Photo of the Day

Plenty of blame to go around.

It is 1828 and the Southern economy has changed.

Tobacco plantations in the northern regions are in decline.

But in the Deep South, cotton and sugar plantations are thriving.

An enslaved family works in a cotton field.

Isaac Franklin and John Armfield sense a business opportunity is this dichotomy.

Franklin & Armfield offices and slave holding pen were located at 1315 Duke Street in Alexandria.

So, they lease a three-story townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

Build prison cells in the basement and in adjacent wings of the building.

A woman visits enslaved men held at the Alexandria slave pen. The building is now a museum, called ‘The Freedom House,” which showcases the history of Black people in Alexandria.

And then travel through tobacco country in Maryland and Virginia, buying unneeded slaves from strapped tobacco farmers.

Enslaved people toil in a tobacco field.

They’ll transport these people to Louisiana and Mississippi by overland forced marches or by ship.

Then resell them to thriving plantations in need of workers.

The auction block on which enslaved people stood when they were sold at the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange in New Orleans.

The Franklin and Armfield operation became the largest domestic slave trading business in the country.

They turned the haphazard domestic slave trade into a thriving business model which other slave traders adopted.

Men stand in front of the leading St. Louis slave trader’s pen, c. 1852.

During the eight years of their operations, from 1828 to 1836, Franklin and Armfield sent four thousand enslaved people to sugar and cotton plantations in the Deep South.

They became extraordinarily wealthy members of the upper-class white Southern society.

James and Mary Chesnut, c. 1863.

But Confederate diarist Mary Chesnut noted correctly that men in the North had owned slaves and had also engaged in the slave trade.

It was wrong, she claimed, to label slavery solely a Southern sin.

Advertisement of Boston slave auction, 1769.

“It is a crowning misdemeanor for us [Southerners] to hold still in slavery those Africans whom [the Yankees] brought here from Africa or sold to us when they found it did not pay to own them themselves.

“Gradually, they slid or sold them off down here; or freed them prospectively, giving themselves years in which to get rid of them in a remunerative way.

“If they had been forced to keep the negroes in New England, I dare say the negroes might have shared the Indians' fate.” — Mary Chesnut, 1861.

An enslaved family wears their best clothes for the photographer.

On the question of slavery, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda