The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (14 page)

Seemingly unable
to think beyond a playbook that had already ended in vengeance, Saint-Domingue refugees and their French- and Spanish-speaking compatriots demanded more slaves. From their perspective, the
Louisiana colony had been long starved of enslaved Africans, having imported fewer than 2,000 in the decade before American acquisition. When Claiborne arrived in 1804, bringing the news that Congress would
probably block the international slave trade to the territory, he discovered “an almost universal sentiment in favor of this inhuman traffic.” “The prohibition thereof,” he reported, was “a great source of discontent” among French-speakers, but even English-speaking residents agreed that “
they must import more slaves or be ruined forever
.”
²⁷

Ruined! And forever! “No subject seems as interesting
to their minds,” wrote one of Claiborne’s deputies, “as that of the importations of brute Negroes from Africa.”
Nègres bruts
, people recently stolen, or, as they also called them:
têtes
, heads. Claiborne reported that a reopened trade would “better reconcile” French residents “to the government of the United States than any other permission which could be extended”—though he worried that enslaved
Africans would turn Louisiana into “another Santo Domingo.” In July 1804, however, Louisiana whites learned that Congress was also planning to ban the internal slave trade from other parts of the United States to Louisiana. New Orleans erupted. Public meetings rang with threats of secession. Community leaders besieged Claiborne: “The most respectable characters cou’d not,
even in my presence
suppress
the Agitation of their tempers, when a check to that Trade was suggested.”
²⁸

Enterprising types rushed in before the October implementation of the slave-trade bans, not bringing the “thousands of African Negroes” that Claiborne had predicted, but 463 in six ships from Africa and 270 in three from Jamaica and Havana. But the next year, Congress passed a law raising Orleans to the same territorial
status as Mississippi. The territory’s attorney general, James Brown, a Virginian who owned a German Coast sugar plantation, pounced on the loophole this law opened. Mississippi could import enslaved people from other states. Mississippi could even import African slaves transshipped from other ports. Therefore, he insisted, so could the enslavers of the Orleans Territory. Jefferson allowed the
ruling on the ground to stand. Slave imports resumed.
²⁹

By ones, like the man in the iron collar, by twos, and by whole shiploads sent from Africa via Charleston, traders brought hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of
nègres bruts
to New Orleans before the legal Atlantic slave trade closed at the end of 1807. In addition, enslavers—including a Tennessee judge named Andrew Jackson—were sending
English-speaking enslaved people down the Mississippi River. The new flows of enslaved people into New Orleans began to meet the demands of new arrivals, refugee planters,
and old Creole entrepreneurs alike. In a single year, 1804 to 1805, the number of people sold in New Orleans increased almost five times over, and average prices dropped as supplies rose (see
Tables 2.2
and
2.3
). Not all sellers—or
buyers—were white. John Palfrey’s overseer reported that he’d bought a “negro winch” from “a Quadroon named John Chassier.” Chassier was, Palfrey noted, very persistent in collecting his debt.
³⁰

TABLE 2.2. SLAVES SOLD IN NEW ORLEANS, 1800–1819, BY HALF-DECADE INCREMENTS

Source:
Hall Database,
www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
.

Thanks to decisions made in London and Washington, the boom didn’t last. Great Britain insisted on searching and seizing American merchant ships bound for her enemy France, often kidnapping some of the vessels’ sailors into the British navy. In 1807, Jefferson banned all foreign trade. His theory was that Britain and France would suffer so much
that they would agree to respect neutral shipping and allow American vessels to carry American cargoes of tobacco, sugar, and other crops wherever they could find the best market.

For eighteen months, the government struggled to enforce Jefferson’s policy. Rampant smuggling punched holes in the embargo and undermined the presidency’s claim to authority at home and abroad. But smuggling couldn’t
preserve the export-dependent economy of New Orleans, and the embargo chilled slave sales throughout 1808. Finally, three days before Jefferson left office, on March 1, 1809, Congress replaced the embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act, which attempted to ban US trade with Britain and France only.

So now we are back to May 15, 1809, with Claiborne in his office on the verge of panic because, as
the letter he was writing informed his superiors in Washington, a ship from Santiago, Cuba, “with a number of French passengers and thirty-six slaves,” was near the city. Many Saint-Domingue refugees had moved to Spanish Cuba. Some of these French nationals had helped
to incubate the new Cuban sugar industry. But at the beginning of 1809, when Napoleon invaded Spain, the Spanish Empire retaliated
by expelling the refugees from its possessions. Now a shipload of these twice-refugees had crossed the bar at the Balize, seeking asylum. A fast messenger boat had run the news up and was waiting for instructions from the governor.

TABLE 2.3. SLAVES SOLD IN ORLEANS PARISH, 1804–1811: INDIVIDUAL SALES

Source:
Hall Database,
www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
.

