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Smithsonian Magazine
America’s forgotten migration – the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South
By
Virginia Delegate Delores McQuinn has helped
raise funds for a heritage site that will show the excavated remains of
Lumpkin’s slave jail.
(Wayne Lawrence)
When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family’s roots.
He said his own father knew the name of the
people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they
lived—in the same house and on the same land—in Hanover County, among
the rumpled hills north of Richmond.
“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and
asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave
days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I
have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give
it to you.’
“The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in
his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation
records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my
grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he
said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get
off my land.’
“The intent was to keep that history
buried,” McQuinn says today. “And I think something like that has
happened over and again, symbolically.”
McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the
former capital of the Confederacy—a city crowded with monuments to the
Old South. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the
late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. One of her
proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new
light on an alternate history.
For example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about
slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. She has
helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated
remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin’s Jail.
“You see, our history is often buried,” she says. “You have to unearth it.”
Not long ago I was reading some old letters
at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little
unearthing of my own. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing
papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James
Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in
Virginia. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin
& Armfield, run by his uncle.
“We have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. Should you purchase
a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer,”
Franklin had written. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in
1834—the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. “A good lot for walking”
was a gang of enslaved men, women and children, possibly numbering in
the hundreds, who could tolerate three months afoot in the summer heat.
Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin
& Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established in
Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. Over the next decade, with Armfield based
in Alexandria and Isaac Franklin in New Orleans, the two became the
undisputed tycoons of the domestic slave trade, with an economic impact
that is hard to overstate. In 1832, for example, 5 percent of all the
commercial credit available through the Second Bank of the United States
had been extended to their firm.
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