Why do you say „New Orleans, the center of slave trade“ - do you think it was the main objective of the Anaconda plan to suppress slavery in the South?
The firm of Armfield & Franklin was headquartered in Virginia. Their slave jail HQ is a NPS site. The company’s records are in the National Archives. Issac Franklin was the Bill Gates of the slave trade.
Traditional plantation staple crop production was no longer a paying proposition in the border states. Essentially, raising human beings for sale was their cash crop. The “extras” from plantations in Deleware, Maryland & Virginia were shipped overland to the Fork in the Road market in Natchez MS. Convoys of slaves walked for up to six months via Nashville & the Natchez Trace.
A fiddler led the way. The men were joined together by the neck. The women & small children were packed onto wagons. Nightly, Franklin & his men would choose amongst the women & girls for their “companion.” Particularly willing victims were earmarked for the fancy girl market & a premium sale price.
The slaves gathered at the Virginia HQ were from a relatively benign slave-holding culture. In order to prepare them for transportation & sale, they were broken in. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what that entailed
A veteran of the overland trade, Isaac Franklin came up with a radical plan. You could say that it was the UPS of slave trading. Special built schooners were outfitted for quick passages to New Orleans. The “fancy girl” market in New Orleans was the center of the sex slave trade. Likely young women (many of whom either Franklin or his partner had raped) were sold there. They had a coded system for rating the fancy girls in order to set prices.
The individuals who were intended for the MS market were off loaded at Franklin’s Angola Plantation. (Yes, that Angola) The slaves were sorted & the old or infirm shipped to MS for immediate sale. Not all of them survived the journey. The stench of the bodies that Franklin dumped in the wetlands was the subject of lawsuits.
“Prime Hands” were fattened up at Angola & brought to market for sale at premium prices. When he died, Franklin was one of the richest men in America.
Nahan Bedford Forrest, among many others, profited from Franklin’s pioneering enterprise. His partnership specialized in the sale of extras from Virginia & other border states. The insatiable demand for additional labor in the Deep South was filled by the extras from the border states. It was a given of slave-holding that stock needed to be replaced at 7 year intervals. For that reason, the slave trade was centered at New Orleans.
The impact of the loss of the replacement labor trade from Virginia to New Orleans is one of those economic impacts that gets overlooked. It cut off the major source of cash flow for wealthy Virginia families.
Armfield & Franklin, Issac Franklin, Adalisha Atkins, Franklin’s widow & the Natchez slave market are a Google search that will fill in the details. Fair warning, the quotes from Armfield & Franklin’s correspondence is not for the faint of heart. This is not Moonlight & Magnolia nostalgia material.
The blockade, loss of access to the overland & Mississippi transportation routes strangled the cash flow of border state elite slave-holders. It also embargoed the importation of fresh labor the Deep South states depended on.