The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  The debate over the Yazoo claims might seem straightforward: big money versus small farmers meant Federalists versus Jeffersonians, nationalists versus states’ righters. Yet things were not so simple. Many northern Republicans had invested in Yazoo bonds. Many Georgians recognized how they could benefit if the sale stood. And there was a potential quid pro quo on the table. In 1798, Congress was debating whether to organize the Mississippi Territory—the land sold off by the Georgia legislature in 1795. Several northern Federalists attempted to add the Northwest Ordinance’s Article VI to the bill, proposing to outlaw slavery in a land where it already existed—especially around Natchez. Although the territory would obviously become at least one Jefferson-leaning state, Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper gathered an interregional coalition of both Federalists and Republicans to defeat the amendment. These were not only southerners, but also northerners who knew that trying to ban slavery could jeopardize Georgia’s surrender of land claims to the federal government. That would delay the survey and sale of land, and thus the time when Yazoo investors could recoup their investments. And the investors knew that these millions of acres would yield much more value if purchasers could count on setting slaves to labor on them.49

  Many congressmen examined their direct financial interests and chose to ensure that Mississippi became a slave territory. To soothe their consciences, some of Jefferson’s followers began to claim that expanding slavery would actually make it more likely that slavery could eventually be eliminated. “If the slaves of the southern states were permitted to go into this western country,” argued Virginia congressman William Branch Giles, “by lessening the number in those [older] states, and spreading them over a large surface of country, there would be a greater probability of ameliorating their condition, which could never be done whilst they were crowded together as they now are in the southern states.” If the slaves were “diffused,” enslavers would be more likely to free them, for whites were afraid to live surrounded by large numbers of free black people. Thus, moving enslaved people into new regions where their enslavement was more profitable would lead to freedom for said enslaved people. Make slavery bigger in order to make it smaller. Spread it out to contain its effects. And those most eager to buy this bogus claim were the Virginians themselves. Jefferson became the most prominent advocate of diffusion. The notion provided a layer of deniability for liberal enslavers who were troubled by slavery’s ability to undermine their self-congratulation. Diffusion answered the clanking figures who sang “Hail Columbia,” and the knowing sneer of the Georgia-man who knew the price of every soul.50

  In 1798, Georgia ceded its lands to the federal government, and Congress organized the land between the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi Rivers into the Mississippi Territory, with slavery included. Congress proved unable to decide whether the Yazoo claimants had a right to the land bought in 1795. In the House debate, Virginia Federalist John Marshall was one of the claimants’ most vigorous promoters. Long an advocate for investors who speculated on southwestern lands, Marshall would soon be appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court by President Adams.51

  Once Jefferson was elected, he tried to settle the troubled waters of the political nation by proclaiming, in his 1801 inaugural address, “We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans.” He might as well have argued, “We are all diffusionists, we are all Yazoo speculators.” And then he could have added, reassuringly, “We are none of us Georgia-men.” Yet, in 1805, the man on the horse directed Charles Ball and his coffle around Richmond, Virginia’s capital. Perhaps he did so to spare the eyes and the consciences of those who weren’t fully persuaded by diffusionism’s sloppy logic. But Georgia-men didn’t have to explain themselves to the likes of Charles Ball. Or to anyone, so long as the enslavers were willing to supply a stream of men and women to the backcountry. And the existence of Georgia-men allowed those who reacted to the ugliness of diffusion-in-actual-practice to waste their heat on an enemy who didn’t care what they said.

  So Ball and the coffle crossed the river on a ferry west of the city. The two lines, men in chains and women in ropes, walked southwest from Richmond for weeks. One day in southern Virginia, they passed a road leading up to a low house surrounded by sandy tobacco fields. A hundred men, women, and children toiled out there under the gaze of a white man with a long whip. The Georgia-man stopped another white man coming up the road. “Whose land is that?” he asked. “Mr. Randolph, a member of Congress.”

  The coffle kept on. They crossed the Roanoke River, entering North Carolina’s Piedmont. Next came a week of hard marching through this land of small farms, passing cornfields and the boys and girls toiling in them. Then water was sloshing around Ball’s feet on the deck of an overloaded flat as a Yadkin River ferryman pulled on the rope: one trip for the men, going back for the women. Three days’ marching later, and the Georgia-man told them they had entered South Carolina—a placename that was part of the greater Georgia in Ball’s geography. Night fell. Thoughts of death returned.

