To get rid of their attitudes.. And you know that the first legal slaveholder in the United States was a black man? Franklin sold the enslaved woman and her baby right after his wedding. If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. Some names in the lists are familiar. As she talks and points out objects, I notice something I had never seen during many visits to this archive: black people. 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. All the servants were black. I was sold with a younger sisterBettie. Enslaved persons--Correspondence. They are great people. My heart grieves over Sarah and I do wish it could be different, he wrote. Our mission is to offer gracious hospitality while providing opportunities for connecting with God & community. This morning finds us six miles west of Abingdon, Waller wrote home from one of the richer towns. 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 did not know before I came home whether my parents were dead or alive. And now, mother nor father did not know me., Edward Ball He does not make small talk. Genealogy for John Franklin Layfayette Armfield (1858 - 1910) family tree on Geni, with over 240 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. About John Armfield Came to America in 1718 with his wife and a colony of Quaker emigrants to Philadephia. 1695 ENG d. 1792 NC Julie Avedikian 2/13/00 Re: John Armfield b. William Waller left for New Orleans during the second week of January 1848, taking an 18-hour steamboat ride. 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. At the central square are the contradictions of a Deep South village, both of Wallers time and the present. But here, they were marching through wilderness. John's three married daughters had rem ained in Pennsylvania. At the Forks, Waller found a poke salad of low wooden buildings, long and narrow, each housing a dealer, each with a porch and a dirt yard in front. Thomson is an antiques dealer, mostly retired, and an amateur historian, mostly active. Franklin, who was approaching his 50s, was tired and didnt want to do it anymore, Rothman said. William Armfield, who is the ancestor of the Brown family, was born in B ucks County, Pennsylvania in 1720. There was one place en route, however, with a small slave marketAberdeen, Mississippi. 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. It hangs in the living room, above the sofa. And it was really past time.. The nicest families in the Shenandoah tipped people into the pipeline south. 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. An act of Congress is needed. 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. These children were not 10. Men and boys sold, on average, for about $700. 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. PARENT . The bloodletting here has a kind of glamour. John Armfield, slave trader and businessman, descended from North Carolina Quakers who were Loyalists during the American Revolution. The first polite questions appeared in newspapers in the summer of 1865, right after the Civil War and Emancipation. He had six plantations and 650 slaves.. Across the street, five historical markers stand on a naked lawn. Researching people who were slaves is like a mystery tale. A few people launch into stories about the brave Confederates. Now Angela symbolizes a brutal history. It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush. It was all he did for the rest of his professional life, right up until he retired. So one of his men picked a shallow place and tested it by sending over a wagon and four horses. We were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts, recalled Charles Ball, who marched in several coffles before he escaped from slavery. A plate of pokeweed yanked up from the field and put on the table is one way of saying a mess. Blair shifts metaphors. I do not approve of revisionist historians. A month ago the bridge was uncovered with a backhoe by a developer, Boxley says. When cotton went low, they did not. Franklin died in 1846 of intestinal issues. of [father unknown] and [mother unknown] Leave a sympathy message to the family on the memorial page of John Hawkins Jr. to pay them a last tribute. Outside universities and museums, the story of the Slave Trail lives in shards, broken and scattered. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. While still a boy, Armfield ran away from home, vowing not to return until he had acquired more wealth than his father, Nathan Armfield. These were stores and taverns with places to sleep in the back. Can anyone inform me of the whereabouts of John Person, the son of Hannah Person, of Alexandria, Va., who belonged to Alexander Sancter? But the tourist money is fairly recent. Whether youre a lifelong resident of D.C. or you just moved here, weve got you covered. He showed young Isaac how it was done, apprenticed him. It must be in the genes, because I have a brother who is a minister, and a cousin who is a minister, and another relative. Terms of Use It took two days wages if you earned 50 cents a day, what freedpeoplea new wordwere starting to get for work. It was at the beginning of the 1800s. Map sources: Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond; Edward Ball; Guilbert Gates; Dacus Thompson; Sonya Maynard, Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, AP Photo/The Natchez Democrat, Ben Hillyer, Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12. His trip on the Slave Trail, like most others, would end in Natchez and New Orleans. I wish to inquire for my relatives, whom I left in Virginia about 25 years ago. Several of Thomas Dabneys children lie beneath granite stones. Every Sunday, preachers around the South looked out at congregations and read announcements from Lost Friends and columns like it. As plantations talk more honestly about slavery, some visitors are pushing back, In surviving correspondence, they actually brag about raping enslaved people who theyve been processing through the firm, said Calvin Schermerhorn, a professor of history at Arizona State University. In 1827, it was 1,359. Most of the others were under 20. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacya city crowded with monuments to the Old South. Few, if any, American high school or college students ever learn about the duo. 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. Two phone calls later, one of the living Franklins answers. He is bearded white and gray, and half bald. But names and history contain shadows.). My plan is, take my negroes to Raymond about 150 miles from here and put them with Mr. Dabney and look out for purchasers, Waller told his wife. 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. 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.. 