When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family\u2019s roots.<\/span><\/p>\n He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived\u2014in the same house and on the same land\u2014in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cMy grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, \u2018Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.\u2019 The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, \u2018Sure, we\u2019ll give it to you.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. 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. \u2018You want your history?\u2019 he said. \u2018Here it is.\u2019 Watching the things burn. \u2018Take the ashes and get off my land.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe intent was to keep that history buried,\u201d McQuinn says today. \u201cAnd I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy\u2014a city crowded with monuments to the Old South. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin\u2019s Jail.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cYou see, our history is often buried,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have to unearth it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Virginia Delegate Delores McQuinn has helped raise funds for a heritage site that will show the excavated remains of Lumpkin\u2019s slave jail. (Wayne Lawrence)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n **********<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Franklin had written. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834\u2014the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. \u201cA good lot for walking\u201d was a gang of enslaved men, women and children, possibly numbering in the hundreds, who could tolerate three months afoot in the summer heat.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This letter from 1834 held riches, and \u201cI will bring them out by land\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n With that signal from Natchez, Armfield began vacuuming up people from the Virginia countryside. The partners employed stringers\u2014headhunters who worked on commission\u2014collecting 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.<\/span><\/p>\n It took four months to assemble the big \u201ccoffle,\u201d to use a once-common word that, like so much of the vocabulary of slavery, has been effaced from the language. The company\u2019s agents sent people down to Franklin & Armfield\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Bill Keeling, male, age 11, height 4\u20195\u201d | Elisabeth, female, age 10, height 4\u20191\u201d | Monroe, male, age 12, height 4\u20197\u201d | Lovey, female, age 10, height 3\u201910\u201d | Robert, male, age 12, height 4\u20194\u201d | Mary Fitchett, female, age 11, height 4\u201911\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s offices in Alexandria, at 1315 Duke Street.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2014it had a due-date notice from 50 years ago\u2014but in it Andrews described the scene as Armfield directed the loading for an enormous journey.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFour or five tents were spread, and the large wagons, which were to accompany the expedition, were stationed\u201d where they could be piled high with \u201cprovisions and other necessaries.\u201d New clothes were loaded in bundles. \u201cEach negro is furnished with two entire suits from the shop,\u201d Andrews noted, \u201cwhich he does not wear upon the road.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1834, Armfield sat on his horse in front of the procession, armed with a gun and a whip. Other white men, similarly 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\u2014six 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n **********<\/span><\/p>\n The Slave Trail of Tears is the great missing migration\u2014a 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\u2014Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky\u2014to the Deep South\u2014Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. They were made to go, deported, you could say, having been sold.<\/span><\/p>\n This forced resettlement was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson\u2019s \u201cIndian removal\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201cKing Cotton.\u201d It sometimes sank into a political story, something to do with the Louisiana Purchase and the \u201cfirst Southwest\u201d\u2014the young states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.<\/span><\/p>\n Historians know about the Slave Trail. During the last ten years, a number of them\u2014Edward Baptist, Steven Deyle, Robert Gudmestad, Walter Johnson, Joshua Rothman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Michael Tadman and others\u2014have been writing the million-person-migration back into view.<\/span><\/p>\n Some museum curators know about it, too. Last fall and this past spring, the Library of Virginia, in Richmond, and the Historic New Orleans Collection, in Louisiana, working separately, put together large exhibitions about the domestic slave trade. Both institutions broke attendance records.<\/span><\/p>\n Richmond was a hub for exporting slaves southward. In 1857 alone, says historian Maurie McInnis, sales came to more than $440 million in today\u2019s dollars. (Wayne Lawrence)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n Maurie McInnis, a historian and vice provost at the University of Virginia, who curated the Richmond exhibit, stood in front of a slave dealer\u2019s 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. \u201cRed flags fluttered down the streets in Richmond, on Wall Street in Shockoe Bottom,\u201d she said. \u201cAll the dealers pinned little scraps of paper on their flags to describe the people for sale.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Virginia was the source for the biggest deportation. Nearly 450,000 people were uprooted and sent south from the state between 1810 and 1860. \u201cIn 1857 alone, the sale of people in Richmond amounted to $4 million,\u201d McInnis said. \u201cThat would be more than $440 million today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Outside universities and museums, the story of the Slave Trail lives in shards, broken and scattered.<\/span><\/p>\n The phrase \u201csold down the river,\u201d 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\u2014and some without their children\u2014whom they were made to leave behind. \u201cSold down the river\u201d labels a raft of loss.<\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cchain gang\u201d also has roots in the Slave Trail. \u201cWe were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts,\u201d recalled Charles Ball, who marched in several coffles before he escaped from slavery. Ball was bought by a slave trader on Maryland\u2019s Eastern Shore, and later wrote a memoir. \u201cMy purchaser…told me that we must set out that very day for the South,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI joined fifty-one other slaves whom he had bought in Maryland.\u201d 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\u2019s case, the chain ran through an iron neck collar. \u201cI could not shake off my chains, nor move a yard without the consent of my master.