He knew what manners and culture were, Thomson says. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother. Sometimes, as in Balls case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. It was March 13, 1848. 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 Emancipation, now a freedman of about 20, Glenn remembered the name of his hometownRoxboro. We in New Orleans have come a long way since Hurricane Katrina in terms of the comfort level of addressing certain subjects. In Gallatin, I drive out to look at the old Franklin estate. Thereand this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangshalf of the big gang might have been sold. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield (1828-1837) were the first to use the property as a slave pen. During the move to the Deep South, many slaves found themselves on steamboats winding down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Short white hair, short white beard, khakis, cotton short-sleeve with flap pockets and epaulets. He regularly acts as a mediator with respect to family provision claims. Daniels expression empties. In the old days, there were few black people here, a lot of Quakers and the beginning of an antislavery movement. A few people launch into stories about the brave Confederates. Among them were the field hand Nelson, plus his wife; a man called Piney Woods Dick and another nicknamed Runaway Boots. He shakes his head. There were free blacks in the South that owned slaves. Whether youre a lifelong resident of D.C. or you just moved here, weve got you covered. Near a school playground in the middle of Raymond, I find the Dabney family graveyard, surrounded by an iron fence. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. He is white, a face etched by too much sun. Well, Germans and Scots-Irish settled the Shenandoah, thats who was here. . He knew how rare this was, so he decided to go back to his birthplace and look for his parents. Shoes with crepe soles. In 1835, it was 4,723. The coffle moved along at three miles an hour. No buildings on that half-acre. Even while actively trading slaves, the two men enjoyed an excellent reputation and moved in top-tier social circles, according to Rothman. 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. 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. Address me at Morales, Jackson Co., Texas.Mary Haynes.. People Projects Discussions Surnames Along the way, the coffle met other slave gangs, construction crews rebuilding the Wagon Road, widening it to 22 feet and putting down gravel. 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC 10/12/98 Now those, gesturing at some more yellowed papers, are the worst for me, she says. People sang. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. Franklin, Isaac, 1789-1846. I am enveloped in darkness; but still, strange to say, I live upon hope, the friend of man.. This is one of the richest portions of the state and perhaps one of the most healthy, he wrote home. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men manacled and chained to each other, lining up in double file. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears. A lot of black people, she said, do not want to know about their ancestry. I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. It took two days wages if you earned 50 cents a day, what freedpeoplea new wordwere starting to get for work. And that includes about Isaac Franklin. Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island. A celebration of life will be held on Friday, March 3rd 2023 at 1:00 PM at the same location. 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. They didnt buy slaves in order to free them, but to make money.. Sold down the river labels a raft of loss. That would be more than $440 million today.. 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. 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. Ben Key was a slave to Isaac Franklin at Fairvue. 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. Uncle Isaac was different. It is 8 p.m., and the sun is failing. You have to unearth it.. Just outside town, the Trace comes to an end at a shabby intersection. 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. The fancy trade meant women sold as forcible sex partners. Did an Ancient Magnetic Field Reversal Cause Chaos for Life on Earth 42,000 Years Ago? 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. Recently, Laise tells me, she stumbled on evidence that in the 1820s a large number of people went up for sale at Belle Grove. Former slavesthere were four millionasked by word of mouth, but that went nowhere, and so they put announcements in the papers, trying to find mothers and sisters, children and husbands swept away from them by the Slave Trail. We have been stopped for two days by the breaking up of turnpikes and bridges. The Club at Fairvue Plantation opened in 2004, and hundreds of houses sprang up on half-acre plots. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred. No. After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel. 1730 including research + descendants + more in the free family tree community. The only reason your black behind is here at all is because somebody survived that deal. 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. 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. No commands given by anyone, no noise about it, no talking in the ranks, no laughter or merriment, just marching, round and round. I ring the doorbell at the house the Slave Trail built. Ferrill and was brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of 10 years. 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. A singular spectacle, Featherstonhaugh wrote. Palladian manse, Empire franais, Tudor grand, and a form that might be called Tuscan bland. You have Robert H. Elam operating in the site over there. Franklin went to the theater with other rich whites and threw dinner parties, earning a reputation as a gregarious host with the best liquors, Rothman 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. Then came second thoughts, and more self-pity: I have not obtained as much as I expected, but I try and be satisfied.. Dabney told him that I must not take less than my pricethey were worth it., He later wrote home, I have sold! As autumn gathered in 1834, the caravan that John Armfield handed over left Tennessee, bound for Natchez. Today as then, Raymond, Mississippi, is a crossroads, population 2,000. New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the 1840s. And in Gallatin there is a church named after one of the Key family preachers. 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. Frederick County Visitor Center. 