The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Every forced migrant whose story has survived tells us that when they crossed the threshold of the fields of a new slave labor camp, they entered a world that was fundamentally different from the one in which they had toiled before. As Ball lined up by the first waist-high cotton plant of his row, he was about to learn a new way of working, one meant to occupy most of the waking moments remaining to him on earth. He saw Simon take a row, lift his hoe, and begin to work rapidly down the side of his furrow. Everyone else began to do the same, in a great hurry. Ball could see that each of them had to chop all the weeds in their row without damaging the cotton plants. But then the man in the next row warned him that no one was allowed to fall behind the captain. Ball realized that thus “the overseer had nothing to do but to keep Simon hard at work, and he was certain that all the others must work equally hard.” And the overseer was already stalking across the rows, whip in hand. Ball put his head down and kept his hoe moving, trying to keep up with Simon’s furious pace.7

  By the time he reached the end of the first row, Charles Ball had been exposed to crucial differences between the forms of enslaved labor demanded in Maryland and the new ones on the cotton frontier. Survivors identified these differences not as idiosyncrasies, but as a new system of enslaved labor. Most forced migrants had been brought up working according to the rules of one of two southeastern regimes. In some regions, a “task” system had prevailed, as in the South Carolina and Georgia “low country.” In those rice swamps, each day enslavers assigned each worker a specific job. Custom fixed the volume of each daily piece of labor, so that a man knew that on a day when he had to chop weeds, his “task” was to cultivate an acre of rice and no more. As historians have pointed out, a long history of “negotiations” between masters’ power and the cunning of the enslaved had created the task system. It contained benefits for both left hand and right. Those who finished early could tend their own gardens, help others to work, or simply relax for an hour or two. Without direct supervision, forced labor was usually inefficient, but tasking relieved enslavers of this dilemma by offering diligent slaves an incentive: free time. No wonder owners who tried to increase customary tasking levels and limit free time faced direct or covert resistance.8

  Yet most enslaved migrants marched to places like Congaree did not come from the low country. They came from the greater Chesapeake of Virginia, Maryland, and their North Carolina and Kentucky offshoots. A watercolor sketch made in 1798 by Benjamin Latrobe, designer of the US Capitol, shows the prevalent form of labor on Chesapeake tobacco farms. A white overseer stands on a stump, a pipe in his mouth and his whip under his arm, supervising a “gang” of enslaved women as they cultivate tobacco plants. This gang system relied on direct surveillance of labor, but by whom? Tobacco planters often grew their crop on many small and widely scattered plots of land. They had to coordinate complex operations carried out by small groups. Most had no choice but to delegate surveillance to black drivers who led labor crews outside of direct white observation. And while enslavers in the Chesapeake pushed slaves to carry out their field work quickly, drivers had their own incentives. Workers moved across Chesapeake fields in ragged disorder set by divergent individual paces, not ranks formed up in lockstep like the ones that marched that July morning at Congaree.9

  The best-known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians have been concerned, the gin is where the study of innovation in the production of cotton ends—at least until the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1930s, which ended the sharecropping regime. But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean? For once the gin shattered the processing bottleneck, other limits on production and expansion were cast into new relief. For instance, one constraint was the amount of cheap, fertile land. Another was the lack of labor on the frontier. So enslaver-generals took land from Indians, enslaver-politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand, and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and commodify “hands.” And, given a finite number of captives in their own control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called “the pushing system.” This system increased the number of acres each captive was supposed to cultivate. As of 1805, enslavers like Hampton figured that each “hand” could tend and keep free of weeds five acres of cotton per year. Half a century later, that rule of thumb had increased to ten acres “to the hand.” In the first minute of labor Charles Ball had encountered one of the pushing system’s tactics, in which overseers usually chose captains like Simon to “carry the fore row” and set the pace.10

  We do not know who invented the pushing system. But it was already present when Charles Ball got to Congaree in 1805. And slavery’s entrepreneurs carried it west and south, sharing it as they went, like Johnny Cottonseed. “You find the Virginian upon Red River, you find the North Carolina man, the South Carolina man, the man from Georgia, alongside of him,” wrote one enslaver about the new neighborhoods in which greenhorns from tobacco or rice regions learned from their peers how to extract the maximum number of acres from each hand. On early-summer visits to town, migrant entrepreneurs began their street-corner conversations by asking “Well, how does your cotton look?” Thus, wrote another migrant planter, “any increased quantity of product, by any new course of cultivation, spreads like the fire of the American prairie”—all the way up to ten acres to the hand.11

  Enslavers shared innovations because the world cotton market was an example of what economists call perfect competition. In fact, it was the example—it was used later in the nineteenth century as the archetype in which the great British economist Alfred Marshall discovered the famous concepts of supply-and-demand curves. The market was so big that no individual producer could control even 1 percent of the total. This meant that individual producers had no reason to hoard innovations in the extraction of labor from neighbors, for a neighbor’s increase in production did not change the price the innovator received by a visible amount. Enslavers also had a vested interest in the ability of their neighbors to suppress their own slaves’ resistance. So planter-entrepreneurs readily shared their labor-control innovations: “The intercourse of experience,” wrote one enslaver, is the “solder” of slaveholders’ communities, in which “every individual is bound not only by his duties to others, but by his own interests, to extend and nourish this useful interchange of systems.”12

