The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  One of the most famous speculators, Austin Woolfolk of Baltimore, created a number of innovations that produced increasingly efficient market connections between the old states and the slave frontier. He set up branches of his firm in both selling and buying areas, allowing his trading activities to run more or less continuously. In districts ripe with buyable slaves, such as Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Austin Woolfolk and his brother John used advertisements to generate a groundswell of brand recognition. Soon competitors did the same, such as Samuel Reynolds, who came to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1831 and placed an ad in the Easton Republican Star. It proclaimed that he wouldn’t leave the Easton Hotel until he bought “100 NEGROES,” “from the age of twelve to twenty-five years, for which he will give higher prices than any real purchaser that is now in the market.” Young Frederick Douglass, who was sent back from Baltimore (where he had secretly learned to read) to rural Talbot County—Easton was the county seat—remembered that for those who didn’t read the newspapers, Woolfolk’s employees tacked up “flaming ‘hand-bills’”—printed in loud typefaces—“headed CASH FOR NEGROES.” The Woolfolks, who bought Jacob Green’s mother, paid cash. But they refused to haggle, Green recalled—they typically offered a standard rate for individuals of a particular age and sex.9

  Just to the north of Talbot County was Kent County, another decayed rural area whose enslavers profited more from selling people than they did from selling tobacco. Thousands of whites left Kent County for greener pastures. So did African Americans, such as nine-year-old Henry Highland Garnet, who escaped to Pennsylvania with his parents in 1824. Garnet grew up to become an advocate of African-American self-determination, famous for speeches like his 1842 “Address to the Slaves,” which called for violent revolt. But most of the African Americans who left Kent County went south with speculators, not north to freedom. In 1829 through 1831, the certificates from New Orleans show, slave traders bought 100 slaves in Kent County and took them to Louisiana. Kent County at the time had about 10,000 people, 3,000 of whom were enslaved, so 100 sales equaled more than 3 percent of the enslaved.10

  Look even closer: 97 of the Kent County slaves sold in New Orleans were between the ages of ten and thirty, and 79 were between fourteen and twenty-three, the age group that held most of those who were sold as “hands.” Look with the eyes of Methodist minister and Kent County native John Dixon Long. He saw the result of these sales at the water’s edge where those to be transported were to be loaded onto a ferry. A crowd of mothers, fathers, and friends waited to say goodbye to one out of every ten young men and women in the community. Armed white men kept the two crowds apart, for although a coffle-chain already bound the men and boys, everyone was a potential escape threat. Not even the women were allowed into the bushes. “I have seen [the men], at the Ferry,” Long remembered, “under the necessity of violating the decencies of nature before the women, not being permitted to retire.” They did the best they could, the opposite sex turning away in kindness. Then the barge grounded on the sand and the time came to say goodbye: “‘Farewell, mother’; ‘farewell, child’; ‘farewell, John’; ‘farewell, Bill.’”11

  This scene was replayed at countless southeastern riversides and canal edges, crossroads, and eventually railroad depots every year up until the Civil War. In the 1820s, migrating enslavers and new traders moved approximately 35,000 enslaved people from Maryland and the District of Columbia; 76,000 from Virginia; and 20,000 from North Carolina—and that was only the beginning (see Table 1.1). Speculators repeatedly tapped areas that had large enslaved populations and anemic cash-crop possibilities, skimming off the cream of uncounted parents’ lives: young men and women, boys and girls. Of the enslaved children aged ten and under in Virginia in 1820, only three of every four who lived would still be in Virginia ten years later. The figures for Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina were all similar.12

  Charles Ball had feared the Georgia-men, but beginning in the 1820s, the possibility of being sold to the southwestern interests increased dramatically. In a single year, a given person’s risk might be lower than the 10 percent chance faced by young people in Kent County. But the cumulative risk of being sold at some point in the course of the three decades of one’s “salable” years was close to 50 percent for each individual. These odds also meant that many enslaved people experienced something like what Moses Grandy endured. Enslaved in eastern North Carolina during the 1820s, he watched as his wife, sister, and six children were all sold to the interstate trade. All in all, the nonstop siphoning-off stopped the demographic growth of Virginia’s slave population in its tracks between 1820 and 1860.13

  Image 6.2. In the 1820s and early 1830s, the domestic slave trade from the Chesapeake and Carolinas expanded rapidly. Formerly enslaved people and white observers alike noted the upsurge in activity. This was one of the first graphical representations of both the domestic slave trade and the pervasive family separations it caused. Print c. 1830. Library of Congress.

