The Domestic Slave Trade

On January 1, 1808, the earliest date allowed by Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution, the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect and banned the United States and its citizens from participating in the international slave trade. While importing enslaved Africans became illegal, the sale and transport of enslaved people within the United States remained legal. In the 1820s and 1830s, Alexandria became one of the country’s largest centers of the domestic slave trade. Throughout the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and African Americans were forcibly transported from the Chesapeake region to the Deep South, driven by depleted soils, a shift from tobacco to grain-based agriculture in the Chesapeake, and the westward expansion of the United States into cotton- and sugar-producing areas of the Deep South. Some were relocated as slaveholders moved with their captives, while many others were trafficked by established slave traders and firms that purchased or consigned enslaved people and sent them by ship from ports such as Alexandria, Richmond, Norfolk, and Baltimore to destinations such as New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and Mobile. Others were chained together in coffles and forced to walk hundreds of miles to depots south and west, including the one at the Forks of the Road outside Natchez, Mississippi. In February 1828, Isaac Franklin of Sumner County, Tennessee, and John Armfield of Guilford County, North Carolina, formed Franklin & Armfield and soon leased a large brick house on upper Duke Street. From its headquarters and jail at 1315 Duke Street, the firm quickly became one of the country’s largest and most notorious slave-trading businesses. Based in Alexandria, it partnered with traders across the Chesapeake region, from the Blue Ridge mountains to the Eastern Shore and from Baltimore to Richmond. In summer, the firm transported people overland to Natchez, Mississippi, where it had another facility. During the rest of the year, it ran a regular packet service to New Orleans, with a ship departing Alexandria as often as every two weeks. People held captive at 1315 Duke Street, less than a mile away, were brought to the waterfront to board ships such as the Uncas, Tribune, and Isaac Franklin. The voyage to New Orleans took about a month, where the firm maintained yet another jail. After Franklin & Armfield ended operations in Alexandria in February 1837, a series of slave traders continued using the slave jail complex until May 24, 1861. That morning, the day after Virginia voted to secede from the United States, the Union Army crossed the bridges over the Potomac, landed by steamboat on Alexandria’s wharves, and occupied and liberated Alexandria.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States