Alexandria Gazette Packet

What is also clear from the slave names on the manifests of the slave trade ships is that the enslaved African-Americans of Virginia and Maryland did have a rich and extended family structure. Numerous families appear on the manifests, from young slave men and women with one infant, through apparently husbandless mothers, often with several children, occasionally an apparently wifeless father with children, and finally complete, even three-generational families. For example, a manifest for February 1832 includes Ben Thomas and his wife Milly, both age 40; their three daughters, Ann, Serina, and Matilda, ages 20, 18 and 13: three sons age 18, 11, and 9; and a 20-month old infant who was clearly the child of 20-year-old Ann Thomas.

In another case, on the manifest for the Tribune in October 1835, appears the name Dick Johnson, Senior, age 75, and directly below that Dick Johnson, Jr., age 19. The junior and senior seem to tie the two men together. Was the older man the younger's father or grandfather? If, as seems likely, the manifest was filled in by asking each slave his or her name as they boarded the ship, the family pride reflected in the answer of Dick Johnson, Senior and Junior is apparent.

Family groups accounted for only a small percentage of Armfield's early shipments, a mere seven percent for the first three years. This percentage later doubled to 14 percent of all slaves shipped, and after 1834, when market pressure not to separate families increased, the number of slaves shipped in family groups increased to more than 37 percent for the final three years of Armfield's operation.

In one shipment in 1834, for example, we find an impressive array of African-American slave families and family names: King -- mother and six children, ages 5 to 20; Lucket – mother and four children, 7 to 13; Dorsey -- mother and four children, 9 to 18; John and Hannah Gage and children 4, 2, and two months; Speake -- seven children only, ages three to 17, including twin girls aged 10; Lucy David -- age 22, her infant son and three other children; Gaige -- mother and three children; Paine -- mother, father and two children; Charles and Permillia Greene with five children ages two months to nine years; Butler -- mother and two children, 13 and 7; and Amelia Blackwell with four children, ages 8, 5, 3 and 1.

Such a large number of families in one shipment of slaves most likely came about by Armfield buying an entire plantation laborforce, probably at an estate auction. Even though this 1834 shipment of families was not an isolated incident, Armfield was a careful and shrewd businessman. If he bought more families it was surely because he needed to do so, most likely for solid business reasons.

The local planters from whom Armfield bought his slaves were the prime targets of the abolitionist pressure not to sell slaves or divide slave families, and many planters may have had misgivings about the moral rectitude of human bondage. If a planter saw slave families owned by a neighbor torn asunder by a trader, he might decide to manumit his slaves in his will, rather than consign them to a similar fate. But, if he had confidence that the trader would at least respect the family ties, the planter could, perhaps, allow his executors to sell the slaves and, at the same time, still keep peace with his conscience. Therefore, the significant increase in the percentage of slaves apparently purchased in family groups after 1834, combined with Armfield's excessive assurance to the abolitionists regarding his respect for slave family integrity, suggest that Armfield was responding to social pressure and protecting the source of his slaves by buying rather than separating more slave families.

But, despite the assurances given to both Leavitt and Andrews that groups of slaves who were acquainted and family groups sold easier and for a better price, and that the firm would never sell so as to separate husbands and wives or mothers and children, and despite the increase of slave families in Armfield's shipments, the high percentage of apparently husbandless mothers and of young single adults suggests that such separations were quite common, especially before it became better business to buy families after 1834.

It also seems unlikely that John Armfield and his partner made a fortune trading slaves in only eight years , and became the largest dealer in Virginia and Maryland by asking every slave they bought whether or not he wanted to leave home. Armfield may or may not have purchased the problem slave, that he was offered for “twelve and a half cents,” but it seems most improbable that so shrewd a businessman as he, would refuse what was essentially a free slave, whom he could sell in New Orleans for $500 to $1,000, simply because the slave had a wife on a nearby plantation. The large number of single women among Armfield's slaves, the 80 percent of women with children but without an apparent husband, the 84 percent of males without any identifiable family, all suggest that African-American family disruption of all kinds was common. Armfield and his agents simply bought what would sell.

In the case of the young children after 1829, and of families after 1834, what would sell worked to the benefit of the slaves. But the ready market for prime-age, single men and women in the Deep South and the higher percentage of such individuals among the Alexandria shipments testify to the disastrous effect of the slave trade on African-American slave marriages and families. And, the number of slaves involved was not insignificant.

