The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (20 page)

In 1819, it was hard to come to the city without being taken to Maspero’s “Coffee-House.” If New Orleans was the pivot of southwestern and even national expansion, much of
the city’s commerce rotated around this specific point—a “coffee-house” that was nothing like Starbucks. One visitor complained that “as this is a coffee-house, you can here find all cordials but coffee.” Whiskey fumes cut through tobacco haze, revealing to Rachel the waist-high bar running the length of the back wall; behind it—hovering—a middle-aged man of Mediterranean origin. His eyeglass manufactory
straggled on next door, but Maspero spent most of his time chasing cash over here. He’d sell you a glass of wine or liquor. He’d even sell you, if the right chance presented. Only a year or two after Rachel came to Maspero’s, when an immigrant German “redemptioner,” or indentured servant, died in rural Louisiana, the man’s little white daughter would allegedly be sold as a slave here—like
hundreds of other daughters.
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For the past few years Maspero’s main trade had been providing a place for others to meet and speculate, and today, several dozen white men were seated at the tables scattered around the sand-covered floor that eliminated the need for spittoons. Some of the men turned toward the newcomers when
the door opened. Rachel took inventory. Some were in their twenties,
some older. Some wore hats, some did not. Most dressed in the styles of the time: long trousers, dark jackets over white shirts with cravats. One man of narrow frame wore all black. Rachel might have recognized him from earlier. He was the man in the rowboat.

Rachel would also have seen how they
looked
—how they gazed at
her
, and yet through and beyond her, too, appraising her and fitting her
into calculations that stretched on to the future’s horizon. Here’s how William Hayden felt on the receiving end of that gaze. Sold to Kentucky as a boy in the 1790s, he was dealt again in 1812 to a man named Phillips. This new owner, a Mississippi Valley version of a Georgia-man, carried people down the river to sell them from his flatboat to planters in Natchez, at New Orleans, and in small Louisiana
towns. One day a merchant named Castleman came to talk to Phillips. Castleman “was anxious to secure me,” Hayden remembered, and his smile revealed “the joy that the wolf feels when pouncing upon a lamb.”
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Wolves. Rachel felt their eyes. The key to all the commodities sold at Maspero’s, even cotton, was flesh. When she had boarded the
Temperance
, she had already known that she was going to be
sold in New Orleans. African Americans in Maryland were learning about “New Orleans” just as they had learned about “Georgia.” Rachel could now see the line of men, women, and children standing against the far wall, and she saw that Maspero’s was the place where the sale would happen. But even had she been blind, the palpable anticipation in the air would have revealed the place’s nature. That desire
was not for her alone as a slave, or as a woman—though both of those desires were part of the combustible mixture. The anticipation was part of the identity of the specific white men who waited in the room. They weren’t slave traders in the same sense that the term describes either a Georgia-man like M’Giffin or a Phillips, or their successors who would work in New Orleans in later years. Those
were people who specialized in buying enslaved people in one place, taking them to another, and selling them there. As of 1819, professional slave traders were rare in New Orleans. No specialist kept a private jail, like the two dozen that would cluster by the 1850s along Gravier and Baronne Streets, just southeast of where the New Orleans Superdome now stands. Nor would one find at the levee
in 1819 dedicated slave ships like those that eventually plied the waters between the Chesapeake and the Mississippi.
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On an 1817 journey down the Mississippi, an Englishman noticed that in the taverns where businessmen met along the way to New Orleans, “there are many men of real, but more of fictitious capital. In their occupations they
are not confined to any one particular pursuit, the same
person often being farmer, store and hotel-keeper, land-jobber, brewer, steam-boat owner, and slave dealer.” Most important: “All are speculators; and each man anticipates making a fortune, not by patient industry and upright conduct, but by ‘a lucky hit.’” Such were the men who collected here at Maspero’s. Take the one in black, sipping cold water, for John McDonogh was an abstemious Presbyterian.
