Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears

smithsonianmag.com/history/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968

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. 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. He worked for a
partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle.

“We have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by
land this summer,” Franklin had written. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834—the equivalent of
nearly $300,000 today. “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.

Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin & Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield
established in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. 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. 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.

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 letter was the
first sign that I might be able to trace the route of one of the Franklin & Armfield caravans.

With that signal from Natchez, Armfield began vacuuming up people from the Virginia countryside. 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. Many slaveholders were inclined
to do so, as their plantations made smaller fortunes than many princeling sons would have liked.

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. 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, valets, field hands, hostlers, carpenters, cooks, houseboys, coachmen, laundresses, boatmen. There were so-
called fancy girls, young women who would work mainly as concubines. And, always, children.

Bill Keeling, male, age 11, height 4’5” | Elisabeth, female, age 10, height 4’1” | Monroe, male, age 12, height 4’7” |
Lovey, female, age 10, height 3’10” | Robert, male, age 12, height 4’4” | Mary Fitchett, female, age 11, height 4’11”

By August, Armfield had more than 300 ready for the march. Around the 20th of that month the caravan began to
assemble in front of the company’s offices in Alexandria, at 1315 Duke Street.

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. His book was not
much read—it had a due-date notice from 50 years ago—but in it Andrews described the scene as Armfield directed
the loading for an enormous journey.

“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. “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. There was a pair of
carriages for the whites.

In 1834, Armfield sat on his horse in front of the procession, armed with a gun and a whip. Other white men, similarly
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armed, were arrayed behind him. 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. Behind the men were the women and girls, another hundred.
They were not handcuffed, although they may have been tied with rope. Some carried small children. After the women
came the big wagons—six or seven in all. These carried food, plus children too small to walk ten hours a day. Later the
same wagons hauled those who had collapsed and could not be roused with a whip.

Then the coffle, like a giant serpent, uncoiled onto Duke Street and marched west, out of town and into a momentous
event, a blanked-out saga, an unremembered epic. I think of it as the Slave Trail of Tears.

**********

The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration—a thousand-mile-long river of people, all of them black,
reaching from Virginia to Louisiana. During the 50 years before the Civil War, about a million enslaved people moved
from the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky—to the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were
made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.

This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson’s “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.
It was bigger than the immigration of Jews into the United States during the 19th century, when some 500,000 arrived
from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was bigger than the wagon-train migration to the West, beloved of American lore.
This movement lasted longer and grabbed up more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.

The drama of a million individuals going so far from their homes changed the country. It gave the Deep South a
character it retains to this day; and it changed the slaves themselves, traumatizing uncountable families.

But until recently, the Slave Trail was buried in memory. 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 Southwest”—the young states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Maurie McInnis, a historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia, who curated the Richmond exhibit, stood in
front of a slave dealer’s red flag that she tracked down in Charleston, South Carolina, where it had lain unseen in a box
for more than 50 years. It sat under a piece of glass and measured about 2 by 4 feet. If you squinted, you could see
pinholes in it. “Red flags fluttered down the streets in Richmond, on Wall Street in Shockoe Bottom,” she said. “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. Nearly 450,000 people were uprooted and sent south from the
state between 1810 and 1860. “In 1857 alone, the sale of people in Richmond amounted to $4 million,” McInnis said.
“That would be more than $440 million today.”

The phrase “sold down the river,” for instance. During the move to the Deep South, many slaves found themselves on
steamboats winding down the Mississippi to New Orleans. There they were sold to new bosses and dispersed in a
300-mile radius to the sugar and cotton plantations. Many went without their parents, or spouses, or siblings—and
some without their children—whom they were made to leave behind. “Sold down the river” labels a raft of loss.

The “chain gang” also has roots in the Slave Trail. “We were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts,” recalled
Charles Ball, who marched in several coffles before he escaped from slavery. Ball was bought by a slave trader on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and later wrote a memoir. “My purchaser...told me that we must set out that very day for the
South,” he wrote. “I joined fifty-one other slaves whom he had bought in Maryland.” A padlock was added to the
handcuffs, and the hasp of each padlock closed on a link in a chain 100 feet long. Sometimes, as in Ball’s case, the
chain ran through an iron neck collar. “I could not shake off my chains, nor move a yard without the consent of my
master.”

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Franklin & Armfield put more people on the market than anyone—perhaps 25,000—broke up the most families and
made the most money. About half of those people boarded ships in Washington or Norfolk, bound for Louisiana,
where Franklin sold them. The other half walked from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi River, 1,100 miles, with
riverboat steerage for short distances along the way. Franklin & Armfield’s marches began in the late summer,
sometimes the fall, and they took two to four months. The Armfield coffle of 1834 is better documented than most
slave marches. I started following its footsteps, hoping to find traces of the Slave Trail of Tears.

The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered
highway. Part of Virginia’s 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. But when the slaves marched, it was known as Little River
Turnpike. The coffle moved along at three miles an hour. Caravans like Armfield’s covered about 20 miles a day.

One night in September 1834, a traveler stumbled into the Armfield coffle’s camp. “Numerous fires were gleaming
through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang,” wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. “The female slaves
were warming themselves. 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 men...were standing about with whips in their hands.”

Featherstonhaugh, a geologist on a surveying tour for the federal government, described the slave trader as a raw man
in nice clothes. John Armfield wore a big white hat and striped pants. He had a long dark coat and wore a mustache-
less beard. 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.

Early the next morning, the gang readied again for the march. “A singular spectacle,” Featherstonhaugh wrote. He
counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men “manacled and chained to each other,” lining up in double file.
“I had never seen so revolting a sight before,” he said. As the gang fell in, Armfield and his men made jokes, “standing
near, laughing and smoking cigars.”

On September 6, the gang was marching 50 miles southwest of Roanoke. They came to the New River, a big flow
about 400 feet across, and to a dock known as Ingles Ferry. Armfield did not want to pay for passage, not with his
hundreds. So one of his men picked a shallow place and tested it by sending over a wagon and four horses. Armfield
then ordered the men in irons to get in the water.

This was dangerous. If any man lost his footing, everyone could be washed downstream, yanked one after another by
the chain. Armfield watched and smoked. Men and boys sold, on average, for about $700. Multiply that by 200. That
comes to $140,000, or about $3.5 million today. Slaves were routinely insured—plenty of companies did that sort of
business, with policies guarding against “damage.” But collecting on such “damage” would be inconvenient.

The men made it across. Next came wagons with the young children and those who could no longer walk. Last came
the women and girls. Armfield crossed them on flatboats.

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