Leavitt reported in 1834 that 1,000 slaves had been shipped the previous year and that Franklin and Armfield alone would dispatch 1,200 slaves in the coming year. For 1835, the available manifests (others are still missing) indicate that over 1,400 slaves were exported that year. A veritable surfeit of slaves flowed from Alexandria to New Orleans: 318 in three weeks in February; 201 in March; 352 in five days in October; 344 in 10 days in November; 281 in December; 140 in January 1836. A total of 977 slaves were shipped in the last three months of 1835 alone (1,117 with the January shipment).

In November 1836, Armfield's last shipment, an astounding 254 slaves were dispatched on one ship, the Isaac Franklin. The majority of these slaves probably came from northern Virginia and southern Maryland, but it seems significant that even the Baltimore trading houses complained of difficulty obtaining slaves, and only 208 slaves were shipped from Baltimore in 1836. All of this testifies to the business success of John Armfield as a trader, and to the importance of his “establishment” on Duke Street in the history of Alexandria.

Franklin and Armfield retired from the slave-trading business late in 1836. Two of the firm's ships, the Tribune and the Uncas, were sold to William H. (Yellow-House) Williams, a well known trader in the federal city. The "slave pen" on Duke Street and the ship Isaac Franklin were sold to George Kephart, Franklin and Armfield’s former agent in Frederick, Md. Kephart may have been less careful about his reputation and more anxious for a fast profit than Armfield, He is reputed to have shipped as many as 400 slaves at one time in the Isaac Franklin.

In the early 1850s, the Duke Street establishment was conveyed to "Price, Birch and Co.," slave traders who had operated in Washington City, and had been driven from the District of Columbia by the slave-trading prohibition of the Compromise of 1850. This firm’s name was on the building when it was captured by Union troops in 1861.

The available evidence indicates that John Armfield was neither an iniquitous barbarian nor an enlightened humanitarian, but rather a shrewd businessman. When it was good business to divide families and sell young children, he did so. When it became better business to maintain the slaves in family units, he did that. Because Armfield was on good terms with the selling farmers and planters of Virginia and Maryland, and because he was able to monopolize the local trade, he was clearly operating by, or establishing himself, the local standards for moral and ethical propriety in the buying, selling, and treatment of slaves. Other traders operating in this same market would have been subject to these standards in order to stay in business. To do less for the slaves might have jeopardized the willingness of owners to sell their slaves; to do more would have increased costs, decreased profits, and given the edge to Armfield’s competition,

Standards for slave traders became more restrictive as time passed. The number of young children sold singly declined in response to legal, and presumably, public pressure. At the same time, the proportion of slaves sold in family units increased -- also because of social pressure. Yet, the large number of young, single men and women sent south from Alexandria indicates that African-American slave marriages and families were frequently disrupted to obtain those slaves most marketable at New Orleans -- the prime field hands.

Finally, and most importantly, analysis of the business orientation of the slave traders must not be allowed to obscure the personal, human experience of the African-American slaves, who were the essence of the trade. It was the African-American men, women, and children who were bought, separated from their families, sold, and transported to New Orleans (not John Armfield, Isaac Franklin, nor the northern abolitionists), who testify, even in their silence, to a new and painful understanding of the human tragedy that was the real and actual cost of the Alexandria – New Orleans slave trade.

Epilogue: John Armfield eventually retired to his plantation in Beersheba Springs, Tenn. He died there on Sept. 20, 1871 (apparently at age 74). His slave-trading partner, Isaac Franklin, died on his Tennessee plantation on April 27, 1846, at age 57. Franklin’s estate has been estimated to have been valued at perhaps $750,000 (in 19th-century value), most acquired from his slave-trading operations. All of the Franklin and Armfield “establishment” on Duke Street in Alexandria, except the original house built by General Young, was torn down after the Civil War. That original building at 1315 Duke Street, and some of the adjacent land to the west, was archaeologically investigated in the 1980s and is still standing today, and is a National Historic Landmark.

Detailed information regarding the lives and fate of the thousands of African-American slaves bought by John Armfield in Alexandria and later sold by Isaac Franklin in New Orleans may be lost to history. Doubtless, many of their descendents are still living in Louisiana, Mississippi, east Texas (and elsewhere), a testimony to the hardiness of their forebears who endured the painful experience of being the essence of the Alexandria-New Orleans slave trade.

Four-part Series

See the entire four-part series as it appeared in the Alexandria Gazette Packet by clicking the link below:

Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade

Or read each part online by clicking the links below:

Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade, Part I

Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade, Part II

Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade, Part III

Alexandria to New Orleans: The Human Tragedy of the Interstate Slave Trade, Part IV