  The new slave trade enabled eastern slaveholders to cash in potential wealth on distant markets. Some used the new trade to measure out their slave forces by the spoonful to the speculators, which allowed indebted planters to hold off creditors and stay in the Southeast. Other enslavers sold a few slaves to finance their own resettlement, or to set up one or more family members in the southwestern cotton-growing areas with young slaves so as to make a fortune that would save the old family establishment. “I have been disappointed in getting the negroes I expected of Mrs. Banister,” wrote S. C. Archer, who was trying to get in on the slave-trade business. “She intends sending her son Robert out [to Mississippi] as soon as he is old enough to manage all of her negroes for her.”14

  Individual entrepreneurs penetrated different states in different ways and to different degrees. In South Carolina, collectively they produced a highly centralized output to interstate trade, in which most slaves destined for the New Orleans market were sold in Charleston. Judging from their height—65.3 inches, on average, for adult males, 3 inches shorter than southern white men—most of the South Carolina slaves who were sold came from the underfed and malarial rice plantations of the low country (see Table 6.3). But that didn’t stop Leon Chabert of New Orleans, the trader responsible for a large percentage of South Carolina purchases, from basing his business on them.

  North Carolina, in contrast, was a terrain of vast rural stretches and little infrastructure. Its slave trade focused on a few towns, such as Salisbury in Rowan County in the western Piedmont. And here a series of men dominated the buying and transporting of slaves from the surrounding catchment area. In 1829–1830, it was James Huie. Within a few years Huie was displaced by local sheriff Tyre Glen and his confederates R. J. Puryear and Isaac Jarratt. Craven County, on the coastal sound, was the nexus of another significant trade, a concentration point for slaves brought in by sellers from outlying districts. A third major point was Chowan County in the northeastern swamps, where the county seat was the port town of Edenton.15

  In Virginia the slave market was even more widespread. In 1829–1831, forty-one of the state’s counties sent at least fifteen people to Louisiana for sale. The whole state was, in the words of a former slave, “a regular slave market.” Professional slave-buyers traveled up and down every road and canal, peering into every courthouse town. Slave-selling financed the remaking of the Old Dominion’s political economy: Francis Rives reinvested profits from his Alabama slave-trading journeys in a coal-dealing firm that eventually supplied early railroads and factories with fuel. Thus the market for human flesh funded a new economy that was to be less dependent on plantation-style production, although newly dug canals kept bringing boats from the foothills of the mountains to the slave market in Richmond.16

  Well-supplied with tempting cash by profit-savvy southeastern banks, slave-buyers in the 1820s and onward disciplined sellers to bring in exactly the kind of people the southwestern market sought. For instance, when Jacob Bell sold twenty-year-old Lewis to slave trad
er John Maydwell on September 1, 1830, in Kent County, Maryland, Maydwell was getting Bell’s most valuable property. Perhaps Bell would’ve preferred to keep Lewis, his only adult male slave, to work for him in Kent County. But Lewis would yield Maydwell $500 in profit when he was resold in New Orleans two months later. And Lewis was typical of those whom the traders extracted from the old states’ enslavers. First, he was young: 84 percent of those bought in the Southeast for New Orleans between 1829 and 1831 were between the ages of eleven and twenty-four. Second, he was male, and third, he was sold alone. Two-thirds of those brought southwest to New Orleans were male, and most were sold solo, without family or spouses. Even among the women of childbearing age, 93 percent were sold without children. “One night I lay down on the straw mattress with my mammy, and the next morning I woke up and she was gone,” recalled one former slave, Viney Baker.17

  TABLE 6.3. MEAN HEIGHTS OF ADULTS, BY STATE OF ORIGIN, FROM NEW ORLEANS SLAVE SALES, 1829–1831

  Source: Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans.