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. The first thing that meets the eye in Thomsons house is a large portrait of Isaac Franklin. 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. Many slaveholders were inclined to do so, as their plantations made smaller fortunes than many princeling sons would have liked. When John Armfield was born in 1763, in Guilford, North Carolina, United States, his father, Isaac Armfield Jr, was 37 and his mother, Elizabeth Brown, was 23. The exchanges granite facade can be still found on Chartres Street near the corner of St. Louis Street. She points to a beautiful piece of silk printed with the sentence, Slaves must be cleared at the Customs House. Its a sign that probably hung in staterooms on steamships. A kind of check-your-luggage announcement. Many of their descendants own the cottages today. Its been six years since Rothman began his research, crisscrossing the country to scour old documents such as property transactions in Louisiana, court cases in Mississippi, ship manifests in Alexandria. 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 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. The journey ended, the business done, Waller headed home. They placed ads in local newspapers seeking enslaved people almost every single day they remained in business. Sarah & child $800Henry $800. He could write a letter.. And that includes about Isaac Franklin. Here the mountains thicken into the Appalachian South of deep hollows and secret hills. Although the Historic New Orleans Collection is the citys most serious and extensive history center, it attracted few blacks until this year. Explore genealogy for John Armfield born abt. I was sold to Joseph Bruin, who took me to New Orleans. I never heard of any mistreatment. 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. And we had all these servants till they died. She pulls out an October 1824 newspaper ad, placed by Isaac Hite, master of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law to President Madison). 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. About August 25, they reached Winchester and turned south, entering the Shenandoah Valley. They are each others closest friends and thats rooted in their working relationship, Rothman said. You find them repeatedly. At the same time, that doesnt mean that he didnt have bad habits, Thomson clarifies. He and his young wife came with a colony of Quaker emigrants to Philadelphia in 1718. Ferrill and was brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of 10 years. Surnames; Search People; 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. Armfield did not want to pay for passage, not with his hundreds. Wallers testimony, to my knowledge, has never been examined in detail. In Roanoke, at a tourist information outlet called Virginias Blue Ridge. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much. Americas forgotten migration the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South, Edward Ball; Photographs by Wayne Lawrence. It is plain that in this branch of the Franklin family, the past cannot be unremembered. So it must be true. He complained that his wifes brother Samuel had condescended to him a few months before. She was sold for $1250 to one of the most lecherous-looking old brutes I ever set eyes on, the reporter noted. In place of towns were stands every 10 or 15 miles. It sat under a piece of glass and measured about 2 by 4 feet. The house bursts with 19th-century chairs, rugs, settees, tables and pictures. Numerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang, wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. His humanity was not always visible, but it was there. Ser Boxley was a big young man during the 1950s, raised in the straitjacket of Jim Crow. It is an easy chat between strangers, until I bring up the slave days. Human bondage began I dont know when, but early, thousands of years ago. Theophilus Freeman, who sold Solomon Northup, ofTwelve Years a Slave, operated over there. Across the street was another set of buildings and dealers. Those kinds of stubborn myths they need demolition., Aaron Burr villain of Hamilton had a secret family of color, new research shows. 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. Thomson emphasizes these last sentences. 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. The fireflies come out in the dwindling dusk. The whole thing was so evil, McInnis said. James Ware, the slave dealer Waller had met in Natchez, had come through on the sales, and he offered Waller an itemized statement. The people who accompanied him included a boy of 8 or 9 called Pleasant; Mitchell, who was 10 or 11; a teenage boy named Samson; three teenage sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy; Henry, about 17; a man named Nelson and his wife; a man in his 20s called Foster; and a young mother named Sarah, with her daughter Indian, about age 2. He died of old age in 1871. He shakes his head. After Duck River, in Tennessee, came the Keg Springs Stand. 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). Waller was pinching pennies. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself.. Around the 20th of that month the caravan began to assemble in front of the companys offices in Alexandria, at 1315 Duke Street. Approaching the former Franklin house, I pass the golf course and clubhouse. The other half walked from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi River, 1,100 miles, with riverboat steerage for short distances along the way. My mother was sold from me: After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in last seen ads. Franklin & Armfields marches began in the late summer, sometimes the fall, and they took two to four months. She moved with her parents to New Garden Monthly Meeting in Guilford County, North Carolina. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. Fairvue was a working plantation, but it was also an announcement that the boy from Gallatin had returned to his humble roots in majesty. People Projects Discussions Surnames It ran to 900 pages. Part of the reason theyre successful is they work well together: Each understands the others strengths, they trust and respect each other., We cannot be forgetting: Twilight marchers in Alexandria evoke the pain of enslaved thousands. Isaac Franklin and John Armfield were two of the nation's most successful slave traders. 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. A message from a woman who had been snatched from her mother when she was a girl might reach hundreds of thousands. A clean back was a rarity, and it raised the price. That is the equivalent of $35,000 today. 