45. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 159; John Haywood to G. W. Haywood, February 5, 1842, HAY; Ingraham, The South-West, 2:286.
46. Campbell, Autobiography, 36–39.
47. Martha Bradley, AS, 6.1 (AL), 47; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 134, 142–143.
48. I. C. McManus, Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA, 2002).
49. ASAI, 69; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 215; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 188–189.
50. ASAI, 69; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 218; Anderson, Life and Narrative, 29; William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston, 1849), 20; GSMD, 199.
51. Adeline, AS, 6.1 (AL), 181; Frank Hawkins to Wm. Hawkins, August 29, 1849, Fol. 84, Hawkins Papers, SHC; Araby Journal, Haller Nutt Papers, Duke; Magnolia Journal, 1848–1851, Fol. 442, RCB; Gray and Thompson, History of Agriculture, 2:702–703.
52. AS, v. 18, GSMD, 199; cf. B. L. C. Wailes, Report on the Agriculture and Geology of Mississippi (Philadelphia, 1854), 154. Historians argue that the acceptability and practice of torture declined in the Western world after the mid-eighteenth century: Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Elizabeth Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” JAH 82 (1995), 463–493. But if the whippings common on southwestern plantations were torture, then in the United States, white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed. Meanwhile, though, a late-antebellum “paternalistic” move made it a crime to kill a slave: Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York, 1993), 130–131. Ariela J. Gross, in Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Courtroom (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 105–120, finds that defendants presented themselves as using torture for the “rational” purpose of compelling labor. Thomas R.R. Cobb, in An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery (Philadelphia, 1858), argues that non-“wanton” violence can enforce “subordination” (90–99).
53. Many historians of torture hold this definition: Page DuBois, Torture and Truth (New York, 1991); John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago, 1977); Edward Peters, Torture, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1996); Foucault, Discipline and Punish. But by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, deliberate violence against an imprisoned and/or bound individual becomes torture when it is designed to extract information or a confession, to serve as a punishment, or to inflict intimidation, or is based on discrimination. Cf. William F. Schulz, ed., The Phenomenon of Torture: Readings and Commentary (Philadelphia, 2007).
54. Herbert Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana, IL, 1975), 17–35; Davis, ed., Plantation Life. Barrow’s journal also reveals that he whipped 75 percent of the sixty-six working “hands” at one point or another, and Patsey’s skills did not save her from being beaten: Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 142–143, 196–199; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 217–218; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 150.
55. R. B. Beverley to R. Beverley, September 3, 1833, Sec. 13, August 28, 1842, Sec. 41, Beverley Papers, VHS; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1860), 1:44, 83–84; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 59; Bibb, Narrative, 115.
56. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York, 1984 [Library of America]), 288–289; Nancy Howard, NSV, 50; cf. NSV, 54, 132, 158, 225–227, 243; James Fisher, ST, 236; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 230–240.
57. Lavinia Bell, ST, 342–345; cf. ST, 180, 433; NSV, 382; Anderson, Life and Narrative, 16; S. Haywood to G. W. Haywood, December 1, 1837, Fol. 151, HAY; Themy to T. Harriss, May [1846], Undated Fol., Thomas Harriss Papers, Duke; W. H. Fox to J. Fox, September 9, 1856, John Fox Papers, Duke; Johnson, NSV, 383–384; Gowens, NSV, 140–141; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 28–30. For a failed-overseer counter-example, see Pearse, Narrative, 35–37.
58. Henry Clay, AS, S1, 12 (OK), 111–112.
59. D. Jordan to Malvina, August 3, 1833, D. Jordan Papers, Duke; ST, 435; NSV, 78; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley Engerman, “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South,” 241–265, and Fogel and Engerman, “Explaining the Relative Efficiency of Slave Agriculture in the Antebellum South: Reply,” in Without Consent or Contract: Technical Papers, vol. 1; Stuart W. Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1790–1860: Sources and Readings (New York, 1967), 7–21; S. Duncan to J. Ker, n.d., Fol. 12, Ker Papers, SHC; Farmers’ Register, November 1834, 353–363; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
60. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 216–217.
