The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (19 page)

Image 3.1. On the New Orleans levee, bales came off river-going steamboats and were loaded onto oceangoing vessels. Thus cotton grown in southwestern fields connected to world commodity and credit markets here, but New Orleans also became the nexus of other network-driven processes glimpsed on the levee, such as the forced migration of enslaved people to slavery’s frontier, or the development of new African-American cultures of performance. “View of the famous levee of New Orleans,” from
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, v. 9, no. 228, April 14, 1860, p. 315. Library of Congress.

BEFORE THE LATE EIGHTEENTH
century, all societies’ economies were preindustrial. Almost all of their inhabitants were farmers or farm laborers. Whether European, Asian, American, or African, such economies
rarely grew by as much as 1 percent per year. So it had been since women and men had invented agriculture ten millennia earlier. Most of what people made fell into a few categories: food, fuel, and fiber. The pace of innovation was glacial. And when preindustrial societies did begin to grow—whether through technological advances, increases in access to resources through conquest or trade, or
changes in weather conditions, such as the warming that took
place in Europe between 800 and 1300 AD—the increasing prosperity led people to have more babies. Babies grew into more farmers, who could grow more food, and more purchasers, who would buy their products. But the increasing number of mouths to feed began to exceed the maximum output possible under preindustrial methods of agricultural
production. The easily accessible firewood was being burned up; and the acres needed for raising the flax or wool to clothe the increasing population was being turned over to marginal subsistence agriculture. Costs rose. Living standards dropped. Famine, epidemic disease, war, political instability, and full-scale social collapse were next.

English clergyman Thomas Malthus wrote about this cycle
in a famous 1798 pamphlet. Food production, he argued, could increase arithmetically at best, while population could expand geometrically. Thus, no increase in the standard of living was sustainable. It would always run up against resource limits. Western societies acquired massive new resources between 1500 and 1800. Conquistadors stripped the Incas and Aztecs of their gold and silver. The creation
of the first slavery complex, with its “drug foods”—sugar, tobacco, tea, coffee, and chocolate—stimulated Western Europe’s desire to seek out and consume still more resources. The massive Atlantic slave trade required ships, trade commodities, and new structures of credit, and growth spilled over into sectors less directly linked to sugar. Many in Western Europe began to work longer hours in
order to get new commodities, in what is sometimes called an eighteenth-century “Industrious Revolution.”
⁵

Yet neither the first slavery, extended hours of labor, or the theft of resources could permanently relieve Malthusian pressures. Even Thomas Jefferson, who hoped that the Louisiana Purchase would delay the collapse of his yeoman paradise for a hundred generations, knew that such solutions
eventually ran out of arithmetic. Malthus and Jefferson’s pessimistic reading of human history from 10,000 BC until 1800 was the realistic one.
⁶

But even as Rachel climbed the levee, the ground was shifting. The global economy was launching an unexpected and unprecedented process of growth that has continued to the present day. The world’s per capita income over the past 3,000 years shows that
a handful of societies, beginning with Great Britain, were shifting onto a path of sustained economic expansion that would produce higher standards of living and vastly increased wealth for some—and poverty for others (see
Figure 3.1
). The new trajectory created winners and losers among the different societies of the world. Until the late twentieth century, we could simply state these with a catchy
phrase: the West and the Rest.

Source:
Gregory Clark,
A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
(Princeton, NJ, 2008).

People have called this incredible shift in human history by a variety of names: modernization, the industrial revolution, the Great Divergence. In those societies that it benefited the most, this transformation built fundamentally upon one key shift: increasing the amount of goods,
such as food or clothing, produced from a given quantity of labor and land. This is what allowed the standard of living not only to keep up with a growing population, but for many, also to improve. By 1819, it was dramatically evident that mechanical innovations and a new division of labor could result in increased production of goods at lower cost in labor and resources than ever before. And exhibit
number one was northwestern England’s cotton textile industry.

Until late in the eighteenth century, cotton fabric had been a luxury good woven on handlooms in Indian villages. But by 1790, British inventors had begun to create new machines that spun cotton into thread at a rate that human hands could not approach. The machines were less expensive to acquire and operate than the human hands,
too. Within seven decades, Manchester factory workers running the new machines could make cloth five or ten times faster than laborers alone working by hand. A new class of factory-owning entrepreneurs emerged. They extracted massive profits from textile manufacturing, but textile revenues also boosted and transformed the entire
British economy. Wealthy landowners borrowed cotton-generated investment
capital and commercialized agriculture. Surplus rural laborers, pushed into factory towns, became wage-earning factory workers.
⁷

