If you read my piece on Isaac Franklin in this week's Scene and wanted to learn more, here are some resources for you.
Isaac Franklin's Gallatin home, Fairvue, is still around. It's been extensively remodeled, but you can get a good idea of just how massive it was for its time.
Isaac Franklin's dad's house is currently for sale, so you can tour it virtually here.
The most extensive biography of Isaac Franklin currently available is Wendall Stephenson's Isaac Franklin, Slave Trader and Planter of the Old South. It's very sympathetic to Franklin and not available as an ebook, but it's worth finding at the library.
A great deal of Isaac's correspondence with Rice Ballard is kept at the University of North Carolina. Some letters have been digitized. As a warning, these men were not ashamed of what they were doing and the bluntness with which they discuss business and how they pass the time can be alarming.
Ethan Allen Andrews' 1836 book, Slavery and the Domestic Slave-Trade in the United States, contains a lengthy description of Franklin & Armfield's headquarters in Alexandria as well as extensive discussions of what U.S. slavery looked like during Franklin's lifetime.
George Featherstonhaugh's 1844 book, Excursions through the Slave States, contains an extensive description of a coffle Armfield took through the South. Supposedly, the man depicted on the front of the book is Armfield.
Steven Deyle's book, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life, is pretty academic, but if you want a broad overview of Franklin's world and what made Franklin & Armfield so good at what it did, this is clear and easy to understand.
I have many minor gripes with Robert Gudmestad's A Troublesome Commerce, but I found myself returning to it over and over. I will say that, if you want to get a sense of the kind of ugly attitudes historians have held about Adelicia Hayes Franklin Acklen Cheatham, you'll get them in this book. It's unfortunate, but a lot of historians treat her like some kind of gold-digging flake or some nitwit victim. If you know nothing else about Adelicia, know this—she was whip-smart and her family was exceedingly well-connected. Not only were the Hayes married into the McGavocks and other prominent Nashville families, Rutherford B. Hayes was a cousin and her nephew married the daughter of Jefferson Davis. She obviously enjoyed Franklin's wealth, but she didn't need it. And she wasn't dumb.
Edward Baptist is one of the most important historians writing about Franklin and his era at the moment. His essay, " 'Cuffy,' "Fancy Maids,' and 'One-Eyed Men': Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade" is the definitive take on the "fancy maid" phenomenon.
His new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is a masterpiece and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about this period. The book has been somewhat controversial, in part because he argues that the idea that slavery was some old-fashioned anachronism that would have been destroyed by Northern industrialization completely misunderstands how slavery was the engine that drove industrialization and that you could not have had the brutal nightmare of the deep south plantations without the technological innovations that made it possible to process that much cotton into goods and the same was true in reverse—the northeast could not have made the leaps in industrialization it did in the mills without the massive supplies of cotton slavery made possible.
