Per Timothy Tyson (in his review above): “Martha Sweart, Martha Sweart, I will never forget her.” Neither will you if you read the following excerpt from Joshua D. Rothman’s The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America.
A purchasing agent working for Rice Ballard passed through the central Virginia town of Charlottesville and bought sixteen-year-old Martha Sweart for $350. That was between $50 and $100 more than slave traders were typically spending for young women early in 1832, but Ballard’s agent believed a buyer in the lower South might pay a premium for her. He brought Sweart to Richmond and delivered her to Ballard, who imprisoned her in the city for several weeks before putting her on a steamboat that churned down the James River to Norfolk. There, Sweart and 87 other enslaved people met a coastwise vessel on its way to New Orleans, a slaver called the Tribune that had left Alexandria five days earlier carrying 134 captives, more than half of them consigned by John Armfield.[1]
Passage on the crowded ship was made even more perilous and difficult by a measles outbreak on board, and Sweart had still other trials ahead of her. After landing in New Orleans, she and over one hundred of her shipmates were transferred to another steamboat. It went up the Mississippi River to Natchez, where Sweart took her place in line, climbed the bluff, and stumbled through the city in chains, still wearing what she had on when she left Virginia, now reduced practically to rags. She ended up at Franklin and Armfield’s compound on the Washington road, where James Rawlings Franklin awaited her. Sizing up the teenager, all of five foot two with skin described both in Rice Ballard’s purchasing records and on the Tribune manifest as “yellow,” Franklin thought Sweart a fine specimen for sale as a “fancy.” The term was a euphemism that entered the lexicon of the slave trade in the 1830s to describe young women peddled to customers as sex slaves. Franklin and Armfield would market Martha Sweart as someone white men would want to rape.[2]
She was not the first. They were strewn across company records, the young, often light-skinned enslaved women and girls made available to white men as sources of pleasure, power, and profit. The commoditized fantasies of racial and sexual domination were revealed in the prices paid. Eighteen-year-old Amy Watts, like Martha Sweart, was denoted on a purchase list by Rice Ballard as “yellow.” Ballard paid $500 for Watts in the fall of 1832, about 50 percent more than he paid for other women her age and more than he paid for most young enslaved men, whose prices served as the benchmark for the slave trade. Three months after shipping Watts to Natchez, Ballard consigned Elizabeth Cosby and Mary Ann Ambler for passage to the lower South. He described Cosby as “yellow,” and Ambler as “brown,” and while he marked down that the seventeen-year-olds were both “seamstresses,” that too was often a kind of code word. No skill with the needle explained why Ballard had paid $600 apiece for Cosby and Ambler, nearly twice what other teenage women had been costing him and far more than, he had been paying for young men.[3]
Ballard’s expenditures could be justified by the money made speculating on the erotic desires of slaveholders. Watts, Cosby, and Ambler were sold privately in Mississippi, but in New Orleans, notarized sales of young women like them stand out. In 1830, when Isaac Franklin was getting between $350 and $450 for young women and $550 to $650 for young men, he sold nineteen-year-old Charity for $700 to Benjamin Story, a merchant, the president of the Bank of Louisiana, and resident agent of the transatlantic trading house of Alexander Brown and Company. Another customer that year, Saint James Parish slaveholder Edouard Robin de Logny, went on something of a spree. One Friday in February, he spent $600 for Mary Wheeler, a nineteen-year-old “yellow” woman, and $800 for a twenty-two-year-old “black” woman named Susan Gant. Five days later, de Logny spent another $770 to buy eighteen-year-old Phillis Carroll. De Logny paid cash for Wheeler and Gant. But Franklin sold him Carroll on credit, in the form of a promissory note payable in a year at Victor David’s merchant house.[4]
In the notarial acts certifying their purchases, Story and de Logny did not made their motives explicit. Neither did George Legendre, a partner in a wholesale grocery firm and a director of the Louisiana State Bank, who bought a twenty-year-old “mulatto” named Lucinda for $760 in 1831. Nor did Lestang Prudhomme, a Natchitoches Parish slaveholder who paid the same price that year for twenty-one year-old Fanny, also described as “mulatto.” They did not have to. The women understood what was happening, and Isaac Franklin and his customers alike pushed past the mystification of high prices. Haggling over the cost was just part of the transaction, and probably the last one. First there were lascivious winks and vulgar remarks, encouragements to give those being sold a good long look, reminders of the envy they would inspire among other white men, opportunities offered to paw at a breast or run a hand up a dress, and allusions made to their histories of having been raped before. [5]
For Martha Sweart may have been raped before she got to Natchez. If she had managed to avoid being assaulted before Rice Ballard’s agent purchased her, it could have occurred during the seventy-mile trek from Charlottesville to Richmond, in Ballard’s jail, on board the Tribune, or from more than one man at more than one stage along the way. Witnesses to the slave trade testified that traders dragged girls and young women into the woods to do with them as they pleased, invited colleagues to take turns with them in wagon beds, threatened or beat them into submission in steamboat cabins, and picked them out of pens and took them to back rooms of compounds for “the basest purposes.” Famously endemic to American slavery as a whole, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women was built into the working lives and business models of slave traders. John Brown, who was trafficked to New Orleans, minced no words about what he saw, writing that in the lower South, “the slave-pen is only another name for a brothel.”[6]
