{"id":15994,"date":"2019-07-20T08:21:22","date_gmt":"2019-07-20T08:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/musicuntold.com\/?p=15994"},"modified":"2019-07-26T08:38:07","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T08:38:07","slug":"smithsonianmag-com-retracing-slaverys-trail-of-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/smithsonianmag-com-retracing-slaverys-trail-of-tears\/","title":{"rendered":"SmithsonianMag.com: Retracing Slavery\u2019s Trail of Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Virginia Delegate Delores McQuinn has helped raise funds for a heritage site that will show the excavated remains of Lumpkin\u2019s slave jail. (Wayne Lawrence)<\/p><\/div>\n

Smithsonian Magazine<\/h1>\n

America\u2019s forgotten migration \u2013 the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South<\/h2>\n

By\u00a0Edward Ball; Photographs by Wayne Lawrence<\/h2>\n

November 2015
\nhttps:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968\/<\/a><\/h4>\n

When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family\u2019s roots.<\/p>\n

He said his own father knew the name of the people who had enslaved their family in Virginia, knew where they lived\u2014in the same house and on the same land\u2014in Hanover County, among the rumpled hills north of Richmond.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, \u2018Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.\u2019 The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, \u2018Sure, we\u2019ll give it to you.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThe man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. \u2018You want your history?\u2019 he said. \u2018Here it is.\u2019 Watching the things burn. \u2018Take the ashes and get off my land.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThe intent was to keep that history buried,\u201d McQuinn says today. \u201cAnd I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.\u201d<\/p>\n

McQuinn was raised in Richmond, the capital of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy\u2014a city crowded with monuments to the Old South. She is a politician now, elected to the city council in the late 1990s and to the Virginia House of Delegates in 2009. One of her proudest accomplishments in politics, she says, has been to throw new light on an alternate history.<\/p>\n

For example, she persuaded the city to fund a tourist walk about slavery, a kind of mirror image of the Freedom Trail in Boston. She has helped raise money for a heritage site incorporating the excavated remains of the infamous slave holding cell known as Lumpkin\u2019s Jail.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see, our history is often buried,\u201d she says. \u201cYou have to unearth it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Not long ago I was reading some old letters at the library of the University of North Carolina, doing a little unearthing of my own. Among the hundreds of hard-to-read and yellowing papers, I found one note dated April 16, 1834, from a man named James Franklin in Natchez, Mississippi, to the home office of his company in Virginia. He worked for a partnership of slave dealers called Franklin & Armfield, run by his uncle.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have about ten thousand dollars to pay yet. Should you purchase a good lot for walking I will bring them out by land this summer,\u201d Franklin had written. Ten thousand dollars was a considerable sum in 1834\u2014the equivalent of nearly $300,000 today. \u201cA good lot for walking\u201d was a gang of enslaved men, women and children, possibly numbering in the hundreds, who could tolerate three months afoot in the summer heat.<\/p>\n

Scholars of slavery are quite familiar with the firm of Franklin & Armfield, which Isaac Franklin and John Armfield established in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1828. Over the next decade, with Armfield based in Alexandria and Isaac Franklin in New Orleans, the two became the undisputed tycoons of the domestic slave trade, with an economic impact that is hard to overstate. In 1832, for example, 5 percent of all the commercial credit available through the Second Bank of the United States had been extended to their firm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Smithsonian Magazine America\u2019s forgotten migration \u2013 the journeys of a million African-Americans from the tobacco South to the cotton South By\u00a0Edward Ball; Photographs by Wayne Lawrence November 2015 https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/slavery-trail-of-tears-180956968\/ When Delores McQuinn was growing up, her father told her a story about a search for the family\u2019s roots. He said his own father knew the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15996,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[204,205,203,202],"class_list":["post-15994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-musicuntold-blog","tag-american-history","tag-delores-mcquinn","tag-slavery","tag-smithsonian-magazine","category-97","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15994"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15998,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15994\/revisions\/15998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicuntold.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}