A coffle, sometimes called a platoon or a drove, was a group of enslaved people chained together and marched from one place to another by owners or slave traders. [1] [2] [3] These troupes, sometimes called shipping lots before they were moved, ranged in size from a fewer than a dozen to 200 or more enslaved people.
In the southern United States before the Civil War, slave traders such as Franklin and Armfield arbitraged slave prices by purchasing slaves at low prices in Mid-Atlantic states such as Virginia, and then reselling them at a higher price in deep-south, especially in New Orleans, Louisiana, and in Natchez, Mississippi, at the Forks of the Road Market. Franklin and Armfield established slave pens near Alexandria, Virginia, to hold slaves, and when a sufficient number were gathered, some were transported by ship. Others were handcuffed to long chains in groups of 100 (a coffle) and force marched to the markets of the deep south, where they would be sold as slaves. Their professions were varied as some would be laborers, seamstresses, carpenters and "fancy girls", who would serve as concubines. [4] The trader Austin Woolfolk reportedly wanted to collect nine or more enslaved people in a platoon before he began moving them from place to place. [2] The slave traders rode horses, while the enslaved "women were tied together with a rope about their necks like a halter, while the men wore iron collars, fastened to a chain about a hundred feet long and were also handcuffed." [5]
In the summer of 1822, as I returned with my family from a visit to the Barrens of Kentucky, I witnessed a scene such as I never witnessed before, and such as I hope never to witness again. Having passed through Paris, in Bourbon County, Kentucky, the sound of music (beyond a little rising ground) attracted my attention. I looked forward, and saw the flag of my country waving. Supposing that I was about to meet a military parade, I drove hastily to the side of the road; and, having gained the ascent, I discovered (I supposed) about 40 black men all chained together after the following manner: each of them was handcuffed, and they were arranged in rank and file. A chain perhaps 40 feet long, the size of a fifth-horse-chain, was stretched between the two ranks, to which short chains were joined, which connected with the handcuffs. Behind them were, I suppose, about 30 women, in double rank, the couples tied hand to hand. A solemn sadness sat on every countenance, and the dismal silence of this march of despair was interrupted only by the sound of two violins; yes, as if to add insult to injury, the foremost couple were furnished with a violin a-piece; the second couple were ornamented with cockades, while near the centre waved the republican flag, carried by a hand literally in chains. [6]
— Rev. James H. Dickey, published 1853
A letter from Georgia written in 1833 described "During this and other days I have passed by many negro traders, who were crossing to Alabama. These negro traders, in order to save expense, usually carry their own provisions, and encamp out at night. Passing many of these encampments early in the morning, when they were just pitching tents, I have observed groups of negroes hand-cuffed, probably to prevent them from running away. The driver told us, that a thousand negroes had gone on his road to Alabama, the present spring." [7]
J. K. Paulding, a noted writer, later U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and one of the most articulate and ardent defenders of American slavery, witnessed the following scene in Virginia in 1816, indicating that especially in the early 19th century, coffles might be a dozen or so enslaved individuals escorted by just one trader–overseer: [8]
The sun was shining out very hot, and in turning an angle of the road we encountered the following group: first, a little cart drawn by one horse, in which five or six half-naked black children were tumbled like pigs together. The cart had no covering, and they seemed to have been actually broiled to sleep. Behind the cart marched three black women, with head, neck and breasts, uncovered, and without shoes or stockings; next came three men, bareheaded, half naked, and chained together with an ox chain! Last of all came a white man—a white man, Frank!—on horseback, pistols in his belt, with the impudence to look us in the face without blushing. I should like to have seen him hunted by blood-hounds. At a house where we stopped a little further on, we learned that he had bought these miserable beings in Maryland, and was marching them in this manner to some of the more southern States. Shame on the State of Maryland! I say—and shame on the State of Virginia! and every State through which this wretched cavalcade was permitted to pass. Do they expect that such exhibitions will not dishonor them in the eyes of strangers, however they may be reconciled to them by education and habit? [8]
Sometimes coffles were prepared in advance, sometimes they were aassembled or disassembled along the route of a particular trader. According to Plantation Slavery in Georgia (1933), "The daughter of Joseph Tooke, a prominent Houston County planter, recalls the annual visits of the speculator, with his gang of slaves, to their home; the Negroes would camp in a grove near the highway, Tooke would go down, inspect the slaves, and purchase those needed." [9]
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and then-new states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Isaac Franklin was an American slave trader and plantation owner. Born to wealthy planters in what would become Sumner County, Tennessee, he assisted his brothers in trading slaves and agricultural surplus along the Mississippi River in his youth, before briefly serving in the Tennessee militia during the War of 1812. He returned to slave trading soon after the war, buying enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, before marching them in coffles to sale at Natchez, Mississippi. He introduced John Armfield to the slave trade, and with him founded the Franklin & Armfield partnership in 1828, which would go on to become one of the largest slave trading firms in the United States. With a base of operations in Alexandria, D.C., the company shipped massive numbers of the enslaved by land and sea to markets at Natchez and New Orleans.
