Richmond's Burgeoning Trade

Richmond's Burgeoning Trade. . , Upon reaching Virginia, enslaved Africans were forced to walk along the riverbanks and into nearby cities, including Richmond, for further sale. This was routine practice when Virginia officially passed a law prohibiting the importation of Africans to its shores in 1778. The Federal 1808 law that banned all African importation curtailed the supply of coerced labor that was crucial to southern states' agricultural fortitude. As a result, the Lower South veered suddenly towards economic crisis., Virginia's early and widespread production of tobacco led to severe soil exhaustion throughout large portions of the state, decreasing the productivity of many agricultural farms. This condition, coupled with the natural increase in the enslaved population, led to a surplus of laborers, and many Virginian communities found themselves with more enslaved Africans than they could support., In the early years of the 1800s, Richmond was still a relatively small but busy riverfront town. Strategically situated at the fall line of the James River, the town played a critical role in the distribution of imported goods to other cities throughout the South, and figured importantly in the export of regional goods. When restrictions on the importation of African captives were adopted, Virginia found itself with an excess of labor that coincided neatly with a rising labor demand in the South. Already equipped as a hub of transportation, Richmond quickly and comfortably fell into the business of exporting enslaved people, adding "human cargo" to its lengthy list of commodities for transport and purchase., While banning the Trans-Atlantic Trade of Enslaved Africans curtailed , at least legally , the horrific practice of capturing Africans on their native lands and transporting them to North America, it promoted the business of trading Africans for profit within the American territories. The intrastate and interstate slave trade boomed, as did the city's general commerce. Richmond's urban development swelled in response. By the 1830s, Virginia slave traders became a professional group. By 1840 Richmond surpassed Alexandria as the most active exporter of enslaved Africans to other American territories, primarily those in the Deep South. Several dozen auction houses operated in Shockoe Bottom from the late 1840s until 1865, supporting the lucrative sugar and cotton plantations, deepening the South's dependence on coerced labor, and fanning the embers of the Civil War., 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.