The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (38 page)

Figure 6.2. Price of Cotton, Price of a Slave, and Value of Cotton Output per Slave, 1805–1860.
Source:
Adapted from Roger Ransom,
Conflict and Compromise
(Cambridge, UK, 1989), 56.

But the legal documents of New Orleans allow us to take an even more accurate measurement of the new traders’ creation—and they show that something else was happening in the 1820s. Whereas most 1815–1819
sales there had been made by entrepreneurs who traded in other goods as well, now specialized slave traders began to dominate the notarial records. These professional traders dramatically increased the scale of the forced migration of people. And when we combine the information from the first document that Boswell recorded—the deed or act of sale, which showed that Pierce was selling Ellen to Barthelemy
Bonny of Orleans Parish for $420—with a second one, we can see that in the 1820s enslavers had also come as close to fully monetizing human bodies and lives as any set of capitalists have ever done. Starting in the fall of 1829, buyers and sellers also had to comply with a new Louisiana law that required everyone who imported an out-of-state slave for sale to create and file a “certificate
of good character,” which had to be witnessed by two property owners from the slave’s home county. Louisiana state legislators were worried that the rapidly expanding trade between slavery’s oldest states to slavery’s newest ones was bringing in rebellious troublemakers. This certificate had to list the names of the original seller and purchaser, the sale site, and a general description of the person
sold: name, age, sex, color, height. So we can see from the certificate Pierce filed with Boswell that Pierce bought Ellen in Davidson County, Tennessee—Nashville—on the 22nd of September, from Garrison Lanier. Lanier was a Davidson County resident who owned six slaves before selling Ellen.
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The law was in force until late 1831, and the trade concentrated mainly in the post-malaria months of
late November to April, so the certificates give us two “selling seasons.” In those two seasons, more than 4,200 certificates of good character entered the books of thirteen different New Orleans notaries. Add them all up, sort them, test them with statistical software, and they yield a census that is unique in the records of the internal slave trade in the United States. Such a database allows us
to see, for these two years, precisely whom the slave trade pulled to the Mississippi’s mouth, where they came from, and who had sold them back in the old states. This knowledge can shed new light on how professional slave traders replaced the multitasking entrepreneurs of the 1810s. The data from the notarial records can also contextualize the experiences of the people who were inside the slave
trade, helping us to see what shaped the stories Ellen told when she got to Barthelemy Bonny’s slave labor camp. (See
Tables 6.1
and
6.2
.)
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To begin with, the enslaved people sold in New Orleans in 1829–1831 by slave traders like Pierce were overwhelmingly from the older states that
constituted the heart of slavery and the African-descended population in the United States. In 1815–1819, 33 percent
of the enslaved sold in New Orleans had come from the Chesapeake and the Carolinas. Now more than one-third of all the certificates were issued in one state—Virginia—which one of its natives, Louis Hughes, called the “mother of slavery.” “When I was placed upon the block,” Hughes remembered, “a Mr. McGee came up and felt of me and asked me what I could do. ‘You look like a right smart nigger,’
said he, ‘Virginia always produces good darkies.’” In fact, more than two-thirds of the people transported to New Orleans between July 1829 and the end of 1831 came from the three states of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The combined share for North Carolina and the Chesapeake—the oldest districts of slavery in the United States—amounts to 3,009, or 77 percent of the total (
Table 6.2
).
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Image 6.1. In 1829, the Louisiana state legislature passed a law that required all enslaved people brought into the state to be sold to be accompanied by a “certificate of good character.” These contained personal information about the enslaved person in question, making possible an unprecedented analysis of where they came from, when they had been sold to the slave trader in question, and other key characteristics of their personal forced migrations.
Source:
New Orleans Parish, Acts of William Baswell, Vol. 7, p. 299, Certificate of Good Character for Ellen, Notarial Archive, New Orleans.

TABLE 6.1. CERTIFICATE ORIGINS BY STATE, 1829–1831, NEW ORLEANS, AND 1826–1834, NATCHEZ

Source:
Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans and Port Register, Adams County, Mississippi (in private hands).

*
Number of persons

**
Percent of column total

TABLE 6.2. CERTIFICATE ORIGINS BY GROUPS OF STATES, 1829–1831, NEW ORLEANS, AND 1826–1834, NATCHEZ

Source:
Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans and Port Register, Adams County, Mississippi (in private hands).

