The mother begged her new master to buy little Jimmie too, but he refused, and the child was dragged away. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. Ser Boxley was a big young man during the 1950s, raised in the straitjacket of Jim Crow. In fact, it is more your story than it is mine.. My oh my, the Scots-Irishthey were like made of brass. The remainder of the gang pushed on to Natchez. I am fighting for our enslaved ancestors. 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. Daniel is pleasant, happy to talk about his hardscrabble days. Isaac had a child by a black woman before he married, Thomson says. In Edinburg, a history bookshop. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. Slaves were routinely insuredplenty of companies did that sort of business, with policies guarding against damage. But collecting on such damage would be inconvenient. The yards were parade grounds that worked like showrooms. Isaac Franklin, Armfields partner, kept house in Louisiana, but his thoughts were often in Tennessee. Americas forgotten migration the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South, Edward Ball; Photographs by Wayne Lawrence. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. It meant hiring someone who could write. He and his nephew, John Armfield, headquartered their operation in Alexandria, Virginia, and they began to trade. In Knoxville, in October 1847, Waller readied his gang of 20 or more for the second half of their journey. It was typical on the Slave Trail: People like Waller marched a coffle and sold one or two people along the way to pay the travel bills. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. Privacy Statement The tollkeeper would lift the bar, and the coffle would march under it. He would stop the group in its tracks, pull out his purse and pay the man. After Swan Creek, McLishs Stand. Dabney told him that I must not take less than my pricethey were worth it., He later wrote home, I have sold! The way I see it, he says, there are a lot of people you have to bury to get rid of. 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. It is a fine country for the slave to live in and for the master to make money in. And by the way, The negroes are not only well, but appear happy and pleased with the country and prospect before them., At the village of Benton a week before Christmas 1847, Waller huddled with his gang in a ferocious storm. The inspection of the back made or broke the deal. The old railroad station, a wooden building with deep eaves, is a used-record store. 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. A painting of the mansion at Fairvue. And the auction setting of choice was a place called the St. Louis Hotel, Greenwald says, a block from here.. After the Civil War, it held on as a cotton plantation, and then became a horse farm. I ask a Nashville museum director, Mark Brown, for help in finding a member of the family in the here and now. She was captured and enslaved 400 years ago. The migration swelled to a widening stream. William Waller and his gang, and other hundreds of thousands arriving by foot, did not leave traces in government records. Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin & Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. He was not ignorant. When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the familys roots. By 1835 this place was abuzz with long-distance traders. I say, your great-great-grandparents were enslaved persons. But here is a group with dozens, aged 10 to 12. I have not seen him for ten years. And Ill tell you what nobody ever talks about. Men on one side, in order of height and weight, women on the other. Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield. Buyers by the hundreds crammed the viewing rooms of dealers in Natchez and the auction halls of brokers in New Orleans. The city government passed an ordinance that banned all long-distance dealers selling people within the city limits. After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel. 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. John Armfield wore a big white hat and striped pants. They continued in black newspapers until World War I, fully 50 years after Emancipation. 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. 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. It has a double portico, with four Ionic columns on the first level and four on the second. The house bursts with 19th-century chairs, rugs, settees, tables and pictures. Multiply that by 200. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield first met in 1824, when Armfield seems to have been at loose ends. Today as then, Raymond, Mississippi, is a crossroads, population 2,000. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother. Frederick County Visitor Center. Across the street, five historical markers stand on a naked lawn. The Armfield coffle of 1834 is better documented than most slave marches. Perhaps in an hour I may be on the river.. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much. She had seen him last when he was 8, and did not recognize him. And this is one of its most horrific chapters.. 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. Who was my mother, says Florence Blair. Ben Key was a slave to Isaac Franklin at Fairvue. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. She pulls out an October 1824 newspaper ad, placed by Isaac Hite, master of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law to President Madison). 2023 Smithsonian Magazine In their heyday, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield sold between 1,000 and 2,000 enslaved people per year, and by the time Franklin died in 1846, his estate was valued at $710,000 almost $24. That would be more than $440 million today.. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. It took four months to assemble the big coffle, to use a once-common word that, like so much of the vocabulary of slavery, has been effaced from the language. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were two of the nation's most successful slave traders. He married Margaret Dunlap about 1784, in Guilford, North Carolina, United States. Daniels expression empties. Most slave traders at that time were considered common and uncouth, with no social graces. And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.. You dont know what they did. The Club at Fairvue Plantation opened in 2004, and hundreds of houses sprang up on half-acre plots. BY KATE PARRISH O n May 11, 1857, James Hervey Otey, the Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, wrote to John Armfield asking for help. 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. 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. At this point in the journey, other spurs, from Louisville and Lexington to the north, joined the main path of the Slave Trail. The female slaves were warming themselves. During the move to the Deep South, many slaves found themselves on steamboats winding down the Mississippi to New Orleans. His trip on the Slave Trail, like most others, would end in Natchez and New Orleans. In 1833, he wrote the office back in Virginia about fancy girls he had on hand, and about one in particular whom he wanted. You know, I have been around blacks all my life. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. Historians know about the Slave Trail. They were probably younger, but nobody was checking.. Later the same wagons hauled those who had collapsed and could not be roused with a whip. This was dangerous. History The history of Beersheba Springs Assembly is complicated; birthed in a spirit of healing and retreat, it thrived from the capital investment of notorious slave trader John Armfield. He had a long dark coat and wore a mustache-less beard. We have been stopped for two days by the breaking up of turnpikes and bridges. The pictures are beautiful. Neither Franklin nor Armfield earned recrimination from their peers during their lifetimes and neither man felt the slightest remorse, according to their papers. Armfield had no wish to continue without his longtime partner. 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.. I ask him to play a debating game. Sometimes, as in Balls case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. Waller had never been to such a big city. Near a school playground in the middle of Raymond, I find the Dabney family graveyard, surrounded by an iron fence. 1730 including research + descendants + more in the free family tree community. An act of Congress is needed. He had some of those. Now I have five adult children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. 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. 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. 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. It reads, in uppercase Helvetica, STAND UP HELP SAVE FORKS OF THE ROAD SLAVE MARKET SITES NATCHEZ MS. He often holds the sign while standing next to the patch of grass that is the only visible remnant of Forks of the Road. 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. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves.. We in New Orleans have come a long way since Hurricane Katrina in terms of the comfort level of addressing certain subjects. The men made it across. Some names in the lists are familiar. Advertising Notice Although the Historic New Orleans Collection is the citys most serious and extensive history center, it attracted few blacks until this year. More Replies: Re: John Armfield b. When Franklin wed a rich socialite in 1839, he had been raping the same enslaved woman for about five years and had fathered a child with her, Rothman said. In my family, people looked after their slaves, he said. Slaves for sale wore a uniform of sorts. The bloodletting here has a kind of glamour. Even while actively trading slaves, the two men enjoyed an excellent reputation and moved in top-tier social circles, according to Rothman. In place of towns were stands every 10 or 15 miles. They got into the domestic slave trade just as the cotton economy and American demand for enslaved labor exploded, and quit right before the United States sank into the financial panic of 1837. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkins Jail. They ran to family, friends, or across state lines to freedom. 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. 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. There they were sold to new bosses and dispersed in a 300-mile radius to the sugar and cotton plantations. You cant judge those people by todays standardsyou cant judge anybody by our standards. (Armfields hotel, which still stands, is used to host events including Methodist retreats.) I mean, just gung-ho., Thomson gets up and walks through the house, pointing out the ample Franklin memorabilia. They were not handcuffed, although they may have been tied with rope. First Name: Last Name [Advanced Search] Home Search Login Find. Surnames; Search People; The exchanges granite facade can be still found on Chartres Street near the corner of St. Louis Street. A singular spectacle, Featherstonhaugh wrote. I dont feel anything per se, she says, benignly. My direct ancestor is Isaacs brother James. At the central square are the contradictions of a Deep South village, both of Wallers time and the present. In 1827, it was 1,359. login . Its been a long time. People still come to show their money at Fairvue, like Franklin himself. 