The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  BACK ON THE FIRST day of January, American troops had been digging in along the Rio Grande five hundred miles to the west of where old John Devereux, Julien Devereux’s Virginia-bred father, had been starting another volume of his diary in Rusk County, Texas. The day opened year 1846 of the Christian era, noted the old gentleman from his desk at the family’s new slave labor camp, but also year 1259 “of the Higera or flight of Mahomet” from Mecca to Medina. John on the page still lived in the curious eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but John the old enslaver dwelled on the rough leading edge of the nineteenth-century economy’s commodity frontier. Between environment and advancing age, John’s language had become less complex, his capitalization sporadic and syntax roughshod. Meanwhile, his son Julien, who like many of their old neighbors had run away from his debts, was preparing to mix up another brew of credit leverage from worldwide financial networks, heated and transformed by the fuel of labor productivity extracted from commodified people.86

  John had fired the previous year’s overseer. Although it was New Year’s Day, all “hands commenced grubbing . . . under management of Negro Scot.” They were clearing land steadily. On the 2nd he heard them “in good spirits and happy singing & caroling at their work except poor henry who will soon be emancipated from slavery by death.” “It’s a cool frosty morning, and the niggers go to work,” Harriet Jones remembered the men singing on a similar Texas labor camp, “with their hoes on their shoulders and without a bit o’ shirt.” On they toiled to prep as many acres of bare dirt as they could for cotton seeds. This effort became more high-pitched once John Devereux decided to hire a white overseer. Meanwhile, forced migrants tried once more to shape their lives so that they could survive in this next new place. At the end of January, Devereux captive Eliza Henry Maria married Sam Loftus, a man owned by another local enslaver. On February 23, a runaway from a nearby labor camp, “Bill L.,” showed up “Choctaw’d drunk.” The “hands” convinced Bill to go back to his owner. Down on the Brazos, where enslavers had already developed a substantial complex of sugar and cotton labor camps, runaways could hope to reach the Mexican border. Bill was too far north and east for that. The people at Devereux’s labor camp probably warned him that his fate could be akin to that of another runaway, a woman who had been recaptured in nearby Tyler County. Her owner dragged her back home behind his horse and tied her to the bedstead. The next morning he tried to cut off her breasts. Then he rammed a hot iron poker down her throat. Survivors of these East Texas camps remembered that out there on that frontier, one could always “hear the whip a-poppin’.”87

  On March 12, John also had a guest: “An old man on foot”—a white man—“called this morning and got breakfast,” John wrote. The man “had laid out all night in the rain—says he is a millwright and was born in Augusta,” in the Shenandoah Valley into which southwest-bound coffles descended after crossing the Rockfish Gap through the Blue Ridge. He knew “the Springers and the Landrums,” old Augusta families from John’s childhood. But from there the barriers of fortune and class lowered on the conversation. The sun rose higher. The poor man stood up and said his goodbye. He walked silently down the road, in his own way representing another life ground under by the rolling frontier of the modern slave economy.

  Image 8.4. After the wreck of so many entrepreneurial plans in the wake of the bursting of the slave credit bubble, enslavers increasingly portrayed their own operations as being driven by paternalist, familial impulses—rather than pecuniary ones. And, as the title of this illustration suggests, enslavers rejected abolitionists’ claims that their society was somehow an un-American tumor that should be excised from the national body. Edward William Clay, “America, 1841.” Library of Congress.