  In the morning, just to make sure they all understood that they had marched into a different part of the world, the Georgia-man pried open his compressed lips and made a little speech. They were now too far from Virginia or Maryland to ever get back again, he told them. They must give up all hope of returning. And there was much truth to what the Georgia-man said. These fifty-two enslaved African Americans had now walked into a place that the coffle-chain had inked onto the map with streaks of iron oxide from sweat and dirty manacles. Beside the road, they began to see a strange crop growing in the early summer fields: “It looked not unlike buckwheat before it blossoms,” Ball remembered. This was the cotton plant. In this place where chains marched past plants that looked like food but turned into fiber, they were trapped in a deeper slavery, one shifted into being by two decades of Georgia-men traveling to and from the Chesapeake. When the American Revolution had ended, 20,000 enslaved people had lived in the South Carolina backcountry. Now 75,000 were there. Meanwhile, the Georgia slave population was growing, too, increasing from 30,000 in 1790 to 107,000 in 1810.52

  The next day, as they walked, a stranger rode up, matching the Georgia-man’s pace. “Niggers for sale?” He wanted to buy two women. The two men negotiated, argued, and insulted each other a little. The new man stared at the women and told them what he thought he’d do with them. The coffle kept moving. The white men rode along, bargaining. Maybe the deal could be sweetened, allowed the Georgia-man, if the South Carolinian paid to have the chains knocked off the men. One thousand dollars for the two, plus blacksmith fees. They stopped at a forge, and they kept arguing. The new man stated for everyone’s benefit that he had worked African men to death in iron collars. The blacksmith came out, and he asked what “the two gentlemen were making such a frolick about,” Ball later said. Frolicking: Down there, Ball realized, the Carolinians’ play, the time when they were most fully themselves, was evidently when they were arguing, negotiating, dealing, and intimidating the enslaved.

  For $2.50, the blacksmith would take off the chains. As he knocked off the bolts and the Georgia-man unkeyed the locks, the South Carolina buyer took the two women away. One was a Calvert woman, the mother of four. Ball had known her most of his life. He hoped he wouldn’t end up with a man as frightening as the one who had taken her.

  Freed of the heavy iron, Ball was giddy, but not happy. Five weeks in the chains had changed him just as surely as it had changed his location on the map. The enslaved people toiling in the fields kept their heads down as the new feet from Maryland walked past. He could see that more power hung over them, and now him, too.

  White people now treated Ball as a different kind of property. Under Virginia and Maryland law, the slave had been chattel since the seventeenth century. Slaves could be sold by their owners, moved by their owners, and separated from others by their owners. Georgia and Carolina cut-and-pasted many aspects of the Virginia slave code into their laws. But in practice, the laws were implemented differently.
Almost all of the slaves down here were new to the whites who owned them, and they used them without constraint. The Chesapeake enslavers were bound by many different considerations when it came to buying or selling human beings: family ties between enslaved people that were important to other whites, fear of angry slaves, fear of one’s evangelized conscience, fear of foreign criticism of the land of the free. Still, by 1805 the coffle-chain was breaking that pattern, even back in Virginia. Up and down the path that ran from east to west, north to south, the chain made a person’s feet work against him or her. The person in irons became more truly owned by someone else, more easily separated from family, and more easily traded and commodified.

  The coffle helped make Ball’s enslavement deeper and more flexible; it linked his marching feet to the needs of the nation’s most successful people. It provided defenses for those who did not want to deal with their own half-hearted moral failure, with the inclusion of slavery in new state constitutions. The existence of the “Georgia-man” and the “Yazoo” as options also made a chained Ball into a movable piece in the political economic puzzle of the young United States. For although coffles got no closer than Pennsylvania Avenue to the room in which John Marshall read out his 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck, their chained footprints walked all over the case file. The technical issue before the Court was whether the Georgia state legislature could overturn a contract of sale into which a previous session had entered. Marshall and the Court ruled that the people of Georgia could not overturn the sale. The contract might have been accomplished by bribery. It may have contravened the will of the majority of white Georgians. But the sale to the investors’ land companies was a sale of property all the same, and property rights, by the chief justice’s interpretation of the contract clause of the Constitution, were absolute. The people who invested in the company—mostly New England money-market types and bankers—should be repaid from the sale of the land, which was now held by the federal government.

  Federalists were happy. But so were many of Jefferson’s party. In Massachusetts, in New York City, and in Philadelphia were large nests of Jeffersonians whose financial fortunes were as invested in the development of stock and bond markets as those of their local Federalist rivals. Congress now had to compensate the Yazoo bondholders. The payout to speculators who had bought up the bonds would in turn strengthen confidence in all American capital markets. The Court was providing security that would bring more money into the southwestern territories over time. Some southern Jeffersonians felt betrayed by the Court’s Republican appointees. Georgia politicians were furious in public. Tellingly, though, neither Jefferson nor his protégé, President James Madison, had attempted to influence the outcome of the Yazoo situation in favor of Georgia’s desire to overturn the earlier legislature’s sale of half of Alabama and Mississippi.

  The principle that a contract is inviolable and that property is absolute was now the accepted conclusion of the federal constitution. In the Fletcher decision, the chief justice never mentioned slavery. But the Court’s decision made possible the survey and sale of more than 20 million acres for slavery’s expanding footprint. Marshall’s ruling also gave every future defender of slavery and its expansion an incredible tool. Consider this: If the people of Georgia couldn’t overturn a contract born from obvious corruption, how could a legislature or any other government entity take slaves away from owners? Enslaved African Americans were property acquired by contract, according to the law of slave states. Nor, the decision implied, could legislatures constrain enslavers’ right to treat said property as being as absolute, as mobile, and as alienable as they liked.

