During the fifty years before the Civil War, Georgian slave traders came north to Virginia where they bought captured people for $300 apiece and sold them in Georgia or other southern states for twice the price. It was a lucrative business. The traders just had to move the slaves. 

When the enslaved saw slave traders from Georgia moving about, looking for the strongest amongst them, they were petrified. A loathsome specter emerged. 

That symbolic specter became known as “The Georgia-man.” He was the Boogie man. He was the Devil. He would force march his newly acquired possessions six hundred to one thousand miles, over mountains and through rivers. The trek lasted up to 3 months. 

The Georgia-man would finally sell the survivors to owners of holding jails, or “slave pens.” The owners of these imprisonment camps hosed down the filthy survivors and fattened them up so they would glean the highest prices.

Approximately one million enslaved individuals, pregnant women, and children included made this treacherous forced march. Thousands died along the way. Named after the infamous Indigenous “Trail of Tears,” their journey is now known as “The Slavery Trail of Tears.”