  John knew that he, too, would die a thousand miles from home. He had more to hope for than an old age of sleeping rough and begging for manuallabor jobs. But the conversation with the wanderer led him to assess his life. John had lost four of his six children, and he was a widower twice over. Yet he admitted that he was much better off than, for instance, Job. Each of his own wives had been “worth a cowpen full such as” the complaining spouse who had burdened the Old Testament figure. And perhaps Julien’s second bride would be better than the first. John hadn’t heard from Julien in months, but he was on his way. After the worst of the legal storm blew over, the younger Devereux had returned to Alabama to pick up several dozen slaves who had been stashed on an ally’s place since 1841. Now, on March 20, “about 12 o’clock,” a white employee arrived with “three wagons and the negroes from Montgomery,” and John relished both their “excitement at meeting with the Negroes here and Julien’s letter giving information that he had sold out and all was coming.” Even better, the letter told “of the birth of a son.” The news “operated powerfully on my sympathies,” John wrote. Tears choked the old man. Julien, remarried, now had an heir of his blood, and thus John did as well. A new generation of enslavers was emerging.

  Just a few days more, and Julien arrived. Overseer, three other employees, Julien, and John: six white men were now at the new house, where only a few months ago there had been none but the old man. All day and into the evening, the slaves worked the raw East Texas soil around the new cotton shoots. The United States had stretched its borders to incorporate these acres, these white men, and their property. Slave prices were climbing. With the promise that the US government would fund Texas bonds, surely credit would pump again through the veins that oxygenated the endeavors of southwestern entrepreneurs. Further southwest, cannon boomed and men marched, pushing the border onward. Here, a woman set supper out. All six men sat down to eat, “which,” John noted, “filled all our chairs and table.” The world had come right side up again.

  9

  BACKS

  1839–1850

  THE GIRL GIGGLED IN her pew, looking back at seventeen newly emancipated Louisianans, frozen in the church entrance. Mid-step between the doorway and a sea of staring faces stood Anna and her four children; Sarah and Frankey, both eleven, no parents; Betsy and her son; Maria, Margery, and their daughters; Little Sam; Jose; Rose; nine-year-old Amos. The big red turbans the women wore had been stylish decades ago in New Orleans, when they’d been sold. Now they screamed country and slave to the Boston streets.1

  A hand tightened on the knowing girl’s arm, jerked down, pulled her around to face the pulpit. She needed to remember. Here at Unitarian King’s Chapel, on Beacon Street, she was also a visitor—black Bostonians usually spent their Sundays elsewhere, such as the new A.M.E. church. The day’s assigned lesson was solidarity. Like many of the other visitors in the pews, her mother was what we’d today call an activist. She might have been at 1843’s huge Faneuil Hall protest meeting, two years earlier. Slave-catchers had come up to Boston in disguise. They had found George Latimer, an escapee from Virginia slavery. He and his wife, Rebecca, were living like free people. The kidnappers had seized the Latimers and thrown them into the Boston jail. But word had gotten out, and soon three hundred free black men were surrounding the Boston courthouse. Their aim was to keep George and Rebecca there until the meeting at Faneuil could raise $600. Eventually, George’s Virginia owner decided that taking the money and making out George’s manumission papers might be his best option.

  Like these seventeen, many of the other African Americans in the church had also been adjusting to Boston. Some were runaways. Others had been forced to leave the South by laws that were designed to make life unbearable for free people of color. They were all in their way forced migrants, driven by slavery’s expansion, driven to a place that they had built. If these newest Bostonians looked up in wonder at King’s Chapel’s austerely magnificent vaults, which soared like white wedding cake from pillars to roof, and if they felt intimidated by the rich variety of clothes on the congregants—clothes unavailable on the backwaters of the Attakapas—the migrants had nevertheless spent their lives constructing exactly this world.

  They had certainly built the Palfrey family. John Pa
lfrey the elder had owned them. He was the Massachusetts merchant whose slaves had joined the 1811 rebellion when he lived in St. John the Baptist Parish along the Mississippi River. Palfrey had moved to St. Martin Parish, pursued by debts. The sheriff repossessed some of his slaves. He sold his silver candlesticks and hand-tooled pistols. But after 1815, he could borrow again, so he bought more enslaved people.