  The interlinked expansion of both slavery and financial capitalism was now the driving force in an emerging national economic system that benefited elites and others up and down the Atlantic coast as well as throughout the backcountry. From Jefferson and Madison’s perspective, the soon-to-be states of the Mississippi Territory would yield votes in the Electoral College and Congress, votes to use against the Federalists—and more than they would have gained by courting hard-core states’ righters. One of the latter was Jefferson’s onetime lieutenant, the increasingly erratic Yazoo-hater John Randolph—whose whip-wielding overseer had seemed to Charles Ball like an omen of the Georgia looming up at the end of his road. Instead, the Republicans now formed a pro-finance, pro-expansion coalition that ingested many onetime Federalists and dominated US politics until, by the 1820s, it became a victim of its own success. Randolph was one of the few southern enslavers consistent enough to insist that both the stigmatization of Georgia-men and the diffusion scam were hypocrisies. That kind of truth-telling drives an implicated man mad, and Randolph, once Speaker of the House, eventually spiraled into a level of insanity remarkable for even a Virginia politician.

  More typically hypocritical was Bushrod Washington, George’s nephew and a Supreme Court justice. This classic Virginia gentleman, who inherited Mount Vernon in 1799 when his uncle died, had concurred with Marshall in 1810. Perhaps he had done so because of the sweet reasonableness of the chief justice’s arguments. More likely, the principle of property and contract offered men like Washington a series of un-trumpable “outs.” Such justifications came in handy in 1821, for instance, when it became public knowledge that Washington had sold fifty-four people from Mount Vernon to a slave trader who had then taken them through the Yazoo territories. In response to a newspaper editor who complained that the Father of Our Country’s nephew had sold human beings like “horned cattle,” Bushrod Washington wrote “on my own behalf and on that of my southern fellow citizens to enter a solemn protest against the propriety of any person questioning our right; legal or moral, to dispose of property which is secured to us by sanctions equally valid with those by which we hold every other species of property.”53

  Men like Washington the younger could use the property story underlined by Fletcher v. Peck to slip away from confronting the contradictions of slavery’s expansion, even if singing coffles and snickering Georgia-men waved the contradictions under Congress’s collective nose. Having said of himself in 1788 that “nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice” to bring about emancipation, in 1814 Jefferson ruefully shook his head and said that the old generation had moved too slowly. Now, instead of finding that “the generous temperament of youth” raised the new generation “above the suggestions of avarice,” he realized that the young men of this new day dawning had digested the lessons of Georgia and were racing to create fortunes from slavery’s expansion.

  Bushrod Washington also got good mileage from Jefferson’s diffusion story. His decision to sell off enslaved people was, he insisted, not a tale of greed but a demonstration of how forced migration protected white lives. As the African Americans living at Mount Vernon grew in number, he claimed, they had become insubordinate. A couple of Washington’s slaves escaped to the North, using their feet to undermine his right to property. The rest came to believe that when he died they would be free. And the justice began to fear that they were speculating about where the sharpest knives were, and how they might hide poison in his food. No more Bushrod, no more slavery. Jefferson had blurted analogous fears, famously speaking of a possible “reversal of fortunes” and describing the situation of Chesapeake slaveholders as being like riding a “wolf [held] by the ears[;] . . . we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Even if whites had agreed to general emancipation, whites had “deeply rooted prejudices,” and blacks “ten thousand recollections.” “New provocations” would divide and whip them into an apocalyptic race-war crescendo. These “convulsions” would end only with “extermination of the one or the other race.”54

  So Jefferson and Washington and other white Virginians stuck to a third choice, a financially profitable one: to “diffuse” enslaved African Americans south and west. And the existence of the Georgia-men allowed such respectable leaders to draw alleged emotional and moral distances between themselves and the unpleasant side of “diffusion.” They wr
ung their hands as coffles and Georgia-men passed. Or they asserted that slaves lived better in the new states than in the old. But while Washington contended that forced migration was carried out for the benefit of enslaved people, one observer, who stood in Leesburg in August 1821 and watched as Bushrod Washington’s coffle went by, saw “unhappy wretches,” among whom were “husbands [who] had been torn from wives and children, and many relatives left behind.” Those left at Mount Vernon whispered bitter words to tourists who visited the national father’s home.55

  BETWEEN THE END OF the American Revolution and the Fletcher v. Peck decision in 1810, slavery’s expansion linked the nation together. The needs of the nation encouraged the growth of a complex of institutions and patterns—and, just as significantly, excuses—that made national political and financial alliances possible. The needs of individual enslavers and others who hoped to profit from the expansion of all sorts of economic opportunities encouraged the growth of a more powerful set of national capabilities, more market-friendly laws, and more unified markets. The needs of national expansion, plus the ability of chained people to walk, trapped enslaved people as absolutely held property in the political compromises, political alliances, and financial schemes of the United States and in the very map of the young country. Slavery, and specifically, the right of enslavers to sell and to move their slaves into new territory, became a national practice: as a strict definition of property under constitutional law, as habit and expectation, and as a pattern of political compromise.