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Capitol: seamstresses, nurses, valets, field hands, hostlers, carpenters, cooks, houseboys, coachmen, laundresses, boatmen. 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. 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. Many slaveholders were inclined to do so, as their plantations made smaller fortunes than many princeling sons would have liked. The partners employed stringers-headhunters who worked on commission-collecting enslaved people up and down the East Coast, knocking on doors, asking tobacco and rice planters whether they would sell. With that signal from Natchez, Armfield began vacuuming up people from the Virginia countryside. The letter was the first sign that I might be able to trace the route of one of the Franklin & Armfield caravans. 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. This story is a selection from the November issue of Smithsonian magazine. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 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. 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. Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin & Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. “A good lot for walking” was a gang of enslaved men, women and children, possibly numbering in the hundreds, who could tolerate three months afoot in the summer heat. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834-the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer,” Franklin had written. “We have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in Virginia. 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. Virginia Delegate Delores McQuinn has helped raise funds for a heritage site that will show the excavated remains of Lumpkin’s slave jail. “You see, our history is often buried,” she says. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin’s Jail. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history.įor example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy-a city crowded with monuments to the Old South. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.” “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers.

“The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. “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? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived-in the same house and on the same land-in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond. When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots.