Transporting Slaves Out of State

Along with several of his employees, John Armfield, co-owner of the Franklin and Armfield slave trading company in Alexandria, guards a coffle of enslaved men and women being transported farther south. The company used agents throughout Virginia and Maryland to purchase slaves on commission. Those slaves were then often transported to more lucrative markets in Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans to feed the demand for labor on the new cotton plantations that flourished in the Deep South starting in the early 1800s. This engraving was published in George W. Featherstonhaugh's two-volume Excursion Through the Slave States (1844).