Corporation · est. 1828
Franklin & Armfield
The largest domestic slave-trading firm in the country, it shipped roughly a thousand or more people a year from its Alexandria pen to the Deep South.
← Follow the MoneyFranklin & Armfield, run by Isaac Franklin and John Armfield out of Alexandria, Virginia, was the largest domestic slave-trading firm in the United States during its peak years (1828–1836). From a holding pen on Duke Street it shipped an estimated 1,000 to 1,800 enslaved people a year, by its own fleet of ships and by overland coffle, to the markets of New Orleans and Natchez, feeding the cotton boom. The partners grew enormously wealthy; Franklin's fortune later endowed a Tennessee plantation empire. The Alexandria building survives today as the Freedom House Museum. Franklin & Armfield is the human face of the domestic-slave-trade: slavery organized as a logistics business.
Documentation
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Connections to other moments, systems, and investigations, the links rarely drawn together.
- profited from·ThreadThe Domestic Slave Trade (the Second Middle Passage)
The largest firm in the internal slave trade.
- profited from·ThreadChattel Slavery
It bought and sold human beings for profit.