Isaac Franklin and his nephew found the abuse gratifying. They peppered their letters with what they considered waggish remarks about it, seamlessly ranging among phallic allusions to themselves and their customers, lewd comments about women they had raped or imagined raping, and discussions of markets and logistics. In the space of a few lines, Isaac Franklin could report to Rice Ballard about sales figures and cotton prices, make banking recommendations, and detail going rates for “ordinary women” and those “of superior appearance,” all before signing off with a chuckle that he “had hard work for a one eyed man.” James Franklin shared his uncle’s habit of mixing business communication and genital slang, telling Ballard he had made some money, but sales were sluggish, and he anticipated “tolerably tough times this spring for one eyed men.” Franklin threw in a personal story too, telling Ballard of “a handsome Girl” in the Washington road compound who “to my certain knowledge has been used and that smartly by a one eyed young man about my size & age.” [7]
James Franklin did not identify the “handsome Girl” by name. The suggestive assurance that he would do “the best with & for the fancy white maid & excelant cook I can” did it for him. Ballard would know whom he was talking about. Perhaps Ballard had “used” her “smartly” himself. Rape helped unite Ballard, Armfield, and the Franklins across space. The physical distance that usually separated them and that might have attenuated their interpersonal bonds was made closer through letters filled with coarse banter about enslaved women they had shared and planned to sell.[8]
They shared no one more extensively than Martha Sweart. In May 1832, James Franklin wrote to Ballard that “the fair maid Martha” was “still on hand” in Natchez, more than a month after her arrival. So was another young woman he hoped to sell as a “fancy,” eighteen-year-old Caroline Brown, whom Franklin referred to as ” our white Caroline. But business was “very slow.” Franklin considered the prospect of selling either of them to be “very bad,” and at some point, he returned Sweart to Ballard in Richmond. However, customer interest in sex slaves picked up again early in 1833, and Isaac Franklin started asking Ballard to send Sweart back to him. For a time, Ballard balked. He preferred to keep her for himself, and he did so for months, putting off Franklin with a pledge to deliver her to the lower South again soon.[9]
After a while, the postponements irked the elder Franklin, who thought he might “use” Sweart as his nephew had and then offer her for sale again. In early November, he wrote from Natchez, informing Ballard that “there are Great Demand for fancy maid I do believe that a Likely Girl and a Good seamstress could be sold for $1000.” He had sold Allice Sparraw, a “fancy girl” Ballard had shipped earlier in the year, for $800, which was a nice return on the $375 Ballard had paid for her in Virginia. But Franklin wanted Sweart. “I was disappointed,” Franklin continued, “in not finding your Charlottesville maid that you promised me.”[10]
Still waiting two months later for Ballard to send Sweart, Franklin’s disappointment turned to exasperation. The intensity of his desire to violate Sweart and then turn her around for a profit had made him practically priapic, and he threatened to make Ballarcl pay the retail price for her if he wanted to hold onto her that badly. “Your old one eyed friend,” Franklin wrote, “is brought up all standing the Fancy Girl from Charlottesville will you send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her say Quick I wanted to see her I fear the time for the 1100 Dollar prices are over and that I will not git to see the fancy maid.” Ballard was taking money out of his partners’ pockets. And he was being selfish, keeping several enslaved women for his own purposes in Richmond. Franklin was fed up. “I thought,” he scolded Ballard, “that an old robber might be satisfyed with two or three maids.”[11]
It was an especially rich jab coming from Isaac Franklin, about whom there were widespread rumors of the things he did on summer visits to his Tennessee property. But the threat to Ballard’s pocketbook worked. By February 1834, Ballard had shipped Martha Sweart to the lower South for a second time. Isaac Franklin kept her for a few weeks in New Orleans before putting her on a steamboat back to Natchez, where James Franklin raped her again. Telling Ballard in March that his uncle “sent me your maid Martha,” Franklin insinuated darkly about the violence he inflicted on her. “She is inclined to be compliant,” he wrote.[12]
“Cuffy” was a common nineteenth-century vernacular term for Black people, and James Franklin cracked wise in an April letter to Ballard that Martha Sweart now “answers by the name of Big Cuff.” Sweart, who had been circulated among Rice Ballard, Isaac Franklin, and James Franklin for over two years and had turned eighteen, was pregnant. One of the traders was responsible, and although none of them knew or cared which one, Martha Sweart herself wanted to go back to Virginia. “Martha sends her best Respects,” James Franklin continued, “& says she wants to see you very much.” Maybe she did. Maybe living with Ballard was preferable to being shuttled back and forth between Isaac and James Franklin, and susceptible at all times to being bought by yet another rapist. At least Virginia was home. Or maybe Franklin was suggesting that Ballard was the father of Sweart’s child, his allusion to her own wishes another twisted joke at a fancy girl’s expense. Maybe. Neither Ballard nor the Franklins ever wrote about her again.
