John Armfield News Today

Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Virginia, examines a brutal past with hope for the future

Many people walk by the unassuming 19th-century white-brick row house in the historic area of Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington, not realizing it was part of a horrible chapter in U.S. history. A sign out front indicates it used to be the Franklin and Armfield Slave Office, one of the major centers of the U.S. domestic…

How 19th century slave traders used, and reused, the brig named Uncas.

The writings of many fine authors support the research and ambitious undertakings of an Institution rising to the challenges ahead

Historian Joshua Rothman uses the lives of three prosperous slave traders to explode myths about pre-Civil War American society.

“Slave trader.” It’s one of the most loathsome expressions in the English language. Even enslavers claimed to recoil at that designation in the era when slavery flourished. Andrew Jackson took umbrage at being called a “negro-trader” during the bitter presidential election of 1828, even though the slaves he bought and sold as a young man as part of the burgeoning interstate trade in enslaved people helped make him rich. Jackson’s slave trading followed the pattern of many financiall...

Phenix Gazette, June 5, 1826, 3, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85025006/1826-06-05/ed-1/seq-3/. FULL TEXT Cash for Negroes. THE subscriber wishes to purchase THIRTY-FIVE OR FORTY LIKELY NEGROES, either separately or in families, for which the highest price will be given. –Apply at Mr. Elias P. Legg’s , on St. Asaphstreet, or any information addressed to me in Alexandria, through the post-office, will be attended to. RELATED CONTENT

Enslaved Africans and their descendants were bought and sold within mainland British North America from the moment they were first brought to Virginia in the early seventeenth century. Tens of thousands of enslaved people were exchanged domestically throughout the colonial era and during the first several decades of the American republic. But this trade was limited, relative to what it would later become, and opportunities for men working as slave traders even more so. Through the age of the A...

Excerpted from The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America  by Joshua D. Rothman. Copyright © 2021. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Waiting for the slave ship  United States near the New Orleans wharves in October 1828, Isaac Franklin may have paused to consider how the city had changed since he had first seen it from a flatboat deck 20 years earlier. The New Orleans that Franklin, one of the biggest slave traders of the early 19t...

The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business Joshua D. Rothman © Adam Maida / The Atlantic Isaac Franklin spent part of Christmas Day 1833 assessing his company’s operations and making plans for the future. Writing from New Orleans to one of his business partners in Virginia, Franklin took a few moments out of his holiday to report that he had rented a new showroom in the city from which he would soon start making sales, and that sales up the Mississippi River at the company...