Existing comment:
Kanawha Canal
Richmond Slave Trail
In Virginia and the rest of the United States, the waterways, both rivers and man-made canals served as the main avenues of commerce. Ships from across the Atlantic or from other American ports transported goods that were transferred to smaller ships and bateaus -- flat boats designed to navigate shallow water -- which in turn carried them further into the interior. Enslaved men were frequently employed on these boats, responsible for transporting hogheads of tobacco from plantations and down the riverways to cities to be sold and exported.
Many plantations in the Upper South reaped the benefit of one of the region's most high-yield cash crops: tobacco. Requiring intensive labor and causing heavy depletions of the soil, the practice of tobacco production was a fast and furious enterprise. To address the problem of soil exhaustion, many farms later switched to "gentler" crops such as grains and vegetables. For the enslaved, daily life on these [continued on next panel]
About the Trail:
Designed as a walking path, the Richmond Slave Trail chronicles the history of the trade in enslaved Africans from their homeland to Virginia until 1778, and away from Virginia, especially Richmond, to other locations in the Americas until 1865. The trail begins at the Manchester Docks, which, alongside Rocketts Landing on the north side of the river, operated as a major port in the massive downriver slave trade, making Richmond the largest source of enslaved blacks on the east coast of America from 1830 to 1860. While many of the slaves were shipped on to New Orleans and to other Deep South ports, the trail follows the footsteps of those who remained here and crossed the James River, often chained together in a coffle. Once reaching the northern riverbank, the trail then follows a route through the slave markets and auction houses of Richmond, beside the Reconciliation Statue commemorating the international triangular slave trade and on to the site of the notorious Lumpkin's Slave Jail and leading on to Richmond's African Burial Ground, once called the Burial Ground for Negroes, and the First African Baptist Church, a center of African American life in pre-Civil War Richmond. - Richmond Slave Trail Commission - 2011 - |