In counties along the James, the Roanoke, and the Potomac, African grandparents, great-grandparents, and even further-back parents had, over the decades and centuries since they had survived the Atlantic slave trade, created the traditions and networks that
enabled enslaved families to survive. They had even thrived, living longer and raising more of their own babies to healthy adulthood. But by the 1820s, enslavers had been pulling up stakes and heading southwest across the mountains to places where money could be made for three decades. As of 1850, 388,000 whites born in Virginia would live in other states. Human property, generated by enslaved
people’s own commitment to raising and protecting children, often represented for the enslavers who remained in the Southeast their only real wealth. Only markets in Georgia or Louisiana could render those slaves as liquid value. And by 1829, a new set of entrepreneurs was building on the earlier development of market institutions in New Orleans to create a powerful and efficient trade
that unlocked
the monetary value stored in the family bonds that enslaved people had built so richly in the Chesapeake and Carolinas.
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As early as the mid-1820s, people who visited the Mississippi Valley had been noticing this new breed of entrepreneurs. They were young men who were getting rich fast by specializing in one commodity—humans. Buying masses of enslaved people for low prices in Virginia and Maryland,
these young men “thrust them into the prison-house for safe-keeping,” drove their enslaved purchases “handcuffed through the country like cattle,” and boated them down the rivers and around the cape of Florida to New Orleans or elsewhere to the southwest. The new entrepreneurs were efficiently connecting stored wealth to markets by handling the entire middle portion of the forced migration
process. And African Americans gave them a new name. Robert Falls heard it from his mother, who told him that her enslaver sold her “to the slave speculators,” who drove her and the rest of a coffle “like a pack of mules, to the market.” They went through North Carolina, where, Falls later said, “she began to have fits. You see they had sold her away from her baby.”
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One of the most famous speculators,
Austin Woolfolk of Baltimore, created a number of innovations that produced increasingly efficient market connections between the old states and the slave frontier. He set up branches of his firm in both selling and buying areas, allowing his trading activities to run more or less continuously. In districts ripe with buyable slaves, such as Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Austin Woolfolk and
his brother John used advertisements to generate a groundswell of brand recognition. Soon competitors did the same, such as Samuel Reynolds, who came to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1831 and placed an ad in the
Easton Republican Star.
It proclaimed that he wouldn’t leave the Easton Hotel until he bought “100 NEGROES,” “from the age of twelve to twenty-five years, for which he will give higher prices
than any real purchaser that is now in the market.” Young Frederick Douglass, who was sent back from Baltimore (where he had secretly learned to read) to rural Talbot County—Easton was the county seat—remembered that for those who didn’t read the newspapers, Woolfolk’s employees tacked up “flaming
‘hand-bills’
”—printed in loud typefaces—“headed CASH FOR NEGROES.” The Woolfolks, who bought Jacob
Green’s mother, paid cash. But they refused to haggle, Green recalled—they typically offered a standard rate for individuals of a particular age and sex.
⁹

Just to the north of Talbot County was Kent County, another decayed rural area whose enslavers profited more from selling people than they did from selling tobacco. Thousands of whites left Kent County for greener pastures. So did African Americans,
such as nine-year-old Henry Highland
Garnet, who escaped to Pennsylvania with his parents in 1824. Garnet grew up to become an advocate of African-American self-determination, famous for speeches like his 1842 “Address to the Slaves,” which called for violent revolt. But most of the African Americans who left Kent County went south with speculators, not north to freedom. In 1829 through 1831,
the certificates from New Orleans show, slave traders bought 100 slaves in Kent County and took them to Louisiana. Kent County at the time had about 10,000 people, 3,000 of whom were enslaved, so 100 sales equaled more than 3 percent of the enslaved.
¹⁰

Look even closer: 97 of the Kent County slaves sold in New Orleans were between the ages of ten and thirty, and 79 were between fourteen and twenty-three,
the age group that held most of those who were sold as “hands.” Look with the eyes of Methodist minister and Kent County native John Dixon Long. He saw the result of these sales at the water’s edge where those to be transported were to be loaded onto a ferry. A crowd of mothers, fathers, and friends waited to say goodbye to one out of every ten young men and women in the community. Armed
white men kept the two crowds apart, for although a coffle-chain already bound the men and boys, everyone was a potential escape threat. Not even the women were allowed into the bushes. “I have seen [the men], at the Ferry,” Long remembered, “under the necessity of violating the decencies of nature before the women, not being permitted to retire.” They did the best they could, the opposite sex
turning away in kindness. Then the barge grounded on the sand and the time came to say goodbye: “‘Farewell, mother’; ‘farewell, child’; ‘farewell, John’; ‘farewell, Bill.’”
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