The Slave That Couldnt Get Enough

Here the mountains thicken into the Appalachian South of deep hollows and secret hills. In the old days, there were few black people here, a lot of Quakers and the beginning of an antislavery movement. The Quakers have largely gone, and there are still many fewer black people than back in Virginia, miles east. I take the old route to Knoxville, but then get onto the freeway, Interstate The path of I west roughly matches a turnpike that once ran miles across the Cumberland Plateau. At this point in the journey, other spurs, from Louisville and Lexington to the north, joined the main path of the Slave Trail.

The migration swelled to a widening stream. Armfield and his gang of had marched for a month and covered more than miles. When they reached Nashville, they would be halfway. He had grown up near Gallatin, 30 miles northeast of Nashville, and he went there during off months. He called it Fairvue. Columned, brick and symmetrical, it was just about the finest house in the state, people said, second only to the Hermitage, the estate of President Andrew Jackson.

Fairvue was a working plantation, but it was also an announcement that the boy from Gallatin had returned to his humble roots in majesty. In Gallatin, I drive out to look at the old Franklin estate. After the Civil War, it held on as a cotton plantation, and then became a horse farm. But in the s, a developer began building a golf course on the fields where the colts ran. The Club at Fairvue Plantation opened in , and hundreds of houses sprang up on half-acre plots. Approaching the former Franklin house, I pass the golf course and clubhouse. A thicket of McMansions follows, in every ersatz style.

People still come to show their money at Fairvue, like Franklin himself. I ring the doorbell at the house the Slave Trail built. It has a double portico, with four Ionic columns on the first level and four on the second. No answer, despite several cars in the drive. More than one preservationist had told me that the current owners of Fairvue are hostile to anyone who shows curiosity about the slave dealer who built their lovely home. The man may be gone, but generations later, some of his people are still around.

I ask a Nashville museum director, Mark Brown, for help in finding a member of the family in the here and now. Two phone calls later, one of the living Franklins answers. Kenneth Thomson opens the door to his house, which is clapboard and painted a pretty cottage yellow—quaint, not grand.

Thomson says he is 74, but he looks Short white hair, short white beard, khakis, cotton short-sleeve with flap pockets and epaulets. Shoes with crepe soles. A reedy voice, gentle manners. Thomson is an antiques dealer, mostly retired, and an amateur historian, mostly active. It hangs in the living room, above the sofa. The house bursts with 19th-century chairs, rugs, settees, tables and pictures. Reading lights look like converted oil lamps. He takes a seat at his melodeon, a portable organ that dates from the s, and plays a few bars of period-appropriate music.

It is plain that in this branch of the Franklin family, the past cannot be unremembered. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. Which means that Isaac Franklin was my great-great-great-great-uncle. It is an important gloss, as it turns out: Taking a seat in an armchair upholstered in wine-colored brocade, he picks up the story. It was at the beginning of the s. When the brothers were growing up in Gallatin, James Franklin, eight years older than Isaac, took his sibling under his wing.

He showed young Isaac how it was done, apprenticed him. Now, I heard this more than 50 years ago from my great-grandfather, who was born in , or two generations closer than me to the time in question. So it must be true. The family story is that after Uncle Isaac came back from service during the War of , which sort of interrupted his career path, if you call it that, he was all for the slave business.

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I mean, just gung-ho. Thomson gets up and walks through the house, pointing out the ample Franklin memorabilia. A painting of the mansion at Fairvue. A Bible from the family of John Armfield. He had six plantations and slaves. Most slave traders at that time were considered common and uncouth, with no social graces. Uncle Isaac was different. He had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education.

He was not ignorant.

He could write a letter. But bad habits concerning sex were rampant among some of those men. You know they took advantage of the black women, and there were no repercussions there. Before he married, Isaac had companions, some willing, some unwilling. That was just part of life. And here, someone close to the memory of it says much the same.

In , at age 50, he married a woman named Adelicia Hayes, age 22, the daughter of a Nashville attorney. It is possible, of course, that Isaac Franklin sold his daughter. It would have been the easiest thing to do. How does a person inside the family measure the inheritance of slave trading?

Thomson takes a half-second. It was a part of life in those days. Many things in the Old Testament are pretty barbaric, but they are part of our evolution. Thomson warms up, shifts in his seat. I mean, people who do not understand the old lifestyles—their standpoint on life, and their education, are what today we consider limited. That applies to Southern history, to slave history. They are great people.

