 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Joshua D. Rothman, author of The Ledger and the Chain. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, April 29th, at noon, John Grinspan will discuss his new book, The Age of Acrimony. This work charts the rise and fall of 19th century America's unruly politics and reveals our divisive political systems enduring capacity to reinvent itself. And on Thursday, April 29th, at 7 p.m., Karen Tumulty will discuss Nancy Reagan's role as partner to the president, which she profiles in her new book, The Triumph of Nancy Reagan. A ship's manifest in the National Archives awards the names Joseph Roach, age 23, Edward Woods, 45, Sarah Robinson and Child, 25, 14, John Little, 5. These four and 44 others were transported from Baltimore to Mobile in 1844 as the printed form declares the purpose of being sold or disposed of as slaves. Slave trade was big business in pre-Civil War United States. The buying and selling of persons took place in city centers across the country, including the nation's capital. A slave pen set just a stone's throw from where the National Archives building is now. In the ledger in the chain, Joshua D. Rothman reveals to us the pervasiveness of the domestic slave trade in America and its role in the growth of the United States. Joshua Rothman is a professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama. He is the author of the award-winning books Flush Times and Fever Dreams and Notorious in the Neighborhood. Rothman has also written nearly a dozen professional articles that have been in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post and other venues. He has held fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society and the Gildo Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. Rothman is also co-director of Freedom on the Move, a database of fugitives from North American slavery and co-editor with Heather Cox Richardson of the online magazine We Are History. Today's moderator is Rachel L. Swarnes, a journalist, author and professor who writes about race and race relations as a contributing writer for the New York Times. Swarnes spent 22 years as a full-time correspondent for the New York Times and is currently an associate professor of journalism at New York University. Her book, American Tapestry, which explored the ancestry of Michelle Obama was ranked as one of the 100 notable books of 2012 by the New York Times Book Review. Swarnes also serves as an academic advisor to the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C. Now let's hear from Joshua Rothman and Rachel Swarnes. Thank you for joining us today. Well, it's wonderful to be here. We are at a moment when the issue of slavery and the urgency of reckoning with slavery have increasingly become part of our national conversation. And Josh, your book is essential reading in my view to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of that history, which is history that we've often turned away from as a country. So it's a real pleasure to be here. And for those of you who are joining us today, please remember that this is a conversation we want to hear from you. So if you have questions, please put them in the chat. And let's get started. Josh, tell us a little bit about your book. All right. Thank you, Rachel. Thanks for taking the time to moderate and hold this discussion with me. And thanks to the National Archives for hosting this event and to everybody on the Zoom for coming out and being interested in the book. Now I want to leave as much time as I can for our conversation and for questions. So I just really want to provide a brief overview of what the book is about and why I think it matters. The Legend of Chain traces the lives and careers of Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard, who were the most important domestic slave traders in American history. And by the domestic slave trade, I'm referring to buying and selling of enslaved people within the boundary of the United States. And the domestic trade was something that pre-existed the United States itself. But it really took off in the 19th century as the nation expanded into what was then the Southwest. As white farmers flocked there to capitalize on Indian dispossession and the growth of the cotton economy. And as the federal ban on the transatlantic slave trade took hold beginning in 1808, leaving those farmers who wanted enslaved laborers no choice but to acquire them domestically. The slave traders fed this demand and no one played a bigger role in the slave trade industry than the man at the center of my book. Through their company, commonly known as Franklin and Armfield, they trafficked roughly 10,000 enslaved people from the Upper South, particularly from Maryland and Virginia, to Lower South, particularly to Louisiana and Mississippi. They did it very quickly. The company was founded in 1828. It effectively stopped dealing in human beings in 1836. And yet in that short period of time, Franklin, Armfield, and Bower transformed the domestic slave trade from something white men might do in the short term for extra money into a profession, a big business that could yield tremendous wealth for its operators. And in doing that, they established a business model for the slave trade that other traders would follow and build upon for decades. But I also argue that their impact went, of course, well beyond the slave trade business. By selling the labor, the bodies, the asset values of enslaved people, they made possible the expansion of the cotton and sugar economies. And the cotton economy in particular sat at the heart of not just Southern economic growth, but of American economic growth before the Civil War. And the capital extracted from the enslaved as they were bought, trafficked, sold, and forced to labor, circulated throughout the entire country and ultimately across the Atlantic Ocean as well. And of course, slave traders and the slave trade absolutely ravaged the families and the communities of the enslaved people who fell victim to it. The numbers of which