Being a slave-trader for any extended period of time required more than merely a willingness to hurt, degrade, and terrorize enslaved people, to ravage their lives, march them hundreds of miles, and pack them onto” ships destined for some of the harshest labor regimes on the planet. It required commitment to those things, and enthusiasm for them. Isaac Franklin, James Franklin, and Rice Ballard enjoyed tormenting Martha Sweart, and as they and John Armfield reached the top of their profession in the early 1830s, the collaborative pleasure they took in inflicting pain on the enslaved helped make them successful.
The exuberant cruelty embedded in the culture of their industry and their company suffuses the surviving correspondence of the Franklins, Armfield, and Ballard. The life they chose could be taxing, all-consuming, and dangerous. But the control over Black women and men that that life provided and the financial gains reaped from making them suffer also licensed and fueled a knavish and domineering masculinity that they found rewarding. It kept them going, and it gave them a sense of entitlement and untrammeled authority that bled into their dealings with white people as well. The brutality, the hustle, the salacious gibes, and the sexual assaults made it fun to work in tandem and grow a business buying and selling enslaved people.[14]
Attitude and personal attachments cemented through violence were social currencies propelling the ascendancies of the men who composed Franklin and Armfield. But only proficiency with actual currency could really foster steady cooperation and keep the company profitable. Isaac Franklin was particularly masterful in that regard, gifted with the ability to keep track of hundreds of thousands of dollars at once. Franklin also saw that a business whose operators generally sought instant gratification and visible profits from quick cash sales could pay off more handsomely over time through connections to powerful capital networks. He understood that as the company he and John Armfield had founded grew in size and renown, its developing reputation and the volume in which it dealt could provide access to credit that would facilitate additional expansion and market influence.[15]
Franklin and Armfield was poised for such an approach when it started recruiting purchasing agents in 1830. The company’s clout had swelled well beyond what it had been in 1828 and 1829. During the 1830 calendar year, the company sold 424 enslaved people in New Orleans, an increase of 42 percent from 1829 and a demonstration that John Armfield’s buying and shipping strategies were seeing concrete results in Alexandria. Gross sales in New Orleans for 1830 came to nearly $225,000. Corresponding to about $6 million today, it was an increase of 185 percent from the previous year.[16]
Franklin and Armfield’s sales were even more noteworthy when reckoned as an overall share of the New Orleans slave trade. The number of enslaved people imported by traders from outside Louisiana and sold in New Orleans peaked at nearly four thousand in 1829, and Franklin and Armfield accounted for less than 10 percent of those sales. In 1830, thanks in part to the documentary requirements and geographic limitations that the state and the city imposed on traders and the trade, sales in New Orleans by out-of-state dealers fell to around twenty-three hundred people. But Franklin and Armfield accounted for a bit more than 18 percent of the total, almost doubling the company’s market impact.[17]
Piling advantage upon advantage, the company would become even more-powerful in the years to come. Isaac Franklin supervised and conducted sales in New Orleans and Natchez, cultivated relationships with bankers and commission merchants across the United States, and sent advice, market reports, and tens of thousands of dollars in checks and other commercial paper to the Chesapeake. John Armfield and Rice Ballard converted that money into banknotes, distributed the cash to purchasing agents, aggregated agent purchases in prisons and pens, made shipping arrangements, themselves negotiated deals for slaves, and coordinated other operational logistics. From company headquarters in Alexandria, Armfield also directed aggressive additional expansion, bringing on more agents who scoured an ever-widening range of territory in Maryland and Virginia.
At the center of it all were the bodies of the enslaved, decoupled from any individual human qualities extraneous to their prices, flattened into marketable items for sale, and transformed into pieces of paper and assets on a balance sheet. Enslaved people were a kind of currency too, and the endless financial loops into which Franklin, Armfield, and Ballard integrated them by the hundreds hemmed them in as effectively as a bolted door.
It was an undertaking as intricate as it was diabolical, and serendipity played a role in its progress. Franklin and Armfield partially owed its success to the partners’ shrewdness. But like most successful entrepreneurs, they were lucky to be working in the right place at the right time. The cotton bonanza of the 1830s constituted the leading edge of an economy booming as never before in the nation’s history. Cotton prices increased by 80 percent in the first half of the 1830s, and those prices, along with the easy credit and cheap money that poured into the lower South to capitalize on them, drove slave prices higher as well. They seesawed a bit early in the decade, hut prices for young enslaved men in New Orleans almost doubled between 1830 and 1835, and profit margins for slave traders rose to a range of 30 to 50 percent. Though Isaac Franklin, John Armfield, and Rice Ballard might have done well in the slave trade whenever they started working together, they could not have done better than to have. started precisely when they did…[18]
Excerpt from The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua Rothman. Copyright © 2021. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Editor’s Note (& Apology): Notes for these pages may be read at the end of The Ledger and the Chain. They will be scanned and added to the text here next week.