Domestic Slave Trade Coffles: One Million Enslaved People Marched South After 1808

Following the 1808 import ban, the domestic slave trade became the engine of American slavery's expansion. Slave trading firms — including Franklin & Armfield of Alexandria, Virginia — purchased enslaved people from the Chesapeake and marched them in iron-linked coffles (chains) hundreds of miles to markets in Natchez, New Orleans, and Mobile. Eyewitness accounts describe columns of men chained at the neck, women carrying infants, children struggling to keep pace. An estimated 1 million people were sold interstate between 1808 and 1865. Studies of slave manifests show that roughly one in three Upper South marriages was broken by sale, and a majority of children in the Upper South were separated from at least one parent.