were enormous. Between 1800 and 1860, roughly 1 million enslaved people were forcibly migrated across state lines. At least twice as many were bought and sold within individual states. All told, an enslaved person was sold somewhere in the United States roughly every three and a half minutes for decades. The book also uses the stories of Franklin and Arfield and Ballard to trace the broader ebbs and flows of this domestic trade over time. Watching it grow and expand in the early 19th century, stagger under the blows of financial disruptions and then rise again out of depression only to become nearly as big as it had ever been by the outbreak of the Civil War that finally brought it to an end. So the book covers a lot of history of slavery, the slave trade, its relationship to the American economy. It tells a story of several men in particular and their business that were central to that history. And it is frankly a hard history to deal with. But among the hardest things, I think, is that the book demonstrates how neither the slave trade nor slave traders ever really suffered for the criticism that they faced from the small number of American anti-slavery activists. Quite the opposite, in fact, they flourished both socially and economically. And notions to the contrary are things that Americans often said about the trade and traders both at the time and for more than a century after the Civil War ended. But those notions are largely myths. And the fact that they are myths, the fact that the slave trade was a ubiquitous, profitable, widely accepted element of American life before the Civil War. The fact that slave traders could be understood as respectable businessmen vital to American development. All of that says, I think, some deeply uncomfortable things about the history of the United States. But I also think there are things that we need to face squarely and learn how to grapple and that's sort of a general kind of sense of what the book is about and what kind of ground it covers. Rachel, I assume you've got probably some questions for me. A few. So it's fascinating history and the truth is that most of us most Americans know very little about the mechanics of the slave trade about how it worked, how it fueled our economy and the growth of our institutions. Talk to me a little bit and everyone here about how you decided to dive into the story and the partnership of these three men who appear in the literature. They're kind of everywhere and nowhere. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so it's hard to read about the domestic slave trade without coming across the name Franklin and Ornfield. They really are everywhere and pretty much every standard account of the trade going back a very long time. But when I was thinking about this project I don't know it just occurred to me that coming out of my last book which really was about the expansion of the cotton frontier particularly to Mississippi and the consequences of that I came across the slave trade I came across slave traders a fair amount they were obviously central to the development of the cotton frontier and there had been recent work on the slave trade more and more in fact in the last 10 or 15 years. But it occurred to me that even as we were learning a lot more about the slave trade we really didn't know a lot about slave traders who they were, where they came from, what their lives were like really what we were relying on were kind of little pocket biographies that people had told decades before that scholars went back to the same sources over and over again to tell that story of their background. We were relying a lot on what I always suspected was sort of mythology about their social status but we really didn't know a whole lot about that. And so when I got started on the project I initially thought I would just take on the life of Isaac Franklin. I thought I would take it on as a biography and sort of see where that went. But it became clear to me very quickly once I got into it that the story of Franklin couldn't be told in isolation from the stories of his business partners and their families it couldn't be told in isolation from the broader story of the trade itself and so like a lot of projects it started off as one thing it evolved into something else into something a lot bigger than I had anticipated but I think also a lot better and a lot more a lot more revealing. It's really striking to read about the commodification of black bodies and the range of people profiting from the trade right the language that they used surplus products talking about the human beings that they bought and sold and the various institutions that benefited banks ships doctors blacksmiths and black people actually were one of the most valuable commodities from the Chesapeake area at the time obviously these guys weren't alone though in trying to make it out of the trade how did they distinguish themselves from their competition what did they see that others didn't so yes there are plenty of slave traders both people who worked within a particular state and maybe weren't bringing enslaved people very long distances to people who work like Franklin and Armfield to move people 1,200 miles across the continent and they really are sort of everything in between you have slave traders who are moving people maybe from Baltimore to South Carolina and so there's lots of different ways this could play out and over the course of time more and more white men get involved in the slave trade they see it as an opportunity for profit they see it as an opportunity sometimes as a profession sometimes just to kind of get their start in the world and then they think they're going to do something else and what really sets Franklin and Armfield apart so I should note that they don't invent their business model out of full cloth they don't just sort of get together in 1828 and say aha we've got this idea that no one has ever thought of before they really are modeling their business in some ways on a man named Austin Wolfolk who was a trader in the Baltimore area if you're