The Half Has Never Been Told
Page 31
The next day, the rain falls. Water molecules leach through the seed coat. The helixes awaken. They twist, shudder, break apart, draw more molecules to their open spaces, building their own mirrors. From them march streams of chemical messengers; orders that compel whole cells to stretch and split into twins. The embryo plant bulges. It shatters the seed hull from within and forces the stem up toward unseen light.
Squatting in the creek, the girl washes herself frantically. She does not know that if the planter’s seed is motile enough, it has already journeyed up into her hours ago, questing for her own. If this is her time, they will meet.
The green shoot breaches the surface. Tiny pores gasp carbon dioxide, and cell membranes gulp in the life-sustaining molecules. The first rounds of photosynthesis begin. Triumphantly the erecting stem spreads two cotyledons, baby leaves that all winter long have been tucked like arms on a fetus.
All across the field, thousands of other shoots are doing exactly the same thing. Now they can consume Mississippi’s long arcs of sunlight, heavy rains, and the incredible chocolate soil that river and forest built. The local ecosystem struggles against this invader. But the cotton plant has plow and hoe as its allies. And it is rammed into this dirt by command of desires equipped with yet more powerful tools, hands that will keep these little plants clear of weeds for four months. For the four after they will dominate this field, shading out every other plant that challenges their possession, making this field a grid of revenue on which only one species lives. By mid-August they will explode into an unnatural whitescape that lasts until winter falls or picking finishes.
Yet whether the seed’s seed will live on is an open question. Its DNA codes for a life cycle in which it grows into a tree that lives many years in a tropical climate. Here, though, this plant dies with the first winter frost. By that time most of its seed will have been picked with the cotton bolls, separated by the gin, and discarded. Already in the early 1830s many planters buy each year’s seed from breeders who create new varieties and promise great yield. The white entrepreneur will risk many things, but not the chance that this hybrid kernel’s own seed will fail to run true and leave his production anemic in a year of high prices.
This tree-turned-into-a-bush, in short, is fucked. So, too, is the soil. When the enslaved men broke it open for the entrepreneur, he fucked this dirt with them as his tool. He fucked this field. He might fuck their wives out in the woods, or in the corn when it is high. Or their daughter in the kitchen. Then the next new girl he buys at New Orleans.
But he fucks the men, too. He plants in all his hands the seeds of his dreams. In fact, he plants them all, men and women, in this place, just as he plants as those seeds. Plants, ecosystems, people strain to live their lives according to their own codes, but he twists their efforts into helixes of his own design. He takes their product, keeps it for himself. He breaks open the skin on their backs with his fucking lash, striking their lives with his power, marking them and their world with his desire.
So even as the cotton plant’s internal programming raised two little leaves to flutter in the April breeze off the Mississippi River, entrepreneurs’ desires dominated it. In a broader sense, much of this story about the expansion of slavery and how it shaped the lives of black folks and the wider world is driven by the white men who tried to impose their codes on everything around them. Those codes included, above all, their ideas about what made them men. White men’s code of masculinity shaped all lives on slavery’s frontier: shaped the costs of being black, the benefits of being white, the costs of being female. White men used the code as both weapon and motivator against each other in battles for political equality and access to the economic benefits of slavery. And the seed sowed by entrepreneurs sprouted in ways both cultivated and unforeseen: into the two-party political system emergent in the 1830s, the economic boom that shaped the years from 1829 to 1837, and ultimately the Civil War, which the boom’s aftermath planted. By the time 1837 came, all would be different—national politics, slavery’s economic status, the South’s relationship to the rest of the United States, even how enslavers felt about slavery. Above all, this decade, perhaps the most pivotal in American history, unraveled and re-knit and scattered and chopped short and harvested and broke and consumed the lives of millions of enslaved people.