  The separations that the seventeen, or their parents, had endured as they had traveled from the Chesapeake Bay area to Maspero’s place in New Orleans, and then the work they had endured in the crop fields of the Attakapas, had rebuilt John Palfrey’s twice-destroyed financial self. His own family was also divided, though not exactly like the families of the people he bought. His oldest son, John Gorham Palfrey, lived in Louisiana briefly with his father, but then returned to Massachusetts. Talents and birth destined John the son to be a Harvard prodigy. At nineteen, he was ordained a Unitarian minister. Then, in 1830, he became a Harvard professor. Later in the decade he took over the North American Review. Economic growth was producing a well-educated bourgeois that wanted to participate in a national high culture distinct from that of old Europe. Under Palfrey, the Review published the authors of America’s emerging literature, from James Fenimore Cooper to William Cullen Bryant.2

  Young John’s four brothers stayed in Louisiana. Henry became a cotton broker; William, a Bayou Teche planter. In 1816, however, Edward died of yellow fever in the New Orleans counting-house where he worked. George caught a pistol ball in an 1824 duel. Death by hot-blooded dueling did not happen in the orderly, morally improving Boston of the North American Review. But the brothers stayed in contact. John G. Palfrey visited at the height of the 1830s boom, traveling on the steamboat Southerner. The letters he sent to Louisiana afterward asked ironically after enslaved people in the terms of racist parody: How are “my sooty friends?” When William contemplated visiting Boston, John the younger warned him to bring his own slave: “The black servants you can hire here are good for nothing.” The Palfreys agreed on national politics. All were sensible Whigs, supporters of the party’s project of national social and moral uplift. Henry sold copies of John’s Review to his planter clients, who perhaps squirmed to read an English author’s claim that “the continuance of slavery” in the United States was a disaster. But the author’s claim that American problems were caused by too much democracy surely found secret assent.3

  Of course, the Review didn’t pay the bills any better than serious magazines ever have. When the Panic of 1837 hit, subscriptions dropped and bills multiplied. Henry helped the Review stay afloat, sending young John $1,000 from Louisiana and convincing their father to lend $5,000 to the magazine. Slavery financed John Palfrey’s Massachusetts literary project. However, the question of whether slavery should grow or shrink was about to strain the brothers’ bonds. As John the elder aged, the Louisiana Palfreys took care to advise their brother that he would, by the terms of their state’s Napoleonic civil code, inherit one-third of his father’s property. Most of the value of that property was in slaves. The best way to turn this share into money usable in Massachusetts would be to sell the people he inherited. But “you might incur the risk,” wrote William, “of some busy abolitionist . . . report[ing] that the Revd. Dr. P. had been selling human flesh etc etc or living on the income of slave labor.”4

  Ties of blood linked John G. Palfrey to the southern slave-owning elite, and so did ties of economic growth. Northern growth in general and the fortunes of its middle and upper classes in particular were built on the forced labor of people like those whom John would inherit from his father. But moderate northern Whigs had grown increasingly disturbed by southern politicians’ domineering aggression. By late 1843, Louisiana Whigs were salivating over impending Texas annexation, but the constituents of the Massachusetts Whigs were holding a rash of angry meetings. They were spewing anger at New England “Cotton Whigs” whose close ties to the state’s textile manufacturing interests supposedly predisposed them to cave in to enslavers’ endless demands.5

  In the autumn of 1843, one of the season’s first cotton ships arriving in Boston also brought news from New Orleans. Old John Palfrey had died. John Gorham Palfrey now owned twenty human beings, a mixed crew ranging in age from Margery’s unnamed infant child to Old Sam, sixty-five. At the current price level in New Orleans slave markets, their value approached $7,000—but John the younger had decided that he didn’t want any more money from slavery. This new conviction tells us something about his conscience. But it also tells a story about the outcomes of cotton-driven change in the United States over the first half of the nineteenth century, one in which northern and southern brothers began to argue uncontrollably in the 1840s precisely because they had helped each other to thrive for the preceding half-century.

  From the 1790s, the continually increasing productivity of enslaved hands had generated the most important raw material in the world economy at a constantly declining real price. This had made southern enslavers incredibly wealthy, and powerful, too. They were able to attract massive quantities of investment capital in the 1830s. Enslavers also exerted disproportionate influence over the national government, ensuring the creation and implementation of policies that benefited them. Yet the same work of hands that built a wealthy South enabled the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution. This one began in the cotton mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. From the mills, the development of the northern economy spiraled outward to transform wider sectors. After the South’s economy grew into a bubble, and then exploded, the North recovered while the South floundered. And the main reason for the North’s quicker recovery was that northerners had reinvested profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy.

  Now, having built a brave new world on the product of the cotton fields, northerners such as John G. Palfrey were convincing themselves that slavery was a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy. This was an inaccurate generalization from an accurate observation. Northern observers and antislavery activists saw the slower recovery of the southern economy and thought it proved that slavery was an economic incubus and not an engine of growth. But they also had some powerful emotional reasons to look at slavery in this way. By 1843, enslaver-politicians had begun to lunge at Texas and beyond, hoping to implement once again their classic formula: new land, new credit sources, a new boom. This time around, however, northern brothers decided that there was a “Slave Power” bent on tyrannical domination, and not just of enslaved hands.

  So Palfrey consulted with several Boston acquaintances. The first was a political and legal mentor, US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Just the previous year, Story’s opinion in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania had strengthened southerners’ claims that the US Constitution protected slavery. Edward Prigg, a Maryland enslaver, had tried to recover an enslaved woman who had run to Pennsylvania with her children to escape sale to slave traders. State authorities blocked him. The case went to the Supreme Court. It put Story under pressure from two sources: slavery expansionists, on the one hand, and African Americans who resisted being stolen, on the other. He did not want to write the ruling, but he had no choice. In Prigg, the Court ruled that the Constitution required northern states to hand over escapees, undermining northern states’ laws that ended slavery within their own borders.

  Palfrey also met with the young “Conscience Whig” politician Charles Sumner. If Story warned him of the difficulty of getting the moral responsibility of slavery off one’s back, Sumner helped stiffen John’s spine for heavy lifting. Without notifying his brothers, John petitioned the Louisiana state legislature to let him free the twenty slaves and allow them to stay in the state. The brothers learned of John’s actions from a New Orleans newspaper story reporting the legislature’s rejection of his request. Henry wrote angrily to John: the whole story would “be published in the Attakapas paper on Saturday.” Local planters would read it. William and Henry would
hear questions. Their Attakapas neighbors knew that meddlers were choking Congress with petitions accusing slaveholders of being rapists, torturers, and slave traders. If the Palfreys’ brother was an abolitionist, the local Whig Party, in which the brothers were stalwarts, would suffer. Meanwhile, proposing emancipation for twenty people at old John’s camp would render the other forty unmanageable. They’d send the news up and down the Attakapas by the grapevine telegraph, talk back to overseers, or run to New Orleans to find a lawyer for a freedom suit. “Better to let them remain quietly at work and time will gradually settle all difficulties,” Henry insisted.6

  Henry knew that enslaved people acted as someone else’s hands because they had no other choice. If the grip slackened, African Americans seized opportunities. As the domestic slave trade surged in the 1830s and the flood of new bodies taxed whites’ ability to surveil the captives, the number of southwestern fugitives also spiked. Some made it all the way to the North. These new fugitives, who were also migrants—though against the grain of slave-trade and credit-circle flows—invigorated northern antislavery organizations. William Lloyd Garrison, taught by slavery-survivors, had helped to mobilize politically effective petition campaigns that portrayed enslavers as opponents of whites’ freedom—particularly whites’ freedom to disagree with policies promoting the expansion of slavery. Still, Garrison insisted that abolitionists should reject politics, which required compromises of the sort that in his view rendered the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” But by 1840, a new wave of survivors of slavery’s frontier, including activist fugitives such as William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb, was steadily pushing abolitionism into the current of political fight.