familiar with those sections of Frederick Douglass's autobiographies where he talks about slave traders sort of constantly kind of haunting the enslaved population of Maryland he's talking about Austin Wolfolk and sometimes explicitly mentions Wolfolk and what Wolfolk did that was sort of different from what a lot of traders did before him was he did things like instead of operating out of a bar or a tavern or a hotel which a lot of slave traders did and continued to do he set up a headquarters a house that used as his private office he had a jail attached to it and so you knew he was a regular businessman he wasn't just some sort of itinerant fly-by-night operator Wolfolk also relied a lot on the coastal trade I think the image to the extent most Americans think of the domestic trade at all the image that's usually in their minds is that of the coughle system caravans of people chain together in long lines being walked over land and that is certainly a very prevalent model of moving enslaved people arguably the predominant model particularly if you include the trade operating within states but even though the transatlantic trade prohibits ships coming in from beyond the boundaries of the United States it didn't mean you couldn't ship people and Wolfolk really relies very heavily on that people on boats in Baltimore he's sending them down the Atlantic coast and so Franklin and Armfield do some of those things they have a headquarters in Alexandria that is significantly larger than what Wolfolk sets up they go deep into the shipping business eventually they actually own three of their own brigs for shipping people they really have basically a company fleet of slavers they are moving people at their peak every two weeks by the time they're really at sort of the top of their game there really isn't a day during the year when one of their ships isn't at sea somewhere they're always at sea somewhere in part because even in the off season and the slave trade does have a seasonality to it but even in the off season what they would do is they would use the ships and the merchant vessels they might send people to New Orleans fill the holes with sugar and cotton and other things coming from the deep south bring them back up to merchants in the north and the mid-Atlantic and so that's another kind of thing they're doing that's sort of building on what Wolfolk did but really what sets Franklin and Armfield apart probably the most and again they weren't the first people to do this they just are the biggest and the most successful at it it's the money what they're able to do slave traders like to operate on a cash basis if they could particularly when they're buying people in the upper south they're using cash that's the appeal to slaveholders who are trying to sell enslaved people at the sales end though while slave traders did prefer cash if they could get it there was opportunity to afford to sell enslaved people on credit and there's opportunity not only in the interest payments that buyers might make but there's opportunity for presenting buyers with the prospect of saying look you can take the people now and you pay me when you're ready when you have the money in the meantime we'll accumulate interest now in order to do that you've got to have access you're not just like sitting on a pile of cash that you can use to extend the credit you have to have connections with banks who are offering you credit so that you constantly have money at your disposal and that's really what Franklin and Armfield are are brilliant at Isaac Franklin in particular had been involved in the slave trade for about 20 years by the time he teams up with John Armfield he has extensive connections in Natchez and New Orleans so he has all of these business connections that are already set in place and then enable him to develop particularly credit networks over time that enables Franklin and Armfield to get enormously big and to outdo a lot of their competitors Black people called these men's soul drivers right Among other things Among other things it's fascinating to see how white people responded to them can you talk a little bit about that I mean obviously Franklin had connections with extraordinarily wealthy people but they were viewed with distaste kind of on the one hand and then sometimes people just diverted their eyes on the other can you talk about that their reception look in the grand scheme of American society among white people it varies there are obviously anti-slavery activists the abolition movement is particularly picking up steam in the 1830s it's taking on a new sort of more radical turn in the 1830s precisely when Franklin and Armfield are becoming very successful they certainly draw a lot of attention from anti-slavery activists who disdain the slave trade and all slave traders as soul drivers, man stealers you know the list of terms goes on and on but anti-slavery activists are not most of the white population even in the north they're not most of the white population and in the south where Franklin and Armfield are doing most of their business although they have connections as you said with bankers and merchants throughout the country you know there's slaveholders who are often skeptical of slave traders they wonder about their business practices they feel like they can't always trust where slave traders are coming from where they're bringing people from but this was something that was particularly true for small timers slave traders who like I said before there were men who kind of came and went you never knew where they came from you had to kind of take their word for it when they told you about the enslaved people they were buying and selling and so and there is a fair amount of skepticism of slave traders as a kind of necessary evil like slaveholders said all the time they didn't really like doing business with them but they had no choice which is a separate sort of mythology but the truth is that that kind of general sense that slave traders were disdainful as a class as a business as a kind of entrepreneur it simply isn't