THE NEW CROP SPREAD far in space and in time, but to understand the DNA of the white men who planted it, one must look back to the old states where it was first synthesized. In an early 1832 letter to his business partner, North Carolina–based slave trader Tyre Glen coined a verb that cut straight to that essence. As an aside from an otherwise ordinary discussion of trafficking-in-humans, he noted that “because of a recent bill in the General Assembly, potterizing now carries the punishment of death.”3
“Potterizing” was a neologism. It evoked the recent case of “Bob Potter,” as Glen called him. Robert Potter had been born around 1800 into a poor family in Granville County, North Carolina. In the Granville of Potter’s childhood, an old tobacco district with worn-out fields and an entrenched planter oligarchy, there was no economic mobility except by geographic migration. Indeed, while poor white men like his father were free, and white, they lacked key rights that distinguished the independent from the dependent. North Carolina’s constitution, for instance, excluded most white men who did not own property from voting for the state legislature. Restricted voting perpetuated oligarchy. Planter legislators levied taxes on all to build infrastructure that carried little but planters’ crops to market; established state banks that lent only to the wealthy; and created a state university that educated only planters’ sons.4
Yet as a boy, Potter always stood out from Granville County’s other second-class white citizens. A local gentleman took an interest in him, granting him unusual favors: a free classical education from his son’s tutor, and later, appointment as a midshipman in the US Navy. The kinds of favors showered on Potter could easily co-opt a lower-class white man. Look at Henry Clay, another social climber. Born the son of a small Virginia slave-owner, Clay moved to Kentucky and became the best rich man’s lawyer in the land-speculation game. Days after his first arrival in Congress, awed colleagues made Clay Speaker of the House. Later he became a senator, secretary of state, and presidential candidate. Above all, Clay was the architect of the “American System” of economic development. Development-minded elites loved his ideas for domestic markets, support for banks, and government funding of infrastructure projects.
But many less wealthy white men disliked the idea of the American System, fearing it shed benefits unequally. Even as they moved southwest, it seemed to them that the political system was widening the gulf between rich and poor. Although by the 1820s all white men in the new states could vote, except in Louisiana and Mississippi, rich men’s concerns still set the political agenda. Mississippi’s legislature, for instance, chartered the state’s Planters’ Bank in 1830, subsidizing it with $2 million of taxpayers’ money.5
Potter spent his teenage years at sea, learning how to turn charisma into practical leadership. But when he returned to Granville in 1821, he found that things there were as they’d been when he’d left for the sea a decade before. In the zero-sum world of the decaying southeast, sustained by slave-trade remittances, Potter immediately ran into limits intended to remind him that he should defer to his betters. In 1824, Potter ran for the state legislature, but elite factions conspired to ensure victory for old-money planter Jesse Bynum. The furious Potter challenged Bynum to a duel. The victor declined, for Potter was no gentleman. Potter ambushed Bynum and cracked his skull with a stick.6
In Western Europe, from the fifteenth century to the start of the twentieth, the homicide rate plummeted from 41 per 100,000 to 1.4. In Western societies, the state claimed a monopoly on violence, and the law became the legally and culturally approved way to settle individual disputes. But the great outlier in this picture was the South. Even leaving aside the unmeasured violence committed against the ensl
aved, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the white-on-white homicide rate in Virginia was around 9 per 100,000—eight times that of New Hampshire.7
At the most basic level, white people fought and killed each other in the old slaveholding states to prove that they were not slaves. Enslaved men were not allowed to defend their pride, their manhood, or anything else. They had to endure the penetration of their skin, their lives, their families. Therefore, the best way to insult a white man was to treat him like a black man, as if he could not strike back, and the best way to disprove that was to strike back. In Robert Potter’s North Carolina, courts often denied poor white men that right. There was much talk of charging Potter for assault and battery on Bynum. The court may have had the discretion to punish him with a slap on the wrist, giving him a sentence like Austin Woolfolk’s one-dollar fine for beating up Quaker editor Benjamin Lundy—or may have done something much harsher and more humiliating.
