American Auto Trail-Mississippis U.S. Highway 80 (American Auto Trails)

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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. 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. 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.

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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. 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. 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.

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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. It was typical on the Slave Trail: People like Waller marched a coffle and sold one or two people along the way to pay the travel bills. Sarah and Indian, the mother and daughter, wanted to be sold together. The three sisters, Sarah Ann, Louisa and Lucy, also wanted to be sold together, which was not likely to happen, and they knew it.

When cotton retailed high in New York, slaveholders in Mississippi bought people. When cotton went low, they did not. In winter , cotton was down. Buyers by the hundreds crammed the viewing rooms of dealers in Natchez and the auction halls of brokers in New Orleans. There was one place en route, however, with a small slave market—Aberdeen, Mississippi. Waller decided to try to sell one or two people there. At Tupelo, he made a daylong detour to Aberdeen but soon despaired over his prospects there: Waller dragged his gang northwest, four days and 80 miles, to Oxford, but found no buyers.

Thomas Dabney was an acquaintance from Virginia who had moved to Raymond, on the Natchez Trace, 12 years earlier and doubled his already thick riches as a cotton planter. Today as then, Raymond, Mississippi, is a crossroads, population 2, A magnificent Greek Revival courthouse stands next to a one-room barbershop with a corrugated metal front.

Pretense and bluster rub shoulders with the plain and dejected. The old railroad station, a wooden building with deep eaves, is a used-record store. Near a school playground in the middle of Raymond, I find the Dabney family graveyard, surrounded by an iron fence. Dabney has taken Henry and is security for the balance—the three sisters to one man. Waller himself was a little defensive about this people-selling business. As far as I am concerned I have had pain enough on the subject without being censured in this quarter.

Natchez, pearl of the state, stands on a bluff above the Mississippi. Beautiful houses, an antique village, a large tourist trade. But the tourist money is fairly recent. Just outside town, the Trace comes to an end at a shabby intersection. This is Forks of the Road, the Y-shaped junction formed by St. Franklin once ran the biggest operation at Forks of the Road, moving hundreds of people every month. But by the time Waller arrived, Franklin was gone. After he died, in , his body was shipped from Louisiana to Fairvue in a whiskey barrel.

Today at the Forks there is a muffler shop and, next to it, a gutter-and-awn-ing business. Across the street, five historical markers stand on a naked lawn. No buildings on that half-acre. In Raymond, thanks to Thomas Dabney, Waller had gotten in touch with a slave seller named James Ware, a year-old with Virginia roots.

Waller knew his family. At the Forks, Waller found a poke salad of low wooden buildings, long and narrow, each housing a dealer, each with a porch and a dirt yard in front. The yards were parade grounds that worked like showrooms. Slaves for sale wore a uniform of sorts. The display was weirdly silent. They were sorted by sex and size and made to stand in sequence. Men on one side, in order of height and weight, women on the other. This sorting arrangement meant that it was more likely children would be sold from their parents.

At the Forks, there were no auctions, only haggling. Buyers looked at the people, took them inside, made them undress, studied their teeth, told them to dance, asked them about their work, and, most important, looked at their backs. The inspection of the back made or broke the deal.

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Many people had scars from whipping. After examining the people on display, a buyer would talk to a seller and negotiate. It was like buying a car today. The man in the South who has done the most to call attention to the Slave Trail was born in Natchez in His parents named him Clifton M. During the black power years of the s he renamed himself Ser Seshsh Ab Heter. Machines did not replace human hands until the s.

He is bearded white and gray, and half bald. He is direct, assertive and arresting, with a full baritone voice. He does not make small talk. He carries a poster, 4 by 6 feet, in the back of his red Nissan truck. He lives alone in a five-room cottage in a black section of town, away from the camera-ready center of Natchez. The tan clapboard house—folding chairs and a hammock in the front yard, cinder blocks and planks for front steps—overflows inside with books, LPs, folk art, old newspapers, knickknacks, clothes in piles and unidentifiable hoards of objects.

In a front room, a parallel—dozens of photos of the slave factories of Ghana and Sierra Leone, where captives were held before being sent to the Americas. Boxley left Natchez in , at age He spent 35 years in California as an activist, as a teacher, as a foot soldier in anti-poverty programs. He came home to Natchez in and discovered Forks of the Road. The site is empty but for the five markers, paid for by the City of Natchez.

They say there were no feelings here. He tells the back story. Some had cholera, and these enslaved people died. Franklin disposed of their bodies in a bayou down the road. They were discovered, and it caused a panic. The city government passed an ordinance that banned all long-distance dealers selling people within the city limits. So they relocated here, at this junction, a few feet outside the city line.

Across the street was another set of buildings and dealers. You have Robert H. Elam operating in the site over there.

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By this place was abuzz with long-distance traders. Since , a proposal to incorporate the site into the National Park Service has been creeping toward approval. An act of Congress is needed. The public recognition for Forks of the Road is for the ancestors who cannot speak for themselves. I ask him to play a debating game. Imagine a white woman asks a question: This story is hard for me to listen to and to understand. Can you tell it in a way that is not going to injure my sensitivity?