When I grew up, we were servanted. All the servants were black. We had a nurse, a woman who used to be called a mammy. We had a cook, a black man. We had a maid, and we had a yard man. We had a guy that doubled as a driver and supervised the warehouse. And we had all these servants till they died. There were free blacks in the South that owned slaves. And there were lots of them. Thomson emphasizes these last sentences. It is a refrain among Southern whites who remain emotionally attached to the plantation days—that one in 1, slaveholders who were black vindicates in some fashion who were not.

We are not accountable for what happened then. We are only accountable if it is repeated. I never heard of any mistreatment. You see, blacks were better off coming to this country. It is a fact that the ones over here are far ahead of the ones over there in Africa. And you know that the first legal slaveholder in the United States was a black man? You need to look that up. I think slavery developed here primarily because of the ignorance of the blacks. They first came over here as indentured servants, as did the whites. But because of their background and lack of education, they just sort of slid into slavery.

I grew up in the Deep South, and I am familiar with such ideas, shared by many whites in Mr. I do not believe that black people were responsible for their own enslavement, or that African-Americans should be grateful for slavery because they are better off than West Africans, or that a black man was author of the slave system. But I recognize the melody, and let the song pass. Kenneth Thomson brings out some daguerreotypes of the Franklins and others in his family tree.

The pictures are beautiful. The people in them are well-dressed. They give the impression of perfect manners. To get rid of their attitudes. Ben Key was a slave to Isaac Franklin at Fairvue. He was born in in Virginia. Franklin probably bought him there and brought him to Tennessee in the early s. For reasons unknown, Franklin did not send Key through the burning gates of the Slave Trail, but made him stay in Tennessee.

At Fairvue, Key found a partner in a woman named Hannah. Their children included a son named Jack Key, who was freed at the end of the Civil War, at age Florence Hall Blair, born and raised in Nashville, is 73, a retired nurse. She lives 25 miles from Gallatin, in a pretty brick, ranch-style house with white shutters. After 15 years at various Tennessee hospitals, and after 15 years selling makeup for Mary Kay Cosmetics and driving a pink Cadillac, because she moved a ton of mascara , she now occupies herself with family history.

A lot of black people, she said, do not want to know about their ancestry. You see the names. Some names in the lists are familiar. You find them repeatedly.

The Most Damaging Myths About Slavery, Debunked

He was a minister. It must be in the genes, because I have a brother who is a minister, and a cousin who is a minister, and another relative. And in Gallatin there is a church named after one of the Key family preachers. And that includes about Isaac Franklin. I think Franklin was a cruel individual, but he was human. His humanity was not always visible, but it was there.

Time kind of mellows you out.

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The older I get, the more tolerant I become. It was like that. He did it, but it is what it is. If you carry hatred or strong dislike for people, all you are doing is hurting yourself. Now I have five adult children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. I am married to a man with four children. Put them all together, we are like a big sports team. On holidays it is something, we have to rent a community center.

As autumn gathered in , the caravan that John Armfield handed over left Tennessee, bound for Natchez. Records of that part of the journey do not survive, nor do records about the individual slaves in the coffle. Like other Franklin gangs, the probably got on flatboats in the Cumberland River and floated three days down to the Ohio River, and then drifted down another day to reach the Mississippi. A flatboat could float down the Mississippi to Natchez in two weeks.

There—and this is conjecture, based on what happened to other gangs—half of the big gang might have been sold.

As for the other half, they were probably herded onto steamboats and churned miles south to New Orleans, where Isaac Franklin or one of his agents sold them, one or three or five at a time. And then they were gone—out to plantations in northern Louisiana, or central Mississippi, or southern Alabama. In Knoxville, in October , Waller readied his gang of 20 or more for the second half of their journey. He expected another month on the road. It would turn out to be four.

On Tuesday, October 19, the troop headed southwest, Waller leading from his horse and his friend James Taliaferro bringing up the rear, both men armed. No steamboats for this group. Waller was pinching pennies. In Virginia, the coffles marched from town to town. But here, they were marching through wilderness. But during the 50 years coffles were sent on the Slave Trail, the road most taken was the Natchez Trace. The Natchez people first carved the footpath some years before and used it until about , when they were massacred and dispersed, at which point white travelers took possession of their highway.

The Natchez Trace Parkway, with asphalt flat like silk, now follows the old route. Remnants of the original Trace remain out in the woods, yards from the breakdown lane, mostly untouched. Starting in Nashville I drive down the parkway. Overland coffles would have used the road that molders off in the trees. These were stores and taverns with places to sleep in the back. Gangs of slaves were welcome if they slept in the field, far from business.

Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears

Their drivers paid good money for food. Waller reached Mississippi by that November. At the village of Benton a week before Christmas , Waller huddled with his gang in a ferocious storm. Although today is Sunday my hands are engaged in repairing the road to enable us to pass on. I put the car on the shoulder and walk into the woods to find the real Natchez Trace.

Retracing Slavery's Trail of Tears | History | Smithsonian

It is easily stumbled into. And it really is a trace, the faint line of what used to be a wagon road. The cut is about 12 feet wide, with shallow ditches on each side. Spindly pine and oaks away off the roadbed, a third-growth woods. Cobwebs to the face, bugs buzzing, overhanging branches to duck. On the ground, a carpet of mud, and leaves beneath it, and dirt under the leaves. The path the slaves took is beautiful. Nearly enclosed by green curtains of limbs, it feels like a tunnel. I squish through the mud, sweating, pulling off spiders, slapping mosquitoes and horseflies.

The fireflies come out in the dwindling dusk. And as night closes, the crickets start their scraping in the trees. A sudden, loud drone from every direction, the natural music of Mississippi. Slavery scholars have documented many of the mutinies and rebellions —if not the countless escapes and suicides, starting with African captives who jumped into the sea rather than face loss of liberty—that made the buying and selling of humans such a risky, if lucrative, enterprise.

Beyond famed slave revolts such as that of Nat Turner were less well-known ones such as that of Denmark Vesey. The literate freedman corralled thousands of enslaved people in and around Charleston, South Carolina into plans for an ambitious insurrection that would kill all whites, burn the city and free those in bondage. After an informant tipped off authorities, the plot was squelched at the last minute; scores were convicted, and more than 30 organizers executed.

Those unlucky enough to be caught and returned knew what awaited them: Most runaways became horrific cautionary tales for their fellow slaves, with dramatic public shows of torture, dismemberment, burning and murder. Gordon, a freed slave in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, displays his whip-scarred back on April 2, American culture has long been deeply threaded with images of black inferiority and even nostalgia for the social control that slavery provided.

In the period immediately before and just following the Civil War , benign images in paintings and illustrations presented the old plantation as a kind of orderly agrarian paradise where happy, childlike slaves were cared for by their beneficent masters. The Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras saw the emergence of an even more damaging stereotype: As seen in the work of authors such as Thomas Dixon and films such as D.

Cue the Klan and lynch mobs. African Americans were enslaved on small farms, large plantations, in cities and towns, inside homes, out in the fields, and in industry and transportation. Though slavery had such a wide variety of faces, the underlying concepts were always the same. Slaves were considered property, and they were property because they were black. Their status as property was enforced by violence -- actual or threatened. People, black and white, lived together within these parameters, and their lives together took many forms. Enslaved African Americans could never forget their status as property, no matter how well their owners treated them.

But it would be too simplistic to say that all masters and slaves hated each other. Human beings who live and work together are bound to form relationships of some kind, and some masters and slaves genuinely cared for each other. But the caring was tempered and limited by the power imbalance under which it grew. Within the narrow confines of slavery, human relationships ran the gamut from compassionate to contemptuous. But the masters and slaves never approached equality. The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with hundreds of slaves.

In fact, such situations were rare. Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the priviledged ranks.

In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white. In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco. Many plantations raised several different kinds of crops.

Besides planting and harvesting, there were numerous other types of labor required on plantations and farms. Enslaved people had to clear new land, dig ditches, cut and haul wood, slaughter livestock, and make repairs to buildings and tools. In many instances, they worked as mechanics, blacksmiths, drivers, carpenters, and in other skilled trades. Black women carried the additional burden of caring for their families by cooking and taking care of the children, as well as spinning, weaving, and sewing. Some slaves worked as domestics, providing services for the master's or overseer's families.

These people were designated as "house servants," and though their work appeared to be easier than that of the "field slaves," in some ways it was not. They were constantly under the scrutiny of their masters and mistresses, and could be called on for service at any time. They had far less privacy than those who worked the fields. Because they lived and worked in such close proximity, house servants and their owners tended to form more complex relationships. Black and white children were especially in a position to form bonds with each other.

In most situations, young children of both races played together on farms and plantations. Black children might also become attached to white caretakers, such as the mistress, and white children to their black nannies. Because they were so young, they would have no understanding of the system they were born into. But as they grew older they would learn to adjust to it in whatever ways they could. The diets of enslaved people were inadequate or barely adequate to meet the demands of their heavy workload.