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. Thats the type of name I should have had if traditional African cultures had stayed intact, compared to Clifton Boxley, which is the plantation name, or slave name, he says. I squish through the mud, sweating, pulling off spiders, slapping mosquitoes and horseflies. Then came second thoughts, and more self-pity: I have not obtained as much as I expected, but I try and be satisfied.. For buyers, these were interpreted not as signs of a masters cruelty, but of a workers defiance. I have not seen him for ten years. Franklin probably bought him there and brought him to Tennessee in the early 1830s. Trailer-park childhood. I ask him to play a debating game. 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. No buildings on that half-acre. Never heard of it. Here it is. Watching the things burn. But what it says is wrong. After he died, in 1846, his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel. 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. Uncle Isaac was different. Why does no one know their names? You see, blacks were better off coming to this country. No, thats not true, says Erin Greenwald, a curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection. 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. Franklin divided his retirement between a large mansion he built in Tennessee and several Louisiana plantations he acquired over the course of his career. The tollkeeper would lift the bar, and the coffle would march under it. You cannot imagine it, he wrote home. Boyd, Samuel S. Clay, Henry, 1777-1852. The Armfield coffle of 1834 is better documented than most slave marches. Ballard, Rice C. (Rice Carter), -1860. He spent 35 years in California as an activist, as a teacher, as a foot soldier in anti-poverty programs. In the morning during winter, the high selling season, black people were marched in circles in front of the dealers shacks. Sold down the river labels a raft of loss. Northern Shenandoah was wheat country then, with one in five people enslaved and hoeing in the fields. You know, I have been around blacks all my life. He did it, but it is what it is. 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. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Thomson brings out an article that he wrote some years ago for the GallatinExaminer. The Natchez Trace Parkway, with asphalt flat like silk, now follows the old route. Your Privacy Rights Few profited more than the two Virginia slave traders. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore. But by the time Waller arrived, Franklin was gone. Waller had never been to such a big city. On the ground, a carpet of mud, and leaves beneath it, and dirt under the leaves. We are only accountable if it is repeated.. Franklin and Armfield transported an estimated 10,000 enslaved people over the course of their careers, according to Rothman. It meant compliant, gentle and not broken by overwork. Thomson is sensitive to the suggestion that the family took benefit from the industrial-scale cruelty of Franklin & Armfield. They were sorted by sex and size and made to stand in sequence. Their children included a son named Jack Key, who was freed at the end of the Civil War, at age 21. 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. And, always, children. The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around. You cant judge those people by todays standardsyou cant judge anybody by our standards. These carried food, plus children too small to walk ten hours a day. If you squinted, you could see pinholes in it. 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. My mothers name was Matilda; she lived near Wilton, Va., and belonged to a Mr. Percifield. As U.S. 11 steps into Tennessee, the road finds the Holston River and runs parallel to it. He was a minister. Tell me, aint you my child whom I left on the road near Mr. Moores before the war? I broke down and began to cry. Kenneth Thomson opens the door to his house, which is clapboard and painted a pretty cottage yellowquaint, not grand. Samuel Garland said something about negro trading that makes me infer the Church is displeased with me. A hundred yards from Forks of the Road, there is a low brick bridge across a narrow creek. You need to look that up. Before he married, Isaac had companions, some willing, some unwilling. You would get paid $3 for 100 pounds of picking cottonthat is, if you were lucky to find a farmer who would employ you.. Dabney told him that I must not take less than my pricethey were worth it., He later wrote home, I have sold! A painting of the mansion at Fairvue. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. 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. Their plan was to leave a few slaves behind with Sarah as house servants and for William to march nearly all the rest to Natchez and New Orleans. I shall proceed to sell sixty slaves, of various ages, in families, Hite said. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered highway. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. So they relocated here, at this junction, a few feet outside the city line. A black man asks:I am a middle-class father. Franklin, meanwhile, stayed mostly in Natchez, Miss., and was responsible for selling their human cargo to plantations in the Deep South. We studied hundreds of shipping manifests and compiled data on 70,000 individuals. A flatboat could float down the Mississippi to Natchez in two weeks. Waller planned to sell all of them. Multiply that by 200. Next came wagons with the young children and those who could no longer walk. I take the old route to Knoxville, but then get onto the freeway, Interstate 40. That was possible largely because of the traders willingness to be unusually cruel and heartless even for a business built around the sale of human beings as they committed atrocities they appeared to relish. Along the way, the coffle met other slave gangs, construction crews rebuilding the Wagon Road, widening it to 22 feet and putting down gravel. 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. [1] He was also the developer of Beersheba Springs, and a co-founder of Sewanee: The University of the South . The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migrationa thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black, reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. The trace was a 450-mile roadtrace being the colonial word for a native trail through forestand the only overland route from the plateau west of the Appalachian Range leading to the Gulf of Mexico. Franklin and his business partners, John Armfield and Rice Ballard, were the most important domestic slave traders in American history.
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