The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Heirs of Thomas Jefferson, critic and beneficiary of slavery, the Republicans had already presided over a massive extension of human bondage. Despite the claims of Virginians that the diffusion of slavery across the southwestern frontier would make the institution somehow dissipate, northerners who had traveled on business to New Orleans or Alabama understood that the opposite was happening. By the 1810s, thanks to the Constitution’s bargains, seventeen southern congressmen represented three-fifths of the slave population—though, of course not the interests of the enslaved, but of the enslaver. This increment allowed southern politicians to dominate the Republican faction, and thus—with the loyalty of northern Republicans—the entire government. After all, cotton entrepreneurship passed on benefits to the North, expanding credit markets, supporting trade, and making markets for the new textile mills being established by John Quincy Adams’s constituents. Adams was a good Republican soldier. He was now secretary of state for President James Monroe, another Virginia slaveholder. But he complained that the “slave representation . . . will be forever thrown into the Southern scale.” In other words, the pounds of cotton that mounted up on the steelyards of new southwestern labor camps did more than tell the truth about an individual’s daily picking. When the pounds were counted and multiplied by the number of the enslaved, they also created more money, more slavery, more southern congressmen and senators, and more legislation favorable to the South—and then, in turn, even more money, even more slavery . . . on and on in a continuous growing cycle. The ever-growing weight of slave owners’ political power, worried the New Englander in Adams, “must forever make ours kick the beam.”17

  During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of settlers from Virginia and Kentucky moved west of the Mississippi and north of what is now the state of Louisiana. The part of the country where the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Ohio mingle the waters of half a continent and head south toward New Orleans rests on a major geological fault line, which in 1811 shifted, and destroyed the important Mississippi River port of New Madrid. But the Missouri Territory, as the region was now called, also rested atop another confluence of opposing forces. To the northeast lay the new state of Illinois, ostensibly free by virtue of its inclusion in the 1780s-era Northwest Territory, but in reality settled in part by southerners, who used a loophole in the state’s law to hold African Americans in slavery. In 1821, in fact, those settlers would attempt to rewrite the Illinois state constitution to permit large-scale human bondage. To the north and west and south of Missouri, meanwhile, lay the vast Louisiana Purchase. Only one section of this area—Louisiana—had yet become a state. The status of the remaining 800,000 square miles was undecided.18

  By December 1818, when a petition from the Missouri Territory’s whites reached Congress for statehood, those settlers had established a thriving agricultural economy in the valleys west of St. Louis, one based on tobacco, hemp for cordage and sailcloth, and corn. And, of course, slaves. More than 10,000 enslaved African Americans lived in Missouri. Now Missourians were asking Congress to admit their territory as a state, so Congress took up the issue. Beginning with Kentucky in 1795, Congress had now admitted five slave states west of the mountains and south of the Ohio. Perhaps, given the growing anxiety among good northern Republican soldiers like John Quincy Adams, no one should have been surprised by what Representative James Tallmadge of New York said when he stood up in Congress on February 13, 1819. But they were surprised.19

  For Tallmadge proposed two amendments to the Missouri statehood bill. The first banned the importation of more slaves into Missouri. The second proposed to free all enslaved people born in the new state once they reached twenty-five. And here is what might have surprised even savvy observers: as the clerk of the House counted the votes, it became clear that heavy northern support had passed Tallmadge’s amendments over universal southern opposition. Some in the free states clearly feared that they were becoming mere junior partners in the government of the United States. They were choosing to draw a line, though not against slavery itself, or against the kind of slavery from which they profited most. Missouri was too far north for cotton to grow. Still, for the first time since the Congress had affirmed the Northwest Ordinance in 1789, a house of the national legislature had blocked slavery’s expansion.20

  In the Senate, matters were different. Over the previous decade, Congress had been admitting states in pairs, retaining a rough balance between North and South in the Senate. Southern senators turned back the House’s bill and struck the antislavery clauses. In response, the House rejected the Senate’s version of the Missouri statehood bill. And as speeches grew more heated, John Quincy Adams realized that they “disclosed a secret,” a subterranean fault line—the fact that almost all northern representatives would, if pushed to the test, vote against more slavery expansion. Meanwhile, southern representatives were deciding that the right to expand slavery was inseparable from any other right that they possessed. John Scott, the nonvoting delegate from Missouri, insisted that restriction would deny Missouri whites their constitutional right to property. The right to expand was even the right of self-preservation. If slavery restriction blocked further expansion, southern representatives wailed, slave numbers would balloon until a black rebellion erupted, making a giant Haiti of the southern states. Thomas Cobb of Georgia warned that the friction of slavery restriction was “kindling a fire which all the waters of the ocean could not extinguish. It could only be extinguished in blood!”21