Claiborne did not know what to do. The city’s many former refugees would be deeply sympathetic to this latest wave, many of whom had left coffee plantations and sugar mills behind them in Cuba. But some brought slaves, and to welcome them in would violate federal law. And before the governor could even finish his first letter to Washington—a letter
that was irrelevant, since it wouldn’t bring a response in time to solve the immediate crisis—the local French consul arrived with news that another 6,000 people were on their way. Claiborne hustled the consul back out as soon as possible, broke the seal on the first letter to Washington, and scrawled a despairing postscript: “So great and sudden an Emigration to this territory, will be a source
of serious inconvenience and embarrassment to our own Citizens.”
³¹

Claiborne could easily tick off the difficulties the situation presented. There was the problem of finding food, shelter, and employment for 9,000 people in a city that normally supported 15,000. There was the legal problem of bringing slaves. And then again, there was the fact that a third of the refugees were free people of
color, forbidden to immigrate to the United States and unwanted by whites in New Orleans—particularly by English-speakers who preferred the ostensible clarity of their own American pattern in which all black people were assumed to be enslaved. Yet over the next few days, the
white people of New Orleans held meetings and wrote petitions insisting that they wanted Claiborne to admit the refugees.
³²

Sympathy drove them, but so did other forces of attraction. “I have no doubt,” the mayor of New Orleans wrote to Claiborne, carefully pressing him to admit the refugees, and their slaves, “that the result would be the settling of many new plantations, which would give large crops of cotton and other produce before three years time.” More trade, more connections with other markets, and—this was
implied—more unity between white citizens, whatever their native language. Allowing slavery’s expansion, the mayor and other wealthy Louisianans insisted, made white New Orleans and white America more prosperous and more united, binding states and factions together. So Claiborne capitulated. The refugees poured up the river. Congress would (when it heard) quibble, but it backed down and consented
to this post facto exception to the 1807 international slave-trade ban. The governor himself enforced only a single law. Following territorial regulations to the letter, he expelled all free males of color over the age of fifteen who had entered on the refugee ships. Women and children could stay.
³³

“To the arrivals from Cuba,” is how A. Bonamy, a Louisiana enslaver, directed his advertisement
in the New Orleans newspaper
Moniteur de la Louisiane
. “I will hire thirty
nègres de la hache
”—“slaves of the axe” might be a rough translation—“and a number of laboring negresses for long leases.” In 1809, the number of slaves sold in New Orleans surged sharply upward. Close to one-third of the slaves brought from Cuba were cashed in by enslavers who needed ready funds for a new start. As ever
in histories of displacement, people who were ready and able to make profit out of distress did well. One was Christian Miltenberger, a physician of French extraction, who had been kicked out of Cuba in 1809. Right before he boarded the ship that would take him to Louisiana, he had bought a man named Pierre Louis from fellow refugee Marie François. Pierre Louis had been born a slave in Saint-Domingue
and transported to Cuba when his owner fled there at some point between 1791 and 1804, during the revolution. Miltenberger sold some people once he reached New Orleans, which allowed him to restart his career as a planter, but he didn’t sell Pierre Louis. Using the cash from other slave sales, Miltenberger established a small sugar plantation, where he put Pierre Louis to hard labor.
³⁴

The refugees’
arrival injected new enslaved laborers and new buyers for land in lower Louisiana. Hard times and cultural dissonance between English and French, and distance from Washington, had slowed the newest West’s incorporation into the United States. The incorporation of the refugees helped
smooth over those sources of friction. The refugees’ slaves accounted for a full quarter of the growth of the Orleans
Territory’s slave population, from 22,701 to over 34,000, between 1806 and 1810, and for 16 percent of the 3,000 people sold as slaves in New Orleans between 1809 and 1811 (see
Table 2.4
). The American empire expanded instead of devolving into a squabble between local slaveholders over scarce resources.
³⁵

TABLE 2.4. SLAVES IMPORTED TO LOUISIANA, 1809–1811

Source:
Hall Database,
www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
.

*
The variable used was “Via,” which records the place from or by which the seller brought the slave to New Orleans; 9,157 other sales and/or probate records contain no entry for this variable.

NOT EVERYONE IN THE
Mississippi Valley was willing to cooperate. Rival empire Spain still hoped to block the growth of the United States. So did Britain.
And 50,000 Native Americans, who did not plan to surrender the rich soil under their feet, still lived on the millions of acres that Yazoo companies and other speculators had successfully turned into paper on the financial exchanges of America’s northeastern cities. These conflicts were coming, and soon. Even sooner, in 1811, the enslaved people who had been brought in such diversity to the Mississippi
Valley as “heads” and “slaves of the axe” would make their own attempt to change the course of things.