. In Virginia, the coffles marched from town to town. After a few days Glenn turned up in Roxboro. Two phone calls later, one of the living Franklins answers. And there, in an accident hardly repeated by any of the million on the Slave Trail of Tears, he found his mother. On the dark slope after 40, since you ask. The whole amount of sales for the twentythe entire group that had come with him from Virginiais $12,675. (About $400,000 now.) Last came the women and girls. 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. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. Also, an elderly black woman named Charity, whom he and Sarah had kept at home, knowing that no one would offer money for her. 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. I am now waiting for a safe boat to set out for you, he wrote. Natchez, pearl of the state, stands on a bluff above the Mississippi. I wasnt taught to be prejudiced. 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. 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. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. In Gallatin, I drive out to look at the old Franklin estate. He was sold to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. You see, blacks were better off coming to this country. Part of Virginias section of that highway is known as the Lee-Jackson Highway, a love note to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the two Confederate generals. Members of the Armfield family among the travelers were J ohn, his wife, and their five sons-William, John, Jr., Robert, Isaac an d Thomas and all their families. They had seen the money others were making by selling out and decided to do the same. It was like that. Here the mountains thicken into the Appalachian South of deep hollows and secret hills. A typical display placed an 8-year-old girl on the left end of a line, and then ten people like stair steps up to the right end, ending with a 30-year-old woman, who might be the first girls mother. When I got back to Natchez, at age 55, I saw the large tourism industry, and I noticed that nowhere in this chattel-slavery museum town could I find, readily and visibly, stories that reflected the African-American presence. So he started advocating for the Forks. It never occurs to them to think slavery might be bad: Slavery is what made their society work, it made them rich, it was a given that that was what black people were for, Rothman said. Perhaps in an hour I may be on the river.. 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. 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. She was captured and enslaved 400 years ago. Men on one side, in order of height and weight, women on the other. The same reporter described a noble-looking woman with a bright-eyed seven-year-old. When mother and boy stepped onto the platform, however, no bids came for them, and the auctioneer decided on the spur of the moment to put the boy on sale separately. I sold your fancy girl Alice for $800, Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. 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. Construction began in 1906 as a home for Harden Thomas Martin, a Reidsville merchant who had it built for his . 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC 10/12/98 His book, Slaves in the Family (1998) won the National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in Virginia. You need to look that up. 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. In 1820, the number of ships carrying slaves from Eastern ports into New Orleans was 604. At this point in the journey, other spurs, from Louisville and Lexington to the north, joined the main path of the Slave Trail. Greenwald stands in front of two beige livery coats hanging behind a pane of glass. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield (1828-1837) were the first to use the property as a slave pen. I dont spare anything. The brig held 201 captives, with 149 sent by John Armfield sharing the misfortune of being on board with 5 people shipped by tavernkeeper Eli Legg to a trader named James Diggs, and 47 shipped. Waller reached Mississippi by that November. Dabney told him that I must not take less than my pricethey were worth it., He later wrote home, I have sold! The words Virginia Negroes signaled a kind of brand, Greenwald says. Across the street was another set of buildings and dealers. Here it is. Watching the things burn. Records of that part of the journey do not survive, nor do records about the individual slaves in the coffle. Though unsure what he wanted to do, Armfield was clear on what he didnt: He loathed farming. Brooks Brothers was top-of-the-line slave clothing, Greenwald says. Hannah Cole was one of them, maybe the first. Caravans like Armfields covered about 20 miles a day. It sat under a piece of glass and measured about 2 by 4 feet. They created a modern machinery to support the business of human trafficking.. During the black power years of the 1960s he renamed himself Ser Seshsh Ab Heter. The great fall in cotton has so alarmed the people that there is not the slightest prospect of our selling our negroes at almost any price, he wrote home. Actually, Uncle Isaac sent her off because he didnt want her around after he married.. But the tourist money is fairly recent. They were discovered, and it caused a panic. The women wore calico dresses and white aprons and a pink ribbon at the neck with hair carefully braided. Sometimes, as in Balls case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? Each negro is furnished with two entire suits from the shop, Andrews noted, which he does not wear upon the road. Instead, these clothes were saved for the end of the trip so each slave could dress well for sale. Many people had scars from whipping. In 1827, it was 1,359. He knew what manners and culture were, Thomson says. In 1839, at age 50, he married a woman named Adelicia Hayes, age 22, the daughter of a Nashville attorney. At Tupelo, he made a daylong detour to Aberdeen but soon despaired over his prospects there: The market was crowded with nearly 200 negroes held by those who have relations & friends, who of course aid them in selling., Waller dragged his gang northwest, four days and 80 miles, to Oxford, but found no buyers. People do know, however, about Civil War battles. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. You see, our history is often buried, she says. Hundreds of thousands crossed this waymigrants, enslaved people, whites, Indians. He turns. The tollkeeper would lift the bar, and the coffle would march under it. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. And there were lots of them. Their success was immense: The duo amassed a fortune worth several billions in todays dollars and retired as two of the nations wealthiest men, according to Joshua Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Alabama who is writing a book on Franklin and Armfield. Cobwebs to the face, bugs buzzing, overhanging branches to duck. After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. It was like buying a car today. At the central square are the contradictions of a Deep South village, both of Wallers time and the present. We had a nurse, a woman who used to be called a mammy. 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. I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. While still a boy, Armfield ran away from home, vowing not to return until he had acquired more wealth than his father, Nathan Armfield. Palladian manse, Empire franais, Tudor grand, and a form that might be called Tuscan bland. She pulls out an October 1824 newspaper ad, placed by Isaac Hite, master of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law to President Madison). While their business strategy was not especially innovative, it was conducted on a scale bigger and better than anyone else, Rothman said. One of them was led by a man named William Waller, who walked from Virginia to Louisiana in 1847 with 20 or more slaves. Thats good. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield first met in 1824, when Armfield seems to have been at loose ends. Many things in the Old Testament are pretty barbaric, but they are part of our evolution.. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer, Franklin had written. Thomson says he is 74, but he looks 60. 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. And that includes about Isaac Franklin. When they reached Nashville, they would be halfway. Which means that Isaac Franklin was my great-great-great-great-uncle., It is an important gloss, as it turns out: You see, Thomson said, my forebear James Franklin was the family member who introduced Isaac Franklin to the slave business., Taking a seat in an armchair upholstered in wine-colored brocade, he picks up the story. During the 50 years of the Slave Trail, perhaps half a million people born in the United States were sold in New Orleans, more than all the Africans brought to the country during two centuries of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The first polite questions appeared in newspapers in the summer of 1865, right after the Civil War and Emancipation. Armfield, John, Active 1830-1859. Randolph once wrote a friend to complain that the road was thronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcass-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market. Comparing Virginia to a stop on the West African slave trade, Randolph sighed, One might almost fancy oneself on the road to Calabar.. As he pushed his hands down the pike, Waller felt guilty about Sarah and Indian, he told his wife. Waller planned to sell all of them. Buyers by the hundreds crammed the viewing rooms of dealers in Natchez and the auction halls of brokers in New Orleans. 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.. (Armfields hotel, which still stands, is used to host events including Methodist retreats.) Waller and his gang reached the Valley Turnpike in October. I mean, just gung-ho., Thomson gets up and walks through the house, pointing out the ample Franklin memorabilia. She was about sixteen, dressed in a cheap striped woolen gown, and bareheaded.. This is Forks of the Road, the Y-shaped junction formed by St. Catherine Street and Old Courthouse Road, where Isaac Franklin presided. Thats on the Internet. Those kinds of stubborn myths they need demolition., Aaron Burr villain of Hamilton had a secret family of color, new research shows. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. 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 is the humanity of our ancestors denied that I am interested in. John Armfield: Muttenz Descendants, Inc. Muttenz Descendants, Inc. Muttenz Descendants, Inc.is a not-for-profit tax-exempt corporation portraying and honoring the frontier heritage of Muttenz descendants and their neighbors. But something happened early on, although it is not clear just what. My aim is to preserve every inch of dirt in this area, Boxley says. Katrina was cataclysmic, and it changed the way people thought about our collective history, Greenwald says. Freedom-seekers risked brutal punishment and retribution against . We had a guy that doubled as a driver and supervised the warehouse. A singular spectacle, Featherstonhaugh wrote. My direct ancestor is Isaacs brother James. On the lintel above the door you can see in faded paint its old sign, which reads, ___ CHANGE. The St. Louis Hotel was razed in 1916, but it was in the hotel that the Slave Trail ended in the most spectacular scenes. I never heard of any mistreatment. He became interested in Franklin and Armfield after perceiving a relative paucity of books or articles about the duo what he called a gaping hole in all of the literature on the slave trade.. I had plenty of money for the trip, he said. John's three married daughters had rem ained in Pennsylvania. 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. 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. The female slaves were warming themselves. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. One half the circumference of the rotunda is occupied by the bar of the hotel, and the other half by entrances to the vaulted room. The phrase sold down the river, for instance. Beautiful houses, an antique village, a large tourist trade. What do you think about Isaac Franklin? Franklin and Armfield quit the business around 1837. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. You feel something here? Then the coffle, like a giant serpent, uncoiled onto Duke Street and marched west, out of town and into a momentous event, a blanked-out saga, an unremembered epic. Among them were the field hand Nelson, plus his wife; a man called Piney Woods Dick and another nicknamed Runaway Boots. No. A hundred yards from Forks of the Road, there is a low brick bridge across a narrow creek. It gave the Deep South a character it retains to this day; and it changed the slaves themselves, traumatizing uncountable families. And as night closes, the crickets start their scraping in the trees. Waller knew his family. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. 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