  In the face of Cobb’s implied threat of civil war, New York’s Tallmadge replied that “if blood is necessary to extinguish any fire which I have assisted to kindle . . . I shall not forbear to contribute my mite.” Back and forth the debate went, but when the spring session of Congress ended, nothing had been resolved. Congressmen from New York and New Jersey returned home to find that a flurry of public meetings were in progress supporting their anti-slavery-expansion stance. In such meetings, some constituents raised questions that went beyond mere sectional advantage. Wasn’t slavery a contradiction, asked the organizers of a New York meeting, to the principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” But opposition to slavery itself was not what brought most white attendees to those meetings, and the idea of black equality would have been anathema to almost all of them. In contrast to the abolitionist groups that would emerge years later, socially conservative Federalists led these meetings. These old and prominent ministers, these long-established philanthropists, brooked little or no input from African Americans. Instead, most of the complaints voiced by such meetings were about sectional power balances. By the time William Plumer of New Hampshire was on his way back to Congress for the next session, he believed it had become “political suicide” for a free-state politician “to tolerate slavery beyond its present limits.” Further concessions would make America “a mighty empire of slaves” dominated by arrogant planter-politicians.22

  The group that joined Plumer in the capital during the early winter of 1819 was a new Congress, elected in 1818. In the thirteen months between the time of their election and the time of their seating—lame ducks lasted much longer in those days—a major financial crisis had erupted. The Panic of 1819 embroiled the administrators of the Second Bank of the United States in scandals that demanded legislative attention. But the debate over Missouri continued, too. Even though Kentucky representative and Speaker of the House Henry Clay was working behind the scenes with a middle group of congressmen from both free and slave states, trying to organize a compromise, tempers on the floor of the House grew more and more heated. Rumors whispered that congressmen were carrying pistols into debate.23

  John Quincy Adams—a New Englander in a southern administration, trying to focus on his negotiations to acquire Florida from Spain—had assured an audience in the summer of 1819 that he believed the restriction of Missouri slavery was unconstitutional. But while negotiations dragged on into February 1820, and as Monroe used the power of the ex
ecutive to lean on northern Republicans to break from the slavery-restriction ranks, Adams had a startling late-afternoon conversation with Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, a South Carolinian. Calhoun predicted that the Missouri crisis “would not produce a dissolution” of the Union. “But if it should,” Calhoun continued, “the South would of necessity be compelled to form an alliance . . . with Great Britain.” “I said that would be returning to the colonial state,” replied the shocked Adams, who remembered two wars with the old empire. “He said, yes, pretty much, but it would be forced upon them.”

  Adams fell silent. But in his diary, his pen wrote thoughts that his voice was afraid to breathe: “If the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything . . . that it must be shortly afterward followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves.” For “slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union.” The opportunity of war would mean that “the union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed.”24

  Yet, just like Calhoun and all the other cabinet men, Adams was thinking not of self-sacrifice, but of the election of 1824, Monroe’s retirement, and his own possible candidacy for president. In public his tongue stayed silent on this issue—for now. And by early 1820 Clay could offer the House an already-passed Senate bill that admitted Missouri as a slave state, and added Maine (sectioned from the northern coastlands claimed by Massachusetts) as a free state, to keep the Senate balanced. The bill also barred any more slave states from being carved out of the Louisiana Purchase above 36°30' north latitude, essentially Missouri’s southern border. Southern senators thought this deal gave up little of practical importance. One could not grow cotton and sugar in the Dakotas. When free-state representatives in the House shot down the combined compromise bill, Clay divided it into separate Missouri statehood and restriction-line bills. Then southerners, plus a few northerners, voted for Missouri statehood (with slavery), while northerners passed the 36°30' restriction line. At last the crisis was over.25

  With the Missouri statehood issue, the expansion of slavery had been presented as a stark choice, one uncomplicated, for instance, by the desire to bring Louisiana into the Union so that European empires could no longer block national expansion. Northern politicians had united almost instantaneously against it. The shock of this opposition helps explain, perhaps, why southern politicians reacted with their own startling level of emotion and threats of secession. Southern forces in Washington had relied on the Senate’s balance between free-state and slave-state delegates to accomplish further expansion—and those who took a calculating view understood that northern money, especially that represented by New Englanders (who had lagged behind the anti-expansion zealots), was unlikely to slap away the hand that fed it. Merchant elites who depended on the shipping trade still dominated New England politics. While some southerners might complain that a wall of Spanish territory to the west of Louisiana now blocked further expansion, the compromise dealmaker, Clay, thought he could add Spanish Texas to the Adams-Onis Treaty—which already ensured that enslavers would get Florida. He wasn’t able to do so, but southern leaders like President James Monroe still believed that Texas would inevitably fall to the United States. And many, both North and South, now thought that the Missouri Compromise—as it came to be known—had established a precedent of dividing the West between free and slave territory. They would come to refer to the Compromise as a “sacred compact.”26

  The Missouri controversy caused many southern enslavers to become overly sensitive to future criticism; northern opposition to the expansion of slavery, however, dissipated when the crisis was over. Before 1819, there had been no such thing as an organized opposition to slavery or its expansion among northern whites. After 1821, northern whites returned to ignoring the rights of African Americans or the consequences of slavery and its expansion for the enslaved. The few northern whites who recognized that slavery raised important moral issues—issues that went beyond the question of whether it was a stain on the national honor—did not act, but rather cast off upon Georgia-men or other bad actors the moral weight of slavery’s expansion. Moral discomfort and political interest did not coalesce into a lasting opposition to expansion. Indeed, by 1821, some southern leaders were realizing that they would have little trouble creating winning interregional coalitions that allowed for further exploitation of enslaved African Americans so long as they could make a claim that their policies supported increased democracy among whites. Northerners were doing their best to give that impression, at any rate. For instance, even as the ink dried on the Missouri bills, New York was holding a state constitutional convention. In the new document they created, delegates who wanted to undermine the power of the state’s traditional elites eliminated property requirements for white men who wanted to vote, but increased the barriers for black men.

