The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  If racial fears led non-slaveholders to accept the proslavery argument, enslavers could continue to plan for slavery to resume its modernist, capitalist, entrepreneurial, creative, destructive, right-hand-empowering course of expansion. They could continue to deploy the apparatus of forced migration and slave trading that commodified black bodies, rhetorically breaking them into pieces for more profitable use by white people, and creating isolated and rapeable black women. Yet the rhetoric of fear makes one wonder if the speakers knew that common white men feared the South’s volatile, highly unequal, extractive, exploitative economy, and knew that without the safety net of racial privilege—and slavery was that net’s strongest cord—they would fall into complete poverty and degradation. Perhaps, too, the speakers’ horrors projected their own scrambled-together desires and anxieties about life in a migratory, expanding modern economy where fortunes were made and lost at a drop; the conflation of sexual force and political power; and the mixing of sexual pleasure with the use of enslaved bodies for making wealth.

  While these arguments worked well enough in the seven cotton-focused states, non-slaveholder majorities in upper-South states stomped on the brakes. The February 4 election for a Virginia state convention produced only 32 immediate secessionists out of 153 total delegates. Despite the commitment of James Mason and others to Calhounite ideology, less wealthy, less ideologically committed citizens of the Old Dominion were not ready. In the same month, the voters of Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina also rejected secession—at least for the time being.91

  Meanwhile, in Washington, senators and representatives scrambled to resurrect interregional compromise at the federal level. Kentucky’s John Crittenden put together a committee of thirteen senators whose task was finding a way out of the crisis. In the tradition of Henry Clay, Crittenden offered an “omnibus” of six constitutional amendments and four resolutions. Most significant was the amendment that would restore the Missouri Compromise line and commit the federal government to enforcing slavery south of 36°30’ North forever. Another would have forbidden any future change to these amendments, the three-fifths clause, or the fugitive-slave clause of the Constitution.92 If adopted by Congress—and three-fourths of the state legislatures would also have had to approve them to add them to the Constitution—Crittenden’s proposals would have made slavery perpetual in the United States. They would have added new enticements to filibustering. Here was the pattern of compromise, reasserted: a placating response to southern brinksmanship.

  The passage of these amendments might not have persuaded the cotton states to reverse their charge toward political independence. The white population of those seven states was now swept up in a level of violent political fervor that made it hard for anyone to suggest a change in course. A commitment to the idea that southerners constituted a separate political community was already becoming its own justification. In the meantime, southern political leaders still in Washington over December 1860 and January 1861—such as Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis—remained cool toward the various plans for compromise.

  While many Republican Party leaders anxiously participated in the compromise negotiations, the president-elect took a different position. To Thurlow Weed, master of the New York Republican machine, Lincoln wrote, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” The people had spoken. They voted for a platform that opposed all expansion of slavery. Lincoln refused to abandon the results of the election. His insistence that “the tug has to come, and better now,” stiffened the resolve of congressional Republicans, who decided to reject the 36°30’ extension—though they did offer to admit New Mexico as a slave state.

  Some historians have criticized Lincoln for these moves. He and other northerners allegedly misread the South, believing that secessionists were only bullies playing a game of chicken to force the North to back down again. The result of the failure to compromise, this line of thinking argues, was mass death. Such critics of Lincoln’s “interference” with compromise bolster their claims with cost/benefit analyses that assume that slavery would have ended in a few decades even without war. Thus the primary positive gain of the war is accounted as thirty years of freedom for several million people, versus, in the loss column, the deaths of about 700,000 Americans, plus the massive financial cost of the war.93

  Yet the assumption that slavery would have ended is based on the idea that it was an inefficient form of labor that would soon be weeded out by economic realities. By 1860, this system had been growing for seventy years at a rate unprecedented in human history. It had broken its supposed limits again and again. Moreover, in very practical terms, the Crittenden plan itself would have rendered the end of slavery far more difficult to accomplish. And, as Lincoln wrote in January, adopt Crittenden, and the past tells us that “a year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.” In any case, the seceding states sent no emissaries to Washington or Springfield that winter, offered no bargains that included renunciation of disunion.94

  On March 4, Lincoln stood before a crowd in Washington to take the same oath that Andrew Jackson had taken. Thirty-two years later, the democracy that Jackson’s crowd drank in had dissolved. Since late January, armed men had seized most of the federal institutions in the lower South. Representatives of the seven cotton states had met in Montgomery, Alabama, and declared themselves the “Confederate States of America.” They named Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis as their president. Striking a most un-Jacksonian pose, outgoing president James Buchanan had done nothing about any of this. And by Inauguration Day, a crisis was sharpening to a swordpoint. Federal troops evacuated their fort near Charleston Harbor’s old slave-trade wharf and moved to Fort Sumter—a new installation that was much farther offshore. Confederate officials demanded Sumter’s surrender. So far, its commandant, Colonel Robert Anderson, had refused, but his troops were running out of food.

  The rawboned, Kentucky-born lawyer took the oath of office from emaciated old Roger Taney. Lincoln then turned to face the crowd. His six-foot-four frame towered over the podium. This president, a lifelong opponent of Jackson and his followers, was taking office as the most “common” man to hold the office, before or since. No president had been poorer in his youth. Yet here was Lincoln. And here, too, was another irony. The president-elect had made Jackson’s great enemy Henry Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman.” But Lincoln had been studying Andrew Jackson’s words from the 1832–1833 nullification crisis in preparation for facing down the rebellious enslavers.

  Just as he had pointed out to his wavering Republican colleagues, when he refused surrender disguised as compromise, Lincoln now told the nation and the world that consent to secession meant agreement to the principle that the loser can overrule the outcome of an election. The secessionists’ demand, Lincoln argued, ripped the fabric of democratic government, replacing it with the principle that a slaveholder’s threat is the ultimate right-handed veto. The claim that states that were controlled by slavery entrepreneurs could break up the United States by unilaterally revoking the contract of the Constitution was analogous to scrawling a “G.T.T.” on every key document of the Union.

  At the same time, Lincoln warned, “The certain ills you fly to, are greater than all the real ones you fly from.” If enslavers wanted to protect their property and power, their own decisions were counterproductive. In the War of 1812, thousands of slaves had fled to the British. An army raised in the free states, on the ground in the slave ones, would by its mere presence disrupt enslavers’ power. It is certainly strange that few enslaver-politicians considered this possibility. Among the few exceptions to this self-induced blindness were ex-Whig megaplanters such as Stephen Duncan and Paul Cameron, who remained Unionists deep into the crisis. But in general, the more enslaved people secession delegates owned, the more radical were their demands.

  In t
he face of a clear decision by slaveholders and the non-slaveholding whites who appeared to support them, Lincoln counseled patience. He insisted that the Union remained unbroken, but that he would not use his executive power as president to retake seized federal property, send troops into the states, or appoint officeholders “obnoxious” to local communities. Here he accepted the limits of the then possible. In March 1861, the US Army numbered in the few tens of thousands. Moreover, the upper South states remained on the fence. Let Lincoln seem to coerce, and he would shift leverage into the hands of secessionists in those wavering states. So the new president deftly played the ball back into the enslavers’ court. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” Perhaps nationalist loyalty and reason would persuade states like Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Kentucky not to join the ranks of secession. So he closed with his famous invocation of the emotional ties of a common history: “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave . . . will yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  The paths of the future were at that moment unlighted. It seemed unlikely that enslavers would accept the new normal that Lincoln offered and remain part of a nation that had decided to insist that they accept that their desires and dreams would shrink rather than expand. Their inevitable rejection meant that suddenly the future of millions of enslaved African Americans and of their enslavers—these twinned bodies who spread across a subcontinent in a vast embrace of suffering and power—was more uncertain than it had been since the moment when Andrew Jackson looked out across the sugarcane stubble and January mire at Pakenham’s scarlet lines. Or then again, as open as at any one of the millions of moments when enslaved men and women pushed their minds and nerves and hands to pick one or two more pounds before twilight fell, to save their backs from the cowhide verdicts of slate and chalk. In those moments, entrepreneurs had revolutionized the world. They had always done so. This time, instead of trying to sweep away old market patterns, traditional ways of making things, or African Americans’ families, it was the Union that they would try to sweep aside. And then, as with all of those other creations and destructions, they would try to replace it with a new arrangement that was far more conducive to their own profit and power.

  Back when John Brown’s attack began to make the possibility of a resort to arms seem less like a distant fantasy, Henry David Thoreau had written these prophetic words about the imminent execution of the martyr: “When you plant . . . a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.” Still, the white South did not believe the North would fight. Lincoln’s caution seemed unheroic. Perhaps it fed the Confederate leaders’ confidence about war as a solution. But in the month after the inauguration, the new president demonstrated that he was canny enough to outmaneuver enslavers on the field of peace. Instead of forcing his way into Charleston’s harbor with blazing guns, he sent a resupply fleet sailing from New York with instructions to resupply the Fort Sumter garrison—but not to reinforce it with troops and weapons. The South’s decisionmakers decided to move the game onto a different board. They would assert their independence by eliminating the Union presence off the coast of the state where the cotton frontier had started. On April 10, the local Confederate commander heard from Montgomery: tell the Union troops to evacuate Fort Sumter immediately. If they refuse, begin the bombardment before supplies can arrive. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, the first cannon boomed. Fort Sumter surrendered at first light on the 14th, after thirty-three hours of shelling that produced not a single fatality.95

  Afterword

  THE CORPSE

  1861–1937

  LIZA MCCALLUM WALKED SLOWLY back from the lawyer’s office. Just a few days had passed since her second husband, Cade, had died. Now he lay in a whitewashed, above-ground New Orleans tomb. The February wind, cold for Louisiana, bit her seventy-three-year-old bones. It blew a freak flurry across the city of the dead, sweeping stray flakes like tiny sheets of paper over the whitewashed wall and toward Liza’s slow walk along nearby Oak Street.

  She was probably thinking about the cold mechanics of how to keep living. Since 1890, Cade had been receiving a pension from the federal government as a former soldier of the Union Army. To get it transferred to her, she had to prove they had been legally married. So now the lawyer would mail her deposition to Washington, where bureaucrats would judge it. A clerk would eventually file the document with all the other paper that made up the McCallum case. Then he would put Bundle 11, Can 53367, back in its place between 53366 and 53368 on the shelf, in a warehouse full of shelves.

  On those shelves still sleep the biographies of a million men who had defended the nation against those who had fought for the slaveholders’ right to expand slavery. The bundles and cans also contain the stories of soldiers’ families, friends, fellow-soldiers, and communities. And yet they hold clouds of silence, too, fogs that seep from their pages and weigh on the dark air between and under the shelves. For instance, Liza’s own life story, which she told in the depositions she gave to support her claim to Cade’s pension, also revealed that she simply couldn’t know all of Cade’s biography. Cade McCallum, Liza told the lawyer, had been born somewhere near the Atlantic. An army friend, who also submitted to an interview for the pension claim, had once said Cade was born in North Carolina, but all Liza remembered was stories about catching fish from a boat. Maybe he had told her Maryland. Like each of the millions of individuals whose biographies together composed the great epic of the expansion of slavery’s body, he could have explained to Liza how forced migration had destroyed the life into which he’d been born. He could have told her that story every night for decades. But when they both closed their eyes to sleep, no one but Cade—to borrow the words of another survivor of enslavement—could truly “guess the awfulness of it” for him in his own life. Perhaps half of every story is forever unheard.1

  Yet Liza knew some essential facts. She knew that in 1850, when Cade was already a grown man, his enslaver sent him to Richmond. Turned into money, shipped on to New Orleans, and sold as a hand, by 1861 Cade was toiling on the Iberville Parish slave labor camp of a woman whom he remembered as “Madame Palang.” Liza, for her own part, was in 1861 the property and chief capital investment of a Boonville, Missouri, storekeeper. When news of Fort Sumter came, the Missouri state government immediately split in two halves, pro-Union and pro-Confederate. When the Union Army gained control over the area around St. Louis, antislavery writers in the northern press pushed President Lincoln to use war powers for emancipation. Lincoln refused, announcing, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky,” and countermanding Union general John Frémont’s preemptive assertion of emancipation in Missouri—like Kentucky, a border state. But Liza’s enslaver already saw how (just as at Fortress Monroe in Virginia) the presence of Union troops at St. Louis could tempt enslaved African Americans to escape. Hearing that a man named Daniel Berger was buying up slaves to take them south, he cashed Liza out for US dollars. By the late summer of 1861, she was “in the traders’ yard” in the town of Plaquemine, coincidentally in Iberville Parish.

  By that time, Cade McCallum was still on Palang’s farm, though he was probably no longer picking cotton. In 1861 and 1862, southern cotton producers, believing that their collective monopoly on the international cotton market gave them leverage that would sway European powers to their side if they induced a “cotton famine,” quit planting and selling their great staple. Most grew food crops for Confederate Armies instead. By early 1862, the number of bales received at Liverpool fell to 3 percent of the 1860 level. The sudden dearth of cotton on the world market raised prices, ironically rendering cotton from other production zones price-competitive with the yield of enslaved hands for the first time in the nineteenth century. In West Africa and in Brazil, cotton
production expanded dramatically. And in Egypt, farmers turned the rich soil of the Nile delta into a huge cotton plantation. They took their earnings from 1861 to Cairo and purchased slaves brought down the Nile from Sudan or across the desert in caravans from Darfur. One historian estimates that the slave trade to Egypt expanded from less than 5,000 per year in the 1850s to more than 20,000 by 1865.2

  Even before the end of 1861, the Confederacy lost control of its oldest cotton region, South Carolina’s Sea Islands. When Union ships bearing an invasion force arrived off the coast south of Charleston in the summer of 1861, enslavers fled. Union forces occupied the coast around Hilton Head. African Americans, who made up over 90 percent of the local population, began talking about dividing the plantations where they had toiled for generations into individual farms. But federal and other northern policymakers feared that the South would follow the Jamaican precedent. There, after Britain’s 1834 empire-wide emancipation, formerly enslaved people refused to participate in sugar-plantation labor, wrecking Jamaica’s commodity-export economy. To prevent a repetition of that process, as the 1862 crop season loomed, the Treasury Department claimed authority over the abandoned lands and rented them to northern entrepreneurs who proposed to reorganize and revive cotton production on the Sea Islands.

  Often the lessees’ agenda went beyond profit alone. For example, there was the group of Vermont entrepreneurs who assured the Treasury that their “New England skill and energy” could “direct these persons [to] grow cotton 25% cheaper when employed by fair wages than when compelled to do it as slaves.” Thus they could prove that enslavers not only were politically imperialistic, destroying the rights of other white people, but also had operated an inefficient, backward system. Indeed, they believed, “so faforable [sic] an opportunity to prove this will probably not occur again for ages.” Should $6 per month prove insufficient motivation to convince newly liberated African Americans to enter the cotton wage-labor market, instead of growing corn and yams to eat, the New Englanders also asked permission to use “the ball and chain” to enforce “authority.”3