Isaac Franklin

Isaac Franklin was born on May 26, 1789, at Pilot's Knob Plantation on Station Camp Creek in Sumner County, Tennessee.[2] His father James Franklin (1755-1825 or 1828) and grandfather Charles (1735-1769) both came from Baltimore, Maryland. James served in the Revolutionary War and was later listed by militia leader James Robertson as one of the "Immortal Seventy" who were granted one square mile or 640 acres (2.6 km²) each of land by the state of North Carolina for their service.[3] (North Carolina then claimed Tennessee as part of its territory to the west.)

Isaac's mother was Mary Lauderdale. James Franklin prospered in Tennessee—as each of his sons reached adulthood, he presented them with a horse, a bridle, and a pocket knife. When Isaac was twenty-one years old, he received his share and, according to tradition, used the knife to carve a ship miniature. He sold this to a friend for one dollar. In fifteen years he had made a fortune in slave trading.[3]

Franklin took up slave trading in 1810.[1] After serving in the War of 1812, Franklin resumed the trade.[1]

The Franklin and Armfield Office in Alexandria, Virginia.

In 1828 Franklin formed a partnership with his nephew John Armfield when Isaac's father James died and bequeathed land and slaves to him and his brother James.[1][4] They set up Franklin & Armfield in Alexandria, then part of the District of Columbia. Between 1828 and 1837, Franklin & Armfield became "the largest slave trading firm" in the United States.[1] Franklin's main sales office was in Natchez, Mississippi; he also had offices in New Orleans, the major slave trading center in the South, St. Francisville, and Vidalia, Louisiana.[5] Franklin and Armfield joked with each other in letters about the enslaved women they were raping. They each had a child with a woman they had enslaved, and sold their children.[6][7][8]

The firm owned six ships to take enslaved men, women, and children from Alexandria in the coastwise trade to the Deep South.[1] The ships returned with cargoes of sugar, molasses, whiskey, and cotton.[1]

The Fairvue Plantation house, near Gallatin in Sumner County.

Franklin made his Tennessee plantation, "Fairvue," his home. Once Fairvue was finished, he turned toward Louisiana, where he purchased six plantations, named "Bellevue", "Killarney", "Lochlomond", "Angola", "Loango" and "Panola"; much later, land of the combined plantations was used for Angola State Penitentiary. He also bought thousands of acres of land in Texas, as well as a turnpike, bank stock, and a third interest in the Nashville Race Course.[1] After 1835, his activity as a slave trader reduced as he moved his efforts to his plantation interests.[9] When he died in 1846, he owned 10,000 acres (40 km²) of land in Louisiana and more than 600 enslaved people.[3]

In 1839, at the age of fifty, he married socialite Adelicia Hayes (1817–1887),[10] the daughter of Oliver Bliss Hayes (1783-1858), a lawyer and a Presbyterian minister, and Sarah Clemmons Hightower (1795-1871).[11] By the time of his marriage to Hayes, Franklin had fathered a child with an enslaved woman named Lucinda who he had been consistently raping for about five years.[9] Soon after this wedding Franklin sold the enslaved woman and her child, whose fates are unknown.[9][7] Franklin and his wife Adelicia had four children: Victoria, Adelicia, Emma, and Julius Caesar. All died in early childhood.[12][11]

Upon his death in 1846, Franklin left his slave trading fortune, plantations, and slaves to his wife Adelicia. She later married again, and had Belmont Mansion and its estate built in what was then country outside Nashville in 1853.[13] All of his children with Hayes died without heirs, so his only descendants are those of women he raped.[14]

Isaac Franklin died on April 27, 1846, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana.[1][15] His corpse was preserved in alcohol and he was taken to Fairvue.[1]

By a will he made in 1841, Franklin made a bequest to endow a school or seminary at Fairvue. The will was the subject of protracted litigation by his nephew and former partner Armfield.[16]

His widow sold Fairvue to William Franklin[17] and remarried the following year. She leased, and later in the 19th century sold, the Louisiana plantations to Samuel James, who leased convict labor (mostly black) from the state to work them. The state acquired the merged plantations under the name Angola in 1901; this land was used for the development of Angola Prison.[18]

• Slave trade in the United States
• List of American slave traders

• Isaac Franklin at Find a Grave