  Innovation in violence, in fact, was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system. Enslaved migrants in the field quickly learned what happened if they lagged or resisted. In Mississippi, Allen Sidney saw a man who had fallen behind the fore row fight back against a black driver who tried to “whip him up” to pace. The white overseer, on horseback, dropped his umbrella, spurred up, and shouted, “Take him down.” The overseer pulled out a pistol and shot the prone man dead. “None of the other slaves,” Sidney remembered, “said a word or turned their heads. They kept on hoeing as if nothing had happened.” They had learned that they had to adapt to “pushing” or face unpredictable but potentially extreme violence. Enslavers organized space so that violent supervision could extract the maximum amount of labor. “A good part of our rows are five hundred and fifty yards long,” wrote one Tennessee cotton planter in the 1820s. He had created a space in which he could easily identify stragglers. He also simultaneously ensured that when he inflicted exemplary punishment, he did so in clear view of a large audience.13

  THOUGH THE ROWS WERE long and Simon’s pace was hard, Ball was getting his wind back at seven a.m., when they all paused to eat a breakfast of cold cornbread. Charles Ball and Simon exchanged a few grunted words as they returned to their side-by-side rows. Already, the captain recognized that Ball was one of the few
in the field physically capable of keeping up without panicked effort. Both returned to their toil, hoes swinging like metronomes, sweat rolling down arms and backs. The overseer kept the time. Once an hour he allowed the men, women, and children to walk over to a wagon loaded with water barrels and drink a ladleful of water.14

  At noon the hands at Congaree ate another hurried meal: more cornbread, a little salt, one radish each. Ball was catching on to other ways in which the pushing system maximized the amount of labor extracted from him—for instance, the tricks that filled every minute of daylight with money-making labor. At the end of a row, Simon whispered to Ball to conserve what strength he could, for they would have to work until it was too dark to tell cotton from weed. There would be no leaving the field in time to make the evening meal. In fact, the overseer had assigned an old woman to stay back in the quarter and bake everyone’s suppertime cornmeal ration. Likewise, when, thirty years later, Henry Bibb was transported up Louisiana’s Red River to a slave labor camp, his new enslaver ordered slaves to gorge themselves with a heavy breakfast two hours before sunlight. They were then allowed but one break before nightfall.15

  If Ball got ahead of Simon for a moment, stood up straight to wipe off the sweat of this long afternoon, and looked around at the bodies behind him, he’d see two more pushing-system elements that enabled entrepreneurs like Wade Hampton to plant and cultivate more and more acres of cotton over time. First, almost everybody who lived in Wade Hampton’s huts—men and women, children and adults—was in the field. Second, they were all doing the same job. In 1827 a Virginia-born enslaver wrote to his business partner asking him to procure “a number of slaves sufficient to make 40 working hands—which you know in a cotton country will be much less than in a grain country.” Chesapeake slave quarters had large numbers of nonworking children and old people as well as those who did some kinds of labor and not others. But cotton entrepreneurs worked men, women, and older children together for most of the year at jobs that were identical.16

  In labor camps like Congaree, a few men became “captains” or even “drivers.” But torn between the interests of enslavers, their own interests, and those of their peers, drivers were subject to frequent demotions. Women, meanwhile, usually did not even have these options. The flattening of the job hierarchy made men, women, and even children roughly equal in the sense that they did the same kind of labor. Many women and children could accomplish some elements of cotton labor just as well as many men. The elimination of most distinctions among the enslaved, and the curtailment of possibilities for independence, put into practice the theory incipient in the way entrepreneurs sold people at Maspero’s. Everyone had a uniform status—that of cotton “hand.”17

  The product of their labor was also uniform. When the row was finished, the long line of red dirt Ball had turned over disappeared into the sameness of hundreds of identical rows of identical green plants. And the rows stretched on ahead. Simon’s crew finished one set and started another, still moving at his pace as he carried the lead row. Slowly, slowly, the shadows extended out from the trees on the field’s western borders. The vast gang of “hands” toiled on, all straining to hear the same sound.

  At last, as dark settled, the overseer called a halt. The laborers shouldered their hoes and turned for home. Along the way, Ball fell into step with a slow-walking woman. She told him her name was Lydia. Worn and haggard, she carried a baby on her back in a sling of cloth. The baby had been fathered a year ago, soon after she had arrived from Ball’s own Maryland. They talked as the others outpaced them. But as Ball began to ask her how she had adapted to life in the cotton fields, the overseer’s horn blew. “We are too late, let us run,” Lydia blurted.

  Ball arrived back at the slave cabins just as the overseer finished his roll call. Lydia came toiling up a minute later, with the baby bouncing on her back. “Where have you been?” the overseer demanded. “I only stopped a while to talk to this man,” she said, “but I shall never do it again.” She began to sob. The overseer ordered her to lie down on her stomach. Handing her baby to another woman, she complied. The white man pulled up her torn shift, exposing her buttocks and back. Then he drew from his belt the lash he had been carrying folded there all day.

