Coffle

A coffle, sometimes called a platoon or a drove, was a group of enslaved people chained together and marched from one place to another by owners or slave traders.

Others were handcuffed to long chains in groups of 100 (a coffle) and force marched to the markets of the deep south, where they would be sold as slaves.

[2] The slave traders rode horses, while the enslaved "women were tied together with a rope about their necks like a halter, while the men wore iron collars, fastened to a chain about a hundred feet long and were also handcuffed.

Passing many of these encampments early in the morning, when they were just pitching tents, I have observed groups of negroes hand-cuffed, probably to prevent them from running away.

"[6] J. K. Paulding, a noted writer, later U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and one of the most articulate and ardent defenders of American slavery, witnessed the following scene in Virginia in 1816, indicating that especially in the early 19th century, coffles might be a dozen or so enslaved individuals escorted by just one trader–overseer:[7] The sun was shining out very hot, and in turning an angle of the road we encountered the following group: first, a little cart drawn by one horse, in which five or six half-naked black children were tumbled like pigs together.

At a house where we stopped a little further on, we learned that he had bought these miserable beings in Maryland, and was marching them in this manner to some of the more southern States.

"[8] One memoirist recalled seeing a coffle in Mayslick, Kentucky, a "company of forty or fifty men, chained in the same manner as those mentioned before.