The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 Main Menu Yale University Press

"The Slave-Factory of Frankin & Armfield"

8906 "The Slave-Factory of Frankin & Armfield" Chapter 5
“I have always held credit above price,” Isaac Franklin wrote to his Virginia partner from New Orleans in March 1834. The managing partner of Franklin and Armfield had by then built a thousand-mile supply chain in captives based on his ability to access credit, remit capital, and manage a network of agents and assets that funneled as many as a thousand enslaved Americans a year through its organization. The forty-four-year-old Tennessean and his partners, including John Armfield and Rice C. Ballard, built a business that took advantage of enormous credit expansion and market growth, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenues. Franklin oversaw its distribution network and managed inventory and cash flow. His swagger reflected his success. Director-managers referred to their business as “the game,” casting themselves and their competitors as players—“pirates”—dedicated to building wealth and prestige. The confidence of Franklin’s tone, his measured, assuring cadences, punctuated by occasional outbursts at his partners, masked the landscape of social, sexual, and personal violence that turned people into commodities and flung them across a continent to toil on the far frontier of the U.S. republic. But brutal business was still business. As it expanded its capacity and increased in scale, Franklin and Armfield faced a constellation of challenges, including credit, logistics, and management, as it built a far-flung distribution network.

The firm bought at least three slave ships, the Tribune, the Uncas, and the Isaac Franklin, all custom-built for the saltwater slave trade from the Chesapeake to the lower Mississippi Valley. Aboard these ships captives were packed like sardines on occasion, which gave rise to infectious disease. Captives arrived in New Orleans infected with measles and cholera, which compounded the trauma of forced migration away from home and loved ones.

Franklin & Armfield was a customer of the Union Bank of Louisiana, using bank drafts payable in New York City to lower transaction costs and speed the slave trade's efficiency. The Rice C. Ballard Papers are housed in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Southern Historical Collection.

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  1. Bank Bonds and Bondspersons Calvin Schermerhorn
  2. Introduction Calvin Schermerhorn

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  1. Bank Bonds and Bondspersons
  2. Chains of Violence

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  1. Chapter 5 Calvin Schermerhorn

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  1. Introduction

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