It is the humanity of our ancestors denied that I am interested in. This story is your story as well as an African-American story. In fact, it is more your story than it is mine. A black man asks: I am a middle-class father.

Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears

I work for the government, I go to church, have two kids, and I say this story is too painful. Can you put it aside? Boxley lets less than a second pass. The only reason your black behind is here at all is because somebody survived that deal. The only reason why we are in America is because our ancestors were force-brought in chains to help build the country.

The way you transcend the hurt and pain is to face the situation, experience it and cleanse yourself, to allow the humanity of our ancestors and their suffering to wash through you and settle into your spirit. A hundred yards from Forks of the Road, there is a low brick bridge across a narrow creek. It is 12 feet wide, 25 feet long and covered with kudzu, buried beneath mud and brush. William Waller left for New Orleans during the second week of January , taking an hour steamboat ride.

Among them were the field hand Nelson, plus his wife; a man called Piney Woods Dick and another nicknamed Runaway Boots. Waller had never been to such a big city. He had heard bad things about New Orleans, expected to be frightened by it, and was.

During the 50 years of the Slave Trail, perhaps half a million people born in the United States were sold in New Orleans, more than all the Africans brought to the country during two centuries of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. New Orleans, the biggest slave market in the country, had about 50 people-selling companies in the s. Some whites went to the slave auctions for entertainment. Today in New Orleans, the number of monuments, markers and historic sites that refer in some way to the domestic slave trade is quite small.

I make a first estimate: But what it says is wrong. Greenwald stands in front of two beige livery coats hanging behind a pane of glass. The two livery coats, big-buttoned and long-tailed, were worn by an enslaved carriage driver and a doorman. New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade, As she talks and points out objects, I notice something I had never seen during many visits to this archive: And it was really past time.

They record the names, heights, ages, sex and coloration as determined by the person looking at them. And there are many children on the list alone But here is a group with dozens, aged 10 to Louisiana had a law that said children under 10 could not be separated from their mothers.

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And you see a lot of records in which there are an unusual number of year-olds alone. These children were not They were probably younger, but nobody was checking. Developing the exhibit, Greenwald and her team created a database of names of the enslaved who were shipped from the Eastern states to New Orleans.

William Waller and his gang, and other hundreds of thousands arriving by foot, did not leave traces in government records.

But people who arrived by ship did. Of course, that is only some. In , the number of ships carrying slaves from Eastern ports into New Orleans was In , it was 1, In , it was 4, Each carried 5 to 50 slaves. They were women of mixed race, invariably. Isaac Franklin was all over this market.

Louis Hotel is one of several places that can be identified as once-upon-a-time slave-trading sites. Next door to it was another, the New Orleans Exchange. Louis Hotel was razed in , but it was in the hotel that the Slave Trail ended in the most spectacular scenes. There were two auction stands, each five feet above the floor, on either side of the rotunda. And beneath the dome, with sunlight shafting down through windows in the apse, both auction stands did business simultaneously, in French and in English. She was about sixteen, dressed in a cheap striped woolen gown, and bareheaded.

Her name was Hermina. Here, too, in the St. He was sold to a man from Mississippi, his mother to a man from Texas. Then came second thoughts, and more self-pity: James Ware, the slave dealer Waller had met in Natchez, had come through on the sales, and he offered Waller an itemized statement.

The journey ended, the business done, Waller headed home. It was March 13, On April 1, Waller reached home. His wife and children greeted him. Also, an elderly black woman named Charity, whom he and Sarah had kept at home, knowing that no one would offer money for her. The slave cabins were vacant. The first polite questions appeared in newspapers in the summer of , right after the Civil War and Emancipation.

Former slaves—there were four million—asked by word of mouth, but that went nowhere, and so they put announcements in the papers, trying to find mothers and sisters, children and husbands swept away from them by the Slave Trail. Hannah Cole was one of them, maybe the first. I have not seen him for ten years. I was sold to Joseph Bruin, who took me to New Orleans. My name was then Hannah Person, it is now Hannah Cole. This is the only child I have and I desire to find him much. It was not an easy matter to place an ad.

It meant hiring someone who could write. Literacy had been against the law for slaves, so few of the four million knew how to write. One lost friend wrote:. I was sold to a speculator whose name was Wm. Ferrill and was brought to Mobile, Alabama at the age of 10 years. My name was Annie Ferrill, but my owners changed my name. The black churches picked it up. A message from a woman who had been snatched from her mother when she was a girl might reach hundreds of thousands. I wish to inquire for my relatives, whom I left in Virginia about 25 years ago.

I was sold with a younger sister—Bettie. My name was Mary, and I was nine years old when sold to a trader named Walker, who carried us to North Carolina. Bettie was sold to a man named Reed, and I was sold and carried to New Orleans and from there to Texas. I had a brother, Sam, and a sister, Annie, who were left with mother.

If they are alive, I will be glad to hear from them. Historic Highways of Central and Southern California. Historic Roads in Los Angeles County. A new and somewhat infrequent blog on historic highways. North American Auto Trails: This is the web site that started it all. National Old Trails Highway: Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway: Fans of old highways across Colorado should read this informative essay on the little-known Pikes Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway. US 50 Coast to Coast: The mother site of all US highways.

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