In fact, Washington at the time of Sumner’s first visit was the nexus for a great slave migration—a slave “trail of tears,” as it were—in which hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to one million, “Upper South” slaves, who worked in tobacco fields and as household servants in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, were sold to labor-hungry plantation owners in the rapidly growing Deep South cotton and sugarcane states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana.
