The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (22 page)

Credit appeared to be turning enslavers’ Alabama dreams into reality. Alabama was already third in the United States in total cotton produced and first in per capita production. And not just
Alabama enslavers: between 1815 and 1819, settlers transported nearly 100,000 unfree migrants to southern Louisiana, central Tennessee, and the area around Natchez, Mississippi.
These slaves cleared fields bought on spec, grew cotton to make interest payments and keep new loans flowing, and served as collateral besides. The dramatic increase in the ability of would-be entrepreneurs to borrow money
had extended their right-handed reach across time and space, over mountains, and across seas.
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BACK IN NEW ORLEANS
, where plenty of credit was available for the right hands of those who bought and sold, the bells of the St. Louis Cathedral on the Place d’Armes—just around the corner from Maspero’s—rang out at noon, resounding through the conspiratorial coffee-house buzz. Then one of the wizards
of the credit process arose. This was Toussaint Mossy, one of the city’s most popular auctioneers. Until now he had been sitting at a table, observing the people who leaned in a rough line against the wall, puffing on his pipe and glancing occasionally at a sheet of paper. On it were written names, ages, and phrases, some of which might be true. Standing, he turned to face the room. In French-accented
English, he explained to the expectant audience that twenty-three slaves would now be sold by auction. The newspaper had simply said “terms will be made known at the time of sale.” Enslaved people sold as part of an estate often were sold on longer-term credit of a year or more granted from local seller to local buyer, usually with a mortgage to protect the lender. Sellers like McLean, who
had probably bought his slaves in the Chesapeake with short-term credit that soon would be due, wanted bank notes or easily traded credit in the form of bills of exchange. Mossy then explained that the auction would take place outside. He turned and walked out the door.
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Rachel and William blinked in the sunlight that beat down on the St. Louis Street wall. The first person to be pulled out
might have been John—at about fifty, the oldest in the group. Mossy pointed him to the low bench. Tall and light-skinned, John stepped up on the box as white folks filed out of Maspero’s and surrounded him in a semicircle. Passers-by paused: women with market baskets, men striding up from other stores, children white and black, flatboat men from up the river. Enslaved people stood at the back of the
crowd, faces blank. A hush settled, broken by creaking wagon wheels and muffled shouts from stevedores on the levee. The moment was here, the one that made trees fall, cotton bales strain against their ropes, filled the stores with goods, sailed paper across oceans and back again, made the world believe.
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Mossy began to speak. But not in everyday talk. Auctioneers persist long past Mossy’s day.
One knows what they sound like, but their skills seem antique in a time when most auctions are held impersonally online. But there
are two important things to remember about Mossy’s job. First, an auction is the purest moment of supply meeting demand and thus sorting out prices in the capitalist market economy. John, facing the crowd, was a test of the demand for a fifty-year-old male human being
in New Orleans on a Thursday in January when cotton sales had been strong and credit elastic. Buyers and sellers who heard its outcome would hang a whole array of prices on the amount paid for him. This lesson would shape private sales, affect bidding in later auctions, weigh the numbers inked by slaves’ names on estate inventories. Mossy’s cajoling, whispered collusions between potential buyers
in the crowd, nods and raised hands that signified bids, prices of credit and cotton—all were shaped by and in turn blew back and forth the cloud of information and belief that was the market for slaves.

