Norfolk shipped 21,000 enslaved people to New Orleans before the Civil War. Now an effort is underway to document the forgotten history.

Each week, 15-year-old Lianna Schmieder scrutinizes centuries-old scrawl.

She and her classmates at Roadstead Montessori High School in Ghent drag out stacks of folders containing copies of documents — including receipts of slave sales and ship manifests. They parse the names of men, women and children who were shipped South.

The work is meticulous. But the callousness behind the papers never ceases to strike Schmieder: enslaved babies and pregnant women listed next to cargo items.

“It’s not really real until you see all these names on paper,” she said. “You see these people who were 9 years old. It makes it much more real. There are so many names we have and there’s probably more that weren’t even written down.”

The task of Schmieder, a freshman, is “quality control.” She compares the names transcribed by other students against a spreadsheet to find any mistakes.

The students have dedicated hours over the past several years to deciphering the writings of people in the 1800s involved in the flourishing local slave trade. They’re helping Troy Valos, special collections and supervising librarian with the Norfolk Public Library’s Sargeant Memorial Collection; he’s worked the past dozen years to document Norfolk’s long-overlooked and outsized role in the domestic slave trade.

The region sent more than 21,000 enslaved people to New Orleans — more than any other port, according to his research.

“Basically it was legalized human trafficking,” Valos said.

He and the Montessori class are nearing the end of the transcription work. They are shifting focus to contextualizing the information and making it public, particularly for Black Americans who seek to trace their genealogy.

By documenting the names of everyone who passed through, the group hopes it can help future generations connect with their past.

___

More than 300,000 people were enslaved in Virginia by 1800, including much of what’s now West Virginia.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade had been bringing people in chains from Africa to the American colonies since the 17th century. Congress banned the practice in 1808.

But the domestic slave trade — trading humans within the nation’s borders, dubbed “the Second Middle Passage” — continued through the Civil War and is much less discussed.

At the time, the Deep South was expanding, including through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. But, with the trans-Atlantic slave trade cut off, there wasn’t access to bring in more enslaved workers, Valos said.

“There’s this labor crisis in a sense,” he said, tied to a boom in cotton.

States to the north, including Virginia, meanwhile, were beginning to need fewer slaves for traditional agriculture operations.

In Hampton Roads, for example, the soil was worn out from growing tobacco and the trade collapsed, Valos said. Farmers in the region also switched more to so-called truck farming or market gardens, which focused on small-scale vegetable and fruit production.

Moving enslaved people to the Deep South from the upper South, or even northern places like New York, quickly became a primary source of income for slaveowners.

“Virginia is in fact a Negro-raising state for other states,” said Thomas Dew, then a political law professor at William & Mary, in the early 1800s.

The commonwealth’s “principal traffic now consists in raising slaves for the more Southern parts, becoming a complete slave nursery,” a British illustrator observed, according to TIME Magazine.

Some white owners sold their slaves. Others leased them for specific periods of time.

[ Enslaved workers helped build Norfolk Naval Shipyard’s Dry Dock 1, stirring labor tensions ]

New Orleans was a hub for the intercoastal slave trade. The city was exploding in population, and so were its contributions to the country’s finances. Cotton exports from New Orleans — strategically located along the Gulf — increased more than sevenfold in the 1820s, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

Between 1819 and 1860, nearly 71,000 enslaved people were sent there from U.S. coastal ports, according to the Historic New Orleans Collection research center.

The greatest proportion — about a third — came from Norfolk, Portsmouth and Hampton: 21,300.

“That’s literally filling up the Scope twice, to the max,” Valos said.

Most historical literature about the industry focuses on Baltimore, Alexandria and Richmond, Valos said.

But his research shows Hampton Roads ports sent far more enslaved people to New Orleans. Baltimore sent nearly 12,400; Richmond about 8,300; Northern Virginia over 5,300.

There were three main phases of the Norfolk slave trade, Valos found.

It began with French refugees, likely slaveowners, coming from the Caribbean after slave revolts there in the early 1800s. There’s little in records about why they started the Norfolk-New Orleans slave market. Valos speculates they may have received word of labor needs from friends and family who settled in New Orleans.

Take Bernard Raux and Paul Pascal, a partnership that delivered nine shipments of slaves to New Orleans and Natchez, Mississippi, in the early 1830s, for a profit of more than $7,000 — nearly a quarter-million dollars today.

By the 1830s and ‘40s, locals had taken over the trade, prominent players such as George Apperson, Elias Guy, John Caphart and Charles Hatcher, according to Valos’ research.

“I will give the highest Cash price for 50 Negroes, from 10 to 25 years of age, with or without certificates,” reads one advertisement of Hatcher’s, whose business was located not far from what’s now Waterside.

