The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (30 page)

Sarah Wells remembered that near Warren County, Mississippi, where she grew up, some slaves picked 100 pounds a day, some 300, and some 500. But if your quota was 250 pounds, and one day you didn’t reach it, “they’d punish you, put you in the stocks,”
and beat you. If a new hand couldn’t meet the set quota, that hand would have to improve his or her “capacity for picking,” or the whip would balance the account. “You are mistaken when you say your negroes are ignorant of the proper way of working,” wrote Robert Beverley about a new crew transported from Virginia to Alabama. “They only require to be made to do it . . . by flogging and that quite
often.” A few years later, having received another batch of people, he wrote, “They are very difficult negroes to make pick cotton. I have flogged this day, you would think if you had seen it[,] without mercy.”
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Learning how to meet one’s quota was difficult, and those who met it before sunset still had to keep picking. As William Anderson moved toward his quota in a Mississippi field, his new
enslaver repeatedly knocked him down with a heavy stick, claiming William was lagging. In Alabama in the 1820s, “Old Major Billy Watkins” would “stand at his house, and watch the slaves picking cotton; and if any of them straitened their backs for a moment, his savage yell would ring, ‘bend your backs.’” In 1829, also in Alabama, Henry
Gowens saw an overseer force slow women to kneel in front
of their cotton baskets. Shoving their heads into the cotton, he would pull up their dresses and beat them until blood ran down their legs.

Women were disproportionately targeted. Enslavers who were obsessed with getting crops to market were not interested in hearing about recovery from childbirth or gynecological problems. “To make money men are required[,] or boys large enough,” wrote one frustrated
enslaver, and another, “[Because] we have not a pregnant woman on the plantation[,] the females are the better pickers and have saved much the larger portion of the crop.” Women nursing babies in the shade where they had been laid, or toddlers among the cotton plants—all could become flashpoints for white fury. “Gross has killed Sook’s youngest child,” wrote a white woman to her slave-trader
cousin. “He took the child out to work (it was between one year and eighteen months old) & because it would not do its work to please him he first whipt it & then held its head in the [creek] branch to make it hush crying.”
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So, afraid of what lurked behind their bent backs, afraid of the scale and slate that lay before them, enslaved people kept picking till the end of the day. When the weighing
and account-balancing by whipping was done for the evening, they tried to salve their wounds. Yet as they slept, the enslaver sat in his house. By the light of a candle, he transferred chalk totals into the more lasting ink and paper of a ledger. Then he erased the slate. And then, he wrote down new and higher minimums. After Israel Campbell figured out how to meet his quota, Belfer raised Campbell’s
requirement to 175 pounds per day. John Brown remembered that “as I picked so well at first, more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day,” after starting at a minimum requirement of 100.
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Cotton-picking increased because quotas rose. In 1805, Wade
Hampton and his henchmen gradually increased their demands on Ball until he was picking 50-odd pounds a day. By the late 1820s, enslavers in Mississippi and Tennessee demanded 100 pounds. Five years later, that total had gone up another 30 pounds. Hands now moved “like a bresh heap afire”—“as if,” a Mississippi planter wrote, “some new motive power was applied in the process.” As if, in other words,
mechanical engines hummed inside the enslaved, as if the disembodied hands of whites’ language moved by themselves over the cotton plants in the field. By the 1850s, ex-slaves reported, enslavers demanded 200 pounds or more of most slaves on some places, and even 250 on others.
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Image 4.4. Enslavers used cotton-picking records to measure and record each enslaved person’s output. Such ledgers served, along with the scale and the whip, as key parts of the “whipping-machine” system that raised cotton output steadily over time. Here we have two pages of the picking record used in 1852 on the Laurel slave labor camp in Warren County, Mississippi, owned by R. C. Ballard. R. C. Ballard Papers, Folder 447, University of North Carolina.