61. Wm. Kenner to J. Minor, August 23, 1819, William Kenner Papers, LLMVC.
CHAPTER 5. TONGUES: 1819–1824
1. Lucy Thurston, AS, S1, 10.5 (MS), 2113.
2. Sophia Word, AS, 16.2 (KY), 67; Silas Jackson, AS, 16.3 (MD); Ank Bishop, 6.1 (AL), 37; Lucinda Washington, 6.1 (AL), 410; cf. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
3. Ann Ulrich Evans, AS, 11.2 (MO), 118.
4. Lucy Thurston, AS, S1, 10.5 (MS), 2113.
5. Jos. Sheppard to Jas. & Jn. Sheppard, October 17, 1843, James Sheppard Papers, Duke; Sophia Nobody to Sally Amis, June 7, 1858, Fol. 45, Eliz. Blanchard Papers, SHC; Margaret Nickens, AS, 11.2 (MO), 264; GSMD, 45–46, 202.
6. L. A. Finley to Hackett, May 18, 1854, Gordon-Hackett Papers, SHC; Jordan Connelly[?] to H. Brown, October 17, 1833, Fol. 55, Hamilton Brown Papers, SHC; S. Amis to Grandmother, December 22, 1836, Fol. 40, Eliz. Blanchard Papers, SHC; “Hermitage” Account 1820–1822, Miltenberger Papers, SHC; Sim Neal to Mother Sisters Brothers, [1827], Neal Papers, SHC; William Anderson, Life and Narrative of William Anderson . . . (Chicago, 1857), 18.
7. Brian W. Thomas, “Power and Community: The Archaeology of Slavery at the Hermitage Plantation,” American Antiquity 63 (1998): 531–551; Henry C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years a Slave (York, PA, 1895), 52–56; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York, 1849), 25–28; William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, Written by Himself (New York, 1825), 29.
8. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball . . . (New York, 1837), 157, 165; Octavia Albert, The House of Bondage: Or, Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York, 1890), 6.
9. Albert, House of Bondage, 4–5; Prudhomme Family Papers, SHC; Brashear Family Papers, SHC; Slack Family Papers, SHC; Michael D. Picone, “Anglophone Slaves in Francophone Louisiana,” American Speech 78 (2003): 404–443; Elisha Garey, AS, 12.2 (GA), 2.
10. Sarah P. Russell, “Cultural Conflicts and Common Interests: The Making of the Sugar Planter Class in Louisiana, 1795–1853” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2000), 327–328; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), 165; Edgar Schneider, American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Varieties (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1988), 231–235, 255, 275–278; Salikoko Mufwene, “Some Inferences About the Development of African-American English,” in Shana Poplack, ed., The English History of African-American English (Malden, MA, 2000), 246–248; John McWhorter, “Recovering the Origin,” 337–366, in his Defining Creole (New York, 2006).
11. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 189, 264–266.
12. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia (London, 1855), 23–24, 28–30.
13. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 192–193.
14. T. Bryarly to S. Bryarly, February 26, 1847, Bryarly Papers, Duke; Margaret Brashear to Frances, July 10, 1832, Brashear Papers, SHC; G. Henry to [wife], December 2, 1837, Gustavus Henry Papers, SHC; Isham Harrison to T. Harrison, January 20, 1837, James Harrison Papers, SHC; Roderick C.McDonald, “Independent Economic Production,” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture:
Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 200–204; Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Kinship in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
15. Anthony Abercrombie, AS, 6.1 (AL), 7; Dylan Penningroth, “My People, My People,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M.H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens, GA, 2006).
16. Willentz, Rise of American Democracy, 72–140; William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996), 168–169.
17. Matthew Carey, A Calm Address to the People of the Eastern States, on the Subject of the Representation of Slaves (Boston, 1814); Worthington C. Ford, ed., Writings of John Quincy Adams (New York, 1913–1917), 3:71; Sidney E. Morse, The New States: Or, A Comparison of the Wealth, Strength, and Population of the Northern and Southern States (Boston, 1813); James Pearse, Narrative of the Life of James Pearse (Rutland, VT, c. 1826); H. Bellenden Ker, Travels Through the Western Interior of the United States (Elizabethtown, NJ, 1816), 43–50; Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 (Lexington, KY, 1953), 11.