Caphart and Guy were Norfolk police officers — Guy the equivalent of chief — who ran a slave jail on Church Street.

In the third phase of the 1840s to ‘60s, Valos said, fugitive slave hunters reigned. Many players were the same, such as Apperson and Guy.

Caphart, the police constable, gleefully described himself as a punisher; enslaved people spread the word to watch out for him as the “executioner.” Harriet Beecher Stowe used him as the archetype for the slave hunter in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Valos said.

One of the only mentions of Norfolk in the historical literature about the domestic slave trade, he said, is by abolitionist Solomon Northup, whose memoir, “12 Years a Slave,” later was made into an Oscar-winning film.

Northup was a Black man born free in New York. In 1841, he was kidnapped and sent to New Orleans as a slave — and the ship stopped in Norfolk, where a free Black mason was “shanghaied” off the streets, according to Northup’s account.

—

By the early 19th century, elements of the slave trade were all over downtown Norfolk.

On one block there’d be the office of a slave trader; on the next, a slave jail where humans were housed before being loaded onto ships.

[ Intentional or not, local Confederate monuments were built on or near former slave sites ]

There’s little remaining of that history. Valos’ interest started a dozen years ago after the Sargeant collection received a request inquiring about the location of a particular slave jail.

“I could not find a single thing,” he said.

He found some information upon searching. “But it was also, well, ‘What else is there?’”

At most, Norfolk’s role in the slave trade is mentioned in passing, he said.

“So the question became, just how big, how significant was this?”

He collected ship manifests on Ancestry.com listing names of slaves on the voyages — which have since been made available through the National Archives — and began documenting them in a spreadsheet. He also worked to catalog the names, business locations and other details about agents of the local trade.

But transcribing the documents is intensive work, which he does in his spare time. Enter Roadstead Montessori High School.

The dozen or so students at the private school had been working on a hands-on history project for the Jewish Museum in Portsmouth, said Anna Mirkova, a history teacher and co-head of school with her husband, Eran Livni. While wrapping up that project at the Slover Library several years ago, Livni approached Valos, offering the school’s help if he had any other projects.

Valos thought of the ship manifests, and the partnership continued. He works with the students twice a week, at the Slover before the pandemic and now, over Zoom.

They’ve helped transcribe more than 17,000 names on more than 200 voyages from Norfolk to New Orleans, Mirkova said.

“This is really how our students do history, by putting their hands on primary sources.”

On a recent Friday, 18-year-old senior, Dominique Schmieder, Lianna’s sister, was researching slave traders. Doing such work has shifted how she interprets the world.

“It’s a little jarring,” she said. “It really opens your eyes. ... it’s made me pay attention more in general to the news and historical stuff.”

The teens even sometimes get pushback from others in the community, including family members, when they discuss the project, said fellow senior Ainsley John Darling, 18.

“Most people don’t know about it and it boggles their mind,” Darling said. “It’s like, yes it happened, it’s right here in the records. … It’s a big mass of spiderwebs you have to untangle.”

Transcribing such old handwriting can be difficult. The students have a reference key to compare each letter to how it was written at the time.

The next step of the project is to make all the records public for people to reference.

Valos is working on GIS modeling that could show the location of slave trade sites overlaid on a current map of Norfolk. Some of the students also are working with computer science teacher Steve Nelson to develop a publicly accessible database where people can search for their ancestors or research players in the trade. Such components likely will take several more months to complete.

This history “is completely not a part of our memory,” Livni said. “Our idea is to create that public memory, in order to heal from a lot of the trauma.”

___

The team at Roadstead Montessori hopes to go a step further.

Through mutual friends, Livni and Mirkova had met Mike Spence, a Portsmouth native who oversaw the construction of the new Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. He also helped dismantle Confederate monuments in Richmond.

Spence invited the Norfolk class to witness the university memorial being built a couple years ago and learned of their slave trade research. The students floated building such a monument in Hampton Roads.

“I thought it was a wonderful idea,” Spence said. “This is a history, from my perspective, that needs to be told.”

Spence and the school plan to push the city for a memorial that would honor the enslaved and educate residents.

“A lot of people are afraid of teaching this history because they think they’ll be blamed,” Spence said. “But it’s not about blame. It’s about truth.”

As a Black man growing up in Portsmouth, Spence said he learned very little about slavery in the region and its lasting legacies.

His father’s family has traced their roots to a plantation in North Carolina’s Gates County in the 17th century, with relatives now spanning to the Eastern Shore and Louisiana.

“The connections are stunning,” he said.

He wants to help bring the students’ research to light but learning his own genealogy from it would be “the cherry on top.”

“The difference between white Americans and Black Americans is we don’t know where we come from,” Spence said. “Because we were taken.”

Katherine Hafner, 757-222-5208, katherine.hafner@pilotonline.com