Thus enslavers extracted a massive rise in cotton productivity from the 1790s to 1860. While planter-entrepreneurs did not publish their method for making cotton-picking as efficient as possible in a textbook or an agricultural journal, they created practices, attitudes, and material goods—whips, slates, pens, paper, and the cotton
plant itself—that made up the method’s interlocking cogs. White overseers also played an important role, and not just as the ones who often put this system of violent labor rationalization into hour-by-hour practice. They probably invented many of the practices of accounting and torture as they carried their slates and bullwhips ever west and south. Eager to impress their employers, associating
with each other, they, too, shared ideas and pushed their peers to conform to an ideal of absolute control over their captives through a commitment to violence. But whoever created the pushing system and the dynamically increasing picking quotas, they were
crucial to what one overseer called this “great revolution in the commerce and manufactures of nations,” the continuous increase in cotton
productivity that shaped the nineteenth-century transformation of the world.
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In 1861, the basic mechanics of arms, backs, and fingers remained as they had been in 1805, when Charles Ball came to Congaree. They were unchanged from the time when human beings invented agriculture. Nor could enslaved people imagine, when they were confronted by ridiculously high quotas, how they would pay their
debt from their hands and not their skin. Often, their first solution was to try to fool the weight and cheat the whip. They hid rocks, dirt, and pumpkins in their baskets in order to make them heavier. Sometimes it worked. Israel Campbell hid watermelons in his baskets to cover the ten pounds he could never quite make. He got away with it for a year. Another method took teamwork: distracting the
overseer as he manned the scale, taking advantage of the darkness outside the circle of his lamp to swap a heavy basket for a light one. “Such tricks as these will be continually practiced upon an overseer who is careless or ‘soft,’” wrote one planter.
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Overseers, however, were selected for their “hardness.” If they caught enslaved people trying to short the scales on their daily cotton debt,
the punishment was severe. Surveillance and physical intimidation in the fields also made it difficult for pickers to cheat the scale by loading in field rocks, or to run away before weighing time. Sometimes, fast workers tried to help slower ones by putting cotton in their baskets, or taking their rows for a while. But enslavers usually made rules against cooperation, and enforced them. Instead,
as minimums increased for all over time, entrepreneurs and exploiters forced individual enslaved people to marshal the forces of their own creativity against their own long-term health and independence, and even against each other. So, fearing punishment or even death, minds scrambled to come up with ways to speed hands. And the dramatic increase over time in the quantity picked reveals that somehow
they succeeded.
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But how? Look at enslavers’ language. It assumed that some human beings could be reduced to appendages of others. Yet it also mirrored the words that formerly enslaved people used to describe the experience of picking cotton. For they remembered that to pick quickly enough to turn cotton entrepreneurs’ calculations about profit into reality, one had to disembody oneself. Picking
all day long until late at night, even by candlelight, they had to dissociate their minds from pain that racked stooping backs; from blood running down pricked fingertips; from hands that gnarled into claws over a few short years; from thirst, hunger, blurred vision, and anxiety about the
whip behind and before them. One had to separate mind from hand—to become, for a time, little more than a
hand. Or two hands, like novice picker Solomon Northup’s neighbor Patsey. While Northup lurched down his row, “the long cumbersome sack” making “havoc with [cotton] branches,” and groping single cotton bolls with both hands, Patsey worked both sides of her row in perpetual motion, right and left. She reached with one hand and dropped cotton in the bag hanging from her neck with the other, “lightning-quick
motion was in her fingers as no other fingers possessed,” Northup later wrote. She moved like a dancer in an unconscious rhythm, though of displacement rather than of pleasure.
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Patsey’s hands—both of them, right and left—each did their own thinking, like those of a pianist. For most of the laborers, however, the left hand was a problem. Symmetry can be beautiful to witness. In tests, people
seem consistently attracted to more symmetrical faces and bodies. But in fact human beings are in crucial ways asymmetrical. Nine out of ten of us prefer to use the right hand for most tasks. Virtually all of us prefer one hand over another. And we know now that the left side of the brain controls the right hand, and vice versa. The left side of the brain is more heavily involved in analytical, detailed,
specific processes and thoughts. These include language, and they also include skilled work with the hands. The right is more responsible for “global” processes, such as general perceptions of the world. Many believe it to be more artistic, more emotional. Of course, the reality is slightly more complex than a simple right/left spatial separation inside the brain. Nor is the nature of asymmetry
always the same: in some left-handers, language faculties are primarily based in the right side of the brain, rather than the left. But either way, different sections of the brain play specific and distinct roles, and specific parts of the brain are linked in different ways to our dominant and nondominant hands. Right and left hand, right and left brain are neither equal nor interchangeable.
Our hands are crucial elements of how we are wired to the world and the brain and the mind and the self.
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Our strong hand, whether we are right- or left-handed, is the dexterous partner of our conscious, planning mind. We write, we touch, we gesture, we take more with one hand than the other. And we also work with one hand more than the other, and that hand links our work to the mind and the
self, making them all one whole identity. In the skilled tasks that Charles Ball did back in Maryland, the right hand always led his body. Like a woodcarver or a blacksmith, a man like Charles Ball often identified himself with the day’s work he could do with an axe (led by one hand) or the scythe (ditto.) So would a cook, or a housemaid. She, or he, was more than that work. But in
skilled labor
in which one hand was the leader, the mind at work could sometimes express the self with mastery and joy—even if the work was forced and the product stolen.

On the cotton frontier, however, quotas kept rising. Now, there are switch-hitters in baseball, piano and guitar players with equally (though differently) skilled left and right hands. There are those who as a trick or because of an injury
have learned to write with each hand. But these are specific skills, learned for the purpose of distinguishing and expressing the self. In reality, almost no one is truly ambidextrous. Enslaved people were only able to pick the required amount of cotton by learning how to unhook their nondominant hand from the tethers of bodily asymmetry and brain architecture that they had developed over the course
of a lifetime. For eventually, only by using two hands that operated independently and simultaneously could they meet the rising quotas.