Alexandria’s slave pen recalls evil commerce

There is a very old three-story brick row house on a busy Alexandria street directly across from a car-rental business, adjacent to one of the city’s ubiquitous lobbyists associations and a few blocks from a Starbucks. Few of the hurried commuters who drive within yards of its front door every day have any idea of its despicable history.

Northern Virginia is home to a rich collection of history, good and bad. The most evil of all — the purchase and sale of human beings — occurred on a massive scale at a slave pen located at 1315 Duke St. Built as a private residence, it was converted into a slave auction house in the mid-1820s by John Armfield and Isaac Franklin.

For approximately two decades, Franklin ran the New Orleans side of the operations and Armfield managed the Virginia operations. They were so successful that by the mid-1830s, they had made a half million dollars and owned three ships — the Tribune, the Uncas and the Isaac Franklin. Approximately every two weeks, one of the ships made the six-week round trip to New Orleans and back, carrying about 160 slaves.

Slaving was a lucrative business, but as one Southerner put it, “There were none so despised as the slave-trader. The odium descended upon his children and his children’s children. Against the legal right to buy and sell slaves for a profit, this public sentiment lifted a strong arm, and rendered forever odious the name of negro-trader.”

Armfield was described as “exceedingly strange looking … a queer animal about forty years old, with dark black hair cut round as if he were a Methodist preacher, immense black whiskers, a physiognomy not without one or two tolerable features, but singularly sharp, and not a little piratical and repulsive.”

The business closed when the Union Army invaded in May 1861. The Union officer who first took command of Alexandria early in the war wrote this in his diary:

“I found [the slave pen] a decent enough, substantial looking building now guarded by our Michigan fellows. There were kept the auctioneer’s descriptive book of slaves received and sold, [and] their owners’ names. Prices ranged from $50 upward. Some of my officers reported that they had found several slaves, including a man, a ‘likely looking $1,800 girl,’ and a boy, waiting either to be sold or to be taken away by their respective masters or mistresses.

“My men set all three prisoners free, and on the appearance of a well-dressed gentleman to ‘claim his property,’ the negro man, whom he grabbed by the coat collar and attempted to take with him, resisted, and the master was hustled off alone amid the jeers of the Michigan men. That slave took free service and became company cook in Company C. After the war he went to Michigan with Captain Butterworth, at whose home he finally died.”

With its proximity to the railroad and the Potomac River, the location was ideal for transporting slaves to cotton and sugar plantations of the Deep South. Behind the walls of the nondescript edifice lay the buried secrets and unanswerable questions of this most wicked enterprise. How many terrified little girls were ripped from a mother’s embrace in that building? How many lives did the auctioneer’s hammer shatter? How much sorrow can four walls hold?

During the war, the building was used by the provost marshal as a jail for rebellious Southerners and also as “a place for punishing citizens who did not ‘rate’ a jail sentence by dunking them.”

It was reported that a Confederate sympathizer named Billy Brown frequently “jeered at Union troops and yelled hurrahs for the South once too often.” These actions did not merit arrest, but they did result in repeated dunkings in a vat of water in the old slave pen. Mr. Brown wore this penalty as a badge of honor and became a town hero for it.

One Union soldier wrote: “The Slave Pen … is now used as a military jail. Here drunken soldiers are cured by the hydropathic practice. Soldiers who are found in the city without a pass, and persons convicted of selling liquor to soldiers, are incarcerated here.”

Named L’Ouverture Hospital after the war, the building later served as an early location of Alexandria Hospital. Finally, from the 1880s through the 1980s, it was just one of many unremarkable Alexandria row houses covered by decades of decay.

All that changed in 1996, when it became headquarters for the Northern Virginia Urban League. Now renamed Freedom House, it is home to well-furnished offices, but the basement of the building was left in its original condition, metal bars still intact. It is now a museum.

The museum features the stories and achievements of some of its victims, including Lewis Henry Bailey, to whom the building has been dedicated. Bailey was sold into slavery in Texas and eventually walked all the way back to Washington, where, incredibly, he managed to establish two schools and five churches.

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