  Austin Woolfolk’s corporate organization included systematic channels of communication and exchange, widespread advertising, consistent pricing, cash payments, and fixed locations. He and his relatives concentrated people at fixed points in preparation for making large-scale shipments. Moses Grandy saw a set of Woolfolk’s barges coming into Norfolk, Virginia, from the Eastern Shore. Or, rather, he heard the boats, “laden with cattle and coloured people,” easing into the slack water by the docks. “Cattle were lowing for their calves, and the men and women were crying for their husbands, wives, or children.” The Woolfolks also shipped slaves across the Chesapeake to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Employees there offloaded enslaved passengers by night and marched them east up Pratt Street through the heart of today’s downtown Baltimore. Their “dead, heavy footsteps” and “piteous cries” woke young Frederick Douglass, who was living there in his enslaver’s townhouse. When the chained gang reached the end of the street, it was driven through an underground passageway that led up and out into the courtyard of a private “jail” designed for the trade. No more warehouses, barns, and taverns. From the jail, the Woolfolks sent slaves out to New Orleans by the sea route in regular dispatches, often renting entire vessels that carried one hundred or more people at a time. The vertical integration of this multistate enterprise enabled Austin Woolfolk, who had started as a mere Georgia-man, to pile up so much wealth that he could now play the grand gentleman. When University of North Carolina professor Ethan Allen Andrews visited Woolfolk at his Pratt Street pen in the 1830s, neighbors told him not only that Austin was “a most mild and indulgent master,” but also that his cash payments and standard prices proved he was “an upright and scrupulously honest man.”18

  In the old Southeast, white people bought and sold black people on exceptional days. “It was customary,” wrote ex-slave Allen Parker of the early nineteenth century, “for those having slaves to let, to take them to some prominent place, such as a point where two roads crossed, on the first day of the New Year.” Quarterly court days also generated holiday crowds sufficient for community auctions, while Sundays, when gentlemen traded horses and people in the yard outside of the church, were also typical sale days. The certificates from New Orleans reveal, however, that from the 1820s onward traders like Woolfolk were buying slaves not on a traditional calendar of rural time, but in countless individual transactions throughout a new business year. Of the 4,000-plus certificates from southeastern states in the Notarial Archives, 89 percent were created on weekdays—Monday through Friday, which constitute only 71 percent of the week. One reason: individual sales on individual days in “business” places (such as the bar of the Easton Hotel, where Austin’s brother, John, met sellers) eliminated a problem: the possibility of staged auction bids by locals who might collude with sellers to drive up the prices. Slave buying and selling was no longer extraordinary, but ordinary, something businessmen did on business days. For despite Austin Woolfolk’s paternalistic act, his business was separating spouses and orphaning children. He and the new slave traders transformed the selling of human beings in the southeastern United States into a modern retrovirus, an economic organism that respected no ties or traditions and rewired everything around itself so that capitalism’s enzymes of creation and destruction could flow unimpeded.19

  At the same time, the new convenience of slave-selling also met sellers’ desires and needs. Soon enough, authors building on free-floating cultural excuses would publish plantation novels that painted Chesapeake enslavers as reluctant slave-sellers who were driven by debt or other forms of catastrophe to send family property to the market in order to raise money. But the pattern of sales does not suggest that enslavers were paternalistic planters who had fallen on hard times, and who were thus being forced to sell off slaves to make ends meet. Instead, they were men and women who were extracting cash from small portions of their total reserves of human wealth whenever they wanted it. More than half of the slaves in the South were owned by whites who claimed twenty or more people as their property. Two-thirds of the sales in the 1829–1831 records were executed by slave owners who sold no more than four slaves during this time span. If they had been hit by catastrophe, surely they would have sold more slaves all at once. “I am in want of money,” wrote B. S. King of Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1825, even as he mumbled about the moral repercussions of selling a man away from his wife. In the end, “I am in want of money” usually won. “You know every time they needed money they would sell a slave,” said Robert Falls. Traders calibrated their innovations not only for southwestern entrepreneurs who wanted hands, but also to provide a highly useful service to southeastern white folks—the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice.20