true men like Franklin and Armfield and they're hardly the only ones and in fact there are more and more big business men like them as time went on they have established places of business they have connections with very well established and well respected people they build their reputations by being trustworthy by selling individuals who if a slaveholder was not happy with their purchase or claimed that there was something wrong or as they would put it you said the surplus is one of the sort of terminology they would say the people who they bought were defective Franklin and Armfield would say well let's try to work something out instead of a small timer if something went wrong with your purchase you can never find them again in fact the bigger and more successful slave trader was the more respectable they were likely to be in the broader society the more likely they were to be understood as reliable business men and the more likely that people from politicians and merchants to bankers were not only happy to do business with them but were happy to sort of count them as friends and colleagues one of the most powerful aspects of this book I think are hearing the voices of the enslaved you know as was pointed out this is hard history here but it's really powerful to hear those voices and it's not always easy to get them given the time can you talk about that and from a research perspective and also kind of what we know from the vantage point of the black people dealt with them with what the view was from that side of things so yes I mean those voices and those experiences are things that I try to weave in throughout the book the protagonists of the book are obviously white men doing distasteful things but I also wanted to make sure that as the narrative proceeds that the reader never loses track of a steady drum beat of what's on the other side slave traders are doing their business but enslaved people are they are looking back at them sometimes they are talking back to them we do get their voices periodically I try to track down every single time where we have an enslaved person who writes a narrative that mentions Franklin or Armfield or Ballard I wanted to make sure that got in the book the specificity of that but even more broadly there are enslaved people who appear in court cases who are telling their stories or whose stories get told in some way or another I wanted to make sure that their voices are in there their experiences are in there a sense of what happened to them is in there both after they're sold and what they leave behind what's stolen from them effectively at the front end and I do that in part not just because I want the narrative to read a certain way but I think it's important for readers to remember and to understand that resistance is a constant nobody goes willingly into the slave trade and what I try to show in the book is how many different ways enslaved people fought what was happening to them they run away they tell stories to newspaper reporters they try to signal to anti-slavery activists that whatever the slave traders are telling you they rise up on board ships, they have rebellions on ships so every time I'm able to kind of bring that into the story every time I was able to find that in an archive I wanted to make sure that that element of the story gets told too because otherwise all it does in some ways is sort of replicate some of the myths about sort of slave traders as people who just kind of did their business it's all between white people everything that's going on is a matter of white people dealing with white people but it's not every time an enslaved person is bought, moved and sold there are so many different actors on the scene there and there are white people there are black people sometimes there are Native Americans who are involved and I wanted to make sure that all of those people managed to get into the story so a scope of what was really going on was conveyed to the reader the records that you found the business records that you found really portray this in extraordinary detail you have vivid scene where Ballard is scrolling down the lists of the names of the people he imprisoned the attributes that they had and also describes kind of the ups and downs of the business too there were there was cholera, there was recessions clients who wouldn't pay you hear their voices too lamenting their own situation sometimes talk about what this business was like for them, I mean obviously they did quite well did they do? it wasn't easy, right? yeah I'm reluctant to give them too much in the way of sympathy I guess you are you read the book I assume that I don't come across as particularly sympathetic to their problems but they're always complaining they're always full self pity they're always worried that they're going to lose everything the money the spigot of money is going to run out customers aren't going to pay they're not going to be able to collect bills in time something goes wrong with the broader economy and so yeah but for the moment let's put aside the lack of sympathy and say well look, being a slave trader it's not an easy business you have to be concerned with, first of all like I said in slave people who are going to fight you who would gladly kill you in your sleep if they could and sometimes do there are a couple of stories like that in the book too but more broadly there are the ebbs and flows of the cotton economy slave prices track with cotton prices at least broadly and so that's something you've got to keep an eye on changes month to month it's constantly in flux and you've got to be on top of that because you've got to know what you can pay at the front end what sales are likely to be like at the sales end where you can make your margin in the middle there for people who are running a credit heavy business like frank good and arm field were really what's going on is they've got to be maintaining a sort of constant loop enslaved people who are being bought sent to the lower south sold you've got to have enough cash and enough money that you've