Second, auctioneers then as now were expected to weave a spell of excitement about the act of purchasing. Mossy wanted to get the highest possible price, but he also created a community of buyers
and sellers there at Maspero’s. This kind of market-making trained buyers to think about the enslaved in certain ways. As Mossy announced key numbers for John and each of the other subjects of sale who would follow him onto the bench—height, age, and price—he also taught buyers how to see the features this community considered most valuable in an enslaved person. Height was the easiest to learn.
You could see it. Enslavers usually paid more for tall men than for short ones. Height was less important for shaping women’s prices, but age mattered for both men and women. Enslavers generally paid their highest prices for young men between eighteen and twenty-five, or for women between fifteen and twenty-two. At going rates in January 1819, McLean might realize between $900 and $1,100 for Ned
or William, while women of the same age usually sold for at least $100 or $200 less. Mossy would have to work to get $400 for fifty-year-old John.
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Although enslaved people born in the southwestern United States were considered less likely to die from disease than were new migrants to the region, African Americans from Virginia and Maryland were already important to this market, too. There were
simply not enough local prime-age men and women available to meet the demand. And unlike seasoned but savvy locals, a youngster from Virginia might seem like a malleable piece of one’s right-handed dreams: Alexander McNeill, for example, told the man selling teenager Henry Watson that he “wanted to bring up a boy to suit himself.” Moreover, in Maryland at about this time, enslaved men in their
early twenties sold for about $500. In New Orleans, Ned or William might bring twice the Chesapeake price. Transport costs averaged less than $100 per slave, so
entrepreneurs who secured enslaved people from older states could undersell locals while still pocketing a huge profit.
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Image 3.2. At auctions, enslavers and the credit that they wielded formed a community of entrepreneurs, who here stand—both men and women—around the main event. But the auction also shaped a market that measured people as commodities—like the men, women, and children who slump on the bench in the foreground, waiting their turns. George Bourne,
Picture of Slavery in the United States of America
(Middletown, CT, 1834), 144–145.

The transactions of the auction, and indeed of any sale, were more complicated than a simple sale of good
x
by seller (1) to buyer (2) for price
y
or
z
. Going by fifties, tens, or smaller numbers still, bidders competed with each other in ways that were sometimes more about proving oneself than about buying a slave. Methodist minister Wilson Whitaker
reported what happened at a North Carolina auction when John Cotten battled with a man the preacher knew only as “Dancy.” The two first clashed over who would win a cornfield. Then they ran the price of a male slave up to $1,400—New Orleans prices, in North Carolina. Dancy could go no higher. But then he called Cotten “a dam’d scoundrel,” and went for the winner with a whip. So Cotten pulled out
his pistol and shot him. The victor fled, leaving a friend to take possession of the enslaved man.
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At the same time, the auction was a place for finding out how malleable an enslaved person would be in the buyer’s right hand, how well they suited the buyer’s schemes. Young Louis Hughes remembered how the buyers pressed him and dozens of other slaves who stood in a formation at a Richmond slave
pen. Shoppers “passed up and down between the lines looking the poor creatures over, and questioning [the women,] . . . ‘What can you do?’ ‘Are you a good cook? seamstress? dairymaid?’ . . . [and to the men,] ‘Can you plow? Are you a blacksmith?’”
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Image 3.3. Inspection was part of the process of establishing a human being as a “hand” available and ready for sale. This was serious business, but here the enslaved person was required to play a role—standing still, not resisting, answering questions with the most market-friendly responses and behaviors.
Illustrated London News
, February 16, 1861, p. 138.

Private sales, made not in
public auctions but in one-on-one negotiations, sometimes gave a person the chance to size up his or her would-be consumer. On the one hand, if the scuttlebutt in the warehouse told you a prospective buyer lived near the place where you had heard your wife or child or parent had been sold—well, then make yourself the brightest-eyed and most compliant in the bunch. On the other hand, you might not
want to be noticed in some cases. To the frightened teenager Henry Watson, Alexander McNeill
appeared “the very man . . . from whom I should shrink, and be afraid . . . sharp, grey eyes, a peaked nose, and compressed lips.” “He was a very bad-looking man,” Watson said years later, and Watson “never wish[ed] to look upon his face again.” But be careful: If the seller caught you not “selling yourself,”
you would get whipped.
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At auctions, the number of white eyes concentrated on one slave’s body emboldened questioners and intimidated the questioned. Interrogations replaced coy flirtations: “What sort of work can you do? Have you ever run away?” The seller might have primed the slave with answers, but a room full of aggressive entrepreneurs pressed, trying to get slaves to stumble and spill
the truth: “Who taught you how to lay brick?” John might have been struck off in five minutes so that Mossy could get to the more delectable parts of the bill of fare, but others had to endure half an hour or even longer before they could step down. This was too long to game the questions and answers. To add to the pressure, when whites sensed fatigue, they’d press a man on the block to share a fake-companionable
swig of brandy, forcing the enslaved to lower his or her defenses and submissively swallow the spit of the people who sold them.
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