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]
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." [6]
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: [7]
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? [7]
Sometimes coffles were prepared in advance, sometimes they were assembled 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." [8]
One memoirist recalled seeing a coffle in Mayslick, Kentucky, a "company of forty or fifty men, chained in the same manner as those mentioned before. There were some five or six wagons loaded with women and children. The foremost man looked to be about seventy years old, and he was singing 'Hark, from the Tomb.' Mrs. Ann Anderson, a white woman who was sitting at the window, could not help crying." [9]
An account from 1847 blamed the annexation of Texas for a passage of a coffle out of Washington, D. C.: "The Slave Trade — Last Thursday forenoon at 11 o'clock a coffle of slaves to the number of eighty-five was marched from this city across the Long Bridge over the Potomac for the South. They consisted of men, women and children, the men chained together, some of the women carrying children walking with them, other women and children riding in two wagons which accompanied the train. Some were weeping, many were ragged, nearly all were barefoot, one was playing a fiddle — a not unfrequent accompaniment of such scenes! The coffle we presume was chiefly made up of slaves from the surrounding country in Maryland which seems as if emptying its slaves wholesale into the 'far South.' It is but two weeks since we had occasion to notice the departure of another coffle of one hundred slaves by the same route! The Annexation of Texas with Slavery is producing its legitimate fruit. — National Era 2nd." [10]
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were then traded for slaves with rulers of African states and other African slave traders. Slave ships transported the slaves across the Atlantic. The proceeds from selling slaves were then used to buy products such as furs and hides, tobacco, sugar, rum, and raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the triangle.
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 states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
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.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
The pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping into slavery in the United States occurred in both free and slave states, and both fugitive slaves and free negroes were transported to slave markets and sold, often multiple times. There were also rewards for the return of fugitives. Three types of kidnapping methods were employed: physical abduction, inveiglement of free blacks, and apprehension of fugitives. The enslavement, or re-enslavement, of free blacks occurred for 85 years, from 1780 to 1865. Kidnapping of black children for resale was a consistent issue throughout the slavery period.
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 their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, where they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
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".
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 slave owners 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.
Slavery in Maryland lasted over 200 years, from its beginnings in 1642 when the first Africans were brought as slaves to St. Mary's City, to its end after the Civil War. While Maryland developed similarly to neighboring Virginia, slavery declined in Maryland as an institution earlier, and it had the largest free black population by 1860 of any state. The early settlements and population centers of the province tended to cluster around the rivers and other waterways that empty into the Chesapeake Bay. Maryland planters cultivated tobacco as the chief commodity crop, as the market for cash crops was strong in Europe. Tobacco was labor-intensive in both cultivation and processing, and planters struggled to manage workers as tobacco prices declined in the late 17th century, even as farms became larger and more efficient. At first, indentured servants from England supplied much of the necessary labor but, as England's economy improved, fewer came to the colonies. Maryland colonists turned to importing indentured and enslaved Africans to satisfy the labor demand.
Slaves in the United States were often subjected to 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.
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. The term slave depot was commonly used in New Orleans in the 1850s.
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 Northup'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.
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.
Jourdan Michaux Saunders was an American domestic slave trader and farmer, noted 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.
The Paris, Kentucky slave coffle of summer 1822 is notable among thousands of such coffles of chained slaves forced to travel overland as part of the interstate slave trade in the United States because it was observed and carefully described by Ohio Presbyterian minister Rev. James H. Dickey, who reported that the slaves were marching under the flag of the United States. According to The Liberator by way of John Rankin this group of slaves was the legal property of Kentucky slave traders named Stone and Kinningham. This is presumably Edward Stone and Benjamin Keiningham of Bourbon County, Kentucky.
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 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 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.
