During boom times like these, southwestern buyers were more interested in extracting value now than in the long-term accumulation strategy that healthy childbirth and well-fed childhoods represented. A woman who was alone would waste none of her labor on children. And men were universally sold without family members. So were many children. On January 5, just three weeks before Rachel was sold, sixty-one slaves from the Chesapeake had been auctioned at Maspero’s. Among the “smart promising boys” of whom may “be anything made of,” as the ad put it, were young brothers Ruffin, eight, and Harry, six. Ruffin went to Jean Armand, up in St. James Parish. Nicholas Hanry bought Harry. Ruffin and Harry probably saw each other for the last time at the back wall where William now leaned his weight against the interior bricks. From 1815 to 1820, in fact, New Orleans saw 2,646 sales of children under the age of thirteen, of whom 1,001 were sold separately from any family member. Their average age was nine. Many were younger—some much younger.58
Brothers broken apart, mothers taken from daughters and vice versa—all were easier to move, to “be anything made of,” individual units ready to come to hand in entrepreneurial dreams. To make the parents into mere individuals, children were left back in the Chesapeake to be reared by grandparents and aunts and uncles. So African-American households back East paid the cost of increasing right-handed power in the southwestern United States, just as those did who now stood on the block. Purchasers who made complete the conversion of mother into hand did not have to pay, at least not now. They only needed the belief of those who granted them credit, and that could be bought with the promised future value imputed by a person made hand.
Image 3.4. The New Orleans market preferred young people with no attachments. Both in the selling states and in the buying states, the forces of this demand led to separations of parent from child and brother from sister—like Isaac and Rosa, ex-slave children from New Orleans, photographed in 1863 after the Union capture of New Orleans ensured that they would not be sold apart from each other. Library of Congress.
As they created the patterns and expectations of a slave trade that made a uniform commodity—hands—perpetually available, men like William Kenner and Hector McLean were doing more than making profits for themselves. Such entrepreneurs—none of whom were slave-trading specialists—were creating a market for future slave trading, though other entrepreneurs would wrest it from their hands even as it emerged. The appearance of Francis E. Rives in Alabama—he also made two trips to Natchez in 1818 and 1819—foretold the future. Without planning to do so, the merchants of New Orleans had paved the way for a later, more organized “domestic” trade that linked the techniques of the Georgia-men to the much greater distances and emerging markets of the Mississippi Valley. They were laying the connecting rails of a national domestic slave market. Before enslaved people were marched to the ship or the flatboat that took them to New Orleans, and long after their first sale at Maspero’s, the patterns of exchange and newly habitual assumptions there made them the perpetual objects of enslavers’ plans.
An increasingly efficient market for hands was the core of the process that enabled the new men of New Orleans, from Vincent Nolte to Toussaint Mossy to James Stille and William Fitz, to knot together a nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit. The effects of their endeavors reached far beyond both Maspero’s and the expanding southwestern United States itself. Cotton bales were the cheap oil of the nineteenth century. Here their outflow met the influx of credit to yield a new thing: ever-increasing production and thus ever-increasing economic growth. And to keep schemes and trades bubbling along from Manchester to Liverpool to New Orleans to the newly-staked-out faraway tracts of plantation-land-to-be way up the Tennessee River in Alabama required a mighty belief. The flow of hands into the market made would-be lords of commerce and new planters believe. As hands, Rachel and William were also credit: promissory notes on their sellers’ and buyers’ future possession and use of right-handed power.
There was one more crossroads here at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis. But to map this one, we cannot look in the documents that slave-buyers had to file after they won the auction. Instead, we must use a slave-sale memory handed down to us, one that originated with a woman who stood up above this crowd to be the object of inspection and bidding. Forty years after the year when Rachel stood on the bench, a dying grandmother (we do not know her name) reached up from the corn-shuck mattress where she lay under the roof of a Louisiana slave cabin. She grabbed her frightened granddaughter Melinda by the wrist, and she said the last words Melinda would ever hear her speak: “First thing I can remember is that I was standing on a slave block in New Orleans alongside my ma.” The place must have been Maspero’s. The time was the moment of sale that had separated her from her mother and everything that had come before. Maspero’s shaped the rest of her life, and she had to pass that moment on to her own granddaughter in order for Melinda to know her and herself. Here was the crossroads of time and space where Melinda’s family history had to begin again. So would it be for thousands of other family histories.59
TOUSSAINT MOSSY BROUGHT DOWN the hammer. The last heartbeat of Rachel’s old life trickled out of its chamber. Her past and her future had just been killed for the profit of others. William Fitz won her at about $800.
