In 1832, at age 43, supremely rich from 20 years as a long-distance trader, Franklin built a big house on 2,000 acres outside Gallatin. This seemed to be as much a part of Franklin and Armfields culture of business as, say, going to the bar after a successful court case might be the culture of a successful law firms business.. He was sold to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. When they reached Nashville, they would be halfway. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. Numerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang, wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. In NC by 1760 - aound then came to NC with son William (oldest ), and 20 other men exploring. 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. Who was my mother, says Florence Blair. Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. After examining the people on display, a buyer would talk to a seller and negotiate. Sometimes, as in Balls case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. Other white men, similarly armed, were arrayed behind him. 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. Commission merchants--Southern States--History--19th century. Cookie Policy In Roanoke, at a tourist information outlet called Virginias Blue Ridge. When cotton went low, they did not. We had a cook, a black man. As for Sarah and Indian, they had been taken from Sarahs husband and her mother. The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around. 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. 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. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were two of the nation's most successful slave traders. And the auction setting of choice was a place called the St. Louis Hotel, Greenwald says, a block from here.. Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield. They were not handcuffed, although they may have been tied with rope. Armfield, John, Active 1830-1859. About half of those people boarded ships in Washington or Norfolk, bound for Louisiana, where Franklin sold them. They came to the New River, a big flow about 400 feet across, and to a dock known as Ingles Ferry. The slave cabins were vacant. My aim is to preserve every inch of dirt in this area, Boxley says. But names and history contain shadows.). I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. No, I dont believe in revisionist history.. Exceedingly heavy and continued rains have stopped our progress, he told his wife. That applies to Southern history, to slave history. 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. The bloodletting here has a kind of glamour. Last came the women and girls. It meant hiring someone who could write. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. I am married to a man with four children. John Armfield. The old railroad station, a wooden building with deep eaves, is a used-record store. Its been a long time. Red flags fluttered down the streets in Richmond, on Wall Street in Shockoe Bottom, she said. 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. Dried Lake Reveals New Statue on Easter Island. The coffle moved along at three miles an hour. The only reason why we are in America is because our ancestors were force-brought in chains to help build the country. And we had all these servants till they died. And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.. His plantation is gone, but this is where he arranged for a married couple, neighbors, to see Wallers Virginia gang. Next door to it was another, the New Orleans Exchange. One night in September 1834, a traveler stumbled into the Armfield coffles camp. I was sold to Joseph Bruin, who took me to New Orleans. Franklin, Isaac, 1789-1846. 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. After 40 miles, the Little River Turnpike met the town of Aldie and became the Aldie and Ashbys Gap Turnpike, a toll road. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men manacled and chained to each other, lining up in double file. Her research is like a poke salad, she says, dropping a Tennessee-ism. At the peak of their business, the two men were moving roughly 1,000 people a year, historians said. The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. 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. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. On May 1st, descendants of Isaac Franklin and John Armfield visited Sewanee's campus "on a search for greater truth about their family, its troubling past, and its connection to the University of the South." Check out Kate Parrish's write up on Sewanee Features below. 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. Here it is. Watching the things burn. And this site speaks to their denied humanity, and to their contributions, and to Americas domestic slave traffickers. Pretense and bluster rub shoulders with the plain and dejected. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield first met in 1824, when Armfield seems to have been at loose ends. But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. She had seen him last when he was 8, and did not recognize him. In 1857 alone, the sale of people in Richmond amounted to $4 million, McInnis said. But as Waller drifted through Mississippi, he couldnt sell anyone. I sold your fancy girl Alice for $800, Franklin wrote to Rice Ballard, a partner then in Richmond. I wrote the text for four of the markers, he says, sitting on a bench and looking over the grass. I have not seen him for ten years. 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.. It is peculiar that a man can pity himself for being unable to sell a roomful of teenagers he has known since their birth, but as Florence Blair says, thats what it was. 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. I mean, people who do not understand the old lifestylestheir standpoint on life, and their education, are what today we consider limited. He expected another month on the road. John Armfield, slave trader and businessman, descended from North Carolina Quakers who were Loyalists during the American Revolution. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on.. A painting of the mansion at Fairvue. We had never done a dedicated exhibition on the slave trade, on slavery. Isaac Franklin put a building right where that muffler shop issee the peach-colored shed, across the street? Waller knew his family. Beautiful houses, an antique village, a large tourist trade. Literacy had been against the law for slaves, so few of the four million knew how to write. Looking for any information about the ancestors and descendents of John Armfield.I am descended through his daughter, Nancy Ann Armfield. So-called mulatresses., Isaac Franklin was all over this market. 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. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacya city crowded with monuments to the Old South. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. 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. They first came over here as indentured servants, as did the whites. Trailer-park childhood. (Video: Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post). Franklin and Armfield each fathered at least one child with an enslaved woman, Rothman said. Like other Franklin gangs, the 300 probably got on flatboats in the Cumberland River and floated three days down to the Ohio River, and then drifted down another day to reach the Mississippi. They had seen the money others were making by selling out and decided to do the same. 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,. It meant compliant, gentle and not broken by overwork. It sat under a piece of glass and measured about 2 by 4 feet. Armfield and his gang of 300 had marched for a month and covered more than 600 miles. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. John's three married daughters had rem ained in Pennsylvania. Sometimes, he finds it difficult to keep going. Human bondage began I dont know when, but early, thousands of years ago. No. Born in North Carolina, he worked as a stagecoach driver before meeting Isaac Franklin and joining him in the business of selling enslaved men, women, and children for profit. 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. They were sorted by sex and size and made to stand in sequence. The three sisters had been taken from their parents, as had Pleasant, Mitchell and Samson. He shakes his head. On the ground, a carpet of mud, and leaves beneath it, and dirt under the leaves. He had a long dark coat and wore a mustache-less beard. Thats good. Several of Thomas Dabneys children lie beneath granite stones. He is loath to spend yet another day probing the dark activities and darker minds of Franklin and Armfield. In the 1830s, Armfield fulfilled his vow as the partner of . They were in debt. 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. I wonder aloud. 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. The migration swelled to a widening stream. Sold down the river labels a raft of loss. Franklin died in 1846 of intestinal issues. The phrase sold down the river, for instance. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. His face acquires a look that suggests the memory of slavery is like a vampire visiting from a shallow grave. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, they traded thousands of African Americans to the Deep South and secured millions in profit. There they were sold to new bosses and dispersed in a 300-mile radius to the sugar and cotton plantations. 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