collected that you can then send back up to the upper south to buy more enslaved people and you've got to kind of constantly keep that going but if something goes wrong there's a collar out several collar outbreaks in fact people start to die slaveholders maybe aren't going to be buying as many people all of a sudden if you're a slave trader you're going to be stuck with people who you simply can't sell and every day they're in your possession they're costing you money and again it's hard I find it difficult to talk about this stuff in a way not just because it's so difficult to talk about but because there's no way to talk about it without without removing that very human element that we were talking about before there's no way to talk about this as a business without sort of investing yourself in some way in thinking about enslaved people as merchandise, as commodities and that was really one of the challenges of writing this book is how do you tell these stories without simply sort of describing this as a business operation like you want to get across look in pre-Civil War America this was a business something to remember in some ways and yet even for us here talking about it I hear myself talking about it and I really can't do it for more than a couple of minutes before I really feel obligated to stop and say just to observe just how crass and how how just rooted in the material all of this is and it's there's really no way around that yeah because obviously you talked about kind of their role in society right where they're mixing and mingling with bankers and wealthy folks but you also describe what you call I think the intimate daily savagery of this work and I want to talk a little bit about one of the most painful chapters to read which is kind of the systematic rape that occurs and essential reading but devastating it's really hard reading I'm curious they use coded language I'm wondering where you found those records and when did you realize what you were reading so there have been other scholars who looked at these records before the those letters are mostly in the rice ballard papers which are at the University of North Carolina those papers are certainly the single largest collection of letters that deal with with this particular company you know the ballard papers are enormous they trace his entire adult life there's probably I think at least 5,000 items in the collection itself but there's a series of letters probably about I think there's about 300 letters that are in there that are really from the period where Ballard is involved with Franklin and Armfield in the business some of them are most of them are not from Ballard because he's on the receiving end so there are some letters that he kept copies of but most of them are from they're either from Franklin some are from Armfield some are from Franklin's nephew Franklin has it's a family business Franklin is sort of the the kind of leading player of his family in the slave trade but he gets involved first with his two older brothers then he's got one, two, I think at least three nephews who were involved in the trade with him at some point or another so there are all these letters that go back and forth among them and they can actually describe the way they talk about enslaved women and what they're doing to enslaved women how they see enslaved women in the market as code it's really more they're joking as much as anything else I mean to me that was the the hardest part to kind of get my head around to try to figure out how am I going to write this was that slave women under slavery is not news this is pretty standard for depictions of slavery it's very widespread it's extremely disturbing even the stuff about these particular slave traders and the ways that they talk about the sexual exploitation of enslaved women both that they are personally involved in and that they are they know what they're selling these women for they know the kind of customer who's going to want to purchase these women that didn't even surprise me that really wasn't wasn't news and I think to some readers will not be news I think to me the most difficult thing to get my head around the hardest part of it is the the pleasure they seem to take in it it's not the kind of thing where they felt like they had to discuss and that's what I mean they don't, they're not disguising it if anything they're laughing about it this is part of being and this is sort of part of what I argue in the book is how do you how do you get up and do this every single day for years and look I've never, I don't think I entirely sorted through the psychology of it but that goes through a place that's I think even a little too dark for me and I can handle dark subjects obviously but but one element of the psychology here is that they find the the pain and suffering of the people who they are trafficking there's something that's amusing to them about it and that that is sort of one of the most disturbing things I think about that material in particular and I try not to dwell on it too excessively but I think it's really important to understand the mindset of slave traders there is no there's not a moment's hesitation in they're thinking about it we might think to ourselves well did they ever feel bad about it did they ever second guess their choices there's not a shred of evidence that says that they did this is just this is what they did they like doing it it was profitable it was entertaining there was something fun to them about it and that's what keeps them going right and you describe them almost taking pride in their work right describing themselves as pirates as you know swaggering robbers it's a game right and they also took pleasure and pride in being able to outmaneuver the various laws that would come into place right that would try and restrict the trade yeah so you know there are moments when states in the lower south try to restrict the slave trade now it almost never has anything to do with morals they don't it's not a moral issue having to do with slavery it usually has to do with the problem