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. The gang headed down the Great Wagon Road, a route that came from Pennsylvania, already some centuries oldmade by the Indians, in the euphemism. He showed young Isaac how it was done, apprenticed him. Approaching the former Franklin house, I pass the golf course and clubhouse. William Waller left for New Orleans during the second week of January 1848, taking an 18-hour steamboat ride. It was designed by North Carolina's first registered architect, William G. Armfield. 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. 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. Buyers by the hundreds crammed the viewing rooms of dealers in Natchez and the auction halls of brokers in New Orleans. So Isaac had at least one black child, but this daughter of his left the state of Tennessee, and nobody knows what happened to her. John Armfield (1797-1871) was an American slave trader. You know they took advantage of the black women, and there were no repercussions there. 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. 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. My aim is to preserve every inch of dirt in this area, Boxley says. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. 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. The paper lists peoples names, their color and place of origin. Cookie Settings, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia, Illustrated map by Laszlo Kubinyi. Franklin divided his retirement between a large mansion he built in Tennessee and several Louisiana plantations he acquired over the course of his career. I dont feel anything per se, she says, benignly. In 1857 alone, the sale of people in Richmond amounted to $4 million, McInnis said. 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. The original John Armfield, from whom all the Armfields of whom we know were descended, was born in the north of England in 1695. What was it like to be in the room with Isaac Franklin? After 40 miles, the Little River Turnpike met the town of Aldie and became the Aldie and Ashbys Gap Turnpike, a toll road. 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. But the historian Heather Williams has unearthed a handful of reunions. 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. Waller had never been to such a big city. I mean, people who do not understand the old lifestylestheir standpoint on life, and their education, are what today we consider limited. The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around. 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. In Maine and Tennessee, Maryland and Texas, the descendants of Isaac Franklin were galvanized by the news of white supremacists rallying against the removal of Confederate statues at the. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkins Jail. Numerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang, wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. Do you know anything about the chain gangs that streamed southwest through these parts? A plate of pokeweed yanked up from the field and put on the table is one way of saying a mess. Blair shifts metaphors. Freedom-seekers risked brutal punishment and retribution against . You find them repeatedly. 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. Lucy $550.Col. Dabney has taken Henry and is security for the balancethe three sisters to one man. He was relieved. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. I had never seen so revolting a sight before, he said. Genealogy for John Franklin Layfayette Armfield (1858 - 1910) family tree on Geni, with over 240 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. Are we responsible for what the slave traders did? Every few miles, Armfield and his chained-up gang came to a toll station. The slave-trade site it mentions, Masperos Exchange, was diagonally across the street from the sandwich place.. Visitation will be held on Friday, March 3rd 2023 from 12:30 PM to 1:00 PM at the Royer Funeral Home (100 Royer Ln, Grain Valley, MO 64029). The way I see it, he says, there are a lot of people you have to bury to get rid of. Families--Southern States. So they relocated here, at this junction, a few feet outside the city line. I ask him to play a debating game. Privacy Statement Isaac Franklin, Armfields partner, kept house in Louisiana, but his thoughts were often in Tennessee. Armfield may have been less extroverted, but he, too, drew accolades for his social graces. You know, I have been around blacks all my life. I have not seen him for ten years. Listed in 1790 Guilf census 1-2-1 One thing that is hard to document but impossible to ignore is the fancy trade. New Orleans had a niche market. They were once Americas cruelest, richest slave traders. My mother was sold from me: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in last seen ads. He and his young wife came with a colony of Quaker emigrants to Philadelphia in 1718. But by the time Waller arrived, Franklin was gone. 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. 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. They bought shoes for them, blankets for them, brought in doctors to treat them. Waller knew his family. The negroes are happy, he says repeatedly. 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. 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. Today, on the same spot, a six-lane bridge crosses the New River, and there is a town called Radford, population 16,000. 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. You cannot imagine it, he wrote home. Several of Thomas Dabneys children lie beneath granite stones. 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. Double Oaks is a significant historic property, honored by placement on the National Register in 1985. Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Personal life and death 4 See also 5 References I ask a Nashville museum director, Mark Brown, for help in finding a member of the family in the here and now. My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? 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. It ran to 900 pages. 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. Since 2007, a proposal to incorporate the site into the National Park Service has been creeping toward approval. 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. 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. Before 1619, there was 1526: The mystery of the first enslaved Africans in what became the United States, Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and the master class, Here are the facts about the enslavement of Africans in U.S. history. Call me Ser Boxley, he says. Many went without their parents, or spouses, or siblingsand some without their childrenwhom they were made to leave behind. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. In the kitchen are mammy salt shakers, black lawn jockeys, Uncle Tom figurines and memorabilia of other irritating kindslithographs of pickaninnies eating watermelon, an African figure in a grass skirt, a poster for Country Style Corn Meal featuring a bandanna-wearing, 200-pound black woman. login . At the central square are the contradictions of a Deep South village, both of Wallers time and the present. Last came the women and girls. This is Forks of the Road, the Y-shaped junction formed by St. Catherine Street and Old Courthouse Road, where Isaac Franklin presided. The slave trade was all Isaac Franklin ever knew. And as night closes, the crickets start their scraping in the trees. The turnpike ran farther west40 miles to Winchester, and then to the brow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Perhaps in an hour I may be on the river.. It was at the beginning of the 1800s. The yards were parade grounds that worked like showrooms. Armfield and his caravan came to the Shenandoah from Alexandria. 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. In Winchester, the Winchester-. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves.. After the Civil War, it held on as a cotton plantation, and then became a horse farm. And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.. At the same time, that doesnt mean that he didnt have bad habits, Thomson clarifies. At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. Her name was Hermina. In place of towns were stands every 10 or 15 miles. Relatives of President James Madison put up the stone mansion at Belle Grove during the 1790s, and it lives on as a fine house museum run by a historian, Kristen Laise. About half of those people boarded ships in Washington or Norfolk, bound for Louisiana, where Franklin sold them. They are each others closest friends and thats rooted in their working relationship, Rothman said. And, always, children. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacya city crowded with monuments to the Old South. Many things in the Old Testament are pretty barbaric, but they are part of our evolution.. It was all he did for the rest of his professional life, right up until he retired. You see, our history is often buried, she says. His book, Slaves in the Family (1998) won the National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller. Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. I am president of the Sumner County Hysterical Society, he cracks, the only place you get respect for knowing a lot of dead people.. (Video: Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post). Kenneth Thomson brings out some daguerreotypes of the Franklins and others in his family tree. He was not describing the Forks, a mile east of the nice part of town. John Armfield Barrister and Mediator John specialises in estate litigation. In 1839, at age 50, he married a woman named Adelicia Hayes, age 22, the daughter of a Nashville attorney. In May 1765 the caravan reached the various destinations of these Pennsylvania travelers. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. Overland coffles would have used the road that molders off in the trees. This sorting arrangement meant that it was more likely children would be sold from their parents. 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. Though unsure what he wanted to do, Armfield was clear on what he didnt: He loathed farming. He was born in 1812 in Virginia. On the dark slope after 40, since you ask. These carried food, plus children too small to walk ten hours a day. The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business. She laughs, surprisingly. Franklin once ran the biggest operation at Forks of the Road, moving hundreds of people every month. The only reason why we are in America is because our ancestors were force-brought in chains to help build the country. 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,. There were others. My oh my, the Scots-Irishthey were like made of brass. We had never done a dedicated exhibition on the slave trade, on slavery. You feel something here? He is bearded white and gray, and half bald. Franklin and Armfield quit the business around 1837. And there were lots of them. (Armfields hotel, which still stands, is used to host events including Methodist retreats.) It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush. 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. After an hour of this, the showing of the lively stock, the enslaved stood in rows on long overhanging porches. The paper started a column called Lost Friends, a page on which people called out for family that had disappeared on the Slave Trail. Boxley left Natchez in 1960, at age 20. Researching people who were slaves is like a mystery tale. We are only accountable if it is repeated.. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. Robert Glenn was sold at age 8 from his mother and father in North Carolina and spent the rest of his childhood in Kentucky. But the tourist money is fairly recent. Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. At the peak of their business, the two men were moving roughly 1,000 people a year, historians said. Not a single offer, Waller wrote. In 1834, the two men became family when Armfield married Franklins niece. I shall proceed to sell sixty slaves, of various ages, in families, Hite said. Nancy Ann Armfield was born 1732 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania to John Armfield and his wife. (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. Here it is. Watching the things burn. In the morning during winter, the high selling season, black people were marched in circles in front of the dealers shacks. Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield. No steamboats for this group. I say, your great-great-grandparents were enslaved persons. John's three married daughters had rem ained in Pennsylvania. There was one place en route, however, with a small slave marketAberdeen, Mississippi. Franklin sold the enslaved woman and her baby right after his wedding. Daniel is pleasant, happy to talk about his hardscrabble days. Bill Keeling, male, age 11, height 45 | Elisabeth, female, age 10, height 41 | Monroe, male, age 12, height 47 | Lovey, female, age 10, height 310 | Robert, male, age 12, height 44 | Mary Fitchett, female, age 11, height 411. Remnants of the original Trace remain out in the woods, 100 yards from the breakdown lane, mostly untouched. The man in the South who has done the most to call attention to the Slave Trail was born in Natchez in 1940. 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