Before any court case arose, it was time for the next legislative elections. Potter and Bynum met once more in electoral combat. This time, Potter won the majority of the county’s votes. Granville’s small farmers, desperately trying to hang on to their property, and with it their status as voting citizens, appreciated his combative unwillingness to accept the insults of privilege. They gave him the right to strike back, for he punched for them. As soon as he joined the legislature, Potter began to fire off impatient proposals that directly challenged wealthy slaveholders’ grip on North Carolina. His first effort was an attempt to create a new state university: what he called a “Political College.” This would train young men to be leaders, but would accept no student from a family whose property was valued at more than $1,000. One hundred of these young men—one hundred Robert Potters—would graduate every year. His fellow legislators, educated at the state university in Chapel Hill, were shocked at the attempt to overturn their power and blocked his proposals.8
Potter then turned to the state-chartered banks, charging that they foreclosed on small farmers even as they rolled over debts for wealthy men. Potter’s constituents—or most of them—liked his initiatives. In 1828 they elected him to Congress, and again in 1830. But during the summer of 1831, as he visited home between congressional sessions, things took a strange turn. Potter became convinced that his wife had committed adultery with both a Methodist minister and a seventeen-year-old neighbor from a wealthy family. On August 28, 1831, Potter kidnapped both of those men. He took them out into the woods. Then he castrated them. Then he released them.9
Within a day, Potter had been captured. He was then locked in a cell at Oxford, the county seat. But from behind bars, as he awaited trial, Potter penned a defense of his actions. His “Appeal” was, he said, an effort “as a man—as a member of society”—to explain himself “to the world,” but especially “to you, my constituents.” He justified his castration of two white men, honored members of their society, as self-defense. They had tried to unman him first, “stab[bing] me most vitally—they had hurt me beyond all cure—they had polluted the very sanctuary of my soul.” Their cuckolding left him “the most degraded man” in Granville, and he now “felt that I could no longer maintain my place among men.” He had been subjected to the same humiliation that enslaved men had to endure. The only possible solution was to wipe off “the disgrace that had been put upon me, with the blood of those who had fixed it there.” Like a proper gentleman who shot someone in a duel to erase an insult, Potter believed that only an act of greater violation than what had been committed against him would erase the unmanning mark.10
Rich men were almost never prosecuted for dueling. Poor men involved in less deadly fights could face long jail terms. But Potter’s crime wasn’t specifically listed on the law books, and the most serious charge that the local courts could find with which to charge him was “maiming,” with a maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment. This was why the state legislature passed a new law punishing future castrations of white men with execution.
Two years was a long time to sit in a jail cell, however, and while he was in there, the legislature granted his wife a divorce. It also allowed her to change the last name of their two children. The law now said that Potter was not a father and his children were not his seed. In that way, too, he was like a slave. Still, the planters of northeastern North Carolina had not heard the name Potter for the final time. After his 1834 release, Potter ran again for the state legislature. He won a contest marred with violence, which Granville County remembered as the Potter War. But the legislature soon contrived a bogus charge of cheating at gambling, and expelled him. This time Potter obliged his opponents and left. Like countless other troublemakers, Potter headed first for New Orleans. There, he would plant anew.11
Yet it was not certain that white men who came from Potter’s origins would find escape on the frontier from the constricting economic, social, and political inequality of the old states. And if most of them had more ordinary gifts, many of them were still Bob Potters in their own way. This is one reason why, from the earliest days, violent conflicts over status, reputation, and pride of membership, access, and recognition were even more common on slavery’s frontiers than in the older slave states. In the cotton counties of middle Georgia in 1800, for instance, the homicide level was approximately 45 per 100,000 whites, five times that of Virginia. Three decades later, the rate in Florida’s cotton districts was 70 per 100,000, fifty times the northeastern rate.12