  BY THE EARLY 1820s, it was simply the case in the United States that enslaved people could look to no one but themselves for help. And yet they were outnumbered and outgunned, so rebellion and direct resistance would lead only to certain defeat. They would have to change their world in different ways, but even building from within presented problems. Forced migration, which atomized groups and erased identities, required enslaved migrants to create new ties to each other in the constantly changing places where they found themselves. That would not be easy. But people, and indeed the world, can change from things as invisible and acts as ephemeral as words on the wind.

  One Thursday evening in October, sometime around 1820, a Kentucky enslaver named Taylor waited on his porch. Between his barn and his house waited a huge pile of corn in the husk, which needed to be prepared for storage in his barn. Soon he heard muffled sounds: groups of enslaved men and women converging through the woods from their owners’ property, singing as they came to shuck his corn.

  In one of those columns was Francis Fedric, who in 1863 recorded what happened on that night four decades before. And at the head of his line strutted the night’s star, a tall, quick-witted young man named Reuben. Reuben’s cap bristled with sticks and feathers, decorations for the chosen champion of friends and cabin-mates who planned to test their skill and heart in a competition to see which gang could shuck Taylor’s corn most swiftly. Soon, scores of men poured into the fire-lit circle where the corn lay heaped, while women moved around the edges to form an audience. The men who knew each other traded jokes and gave sizing-up glances to new ones. Reuben and another captain huddled to decide the ground rules. Then the selected pair chose up sides, who divided the corn pile in two. Taylor handed each captain the all-important jug of liquor.27

  With a rush the men dived in, grabbing ears and pulling off the shucks, while each captain leapt to the top of the pile, and, turning to his team, took center stage. His job was to lead and encourage his team by making up humorous, catchy verses that the team would then repeat or answer even as they in ceaseless motion pulled off shucks, tossed the naked ears into the “clean” pile, and passed the jug. In corn-shucking competitions, captains sung out rhymes that ridiculed other enslaved people, present or absent, by name or by implication: “Dark cloud arising like [it] going to rain / Nothing but a black gal coming down the lane.” Which dark-skinned woman steamed up with anger or sneered with contempt at these sour grapes? Other lyrics took different risks, slyly chanting half-praise of an owner. Still others talked politics in ways palatable to some owners but rankling to partisans of the other side: “Polk and Clay went to war / Polk came back with a broken jaw.” Some even criticized, for those who had ears to hear—“The speculator bought my wife and child”—this was a slow dragged-out verse—“And carried her clear away.” Or they demanded more of the liquor that fueled the long-night labor of shucking—“Boss man, boss man, please gimme my time; Boss man, boss man, for I’m most broke down.”28


  They worked on past midnight. Whiskey flickered in their bellies and laughter roared, keeping them warm despite the chilly fall air. The smell of the ox roasting a few dozen yards away urged on the rings of grabbing, tearing men. The piles shrank. The captains’ hoarse voices sped the rhythm. At two in the morning, Reuben’s band frenetically, triumphantly shucked their last ears and rushed to surround the others’ sweating circle, waving their hats and singing to the defeated, “Oh, oh! fie! for shame!” But the shame did not sting for long, for now, behind Reuben, they all marched down to Taylor’s house. He waited there on the porch with his wife and daughter. The enslaved men crowded around it and sang one last time to Reuben’s lead: “I’ve just come to let you know / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / [Captain] The upper end has beat / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / . . . [Captain] I’ll bid you, fare you well / [Men] Oh, oh, oh! / [Captain] For I’m going back again / [Men] Oh, oh, oh!” Then they all went back together to shuck the last ears in the losing team’s pile, after which all the corn-shuckers sat down at long tables to feast.29

  The fun and local fame that enslaved people won at such occasions were as fleeting as the meal. Two weeks later, thirty of the men who shucked corn at Taylor’s on that night were sold to buyers who were now, in the late 1810s, beginning to comb Kentucky every December. Reuben was among the first “dragged from his family,” recalled Fedric: “My heart is full when I think of his sad lot.” Yet even as raw memories of his own sale from Virginia flooded his thoughts, Fedric could not forget Reuben’s night of triumph, the way he had led more than one hundred men with virtuosity of wit and artistry of tongue. For that night those three hundred men had all ridden on his gift despite everything that hung over them. And Reuben had soared highest of all.30