The evidence of transformation surrounded the white customers Rachel saw in the stores. Imagine one of them, his fingers checking out one bolt of cloth after another, sensing its weight, its texture, the elaborate variety pumped out by Manchester mills and promoted
in newspaper ads: “Superfine broad cloths,” “white flannels,” “Cambrick and jaconet muslins.” Lower in quality were ready-made and standard-sized “Negro shirts” pieced together from cotton “Negro cloth.” Piled on bales of slaves’ blankets were iron pots and casks of “trace chains” for hitching mules to plows; stacked up on counters were saws, log chains, balance beams called “steelyards” for weighing
cotton; piled in corners were “West India” and “Carolina” hoes for sugarcane and cotton, respectively. These non-textile goods were mostly made in British workshops. Designed for the new markets of plantations and growing cities, they were what economists call “knock-on effects” pushed by the pistons of the cotton textile engine. On the shelves were breakables meant for consumption and not production:
hundreds of “packages” of “earthenware (chiefly blue printed),” perhaps made by Wedgewood, the first large-scale British maker of “china”; “first rate gold watches”; dozens of cases of guns; “2 cases looking glasses” (putting Maspero out of one business); “elegant pianos”; decanters of “Cristal [
sic
] and cut glass.”
⁸

In enclaves like this store, this city, this network of enclaves that stretched
to New York and Liverpool and London and so on, men like this man were changing their worldviews. Increasingly, they anticipated that progress would carry them and their society ever upward and onward to positions of unprecedented power. And for the next eighty years, they would use industrial power and technology to subdue the rest of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, only half
a dozen independent non-Western nations would survive on the globe as colonialism expanded. Even nature surrendered, as William N. Mercer, a physician who traveled to New Orleans in 1816, predicted. “Steam Boat navigation” would conquer “the western country,” taming the immense distances and “deep and impetuous” currents of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Steady improvement in machine technology
became a popular metaphor; it depicted change as unending progress, change in which machines extracted power from nature and yielded it to human beings.
⁹

But the move from arithmetical to geometric economic growth wasn’t only caused by the greater efficiency of British machines. All the new efficiencies,
all the accelerating curves of growth, would have been short-circuited if embryo industries
had run out of cotton fiber. And that nearly happened. Before 1800, most of the fiber came from small-scale production in India, from the Caribbean, and from Brazil. The price of raw cotton was high, and it was likely to rise higher still, because the land and labor forces available for producing cotton were limited, and their productivity was low. High raw material costs constrained the expansion
of the British textile industry.

The North American interior, on the other hand, had thousands of acres of possible cotton fields, thousands for each one in the Caribbean. And the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s helped to uncork one of the bottlenecks to production by allowing the easy separation of cotton fiber from seeds. But even with the dramatic increase in the amount of cotton
produced in South Carolina and Georgia that followed, and even with the growing labor force supplied by coffle-chains and marching feet, southeastern enslavers still were not close to meeting the world market’s growing demand for raw cotton. In hindsight, we see that the greater Mississippi Valley was the obvious answer. Yet the Mississippian who wrote that New Orleans would be the “port of
exit for the redundant produce of the upper country—its sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp”—was typical before 1815 in thinking that cotton came in third. He imagined that Louisiana’s main function would be to replace Saint-Domingue in the world circuit of sucrose. Before 1815, New Orleans lagged well behind Charleston as North America’s main cotton port.
¹⁰

On May 19, 1815, four months after Jackson’s
victory, New Orleans cotton entrepreneur William Kenner reported that “upwards of Thirty vessels were in the River” on the way to the city, because “Europe must, and will[,] have cotton for her manufacturers.” His Liverpool cotton brokers predicted that cotton prices “will not decline.” Before 1815 was half over, 65,000 cotton bales, made on slave labor camps in the woods along the Mississippi
and its tributaries, arrived in New Orleans by flatboat. This was 25 percent of the total produced by the entire United States, and the land and dominion that southwestern slaveholders won in battles against the enslaved, against Native Americans, and against the British prepared them to launch even greater expansions in raw cotton production.
¹¹

In fact, the cotton supply was about to increase
even more rapidly. By the time four more years had passed, and Rachel arrived in New Orleans, 60,000 more enslaved people had been shifted into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama from the older South. By 1819, the rapid expansion of Mississippi Valley slave labor camps had enabled the United States to seize control of the world export market for cotton, the most crucial of early industrial commodities.
And cotton became the dominant driver of US economic growth. In 1802, cotton already accounted for 14 percent of the value of all US exports, but by 1820 it accounted for 42 percent—in an economy reliant on exports to acquire the goods and credit it needed for growth. New Orleans had become the pivot of economic expansion, “the point of union,” as one visitor wrote, between Europe and America,
industry and frontier. Its proliferating newspaper columns were filled with long lists of ship landings and departures, ads for goods imported, brokers’ pleas for more cotton, offerings of commercial credit, and notices of bank directors’ meetings. Economic acceleration loomed over Rachel in mountain ranges of cotton bales.
¹²

THESE WERE THE CHANGES
that flowed through the man’s hands like the
warp and weft of fine cotton, and these were the changes that swept Rachel and the others, five droplets in a human flood, past him and around the corner onto Chartres. The cathedral loomed above the roofs of the stores to the right. Two blocks more, and they reached the intersection with St. Louis Street. On their right stood a two-story stucco building. A wooden box, the height of a bench, waited
by its exterior wall. The white man leading them opened the door and stepped inside under a swinging sign that said, simply, “Maspero’s.” Last of all, Rachel caught the door with her left hand and stepped over the threshold.