One North Carolina migrant wrote back home that in his new Alabama community, “no man [is] safe from violence, unless a weapon is conspicuously displayed on his person.” In North Carolina, he continued, “it is considered disreputable to carry a dirk or a pistol. [But] in Alabama, it is considered singularity and imprudence to be without one: in fact, nine persons in ten . . . you will see with the dirk handle projecting from their bosoms.” When pistols and dirks weren’t handy, white men used anything and everything else to try to intimidate, humiliate, and kill each other: teeth, rocks, nails, cowhide whips, canes, pieces of lumber. Letters from the frontier are riddled with shootings, stabbings, cuttings, gougings, horse-whippings, and other brutal assaults on everyone who had the misfortune to meet them. So and so “had his thumb cut off . . . in consequence of a bite by Bob Hutchins at the races”; “he had the impudence to call my wife & mother whores, & I beat him”; “they will hardly hang a man here for willful murder, and they do not regard taking the life of a man anymore than I would a snake”; “he coughed up a buckshot”; there were “some angry words out in the yard, [then] Dudley shot Rowan in the right side”; “the woods were searched and the body of a man was found with two bullet holes in the forehead and the whole of the hind part of his skull stove in.”13
“They’re mighty free with pistols down there,” an escaped slave told an audience in 1842. “If a man don’t resent anything that’s put upon him, they call him ‘Poke-easy.’” The way white men saw it, being poke-easy was for men toiling in the field, and for the women out there, too—people either forced or willing to be the helpless target. Dirks, pistols, and physical assault asserted that one was un-poke-able. Little boys in the southwestern towns learned to fight for their honor as soon as they could walk. “Catch him down,” said a Florida father watching his son fight another boy, “[then] bite him, chaw off his lip”—or else “you’ll never be a man.” A man must be ready to fight on almost any day, from cradle to grave. And old men dying of alcoholism scrabbled frantically under their beds for stashed revolvers, to shoot the phantoms that still rushed toward them.14
Wealthy men well-positioned to grab the right-handed rewards generated by ever-growing productivity in the cotton fields committed more than their share of frontier violence. But also characteristic was the type of Alabama employer-employee conflict that John Pelham described to his North Carolina uncle in 1833: “I had a falling out with Mr. Bynum (I was not quite as submissive as he would wish an overseer). He threatened to cane me (he has three sons grown). I told him the
whole family could not doe that and dared them to try it.” Bynum wanted deference, but Pelham refused to be submissive. He was an employee, but also, he asserted, an equal. You don’t cane an equal. You cane someone to prove that they are not your equal. Pelham made Bynum back down, and now the rich man had to find another overseer. Meanwhile, Pelham found someone willing to give him credit—to believe his claim-to-status—“I had money and friends and determined to alter my business I went to Florence . . . and bought me a good assortment of grocerys and brought them to this place where I find I am doing a good business.”15
In personal encounters, less wealthy white men who moved to the new states became increasingly confrontational toward those who dared to act like their betters. Tens of thousands of Pelhams, just like the original Potter, also wanted to force political recognition of their equality. When property-owning citizens in South Carolina and Kentucky decided in the 1790s to expand the franchise to all adult white men, regardless of their property-owning status, they probably assumed that educated, wealthy men from the upper class would still hold all offices and set the agenda of politics. This is essentially what happened at first. Many successful frontier politicians were like George Poindexter. He arrived in Mississippi from Virginia in the first decade of the nineteenth century and became the author of Mississippi’s first legal code and the Natchez river–county elite’s political champion. The “Natchez Nabobs” were few in number, but they controlled the state legislature, and so they made Poindexter their US senator.16
Yet, by the time Poindexter’s star was reaching its zenith, the impact of poor white migrants from the old states on frontier elections began to change the political game. The 1832 Mississippi state constitution removed the last few restrictions on white male voting. The broadened electorate brought in a state legislature that told Poindexter to cast his Senate votes against banking policies that benefited his cronies. He responded with the claim that the common voter could not tell him what to do: “If . . . the people of Mississippi desire to be represented in the national legislature by a mere machine, to be wielded by the arm of [popular] power, they have made an unfortunate selection in me.”17