is the slave trade is actually too popular there are too many slave traders bringing too many enslaved people states and sometimes localities are worried about the prospect of disease they're worried about the prospect of rebellion slave traders are draining these states of capital because there's so much money being pumped into the slave trade so there are these kind of regulations almost every state in the lower south at some point or another passes rules against the slave trade most of them don't last very long they're not very effective but Franklin and Armfield yeah I mean they're always looking for a way around them and they have all different kinds of plans some of which go into operations some of which they just sort of talk about their letters but it's not clear whether they do you know and that's everything from kind of bribing public officials to faking the documentation of sales so that it made it look like it was happening in state when it was really happening out of state sometimes they are actually sort of selling to people say you know if there's a ban in Louisiana they might sell their buyers in Louisiana but then actually make the transfer in Mississippi so that the slave holder could bring the people in themselves because that part was legal you couldn't actually bring them in as a trader but if you brought them in for your own personal use you could do that so yeah I mean they take a lot of pride in their business and in their ability to always find a way to make the deal go through you know the thing about Franklin and Armfield is that the slave traders they are a little bit shady but they're actually a lot less shady than a lot of their fellows and I think that part of the pride comes from being able to run what they saw as an upstanding business I mean you see this with Armfield particularly in Virginia he would open up the headquarters you know and he didn't care who came you know customers came anti-slavery activists would come and they would knock on the door thinking they were going to do a lot of lies which he did but he didn't make it seem that way right what he made it seem is look you know come on in I'll show you around you can have a tour you can see the whole place you can see I run a clean decent business here I try to treat people well I try not to separate families at best those things were half true but they do take a lot of pride in trying to present themselves as as running a decent business as as respectable as any other business in the country we're going to take some questions I've got one last one before we turn to you guys out there by the eight late mid 1836 they were out of the game so tell us why and how their exit affects the trade so Franklin Armfield get out of the trade in 1836 but they had really thought about getting out a few times before that Franklin in particular had thought about getting out a few times before that like I said before he he started in the trade with his older brothers in the 18 the first decade of the 19th century in the 1800s and so by the time you get to 1828 he'd been doing it for 20 years he does it for another 10 but he pretty quickly like he just gets exhausted he's out of gas he's out of steam his body starts to break down I mean one of the difficulties of the trade again not to be sympathetic to them but it's physically challenging you're constantly traveling you never really can settle down in one place very long and Franklin really what he hoped to do was sort of make a bunch of money with Armfield turn things over to his nephews and then kind of get out things happen along the way that sort of keep him in the business a little longer than he'd expected so getting out in 1836 is actually a few years longer than Franklin had wanted to be in the business but it's not just the wear and tear of it and the exhaustion of it and the sense that look he made a ton of money he didn't need anymore it's also that by the time you get to the middle of the 1830s the American economy itself is getting very overheated there's tons of banking capital flooding into the cotton frontier there is everything is happening on credit and it's weird politics with the second bank of the United States and Jackson and it just seems like things are maybe not entirely sustainable and that it might be best to sort of take your profits ease your way out and move on with your life from there and the truth is that Franklin Armfield gets started in 1828 which is about as advantageous a moment as you possibly could for getting into the trade they get out in 1836 and they send their last shipment of enslaved people in December 1836 the panic of 1837 starts four months later the sheer luck of their timing is really incredible it's almost as if Franklin in particular but I think his partners as well they just have a sense for how the money is moving when it's time to get in when it's time to get out and how to make it all work so it's a combination of the personal and the economic that really leads them to decide to leave okay all right well please send us your questions we're eager to hear them okay let's see we've got one facilities now historic museum on Duke street in Alexandria right are there some other locations of these events that viewers familiar with the Chesapeake region would know so that's a good question there are certainly plenty of location the actual sort of physical infrastructure of Franklin and Armfield mostly does not exist anymore there is the house on Duke street which is which has been the freedom house museum in Alexandria for some time and is currently undergoing renovations and is going to be I think an even bigger and better museum although what was there for a long time was really a heroic effort by the urban leaving northern Virginia to kind of keep this facility and this building alive as a landmark beyond that though it's really hard to find out where exactly I want to say okay well where can I go to see say Rice Bowards jail in Richmond right because Rice Bowards was set up in Richmond as their kind of agent there the jail isn't