Fitz had bought one other person—a man named Frank Boyd—and Fitz was ready to walk his two new slaves back toward the levee and the boat that would carry them up to Baton Rouge. People sold could sometimes hold on to small things that helped them to remember: a pair of gloves worn by a dead mother; a small blanket, split with a sister. Perhaps Rachel had an opportunity to say goodbye to William and the others from the Temperance. But from this point forward, she disappears from known documents.60
Not so for William, at least not quite yet. He had to wait for James Stille to arrange payment for Perry, a young man from the Emile’s cargo. At the same auction, McLean also sold Stille a young woman named Maria and her infant daughter, America, consigned by Virginian William Coles. And over the next few days, Stille also bought Jacob, Murray, Jefferson, and the nine-year-old boy Braxton, plus eleven slaves from New Orleans merchants Jackson and Reynolds, and six from Virginia residents John Stiles and Thomas Wily. So in less than a week, Stille spent over $20,000—mostly on credit—on new “hands.”61
A day or two later, Stille collected the twenty-five people whom he had purchased from the city jail and the warehouses where they had been stowed while he shopped. He marched all twenty-five back to the levee. The chained city slaves leaned on their shovels, watching a different sort of coffle pass. Past the posts, the leaflets flapping in the wind, William walked across a different gangplank onto a steamboat that could churn steadily upriver against the current. Hands loaded barrels purchased by upstream customers. The bell rang, steam rose, the boat began to back away from the levee. The last passengers sprinted to leap the widening gap, papers fluttering in their hands. The steamer gathered headway upstream past moored flatboats and sailing ships.62
From its deck the bound passengers watched the landscape unroll. Behind the levee, each mile studded with a bare pole, they saw rectangular fields of stubbled cane stretching back. Right before the Red Church, they passed Destrehan’s manor, the double galleries that belted the house shining with new paint. More big houses were visible now than before 1811. Near each were cabins and long, low barracks in sprawling clusters.
After the first day the cotton fields began to appear. Gangs of laborers moved slowly among the winter-brown and bare stalks, hoeing them under. The boat passed Iberville Parish, and there were few sugar plantations. By the time it reached Baton Rouge, there were only cotton fields and woods. But by then, Stille had already disembarked his hands. William and all the rest had vanished into the slave country, a land populated almost entirely by walking, working hands.
4
LEFT HAND
1805–1861
ON JULY 5, 1805, almost fifteen years before William disappeared into the co
tton country with James Stille, Charles Ball jogged down a South Carolina road. Ball had carried iron chains on his wrists and neck for five hundred miles down to South Carolina. Then the slave trader, M’Giffin, had sold him to Wade Hampton at a Columbia inn as part of the local Fourth of July celebration. Now it was late the next morning. Hampton sat low between the two wheels of a stylish horse-drawn chaise, periodically flicking a long, thin whip. He had told Ball to keep up, so Ball and the horse ran. Years later, Ball bragged that in his youth he could cover fifty miles a day. Still, he surely began to flag after two or three hours. What Ball eventually remembered most about that long day’s run, however, was not his ragged breath, but the groves of huge trees through which the road periodically wound. He anticipated each one, grateful that he’d be jogging in the shade for a few minutes. The smell of the trees reached him before he even saw them. Once he was under them, the magnolias’ sweet, musky odor overwhelmed him.1
Ever since the Civil War, magnolias have signaled plantations, and in popular understandings of what slavery was like—movies, novels, tourism, the pages of Southern Living, and even many historians’ scholarly accounts—plantations were places where things didn’t change. But as he ran out of the magnolias’ shadow, Ball passed one newly cleared field after another. On the left was one full of stumps and piles of logs and brush, on the right a black wreck of charred logs and ashes. He jogged past still another, this one covered with rows of nearly waist-high green plants, slaves among them, bending and rising in lines between the rows.2
The night before, he had sat outside the inn and talked with an enslaved man who had once lived just across the Potomac River from where Ball had grown up, a part of Maryland where slaves whispered rumors to each other, saying that down south where the Georgia-man took you, you’d have to eat cottonseed instead of food. The man told Ball that no, he’d have meat and meal. But the man assured him that his work in the cotton fields would be far more difficult and draining than the long hours of labor he had served in Maryland.3
The kind of slavery that Ball was encountering and that was emerging on the frontiers of the early nineteenth-century South was inherently new. For centuries, slavery in the New World had expanded by a process of extension: adding new slaves, clearing new fields from the next sugar island. The southwestern frontier was expanding—in part—via a similar strategy, though on an unprecedented geographic scale: it was not an island, but a subcontinent’s rich interior stripped from its inhabitants. And not mere battalions, but whole armies of slaves were being moved to new soil. By 1820, whites had already transported more than 200,000 enslaved people to the South’s new frontiers in the years since 1790 (see Table 1.1).
What made this forced migration truly different was that it led to continuous increases in productivity per person—what economists call “efficiency.” The two ways out of the Malthusian trap were either to incorporate more “ghost acres”—land outside of industrializing core regions like Britain or, soon, the northeastern United States—or to create systematic increases in efficiency of production. The first slavery had not yielded continuous improvements in labor productivity. On the nineteenth-century cotton frontier, however, enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year.