  THE DOCUMENTS CREATED IN William Boswell’s New Orleans notary office reveal another reason why the Missouri crisis was not even a blip on the long upward climb of slavery’s expansion, which in the 1820s saw the transfer of 150,000 enslaved people from the southeastern states to the southwestern states and territories and an increase in US cotton production from 350,000 four-hundred-pound bales in 1819 to more than 800,000 in 1830. The name with which Ellen’s seller acknowledged his receipt of Barthelemy Bonny’s $450 was a strange one, especially for a man who fished the seas of Kent County and its surroundings. Granville Sharp Pierce’s parents had chosen to name him after a different kind of disciple: the eighteenth-century Anglican priest Granville Sharp. That original Granville had been known for several things, including his research on the grammar of biblical Greek. But Sharp was most famous as an international abolitionist. In the early 1770s, James Somersett, an enslaved man born in Virginia, was brought by his enslaver to London. There he escaped and sought Granville Sharp’s help: the runaway wanted to sue for freedom in a London court. Somersett won the case. The decision ruled that slaves became free the moment they set foot on Great Britain itself, although slavery remained legal in the rest of Britain’s empire. Sharp next attempted to convince the British authorities to prosecute the captain of the slave ship Zong for ordering his crew to murder 122 Africans in the middle of the Atlantic when water supplies were running low. Sharp also helped to found the colony of Sierra Leone, where the Royal Navy (once the British government abolished British participation in the international slave trade in 1808) would land Africans recovered from captured slave ships.21

  Granville Sharp was emblematic of an earlier generation of English-speaking antislavery activists. Their late eighteenth-century offensive targeted the first slavery, especially that of the sugar islands. That system depended, above all, on the Middle Passage, they charged, and they sought to limit slavery by ending the Atlantic trade. The American version of this long-gone antislavery movement had helped to emancipate slaves in marginal areas of the North. What these movements had in common was that they were composed of elite men who were trying to convince centralized power—Parliament, Congress, state legislatures elected by pro
perty-owning citizens—to mandate change through legislative or royal decree. Despite its elitism, Granville Sharp’s generation did shift the center of polite society’s opinion against the Middle Passage. By 1808, the governments of both the United States and Great Britain had outlawed their citizens’ participation in the international slave trade. Sharp and his allies had concentrated on the international slave trade because they believed that without the continual importation of new slaves from Africa, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean would die out.22

  Yet even as northern states were freeing most of their last slaves in the 1820s, the claim that slavery harmed the American political economy looked less persuasive every day in light of cotton’s astonishing profits. The interstate slave trade mocked the hopes of the abolitionists that slavery would die on its own. And Granville Sharp’s generation had not been replaced. No substantive opposition to the expansion of slavery existed among white Americans. After the Missouri Compromise, active white opposition to slavery dwindled toward the vanishing point. Most of those who conceded that slavery was morally wrong in the abstract refused to do anything concrete about it. It was easy to blame Georgia-men for “excesses,” as all the while the speculator upgraded the Georgia-man. It was easy to propose the transportation of African Americans “back” to an Africa that they had never seen. It would never happen. John Quincy Adams, for instance, only needed to calculate on his fingers to see that hoping for an end to slavery through “colonization” was a “day-dream.” And all the while, every new hand in every new cotton field meant markets for northern produce, more foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials for northern industry, and more opportunities for young Vermonters and Pennsylvanians who moved to Natchez. Slavery’s defenders had won the arguments that mattered. Even a man whose parents had named him after Granville Sharp had become a speculator.23