18. Boynton Merrill, Jefferson’s Nephews: A Frontier Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 1976); James Simeone, Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic (DeKalb, IL, 2000); Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Frontier Illinois,” Civil War History 41, no. 1 (2001): 7–29.
19. R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri’s Little Dixie (Columbia, MO, 1992).
20. William R. Johnson, “Prelude to the Missouri Compromise,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1965): 47–66.
21. Moore, Missouri Controversy; “Mr. King’s Speeches,” NR, December 4, 1819; JQA, February 20, 1820, 4:528–529; Stuart Leiberger, “Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis: An Alternative Interpretation,” JER 17, no. 1 (1997): 121–130.
22. Daniel Webster et al., A Memorial to the Congress of the United States, on the Subject of Restraining the Increase of Slavery in States to Be Admitted to the Union (Boston, 1819); Joseph D. Learned, A View of the Policy of Permitting Slaves in the States West of the Mississippi (Baltimore, 1820); William Plumer, quoted in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 231.
23. JQA, February 11, 1820, 4:524, July 5, 1819, 4:398.
24. JQA, February 24, 1820, 4:530–531.
25. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 232–234; Matthew Mason, “The Maine and Missouri Crisis: Competing Priorities and Northern Slavery Politics in the Early Republic,” JER 33, no. 4 (2013): 675–700.
26. Matthew Crocker, “The Missouri Compromise, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Southern Strategy,” Journal of the West 43 (2004): 45–52. The crisis was not over. Missouri passed a state constitution banning free people of African descent—violating, said free-state congressmen, the US Constitution’s “rights and privileges” clause.
27. Francis Fedric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, Or, Fifty Years of Slavery . . . (London, 1853), 47–51; Harry Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery in the United States of America (Grand Rapids, MI, 1891), 37–38; cf. L. A. Horton to R. Horton, October 3, 1830, Wyche-Otey papers, SHC, reporting Alabama corn-shucking; Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South (New York, 1992).
28. Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston, 2006), 66–68; “Dark,” Frank Monefee, AS, 6.1 (AL), 280; “Speculator,” Eliza Washington, AS, 11.1 (AR), 52; “Polk,” Joseph Holmes, AS, 6.1 (AL), 193; “Boss man,” Lucindy Jurdon, AS, 6.1 (AL), 243.
29. Henry Walker, AS, 11.1 (AR), 34; Eliza Washington, AS, 11.1 (AR), 52.
30. Fedric, Slave Life, 50–51.
31. Josiah Henson, Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life (Boston, 1858), 6–7; Benjamin Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820, ed. Samuel Wilson Jr. (New York, 1951), 49–51; William Wells Brown, My Southern Home, Or the South and Its People (Boston, 1880), 121–124; Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, IL, 1977), 95–99; cf. Henry B. Fearon, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a Journey of Five Thousand Miles Through the Eastern and Western States of America (London, 1819), 276–278; Henry C. Knight, Letters from the South and West (Boston, 1824), 127; Freddi W. Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette, LA, 2011).
32. James K. Kinnaird, “Who Are Our National Poets?” Knickerbocker Magazine 26 (1845): 331–341.
33. Ibid.; Portia Maultsby, “Africanisms in African-American Music,” from Joseph Holloway, ed., Africanisms in American Culture (Bloomington, IN, 1990).
34. Eli Sagan, Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, The Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror (Lanham, MD, 2001), 187–190; Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982). A classic claim that African Americans were merely imitators, not creators, appears in Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York, 1984 [Library of America]), 266–267; cf. Ronald Radano, “Hot Fantasies: American Modernism and the Idea of Black Rhythm,” in Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000), 459–480. This lack, the story implied, had consequences in the economic realm. Primitive economies were allegedly stuck on starvation-mode because incompletely realized individuals were unwilling to try new ideas, accepting stale orthodoxies rather than seeking growth through entrepreneurial innovation.
