America's Domestic "Slave" Trading Routes To The Deep South

Professional dealers, traffickers, and speculators in the upper South tore apart families and friends already enslaved or regarded as so-called free people through purchase, deception, and sometimes outright kidnapping, then forced them to the new lower South markets such as Natchez's Forks of the Road to be sold into enslavement again. These roads, trails, rivers, and sea and ocean routes from the upper old South and Mid-South states to Natchez's Forks of the Road were called the Overground Railroad's Passages of Sorrow because of the pain, agony, dehumanization, and destruction caused by being torn asunder and forced to walk or be shipped in the same manner as their foreparents from Africa to the Americas. Many historians agree that enslaved people were driven south and southwest on the same routes, stage and mail roads, byways, and interconnected rivers, creeks, and streams used by migrants and regular travelers. Main interconnected overland routes included one from the Baltimore, Alexandria, and Richmond hubs by way of Abingdon, Virginia, Knoxville, Nashville, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery to Natchez's Forks of the Road and beyond; another from the Richmond hub by way of Salisbury, North Carolina, the juncture of South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, Chattanooga, Rome, Georgia, and Montgomery to the Forks and beyond; a Kentucky route by way of the Lexington hub, Nashville, and the Natchez Trace to the Forks and beyond; and a coastal route from Florida by way of Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Tallahassee, Pensacola, Mobile, and Montgomery to the Forks and beyond.

Natchez, Mississippi · United States