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. Thats on the Internet. I wonder aloud. They placed ads in local newspapers seeking enslaved people almost every single day they remained in business. Address me at Morales, Jackson Co., Texas.Mary Haynes.. Their children included a son named Jack Key, who was freed at the end of the Civil War, at age 21. That meant feeding their captives large amounts of corn pone and pork to fatten them up, dying gray hair black so they looked younger, and if an enslaved persons skin was scarred with whip marks smearing wax into the wounds so they looked healthier, according to McInnis. He shakes his head. Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? While still a boy, Armfield ran away from home, vowing not to return until he had acquired more wealth than his father, Nathan Armfield. 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. But people who arrived by ship did. Sometimes they were forced to. I think thats interesting. When I meet Boxley he wears red pants, brown slip-ons and a blue T-shirt that says, Juneteenth150th Anniversary. Since 1995, he has annoyed the state of Mississippi and worried tourist managers with his singular obsession to mark the lives of those who passed down the Slave Trail through Forks of the Road. His parents named him Clifton M. Boxley. After a few days Glenn turned up in Roxboro. There were others. Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. But you dont know who the old ones are. Numerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang, wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. In the old days, there were few black people here, a lot of Quakers and the beginning of an antislavery movement. He is white, a face etched by too much sun. If you squinted, you could see pinholes in it. The slave cabins were vacant. I have sold out all my negroes to one man for eight thousand dollars! he told his wife. The fancy trade meant women sold as forcible sex partners. But the historian Heather Williams has unearthed a handful of reunions. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. Slave traders would issue new clothes for people they had to sell, but they were usually cheaper. She is petite, talkative, knowledgeable and precise. I do not believe that black people were responsible for their own enslavement, or that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery because they are better off than West Africans, or that a black man was author of the slave system. People sang. 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. 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. People Projects Discussions Surnames 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. 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. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered highway. Both institutions broke attendance records. Theophilus Freeman, who sold Solomon Northup, ofTwelve Years a Slave, operated over there. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. The family story is that after Uncle Isaac came back from service during the War of 1812, which sort of interrupted his career path, if you call it that, he was all for the slave business. The slave-trade site it mentions, Masperos Exchange, was diagonally across the street from the sandwich place.. Many people had scars from whipping. A lot of black people, she said, do not want to know about their ancestry. Hite expressed regret that he had to charge interest if buyers insisted on using credit. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. The surveyor talked to him for a few hours and saw him as sordid, illiterate and vulgar. Armfield, it seems, had overpowering bad breath, because he loved raw onions. They were women of mixed race, invariably. We werent there. Are we accountable? 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. I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. Born about 1730 [location unknown] Son. In the morning during winter, the high selling season, black people were marched in circles in front of the dealers shacks. During the last ten years, a number of themEdward Baptist, Steven Deyle, Robert Gudmestad, Walter Johnson, Joshua Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Michael Tadman and othershave been writing the million-person-migration back into view. Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Personal life and death 4 See also 5 References One thing that is hard to document but impossible to ignore is the fancy trade. New Orleans had a niche market. Armfield, meanwhile, purchased an old hotel in the Tennessee mountains and converted it to a luxury summer getaway for the wealthy. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself.. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on.. When they reached Nashville, they would be halfway. Thin and erect, a crease of a smile, vigorous dark eyes. For buyers, these were interpreted not as signs of a masters cruelty, but of a workers defiance. Families--Southern States. We had never done a dedicated exhibition on the slave trade, on slavery. Last came the women and girls. His face acquires a look that suggests the memory of slavery is like a vampire visiting from a shallow grave. Today in New Orleans, the number of monuments, markers and historic sites that refer in some way to the domestic slave trade is quite small. No. 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. Next came wagons with the young children and those who could no longer walk. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. Waller and his gang reached the Valley Turnpike in October. Franklin divided his retirement between a large mansion he built in Tennessee and several Louisiana plantations he acquired over the course of his career. In Raymond, thanks to Thomas Dabney, Waller had gotten in touch with a slave seller named James Ware, a 42-year-old with Virginia roots. Nearly 450,000 people were uprooted and sent south from the state between 1810 and 1860. Ferrill and was brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of 10 years. The fireflies come out in the dwindling dusk. Nearly enclosed by green curtains of limbs, it feels like a tunnel. As far as I am concerned I have had pain enough on the subject without being censured in this quarter.. Pretense and bluster rub shoulders with the plain and dejected. They first came over here as indentured servants, as did the whites. Samuel Garland said something about negro trading that makes me infer the Church is displeased with me. Then he remembers why he wanted to write the book. So they relocated here, at this junction, a few feet outside the city line. The two livery coats, big-buttoned and long-tailed, were worn by an enslaved carriage driver and a doorman. The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around. Jack Keys children at Fairvue included Lucien Key, whose children included a woman named Ruby Key Hall. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men manacled and chained to each other, lining up in double file. Over the next decade, with Armfield based in Alexandria and Isaac Franklin in New Orleans, the two became the undisputed tycoons of the domestic slave trade, with an economic impact that is hard to overstate. I pull in at various towns and ask around. They were discovered, and it caused a panic. 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. So as far as hating him, I dont have a strong dislike for him. No wonder that there should be robberies and assassinations in such a population.. Historic Structures Report The Historic Structures Report (HSR) for 1315 Duke Street, the Freedom House Museum, was formally presented by SmithGroup on October 28, 2021. 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. You got the wrong person to ask about sparing your feelings, Boxley replies. Waller was pinching pennies. Every few miles, Armfield and his chained-up gang came to a toll station. Boyd, Samuel S. Clay, Henry, 1777-1852. At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. Here, too, in the St. Louis Hotels beautiful vaulted room, families at the end of the Slave Trail were divided. Can you put it aside? No commands given by anyone, no noise about it, no talking in the ranks, no laughter or merriment, just marching, round and round. It was a part of life in those days. Starting in Nashville I drive down the parkway. It is plain that in this branch of the Franklin family, the past cannot be unremembered. Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment. It is a fact that the ones over here are far ahead of the ones over there in Africa. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. On the block was one of the most beautiful young women I ever saw. The two men launched the slave trading firm Franklin & Armfield and moved into the Alexandria townhouse today a museum in 1828. 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. Freedom-seekers risked brutal punishment and retribution against . Their good reputations persisted after retirement. As autumn gathered in 1834, the caravan that John Armfield handed over left Tennessee, bound for Natchez. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? I wish to inquire for my relatives, whom I left in Virginia about 25 years ago. We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled data on 70,000 individuals. The story of the masses who trekked a thousand miles, from the tobacco South to the cotton South, sometimes vanished in an economic tale, one about the invention of the cotton gin and the rise of King Cotton. It sometimes sank into a political story, something to do with the Louisiana Purchase and the first Southwestthe young states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. 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 sold your fancy girl Alice for $800, Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. I make a first estimate: zero. On the ground, a carpet of mud, and leaves beneath it, and dirt under the leaves. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. 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. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. After the women came the big wagonssix or seven in all. I wrote the text for four of the markers, he says, sitting on a bench and looking over the grass. He showed young Isaac how it was done, apprenticed him. Franklin died in 1846 of intestinal issues. Ball was bought by a slave trader on Marylands Eastern Shore, and later wrote a memoir. They created a modern machinery to support the business of human trafficking.. I ring the doorbell at the house the Slave Trail built. It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush. His book, Slaves in the Family (1998) won the National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller. My heart grieves over Sarah and I do wish it could be different, he wrote. People do know, however, about Civil War battles. Of course, that is only some.. Franklin & Armfields marches began in the late summer, sometimes the fall, and they took two to four months. Northern Shenandoah was wheat country then, with one in five people enslaved and hoeing in the fields. For example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. My ancestor James was dabbling in some slave dealing on these tripssmall amount, nothing big. I shook my mothers hand and held it a little too long, and she suspicioned something, Glenn said. 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. 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.. This is one of the richest portions of the state and perhaps one of the most healthy, he wrote home. Franklin and Armfield met a few years after that in the course of business and immediately developed a rapport, Rothman said an intimacy that continued for decades and fueled their profitability. 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.
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