there anymore it's a gas station it's sort of up the street from you know I think people were familiar with the Richmond slave trade know about the site of Robert Lumpkin's operation it's sort of up the street from that but there's no marker there there's no nothing in New Orleans again where they were selling people in New Orleans there were really two different locations they worked out of one of them is sort of hotels and restaurants just outside the French quarter in the Marini the other is a parking lot which now has a historical marker there which has been there just for the last few years but if you read the book you'll see locations at least that are familiar to everybody in the Chesapeake Franklin and Armfield had agents stationed in Baltimore in Fredericksburg in Warrington, Virginia like I said in Richmond in places all along the eastern shore of Maryland so yeah I mean I think a lot of these locations are going to be familiar even if you don't even if you can't really sort of see them physically anymore someone has a question about the banks which banks participated in this kind of credit system where enslaved people were often used as collateral yeah so I have not done the research to try to figure out whether any of these banks in particular have kind of descendant banks if you can draw a direct line from a bank that exists today back to some of these banks it's entirely possible that there are banks open they close their capital becomes part of other banks and so on but the banks at the time were banks of all sorts you know Franklin and Armfield helped circulate the capital of the second bank of the United States they are working with facilities, institutions like the Union Bank of Louisiana which is a bank that is underwritten by state bonds and by plantation owners they are doing business with places like the Phoenix Bank of New York now the Phoenix Bank well yes the Phoenix Bank of New York also the Merchants Bank of New York you know they do business with the Farmers Bank of Virginia you know there's probably about half a dozen of them that I mentioned in the book but really there weren't any banks in the country at least not that I know of that said we won't do business with slave traders that's something we won't do now they don't always have control over where their capital circulates obviously but there are plenty of banks that look slave traders have a lot of cash on hand they always need money and that made them good customers for banks so there's banks everywhere in the United States that are doing business with traders and yes enslaved people are often put up as collateral I mean the Union Bank of Louisiana is a good example of this and this was something that in the deep South in particular there was a kind of bank called the Plantation Bank and basically what happens there is plantation owners they want to have access to more credit that they can draw on whenever they need it and so what they do is they put their plantations and enslaved people up as collateral to underwrite the bank whose capital they can then draw on right so when slave people and I describe several other ways in the book they do this they're often underwriting their own sales they are the collateral on which their purchases are made which is the layers of exploitation really just never end someone has a question about universities are there any connections to higher learning institutions of higher learning and these slave traders did university support them financially or extract profits in the context of the trading business this partnership so the longer answer is that there aren't universities that are supporting these particular traders financially now I didn't do research on every one of their customers so it's entirely possible that there are people affiliated with universities who are buying from Franklin and Arnfield or selling to Franklin and Arnfield but institutionally probably the clearest links between Franklin and Arnfield and institutions of higher education one of them is the University of the South at Swanee after Arnfield gets out of the slave trade he becomes well he does a lot of things but eventually what he does is he becomes the owner of a resort hotel in the Tennessee mountains he is friends with a lot of leading Episcopal bishops in the south he converts to Episcopalianism at some point in his life and when the one of the leading Episcopal bishops in the country, Leonidas Polk decides in the 1850s that sending young white southern men to northern institutions could no longer be trusted there's too much anti-slavery influence he thought so he decides that it was really important for the Episcopal church to create an institution where young white men could be trained not only as good Episcopalians but as good slave holders it was going to be a pro-slavery institution and among the people who they turned to for business expertise and for money is John Arnfield Arnfield gives a very large donation to help get the University of South off the ground Isaac Franklin's widow gives a large donation to help get it off the ground and now the Civil War alters the early history of that institution but that institution is still there there is a through line so yes the University of South and this is no secret to them has a direct connection to Franklin and Arnfield the other one that I think has a pretty direct connection is Belmont University in Nashville the Belmont mansion which is where that university got started and is still on the campus of the university the Belmont mansion was built by Isaac Franklin's widow after he died she marries a wealthy plantation she is already extraordinarily wealthy because she inherits most of Franklin's money she marries a wealthy plantation owner and they build this giant Italianate mansion it is now in Nashville at the time it was just a tiny bit outside the city but that is also a slave trade and so that connection to that institution is also still there there are a number of questions about descendants what if anything do you know about descendants of the people