Setting the Stage

Even before the arrival of the famed Mayflower at the shores of the North American colonies in 1620, in the year 1619 the first blacks imported into the British colonies made their way into Virginia on a Dutch man-of-war that unloaded “20 Negars.”² From here on after, the importation of enslaved people from primarily the western coast of Africa, served to meet the labor demands of the North American colonies and later the United State of America. Europeans established the colonies primarily to provide raw materials and staples to the mother country, in this case England. The extensive labor carried out in the fields and the homes of the colonists, and later the American Republic, was primarily provided by the enslaved. However, in 1808, following the lead of European nations, the United States officially banned the importation of enslaved people. This law precipitated the out migration of planters and the enslaved from the upper southern states, to the lower and southwestern (mainly Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and part of eastern Texas) states were the production of cotton increased precipitously through an ingenious but very practical machine called the cotton gin. The invention of the cotton gin in 1792 solved the labor intensive problem of removing the seeds from the lint which previously limited the production of cotton.

For nearly two centuries the colonists, and later the Americans, farmed the lands located in the upper South and the eastern seaboard, which by the beginning of the nineteenth century were showing signs of exhaustion. Around this time as well Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin, a machine that removed the cotton seed from its lint. The increased farming of the southwestern states for the production of cotton, the official ban on the importation of enslaved people caused through the passing of the 1808 law, and the weakening seaboard economy of the 1820s and 1830s, precipitated the inter-state slave trade, or the movement of enslaved people between states, in this case from the Upper South to the Lower or Deep South. In addition, large farm families found it increasingly difficult to provide each of their children with “sufficient land and resources to sustain and maintain the family legacy.” ³ The sons of the planter elite were eager to become self-made men who were financially self sufficient, and migration to the Southwest afforded them the opportunity to realize this goal. The out migration from the Upper South, mainly the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, to the Deep South which includes those states and territories west of the Georgia border; Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and frontier areas in Tennessee, Kentucky and Florida, was accomplished either through overland coffles, which consisted of a train of enslaved persons fastened together, or aboard slavers, ships primarily tasked with the transport of enslaved persons to the southern slave markets of Natchez and New Orleans.⁴ The men involved in the buying and selling of enslaved persons were also known as slavers. .

The 1820s and 1830s were the boon years for individuals like Franklin and Armfield, who decided to make a living through the sale of the enslaved. Isaac Franklin was a native of Tennessee, and John Armfield was a relative by marriage. Between 1820 and 1860, the Deep South experienced an explosive rise in its slave population, all as a result of the increased cultivation of cotton which required large amounts of slave labor. It is estimated that between sixty and seventy percent of the enslaved relocated to the Deep South did so as a result of the interstate slave trade. The remainder of the migration occurred through planters relocating to the Southwest with their enslaved in tow. Ultimately, the firm of Franklin and Armfield was responsible for at least one-third of the enslaved sold South during the 1820s and 30s.

The site saw continuous use for slave trading under multiple ownerships until 1861 when Union troops entered the city of Alexandria and converted the building into a military prison for the remainder of the War. During the 1870s the slave pens were demolished to make room for adjacent row houses while under the ownership of Thomas Swann, a prominent railroad builder and politician. He also added a third story to the building. Throughout the years, the Franklin and Armfield building transferred ownership multiple times with its primary use as rooming and apartment housing. In 1996 the Northern Virginia Urban League moved its headquarters into the building.

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² George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 4th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), 59.
³ George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 6th ed., vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 599.
⁴ The definition of “Southwest” can be found in Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative History, 598.