The source of this ever-rising productivity wasn’t a machine like the ones that were crucial to the textile mills. In fact, you could say that the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip. And the fact that slave labor was unpaid, and compelled by brute force, was not new. That reality was as old as the human institution of slavery itself.
Just as old was the fact that those who were compelled to knuckle under to right-handed power used the art of secret resistance—such as slowing the pace of work when overseers were out of sight—to undermine the sway of the dominant. It had been the same in traditional societies for all those millennia when serfs, peasants, and slaves made up most of the labor force of most societies. Their craft was much like what Protestant reformer Martin Luther in the sixteenth century called “left-handed” power: the strength of the poor and the weak, the secret way of seemingly passive resistance to evil. Peasants and servants broke employers’ tools, lied, played dumb, escaped from masters. At the same time, they kept their secrets about all their crafts. In older slave regions like the Chesapeake, where Charles Ball had learned to cut and cradle wheat, a secret way of doing or making was a treasure that gave an enslaved man or woman a kind of leverage in his or her dealings with enslavers.4
Yet in the fields past the magnolia grove, the dynamic of right-handed domination and left-handed resistance, a struggle as old as the Pyramids, was changing. Something profoundly new was happening. Enslavers were finding ways to turn the left hand against the enslaved. Entrepreneurs redirected left-handed power by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture. All of this repeatedly accomplished enslavers’ ongoing goal of forcing enslaved people to invent, over and over, ways to make their own labor more efficient and profitable for their owners.
New techniques that extracted ever-greater cotton efficiency radically changed the experience of enslaved people like Charles Ball and the 1 million who followed him into the cotton fields. But they also transformed the world beyond the fields. The amount of cotton the South grew increased almost every single year from 1800, when enslaved African Americans made 1.4 million pounds of cotton, to 1860, when they harvested almost 2 billion pounds. Eighty percent of all the cotton grown in the United States was exported across the Atlantic, almost all of it to Britain. Cotton was the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created our modern world economy. By 1820, the ability of enslaved people in southwestern frontier fields to produce more cotton of a higher quality for less drove most other producing regions out of the world market. Enslaved African Americans were the world’s most efficient producers of cotton. And they got more efficient every year, which is why the real price of the most important raw material of the industrial revolution declined by 1860 to 15 percent of its 1790 cost, even as demand for it increased by 500 percent (see Table 4.1). Cotton also drove US expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest-growing economy in the world. Between the 1790s and 1820, the United States acquired a near-monopoly on the world’s most widely traded commodity, and after 1820, cotton accounted for a majority of all US exports. And all of the transformations that spun from these facts depended on changes inflicted on the left hand.
A little while before sunset, the chaise finally stopped in the drive before Hampton’s house near the Congaree River. Ball bent over, panting and retching. When he finally raised his head, Hampton’s teenaged son was staring at him. The boy sneered with contemptuous menace and asked Ball if he knew how to pick cotton. Just then the elder Hampton walked past. He ordered Ball to put the horse away and help the gardener. In the garden, Ball pulled weeds as his body cooled from the run. As the sun set, a boy came with a message: come to the overseer’s house to find out where to stay that evening. As they walked away from the big house where Hampton lived, they heard the oncoming tramp of feet. From the lowering dusk strode the slave labor camp’s white overseer. After him straggled 170 black men, women, and children. Behind them, night fell on the fields.5
TABLE 4.1. COTTON PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES
Source: Stuart Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings (New York, 1967).
BEFORE SUNRISE, A LOUD, braying noise shattered Ball’s sleep. When the overseer’s horn blew for the second time, his bare feet hit the dirt floor. He stumbled out of the hut to which he had been assigned, rubbed his eyes, and looked around to see something new. Around him, shaping up like day laborers, was the army he’d seen the previous evening. In Maryland and Virginia, labor crews usually numbered only a dozen or so. These people also looked different. Even after a month-long march south, “it could be seen tha
t my shirt and trowsers had once been distinct and separate garments. Not one of the others had on even the remains of two articles of clothing.” Many of the men wore only long, tattered shirts. Many women only had skirts. Some teenage boys and girls were completely naked. And the state of the bodies thus exposed worried Ball even more. Their skin was reddish and ashy, their hair matted and stringy. Bones stood out. Skin hung slack where muscle had atrophied.6
As Ball took in his new peers, the overseer stepped into their midst. Here was a tightly contained white man, of a type much like M’Giffin the Georgia-man. He turned, beckoned silently, and the crowd followed. “A wretched-looking troop we were,” Ball said years later, picturing the moment, still watching them (and himself) marching toward the fields of green, waist-high plants that soon loomed up in the gloaming. They trudged past uncounted rows, through a mile of clods drying from the hoe. Beyond a grove of trees, the rising sun showed that a vast field opened beyond. On its edge the overseer stopped them. He announced eleven men as “captains” for the day, and from his slate named fifteen laborers to follow each. Ball was to go with Simon. Marching his troop to a section of planted furrows, Simon posted his soldiers: one adult or two children to the head of each row.
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 17
