The Black Hole

Abstract

The Black Hole Richard Bell (bio) Joshua D. Rothman,The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. New York: Basic Books, 2021, 512 pp. Figures, notes, index. $35.00. 1315 Duke Street is about two blocks down from the UPS store in Alexandria, Virginia, on a stretch of sidewalk studded with attorneys’ offices and massage places. It’s a handsome townhouse, three stories tall and gable-roofed, its brick-work painted gun-metal grey. When John Armfield started leasing the place in 1829, it had done nearly two decades’ service as a residential dwelling—a nice place to raise a family. But Armfield ripped out its guts and renovated, turning a parlor into a meeting room for suppliers and customers. He kept the merchandise that he bought and sold at the side of the property in two high-walled yards, each one much larger than the footprint of the house itself. From Duke Street, the contents of those yards could be neither seen nor heard. But everyone knew what was kept back there. It wasn’t a secret. Arm-field wanted people to know. Soon after moving in, he installed a large sign emblazoned with his name and the name of his even better-known business partner, Isaac Franklin, above the front door. In Alexandria, everyone knew the sort of business they were in. 1315 Duke Street was a slave pen, the Virginia headquarters of the most ravenous slave trading firm anywhere in the United States. The merchandise stored in this depot and detention center were men, women, and children—dozens and dozens of them caged together on any given afternoon. Today, the visible traces of all that went on in that parlor and behind the bolted, double-locked gates to the two side yards are easy to miss. The small history museum it now houses was closed during the pandemic, and has only recently reopened. An unobtrusive historic marker, flush to the wall of the townhouse and obscured by trees, struggles for the attention of any passers-by. But foot traffic is slow these days on this section of Duke Street, which is a fifteen-minute walk from Old Town, a bustling cluster of waterfront stores that trade on their ties to George Washington and to nearby Mount Vernon. In 1829, Alexandria’s tax assessor scribbled a note to himself in the margins of a ledger describing 1315 Duke Street as “Franklin’s black hole.” It was this man’s private, personal way of marking the horrors of what happened there. [End Page 361] It’s also an apt allusion to the memory hole into which the dealings of Franklin & Armfield and the broader operations of the domestic slave trade have fallen. In antebellum America, the firm had been renowned, if not esteemed, and the massive forced migration to which it contributed—one of the largest in world history—was impossible to ignore. In the decades between 1800 and 1860, traders like John Armfield and Isaac Franklin sold at least one million enslaved people across state lines within the United States, a Second Middle Passage more than twice the size of the first. For the past century and a half, however, this domestic slave trade has lingered somewhere out of sight, confined to the darkest corners of public memory. Hardly invisible but somehow overlooked and unseen, the interstate traffic has for too long been obscured from the public eye by the shadow of the better-known transatlantic slave trade and by the seemingly insular and static regimes of plantation slavery. This didn’t happen wholly by accident. The domestic slave trade didn’t stumble into this black hole of historical forgetting by happenstance. It was pushed. In fact, people have been pushing the domestic slave trade to the margins of memory for decades. Almost every slaveowner bought or sold another human being at some point in their lives. Yet, as Robert H. Gudmestad demonstrated in A Troublesome Commerce (2003), planters in both the Upper and Lower South publicly denied their fundamental dependence on nightmare men like Franklin and Armfield, promoting instead paternalistic fantasies of benevolent mastery in which no one undeserving was ever sold away. The...