McDonogh had come from Rachel’s own Baltimore, two decades earlier—not as goods for sale, but with a cargo owned by merchant employers. He sold it, remitted the proceeds, and struck out on his own. Rivals claimed that McDonogh and his business partner, Richard Shepherd, intentionally planted land-sale rumors in Maspero’s, gossip that raised the price of McDonogh’s own property holdings, which
covered much of Louisiana. Yet McDonogh was neither a landlord, nor—though he bought and sold slaves—a slave trader. McDonogh was an entrepreneur. He modestly clothed his desires in solemn black broadcloth. But he was a disruptive, destructive force that broke and remade the world, just like a more flamboyant man whose gaze Rachel also crossed.
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No single man was more influential in shaping
the New Orleans cotton trade into the world’s biggest one than Vincent Nolte. He first came at the behest of the Anglo-Dutch firm Hope and Company before 1812, bringing half a million pounds in paper backed by the Bank of England. With this stake he built a circuit of cotton and capital between the Old World and the New. After the War of 1812 ended, he linked up with Baring Brothers, the massive London
commercial bank that had financed the US purchase of Louisiana, and whose pressure had convinced American and British negotiators to swallow pride and sign the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814. Barings’ money allowed Nolte to accumulate huge piles of cotton on the levee after 1815, and by 1819 he was buying 20,000 to 40,000 bales per year—4 to 8 percent of US exports, and up to a quarter of
what passed through New Orleans.
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One could argue that as much as any great inventor, factory owner, or banker, it was Vincent Nolte who made modernization possible. He shaped the patterns and institutions of the most important commodity trade of the nineteenth century, the one that fed Britain’s mills with the most important raw material of the industrial revolution. The huge quantities of
money he channeled from Britain into this room at Maspero’s stimulated greater and greater cotton production along the river valleys that fed New Orleans. Nolte’s modernization of the trade incidentally made it both more efficient and more open to new players. He gathered and disseminated information about the state of Mississippi Valley markets by creating a printed circular
that quoted the going
price for all sorts of goods in New Orleans—what his contemporaries called a “Price-current.”
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Usually we think of the architects of modern capitalism as rational. They might be greedy and they might be profit-seekers, but they reject gambling and achieve accumulation through self-denial and efficiency. Accounts of economics usually teach that people are driven by calculations about “utility”
and price, and that market behavior is predictable and rational. Nolte, however, was unquestionably a gambler. He didn’t care about efficiency; he wanted piles of money, and he wanted to win. Make no mistake: He didn’t think he was trusting to luck. He believed that he understood the game of speculation well enough to know its secrets. But he rolled the dice. Over the decades, Nolte gained and lost
vast sums of money. He even put his life at stake for his prospect of gain, fighting four duels with business rivals in 1814 and 1815.
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If Nolte wanted to make an incomparable fortune, it wasn’t because he thought success equaled salvation, or because profit was an end in itself, exactly. Nolte’s actions spurred economic modernization—ever-more-efficient exploitation of ever-greater amounts
of resources—by stimulating the production of enormous quantities of cotton. In the real history of the real modern world, change has been jolted forward again and again by people like Nolte, who in their dice-rolling bids to make massive profits disturb existing equilibriums by introducing new elements. The new elements they introduce as levers of dominance might be technological innovations, but
entrepreneurs rarely create these innovations themselves. Instead, they figure out how to reap their benefits in order to rip market share and profits away from other capitalists who are invested in status-quo technologies and staler business models. They are architects of the dynamic of “creative destruction” that iconoclastic economist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the core engine of capitalism’s
growth. Creative destruction produces wrenching shocks, devastating depressions following dramatic expansions, wars and conquests and enslavements. Here, in New Orleans, cotton—and slaves—enabled creative destruction to produce the modern economy.
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Nolte said he did what he did because of something he wanted to feel—what he called “the charm,” the spell he wove upon himself by knitting a “vast
web of extended commerce” with himself at the center. And Maspero’s was a room full of Noltes, for whom creative destruction was motivation as much as process. Along with McDonogh and Shepherd and Nolte, their ranks at the tables included such men as Beverley Chew and Richard Relf, William Kenner, Stephen Henderson, and French-speakers like merchant
Louis Lecesne and broker P. F. DuBourg, who
cut deals with Creole planters. They, too, loved the sense of power they got from exerting what Nolte called the “enterprising mercantile spirit”: cutting out rivals, knowing that people far away were bending to their wills. They bought cotton from the interior and shipped it to Liverpool. They bought cargoes from England and Germany and sold their contents to stores strung like beads on the rivers
all the way up to Louisville.
