They were once America's cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names? [View all]

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Retropolis
They were once America’s cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names?
Isaac Franklin and John Armfield committed atrocities they appeared to relish

By Hannah Natanson
September 14, 2019 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business. ... Slave trading was a “game.” The men, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, were daring “pirates” or “one-eyed men,” a euphemism for their penises. The women they bought and sold were “fancy maids,” a term signifying youth, beauty and potential for sexual exploitation — by buyers or the traders themselves.

Rapes happened often. ... “To my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one eyed man about my size and age, excuse my foolishness,” Isaac Franklin’s nephew James — an employee and his uncle’s protege — wrote in typical business correspondence, referring to Caroline Brown, an enslaved woman who suffered repeated rape and abuse at James’s hands for five months. She was 18 at the time and just over five feet tall.

Franklin and Armfield, who headquartered their slave trading business in a townhouse that still stands in Alexandria, Va., sold more enslaved people, separated more families and made more money from the trade than almost anyone else in America. Between the 1820s and 1830s, the two men reigned as the “undisputed tycoons” of the domestic slave trade, as Smithsonian Magazine put it.

As the country marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Jamestown, Americans are being forced to confront the brutality of slavery and of the people who profited from it. Few profited more than the two Virginia slave traders.
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The exterior of the Franklin and Armfield Slave Office, today the Freedom House Museum, in Alexandria. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post )
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Hannah Natanson is a reporter covering social issues in the D.C. metro area. She joined The Washington Post as an intern in June 2018. Follow https://twitter.com/hannah_natanson

The story just got this comment:

itsallpoo | 32 seconds ago
In an article in this month's Smithsonian magazine, is the story "In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued for Reparations—and Won" at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/henrietta-wood-sued-reparations-won-180972845/

When I read it, I wondered why I'd never heard of this part of the slave trade, the use of bounty hunters and payoffs for the kidnapping of free Blacks. This article is very informative as is the one printed here, the Smithsonian tells it in a more unnerving fashion. Such a sad period and that Miss Wood won reparations only strengthens the case to consider them in a broader scope.