35. Hattie Nettles, AS, 6.1 (AL), 297–298; Eliza White, AS, 6.1 (AL), 412; Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, NY, 1853), 166–168.
36. Sara Colquitt, AS, 6.1 (AL), 88; White and White, Sounds of Slavery, 67; William Piersen, Black Legacy: America’s Hidden Heritage (Amherst, MA, 1993); George Tucker, Valley of Shenandoah, Or, Memoirs of the Graysons (New York, 1824), 2:116–118; T. C. Thornton, An Inquiry into the History of Slavery; Its Introduction into the United States; Causes of Its Continuance; and Remarks upon the Abolition Tracts of William E. Channing, D.D. (Washington, DC, 1841), 120–122; John Bernard, Retrospections of America, 1797–1811 (New York, 1887), 207, 214; Epstein, Sinful Tunes, 139.
37. George Strickland, AS, 6.1 (AL), 359; Jacob D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green (Huddersfield, UK, 1864), 12–13.
38. J. W. Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and a Freeman (Syracuse, NY, 1859), 115; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 216–222; Albert Murray, “Improvisation and the Creative Process,” in Robert O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Life (New York, 1998), 111–113.
39. William D. Piersen, personal communication; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 180–182; cf. Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
40. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993); David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991).
41. Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Urbana, IL, 1984).
42. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 122–124, 382.
43. John Hope Franklin and Loren F. Schweniger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 279.
CHAPTER 6. BREATH: 1824–1835
1. Hettie Mitchell, AS, 10.5 (AR), 111; Nicey [West?], AS, 6.1 (AL), 324; Foster Weathersby, AS, S1, 10.5 (MS), 2228; Toby James, AS, 4.2 (TX), 250; Smith Wilson, AS, S2, 10.9 (TX), 4239.
2. Robert Falls, AS, 16.6 (TN), 13; Rezin Williams, AS, 16.3 (MD), 76–77; Marilda Pethy, AS, 11.2 (MO), 277; Nancy East, 16.4 (OH), 35. Here is a crucial point to understand: formerly enslaved people interviewed in the 1930s, most of them illiterate, used the same terminology one finds in pre-emancipation published
narratives. Since the former were unlikely to have learned the terminology from narratives to which they did not have access, their words, though chronologically newer, actually transmit an older set of terms and ideas about slavery, one originating prior to the narratives published between the 1830s and 1860s. In fact, the vernacular history of slavery shaped around the fires of the southwestern plantations, and passed on to children who would use such terms in the 1930s interviews, shaped the ideas and expressions used by the fugitive narrators who wrote nineteenth-century autobiographies.
3. Lawrence J. Kotlikoff, “The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 1804 to 1862,” Economic Inquiry 17 (1979): 496–518. By comparison, if we look at the cost of the labor it would have taken to buy a slave, in 2014 dollars the 1820 slave would cost between $230,000 and $500,000, depending on the assumptions and algorithms used. This makes one “hand” the cost-equivalent of an ordinary 2014 American single-family house in the less pricey real-estate markets. See MeasuringWorth.com, www.measuringworth.com/index.php, accessed December 27, 2013.
4. BD, #423; Jonathan Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (1991): 448; Richmond Enquirer, March 26, 1829; US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau, 1830 US Census of Population, R174/p 217.
5. Cf. Pritchett and Freudenberger, “Domestic United States Slave Trade.” My database records all 5,500-odd interstate slave sales in New Orleans between the summer of 1829 and the end of 1831, whether or not they are associated with certificates.
6. HALL; Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of a Planter (Milwaukee, WI, 1897), 11.
7. David Hackett Fischer and James Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Richmond, 1993), 137.
8. Henry C. Knight, Letters from the South and West (Boston, 1824), 101–102; Robert Falls, AS, 16.6 (TN), 13.
9. Jacob D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green (Huddersfield, UK, 1864), 5; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1855), 448; Easton Star, November 27, 1827, May 26, 1829.
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 63