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n (My own ancestors held slaves in South Carolina for six generations. I have studied Charles Ball and found no family link to him. But names and history contain shadows.)<\/span><\/p>\n Franklin & Armfield put more people on the market than anyone\u2014perhaps 25,000\u2014broke 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n **********<\/span><\/p>\n The coffle headed west out of Alexandria. Today the road leaving town becomes U.S. Route 50, a big-shouldered highway. Part of Virginia\u2019s 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\u2019s covered about 20 miles a day.<\/span><\/p>\n People sang. Sometimes they were forced to. Slave traders brought a banjo or two and demanded music. A clergyman who saw a march toward Shenandoah remembered that the gang members, \u201chaving left their wives, children, or other near connections and never likely to meet them again in this world,\u201d sang to \u201cdrown the suffering of mind they were brought into.\u201d Witnesses said \u201cOld Virginia Never Tire\u201d was one song all the coffles sang.<\/span><\/p>\n After 40 miles, the Little River Turnpike met the town of Aldie and became the Aldie and Ashby\u2019s Gap Turnpike, a toll road. The turnpike ran farther west\u201440 miles to Winchester, and then to the brow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every few miles, Armfield and his chained-up gang came to a toll station. He would stop the group in its tracks, pull out his purse and pay the man. The tollkeeper would lift the bar, and the coffle would march under it.<\/span><\/p>\n About August 25, they reached Winchester and turned south, entering the Shenandoah Valley. Among the people who lived in these parts was John Randolph, a congressman and a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph once wrote a friend to complain that the road was \u201cthronged with droves of these wretches & the human carcass-butchers, who drive them on the hoof to market.\u201d Comparing Virginia to a stop on the West African slave trade, Randolph sighed, \u201cOne might almost fancy oneself on the road to Calabar.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The gang headed down the Great Wagon Road, a route that came from Pennsylvania, already some centuries old\u2014\u201cmade by the Indians,\u201d in the euphemism. Along the way, the coffle met other slave gangs, construction crews rebuilding the Wagon Road, widening it to 22 feet and putting down gravel. They were turning out the new Valley Turnpike, a macadam surface with ditches at the sides. The marchers and the roadwork gangs, slaves all, traded long looks.<\/span><\/p>\n Today the Great Wagon Road, or Valley Turnpike, is known as U.S. Route 11, a two-lane that runs between soft and misty mountains, with pretty byways. Long stretches of U.S. 11 look much like the Valley Turnpike did during the 1830s\u2014rolling fields, horses and cattle on hills. Northern Shenandoah was wheat country then, with one in five people enslaved and hoeing in the fields. Today a few of the plantations survive. I stop at one of the oldest, Belle Grove. The Valley Turnpike once ran on its edge, and the coffle of 300 saw the place from the road.<\/span><\/p>\n (Illustrated map by Laszlo Kubinyi. Map sources: Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond; Edward Ball; Guilbert Gates; Dacus Thompson; Sonya Maynard)<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n 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. A walk through the house, a look at the kitchen where all the work was done, a walk through the slave cemetery, a rundown of the people who lived and died here, white and black\u2014thanks to Laise, Belle Grove is not a house museum that shorts the stories of slaves.<\/span><\/p>\n Recently, Laise tells me, she stumbled on evidence that in the 1820s a large number of people went up for sale at Belle Grove. She pulls out an October 1824 newspaper ad, placed by Isaac Hite, master of Belle Grove (and brother-in-law to President Madison). \u201cI shall proceed to sell sixty slaves, of various ages, in families,\u201d Hite said. Hite expressed regret that he had to charge interest if buyers insisted on using credit. The nicest families in the Shenandoah tipped people into the pipeline south.<\/span><\/p>\n I pull in at various towns and ask around. In Winchester, the Winchester-<\/span><\/p>\n Frederick County Visitor Center. In Edinburg, a history bookshop. In Staunton, the Visitor Center. In Roanoke, at a tourist information outlet called Virginia\u2019s Blue Ridge.<\/span><\/p>\n Do you know anything about the chain gangs that streamed southwest through these parts?<\/span><\/p>\n No. Never heard of it. You say it was 150 years ago?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Well, more like 175.<\/span><\/p>\n Don\u2019t know what you\u2019re talking about.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n People do know, however, about Civil War battles. The bloodletting here has a kind of glamour. A few people launch into stories about the brave Confederates. A few bring up their own ethnic lore.<\/span><\/p>\n Well, Germans and Scots-Irish settled the Shenandoah, that\u2019s who was here.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n A woman at a tourist store clarified.\u00a0My oh my, the Scots-Irish\u2014they were like made of brass.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n **********<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n One night in September 1834, a traveler stumbled into the Armfield coffle\u2019s camp. \u201cNumerous fires were gleaming through the forest: it was the bivouac of the gang,\u201d wrote the traveler, George Featherstonhaugh. \u201cThe 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.\u201d Meanwhile, \u201cthe white men…were standing about with whips in their hands.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 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 \u201csordid, illiterate and vulgar.\u201d Armfield, it seems, had overpowering bad breath, because he loved raw onions.<\/span><\/p>\n Early the next morning, the gang readied again for the march. \u201cA singular spectacle,\u201d Featherstonhaugh wrote. He counted nine wagons and carriages and some 200 men \u201cmanacled and chained to each other,\u201d lining up in double file. \u201cI had never seen so revolting a sight before,\u201d he said. As the gang fell in, Armfield and his men made jokes, \u201cstanding near, laughing and smoking cigars.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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\u2014plenty of companies did that sort of business, with policies guarding against \u201cdamage.\u201d But collecting on such \u201cdamage\u201d would be inconvenient.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Virginia](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/smithsonian.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a><\/a>
<\/a>NOVEMBER 2015<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nRetracing Slavery’s <\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n
Trail of Tears<\/strong><\/span><\/h1>\n
America’s forgotten migration
\n\u2013 the journeys of a million African-Americans
\nfrom the tobacco South to the cotton South<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n