The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (41 page)

To the enslaved, only one other set of events in remembered history seemed as significant as the
forced migration that was consuming their families and communities at an accelerating rate in the 1820s. Long after 1808, plenty of people in the South could still talk about how they had been stolen from Africa into the Middle Passage. In 1844, asked to give his age, an African-born Florida man replied, “Me no know, massa, Buckra man steal niggar year year ago.” To understand and explain the expansion
of slavery
in which they found themselves, American-born listeners borrowed terms from African survivors who had told them of how the first slavery had been made. “They always done tell it am wrong to lie and steal,” said Josephine Hubbard. “So why did the white folks steal my mammy and her mammy from Africa?” “They talks a heap ‘bout the niggers stealing,” said Shang Harris. “What was the first
stealing done? It was in Afriky, when the white folks stole the niggers.”
²⁹

In the 1820s and 1830s, as the new professional slave trade in hands became institutionalized and expanded exponentially, so did the stories and so did the number of tellers. The themes of theft, the indictment of whites, and the understanding that the personal disruptions drove a new form of slavery all deepened. Anyone,
enslaved people came to understand, could be taken and transported southwest. All of those taken were in some way stolen, for the basic rituals of this emerging, modern market society were absurd disguises for thievery. So, for instance, implied the apocryphal tale of a woman named Venus, whose story circulated around southern fires for decades. Shoved onto the auction block by her enslaver,
Venus scowled down at those who eagerly bid on her. Then she interrupted the auctioneer’s patter with a sarcastic shout: “Weigh them cattle!” Such stories became classics, delivering again and again a powerful freight of indictment of whites, leading listeners from their own particular experiences into wider criticism of the absurdity of buying and selling human beings as property. “What was the law”—the
one that should be, or even, in the case of children kidnapped from free states, the law that white people themselves had written—“what was the law, when bright shiny money was in sight?” asked Charley Barbour. “Money make the train go . . . and at that time I expect money make the ships go”—to New Orleans with slaves, to Britain with cotton. Instead of being individual misfortunes, enslaved
people realized their own experiences were part of a giant historical robbery, a forced transfer of value that they saw every day in the form of widening clearings, cotton bales moving toward markets, and slave coffles heading further in.
³⁰

African Americans were not confused about what they thought of slavery’s expansion. Yet in the 1820s enslaved people’s vernacular history of being stolen
was still hidden on the breath of captives. And these captives had been carried far away from any audience that had the political or economic power to do much about the situation of enslaved people, or about the endlessly multiplied theft that was still in progress. Forced migration taught enslaved people to call slavery stealing, and it provoked them to take extreme measures to escape. In 1826, an
ad appeared in the
Natchez Gazette
offering $50 for anyone who could capture Jim, a slave who had escaped from owner
William Barrow. Purchased from Austin Woolfolk late the preceding fall at New Orleans, Jim had now run away, and Barrow suspected he’d try to “pass for free” on steamboats. Jim had a speech impediment, Barrow’s ad pointed out. Geography also impeded escape. Most likely, Jim did
not make it, although a few did. The same new technology that sped the passage of enslaved migrants up the rivers of the cotton country could also carry stowaways out.
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The enormity of what was happening in the cotton fields and traders’ jails of the new South was still only beginning to leak out in the 1820s. Runaways would carry most of what was carried: it wasn’t going to leak out with many
whites. Most found ways to accommodate themselves to what they saw, to sweep the inconvenient fragments under the rug. “Mrs. Ann Anderson sat by her window and cried,” remembered ex-slave Elisha Green, seeing in his mind again a white woman in the house where he’d worked back in Mayslick, Kentucky. Wagons filled with crying children came down the street as she watched, and then a clanking caterpillar
of men in irons followed. The oldest, in the lead, “looked to be about seventy years old, and he sang: ‘Hark from the tomb’”—a doleful hymn that in 1825 was already old-fashioned. So Mrs. Ann Anderson wept. And sat still.
³²

In the 1820s, a few scattered white dissidents were trying to raise the issue of slavery. But these white folks were in practical terms almost as powerless as white folks
could be in this era of American history. For instance, there were the southern Quakers, or at least a few of them. Although Pennsylvania was the settlement of New World Quakers, members of the Society of Friends—as the Quakers officially denominated themselves—had lived in North Carolina since the early eighteenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as other denominations
of Protestants in the South accommodated themselves to slavery, many North Carolina Quakers chose slavery over their own religious identity. But a few reacted against slavery’s deepening. There was Rachel Leonard, who became the first white woman to address a mixed male-female gathering on the subject when she read her “Address” to the North Carolina Manumission Society in the 1820s. Then
there was Elihu Embree, an eastern Tennessee Quaker, who in the early 1810s saw enslaved people being driven in irons along the roads across the mountains. Embree couldn’t sit by the window. He freed his own slaves and launched a newspaper called
The Emancipator.
His editorials rejected conventional excuses, such as Thomas Jefferson’s claim that separation from loved ones mattered little to African
Americans. No, insisted Embree, enslaved people had as much “sensibility and attachment” to their families as Jefferson did.
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These isolated dissidents were often unable to see beyond the assumptions that they took on board with their own self-identification as white. But at their best, they knew that slavery was changing and moving, and they knew that slavery’s growth troubled them in ways
that could not be dealt with in the sphere of normal political calculations and regional rivalries. At the same time, other white southerners began to see dissent as more problematic, especially after the Missouri crisis. By the time Embree died in 1820, some of his local associates, including fellow Quaker Charles Osborn, had already been forced out of Tennessee. Osborn moved to free-state Ohio and
established
The Philanthropist
, the first newspaper to advocate the unconditional abolition of slavery. He also met a young New Jersey Quaker named Benjamin Lundy. At nineteen, Lundy had gone to the Ohio Valley to practice his trade of saddle-making. In Wheeling, Virginia, which linked the Virginia valleys to the Ohio River and ultimately New Orleans, he realized the extent of the slave-trade
network. Wheeling, he wrote, was part of “a great thoroughfare for the traffickers in human flesh. Their
‘coffles’
passed through the place frequently. My heart was deeply grieved. . . . I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress; and the iron entered my soul.” Lundy moved Embree’s
Emancipator
to Baltimore and renamed it
The Genius of Universal Emancipation
.
³⁴

“Genius” meant
“Spirit”—or “breath,” and Lundy’s paper was the first white-run abolitionist newspaper to keep breathing for more than a handful of issues. Initially, Lundy used it to support the program of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which in the 1820s was the only prominent white organization to make a claim to being against slavery. The ACS proposed to solve the problem of slavery by shipping emancipated
slaves to Africa and elsewhere. Even this expedient was too antislavery for many whites. The escape of any African American, including the already-free, shrank the potential market in stolen humans. Perhaps that explains the murderous sentiment of the hired captain of an 1826 Quaker-sponsored voyage to resettle freed slaves in Haiti. He told his Quaker employer he’d prefer to tie the forty
emancipated African Americans on the ship to the Quaker himself and drown them all in “the Gulph Stream.”
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Most free African Americans despised the ACS, believing that the country of their birth was their country. A Quaker who interviewed free people of color in North Carolina learned that most were only considering transportation out of their home state because slave traders kept kidnapping
their children. Once Lundy settled in Baltimore, African Americans convinced him to move from colonization to advocacy of the immediate and unconditional end of slavery. In the 1820s, Baltimore was the biggest center of the domestic
slave trade on the East Coast. African Americans left behind there had much to say about the trade that had taken so many of their kinfolk. Their conversations with
Lundy agitated him into confrontation with powerful pro-slave-expansion interests. Soon, Lundy was charging in the pages of
The Genius
that all slaveholders were “disgraceful whoremongers” who bred human beings for the market. He saved his greatest fury for the Woolfolks, describing the family as a set of lawless “pirates” whose “heart rending cruelty” caused “fatal corruption in the body politic.”
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On January 9, 1827, Austin Woolfolk approached Lundy as the editor was locking up his print shop for the day. Woolfolk threw the Quaker to the ground and beat him severely, then walked away. Lundy pressed assault charges against Woolfolk. But when the case came to trial, the judge declared that the editor deserved “chastisement.” He fined the slave trader one whole dollar and then gave a speech
praising the slave trade’s economic benefits to the state of Maryland. He added that Woolfolk also had removed a “great many rogues and vagabonds who were a nuisance in the state.” (The government of Louisiana would have been unhappy to hear that the Maryland justice system encouraged the transportation of dangerous slaves to New Orleans.)
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Lundy had an apprentice, a young man from Newburyport,
Massachusetts. His name was William Lloyd Garrison. Every day, as he set the type for the next issue of
The Genius
, Garrison listened thoughtfully to local African-American men—men such as William Watkins and Jacob Greener, who came to the printing shop to talk with Lundy and each other. What they said “revealed,” as Garrison later put it, “the radical doctrine of
immediate, unconditional
emancipation.”
Lundy began to travel more, and his extended absences gave Garrison a chance to run the paper himself. It quickly became clear that the apprentice had a stronger taste for confrontation—and unlike the diminutive Lundy, Garrison was built like a linebacker. When Garrison labeled Francis Todd, a Massachusetts shipowner whose vessel had transported seventy-five slaves to Louisiana, a “highway
robber and murderer” and an “enemy of the human species,” Todd decided the courts were the better part of valor. He sued Garrison for libel and won. Garrison couldn’t pay his fine, so he was sentenced to six months in jail. After his release, Garrison headed north—another slave-trade-driven migration. Settling in Boston, he launched a new paper, called
The Liberator
.
³⁸

Free African Americans
were already using the boom in newspaper publication and readership to spread what they had seen and heard from those who had survived forced migration. In 1827, Samuel Cornish began to publish the New York
Freedom’s Journal.
Cornish, an African American who had been
born free in Delaware, had spent 1819 as a missionary to enslaved people on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, just as the long-distance
trade to New Orleans was beginning to drain hands from places like Kent County. The newspaper’s first issue contained a harrowing account of something he’d seen there: the sale of a man to a trader Cornish identified as “Mr. W*.”
³⁹

Freedom’s Journal
was the first African-American newspaper in the United States. It was not Cornish, however, but his Boston subscription agent who made the most influential
case that slavery was getting worse and bigger, not better and smaller. Born free in North Carolina, David Walker had also lived in Charleston. There, in 1822, he saw panicked whites torture and execute over thirty enslaved men who had allegedly conspired with a free black man named Denmark Vesey to launch a slave revolt. Fearing for his safety, Walker moved to Boston, where he established
a secondhand clothing shop in the city’s African-American neighborhood. (Garrison, who relied heavily on black subscribers and donors in order to publish
The Liberator
, established his printing shop in the same neighborhood.) Walker’s store was the end of the cotton chain, and as he sat in it, he breathed the dust of frayed fibers that had originally been pulled from the boll by southwestern hands.
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The fibers had a tale to tell, as did the free black sailors who shopped in Walker’s store. When night fell, he wrote these stories down in his office at the back of the narrow shop. He shaped his thoughts into four devastating essays and put them between the covers of one book—and when
An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World
appeared in September 1829, it was like nothing anyone had ever
read before, though it had all been said around a thousand fires. In it, Walker ferociously assailed slavery, slaveholders, and their enablers. Most whites, he charged, either directly or tacitly supported slavery and were thus “our natural enemies”—though slave traders were particular “
devils
.”