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“Slave trader.” It’s one of the most loathsome expressions in the English language. Even enslavers claimed to recoil at that designation in the era when slavery flourished. Andrew Jackson took umbrage at being called a “negro-trader” during the bitter presidential election of 1828, even though the slaves he bought and sold as a young man as part of the burgeoning interstate trade in enslaved people helped make him rich.
Jackson’s slave trading followed the pattern of many financially ambitious men at the dawning of the nineteenth century something done long enough to amass enough capital to buy a plantation and become a comfortable, respectable enslaver and then never mentioned again. By the time Jackson became president, he enslaved almost 100 people but hated being called a slave trader.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants were bought and sold within mainland British North America from the moment they were first brought to Virginia in the early seventeenth century. Tens of thousands of enslaved people were exchanged domestically throughout the colonial era and during the first several decades of the American republic. But this trade was limited, relative to what it would later become, and opportunities for men working as slave traders even more so. Through the age of the American Revolution, and continuing for a generation thereafter, enslavers in places such as South Carolina and Georgia met many of their labor demands by importing enslaved people from Africa and the Caribbean. White migrants to new western territories and to states like Kentucky and Tennessee tended to bring enslaved laborers with them when they moved. At the same time, the American banking system was immature and undercapitalized, which limited capital for large-scale transactions. There were
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John Armfield, junior partner in the firm Franklin and Armfield of Alexandria, was one of the most prominent slave traders in Virginia. Born in North Carolina, he worked as a stagecoach driver before meeting Isaac Franklin and joining him in the business of selling enslaved men, women, and children for profit. In Alexandria, Armfield operated a slave-jail complex on Duke Street, gathering enslaved people from across the Upper South for shipment south, often on coastal brigs that landed in New Orleans. Many slaves then took Mississippi River paddleboats north to Natchez, Mississippi, where Franklin kept his office. The firm sold an average of 1,200 enslaved people per year, mostly young men and women either without families or separated from them, for profits of as much as $100,000 per year. Both Franklin and Armfield became rich, leaving the business in 1836. Armfield eventually moved to Tennessee, where he established a resort community at Beersheba Springs and became a fou