  The whip, ten feet of plaited cowhide dangling from a weighted handle, was, Ball realized, “different from all other whips that I have ever seen.” The impression it made would never leave him. Many other migrants reported the same feeling of shocked discovery. In Virginia and Maryland, white people used cat-o’-nine-tails, short leather whips with multiple thongs. These were dangerous weapons, and Chesapeake enslavers were creative in developing a repertoire of torment to force people to do what they wanted. But this southwestern whip was far worse. In expert hands it ripped open the air with a sonic boom, tearing gashes through skin and flesh. As the overseer beat Lydia, she screamed and writhed. Her flesh shook. Blood rolled off her back and percolated into the packed, dark soil of the yard.18

  Those who had seen and experienced torture in both the southeastern and southwestern regions universally insisted that it was worse on the southwestern plantations. Ex-slave William Hall remembered that after he was taken to Mississippi, he “saw there a great deal of cotton-growing and persecution of slaves by men who had used them well” back in the Southeast. Once “the masters got where they could make money[,] they drove the hands severely.” White people also recorded the way that southwestern captivity distilled and intensified slavery. On a sheet of lined notepaper saved by small-time cotton planter William Bailey survives a strange set of lyrics in the voice of an enslaved migrant, a man moved to the cotton frontier: “Oh white folks, I hab crossed de mountains / How many miles I didn’t count em.” Perhaps Bailey wrote down verses he heard. Perhaps he wrote them as a “darky song” parody. Either way, they tell us what people at both ends of the whip understood as its purpose. “Oh, I’se left de folks at de old plantation / And come down here for my education,” he wrote. What did the “singer” define as his “education”? “De first dat I eber got a licken / Was down at de forks ob de cotton picken / Oh it made me dance, it made me tremble / I golly it made my eyeballs jingle.”19

  Survivors of southwestern torture said their experiences were so horrific that they made any previous “licken” seem like nothing. Okah Tubbee, a part-Choctaw, part-African teenager enslaved in Natchez, remembered his first time under “what they call in the South, the overseer’s whip.” Tubbee stood up for the first few blood-cutting strokes, but then he fell down and passed out. He woke up vomiting. They were still beating him. He slipped into darkness again.20

  Under the whip, people could not speak in sentences or think coherently. They “danced,” trembled, babbled, lost control of their bodies. Talking to the rest of the white world, enslavers downplayed the damage inflicted by the overseer’s whip. Sure, it might etch deep gashes in the skin of its victim, make them “tremble” or “dance,” as enslavers said, but it did not disable them. Whites were open with those whom they beat about the whip’s purpose. Its point was the way it asserted dominance so “educationally” that the enslaved would abandon hope of successful resistance to the pushing system’s demands.

  “Their plan of getting quantities of cotton,” recalled Henry Bibb of the people who drove him to labor on the Red River, “is to extort it by the lash.” In the context of the pushing system, the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain. That’s exactly what Willie Vester, a Mississippi overseer, told his friends back in North Carolina. He hoped to ride back home for a visit on a nice new horse, sporting a suit of fine clothes. To do so, he needed to “make a little more [money].” The way to do that was to “walk over the cotton patch and bring my long platted whip down and say ‘who prowd[,] boys[?]’ and see a fiew more bales made.” Likewise, in 1849 a migrating North Carolina planter hired a “Mississippi overseer” to ensure that his “hands” would be “followed up from day break until dark as is the custom here.” The overseer wou
ld drive each “fore row” in a vast and easily surveyed field, and he would “whip up” those who fell behind. All that pushing, the owner calculated, would force “my negroes [to do] twice as much here as negroes generally do in N.C.”21

  Finished with beating Lydia, Hampton’s overseer turned to Charles Ball, who stood frozen on the edge of the lamplight. “When I get a new negro under my command,” he said, “I never whip at first; I always give him a few days to learn his duty. . . . You ought not to have stayed behind to talk to Lydia, but as this is your first offence, I shall overlook it.” Ball nodded mutely and “thanked master overseer for his kindness.” As he chewed his cornbread, he reflected on his new reality: “I had now lived through one of the days—a succession of which make up the life of a slave—on a cotton plantation,” he later wrote.22

  IN THE COURSE OF surviving his first day, Ball had discovered the new pushing system: a system that extracted more work by using oppressively direct supervision combined with torture ratcheted up to far higher levels than he had experienced before. Between 1790 and 1860, these crucial innovations made possible a vast increase in the amount of cotton grown in the United States. They did so at an immense human cost, which could be calculated in many ways. We could count those who caught malaria in the fields of a more intense disease environment, or those who died young, their bodies malnourished by insufficient food and intense labor. The rate of infant mortality in the new slave labor camps was extraordinary: one of every four children born died before reaching his or her first birthday. This is five times the rate of present-day Haiti, the same as the rate that would have been found in the most malaria-infested parts of nineteenth-century West Africa or the Caribbean (see Tables 4.2 and 4.3). And every burst of forced migration produced a decrease in the average life expectancy of African Americans, not just for infants, but for the whole population.23