John Armfield (1797–1871) was an American slave trader. He was the co-founder of Franklin & Armfield, "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States. He was also the developer of Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, and a co-founder of Sewanee: The University of the South.
Slavery in Georgia is known to have been practiced by European colonists. During the colonial era, the practice of slavery in Georgia soon became surpassed by industrial-scale plantation slavery.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the middle passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
The Franklin and Armfield Office, which houses the Freedom House Museum, is a historic commercial building in Alexandria, Virginia. Built c. 1810–1820, it was first used as a private residence before being converted to the offices of the largest slave trading firm in the United States, started in 1828 by Isaac Franklin and John Armfield. Another source, using ship manifests in the National Archives, gives the number as "at least 5,000".
The Book of Negroes is a 2007 novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for enslavers to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
The Forks of the Road was a slave market in Natchez, Mississippi in the United States. The Forks of the Road market was located about a mile from downtown Natchez at the intersection of Liberty Road and Washington Road, which has since been renamed to D'Evereux Drive in one direction and St. Catherine Street in the other. The market differed from many other slave sellers of the day by offering individuals on a first-come first-serve basis rather than selling them at auction, either singly or in lots. At one time the Forks of the Road was the second-largest slave market in the United States, trailing only New Orleans.
Slave markets and slave jails in the United States were places used for the slave trade in the United States from the founding in 1776 until the total abolition of slavery in 1865. Slave pens, also known as slave jails, were used to temporarily hold enslaved people until they were sold, or to hold fugitive slaves, and sometimes even to "board" slaves while traveling. Slave markets were any place where sellers and buyers gathered to make deals. Some of these buildings had dedicated slave jails, others were negro marts to showcase the slaves offered for sale, and still others were general auction or market houses where a wide variety of business was conducted, of which "negro trading" was just one part.
Theophilus Freeman was a 19th-century American slave trader of Virginia, Louisiana and Mississippi. He was known in his own time as wealthy and problematic. Freeman's business practices were described in two antebellum American slave narratives—that of John Brown and that of Solomon Northup—and he appears as a character in both filmed dramatizations of Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave.
George Kephart was a 19th-century American slave trader, land owner, farmer, and philanthropist. A native of Maryland, he was an agent of the interstate trading firm Franklin & Armfield early in his career, and later occupied, owned, and finally leased out that company's infamous slave jail in Alexandria. In 1862, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts mentioned Kephart by name in a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate as one of the traders who had "polluted the capital of the nation with this brutalizing traffic" of selling people.
Seth Woodroof was a slave trader based in Lynchburg in central Virginia, United States. He was an interstate trader who ran what the Lynchburg Museum called the "most active and infamous" slave pen in the city. He is believed to have been actively trading from approximately 1830 until the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. Woodroof sat on the Lynchburg city council from 1858 to 1865.
Griffin & Pullum, later Griffin, Pullum & Co., was a 19th-century American interstate slave-trading company. The principals were Pierce Griffin and William A. Pullum. They mainly bought people in Kentucky and sold them in Mississippi.
Torture of slaves in the United States was fairly common, as part of what many slavers claimed was necessary discipline. As one history put it, "Stinted allowance, imprisonment, and whipping were the usual methods of punishment; incorrigibles were sometimes 'ironed' or sold." Slaves in the United States were considered chattel, meaning they were legally treated as personal property, akin to livestock.
Jourdan Michaux Saunders was an American domestic slave trader and farmer, notable for his partnership with Franklin & Armfield. Born to a slave-owning family in Caswell County, North Carolina, his father died soon after a move to Smith County, Tennessee, leaving Saunders with a significant inherited estate. As a young man during the War of 1812, he volunteered in the Tennessee militia, seeing service at the Battle of New Orleans. He entered the slave trade in October 1827 as part of a business partnership with David Burford, founding the firm J. M. Saunders and Company and choosing Fauquier County, Virginia as a base of operations.
Washington Robey, sometimes Washington Robie, was an American tavern keeper, livery stable operator, slave trader, and slave jail proprietor in early 19th-century Washington City, District of Columbia.
The question of whether Andrew Jackson had been a "negro trader" was a campaign issue during the 1828 United States presidential election. Jackson denied the charges, and the issue failed to connect with the electorate. However, Jackson had indeed been a "speculator in slaves," participating in the interstate slave trade between Virginia, Tennessee, and what was to become Louisiana and Mississippi.
Sowell Woolfolk was a 19th-century American businessman and politician known for serving as a Georgia state legislator and U.S. state militia officer, working as a slave trader, and dying in a duel at Fort Mitchell, Alabama in 1832.