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Using geographical position, special knowledge, and special access to essential commodities, these nonspecialized, flexible entrepreneurs organized from scratch a massive increase in the global economy’s most important raw material. Over the course of the five years that began in 1815, southern cotton became the world’s most widely traded commodity, and New Orleans
became the gravitational center of the system of buying and distributing it. The city doubled the amount of cotton it shipped, soon surpassing the southeastern ports of Charleston and Savannah.

Maspero’s was the first center of the New Orleans cotton trade. It was also the site around which another new market was coalescing. As the
Gazette de la Louisiane
reported, at Maspero’s you could buy
a cargo of Irish and English cloth; a pilot-boat; a piece of land on Chartres Street; a brick house; a plantation (that of Madame Andry, Manuel’s widow, in fact), and
les esclaves
. One could buy people here, on any day save Sunday, by bidding at auctions or negotiating with these entrepreneurs. In addition to their other activities, all these men sold and bought substantial numbers of slaves there.
Kenner and Henderson sold at least 150 slaves at Maspero’s between 1815 and 1820. McDonogh’s trading partner Shepherd sold 97. Scottish cotton merchant Thomas Urquhart sold 76 people. And so on. And as with cotton, at Maspero’s these creative destroyers established access to supply, stimulated demand, and created a place where a purchaser could always count on finding what he wanted. In other
words, they made a market, one that—though centered in the Lower Mississippi Valley—stretched far beyond this specific place to creep tendrils of incentive reaching into Maryland farms, Alabama cotton docks, New York banks, and London parlors. This slave market would continue to develop over the next four decades in dynamic relationship with the development of the cotton economy.
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As we trace
Rachel’s path, we can see how that market-making happened. Her transport depended on the actions of federal and state governments. The compromises of the Constitution permitted the transport of slaves across state lines. Congress also protected transport with its 1793 law that blocked non-slaveholding states from sheltering runaways. Meanwhile, like most
other enslaved people transported from
the southeast to New Orleans in the pre-1820s period, Rachel came by a route that resembled the paths of other commodities to the levee. Southwestern entrepreneurs asked their southeastern contacts to buy them slaves. Sometimes these were specific requests—a blacksmith from Maryland for Stephen Minor of Natchez, for instance—but usually they were general, as in, “Procure [me] hands from Virginia.”
For now, the people procured were sent on regular merchant ships, such as the
Clio
, on which Benjamin Latrobe sailed from Norfolk in 1818. The
Clio
also carried regular merchandise and one Doctor Day, who was moving to the Red River to become a cotton planter. While Day transported twelve of his own slaves, the ship also bore Tom, who had been consigned, like Rachel, by Baltimore merchant David
Anderson. Tom cost Anderson $800, plus a fare of $30, but he died off the coast of Florida. Watching the
Clio
’s sailors throw his body into the water, white passengers speculated that he would have brought close to $1,200 in New Orleans. Anderson’s New Orleans consignee had lost quite an investment.
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After reaching New Orleans, slaves like Rachel and tall William were often kept on board their
vessels until they could be sold. In other cases, entrepreneurs locked captives in stables, in the city jail, or with other commodities in counting-houses and warehouses. William Kenner kept people at his own slave labor camp until he considered them “seasoned” enough to sell. Slave-sellers also locked people in Maspero’s—in the ballroom adjacent to the bar, or upstairs in the meeting room, the
same one where Andrew Jackson had berated the gathered city fathers for quailing in the face of Pakenham’s redcoats. But Maspero’s made a poor jail. In October 1819, the Roman brothers, local enslavers who branded any person they bought, purchased a woman named Maria for the high price of $1,500. They left her in Maspero’s keeping while they finished their town business. Reluctant to endure the hot
iron the Romans were paying so much to inflict on her, Maria escaped. Seven weeks later, she was still running.
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