that they traded and what do you know about the descendants of Rice, Ballard and Arnfield if anything so I didn't do a lot of genealogical work to trace down descendants of people who they trafficked that can be done certainly in some cases and I know I've seen comments in various social media feeds of people who know that they are descended from people who were bought and sold by Franklin and Arnfield I have no doubt that there are today walking around once you trace down the generations probably literally hundreds of thousands of people who are descended from people who were trafficked by Franklin and Arnfield that kind of work can be done it's sometimes easier than others I didn't do it in any systematic way simply because I wouldn't have even known where to start I mean they deal in so many people how do you pick and choose I do I have had contact however with a number of so neither Franklin nor Arnfield have direct living white descendants John Arnfield and his wife never had any children Isaac Franklin and his wife they do have four children none of them live to adulthood but John Arnfield does raise the children of a number of Franklin's nephews as his own basically and so there are people who are descended from members of the larger Franklin and Arnfield family I have been in touch with them over the course of the research of this book they have been this is hard for them to come to terms with and sometimes they didn't even know until recently what the story of their family was sometimes they did and it's really been they've been extraordinarily generous with me they want to keep track of my research they want to know what the story is they want to help in whatever way that they can they were very very helpful how they actually kind of get their own heads around being descended from this history is I think I would lead that to them to talk about I have not tracked down the descendants of Rice Ballard I am almost positive he has living white descendants three daughters they all lived two daughters they all got married I didn't track them down because I felt like they either don't know the story and I don't want to be the guy who knocks at the door and says guess what about your great great great grandfather or they do know the story in which case they either would be receptive to me making that phone call or they really really would not be I just didn't know how that would play out I didn't feel obligated to drop this on somebody's doorstep if they didn't already know it I would like to know who they are how they understand being that this is what they are at the tail end of but I never did that we are going to be wrapping up but as a historian who is familiar to reign to you obviously quickly was there anything that surprised you and what would you like people to take away from this there probably were a lot of things that surprised me at some point or another some of the things maybe shouldn't have surprised me the the extent of the trade the examples you come across in the archives where you thought we had seen everything and you come across things in the archive that still they would literally take my breath away I would come across something and read a story and I would stop for a minute and realize I had not breathed in a minute I needed to get up and walk away and not all those things made it into the book there were stories that I either couldn't fit in or that I just felt like this is it's too much it's too much but I what I think I want people to take away is I really want people to understand that this business and the men who ran it were not they're not sort of out there on the fringes of how the United States worked before the Civil War I think it's important to understand just sort of how they sit in some ways at the center of economic power sometimes of political power if you see there's connections to particularly prominent politicians in the book that I talk about and I think look I think you started off this conversation talking about reckoning with American history and I think that you know reckoning with slavery and its legacy is something that is a big part of what kind of historians and I think a lot of the broader public are thinking about and have been thinking about in recent years but I think we really need to understand when we're talking about reckoning with slavery we're not simply talking about farms and plantations we're talking about banks we're talking about ships we're talking about merchants we're really talking about something that really looks like a modern business and that is part of slavery's legacy too and it's really in some way sort of at the core of what slavery's legacy is what that ultimately means I think is a much bigger conversation maybe for another day we have I think just a minute next what's next for you I don't know it's funny you ask usually this is my third book I knew what I wanted to do next by the time the first two came out I have some ideas I've been kicking around but I haven't settled on one and I think I look I'm a historian of race and slavery I don't think I'm ever going to move entirely away from those subjects but I need something that I can sit with a little more easily than this one that's one of the things that surprised me I guess was I've written two books about slavery I teach about slavery I went to grad school thinking about slavery I've been thinking about slavery for 25 years I didn't think at this point there was anything that I really sort of couldn't handle and couldn't get my head around and I think what surprised me is just how difficult this book was to kind of live with to live with these men to live with that material and so whatever I do next I need it to be something that's not quite as heavy as what this was right well thank you and thank everyone we all wrestle with the weight of this history and it has been a pleasure to discuss it with you thank you Rachel I really appreciate it and thanks everybody in the audience I'm sorry we didn't get to all the questions but I'm easy to find on email if you want to follow up