The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (44 page)

Then the angels began to sing her name.
They sang her weary legs to the top of the stairs, where the last step emptied upon a high courtyard. There she stood, and somehow she knew she stood before God. A disembodied voice rang out. “How did she come?” Ranks of spirits flickered into sight, and they echoed the question in song. In her waking life, not even her mother knew how hard her path had been. But a second voice did know. It said what
she couldn’t: “She came through hard trials with the hell-hounds on her trail.” She realized that voice had breathed in her ear all along. Mary and Martha, Jesus’s helpers, came forward, clothed her with a new robe, and the first voice said: “You are born of God. My son delivered your soul from hell and you must go and help carry the world.”

She awoke. She was alive. She believed that the most
powerful forces in the universe could name the pains and fears that even she could not. These
forces recognized her. From them, she was not stolen. All she had to do in return for this gift was to carry the whole world.
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The experience of spiritual death and rebirth reassured converted slaves that they had a value and a responsibility that went far beyond the number of dollars one could sell
for, of pounds one could pick, or of babies one could bear for the market. They spoke of their own transformed spirits as being set free from the fear that their enslavers were, in the end, their final judges. “I heard a voice speak to me,” said William Webb. “From that time I lost all fear of men on this earth.”
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No matter how vigorously white preachers argued that conversion made slaves more
docile, enslavers worried that freedom from fear might launch other quests for change. True, in the New Testament, as nineteenth-century Christians often heard it, the Spirit gave redemption from sin and commanded forgiveness. Many Christian slaves believed that God had commanded them to put violent vengeance aside, if only for their own souls’ sake. But following the command to forgive one’s enemies
was a difficult task—“a lifetime job,” said one ex-slave: “I don’t care how long God lets me live, it will still be a hard job.” And forgiveness did not mean that enslaved people believed that the thieving powers of this world would never bow, that the lowest would not one day be the highest, or that their kidnappers would never face judgment. “Him claiming to be a Christian! Well I reckon
he’s found out something about slave driving by now,” mused ex-slave Robert Falls about his now-dead former owner, whom he believed was toiling on Satan’s labor camp. “The good Lord has to get his work in some time.”
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But there was another text available. In some books of the Old Testament, the Spirit kindled not forgiveness but the uncompromising fire of holy warriors like Sampson or Saul,
commanding them to slay all the Lord’s enemies down to the last man, woman, and child. And many enslaved migrants dreamed of that. “The idea of a revolution in the conditions of the whites and the blacks is the corner-stone of the religion of the latter,” recalled Charles Ball of conversations among other captives of Wade Hampton. “Heaven will be no heaven” to the average slave, Ball said, “if he
is not to be avenged of his enemies.”
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Perhaps God demanded that his followers start to “get his work in,” even if avengers lost their lives in the process. That impulse found fertile soil in Southampton County, Virginia, an old tobacco county where the accelerating growth of slavery carved deep scars in the 1820s. John Brown, born there around 1818—the year Francis Rives took his first coffle
from Southampton to Alabama—belonged to an old white woman. She “used to call us children
up to the big house every morning, and give us a dose of garlic and rue to keep us ‘wholesome,’ as she said, and make us ‘grow likely for market.’” Then she “would make us run round a great sycamore tree in the yard, and if we did not run fast enough to please her, she used to make us nimbler by laying about
us with a cow-hide.”
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Throughout the 1820s, the new national slave market drained people like Brown from Southampton. Forty-eight of them, for instance, passed through the hands of New Orleans slave traders between late 1829 and early 1831. In Southampton, the enslaved despaired over the increasing destabilization of their temporal lives, and whites tried to extend their control over African
Americans’ spiritual lives. In 1826, an enslaved Southampton lay preacher named Nat Turner had told a white man named Ethelred Brantley of his religious visions. Brantley believed that Turner’s touch cured him of a skin disorder. The two decided they wanted Turner to baptize Brantley at a local Methodist church, but the white church hierarchy would not let Turner perform the ritual. So Turner and
Brantley went down to the river, where Turner baptized him. A crowd of whites gathered, and “reviled us.” So the preacher later put it.
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By 1828, Nat Turner had stopped believing that he should leave vengeance in God’s hands. Instead, he saw visions that he thought demanded violence: white people and black people fighting in the sky, blood condensing like dew on the corn, a voice like thunder
telling him, “Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.” Turner retreated into his wilderness. He later said, speaking to a local Southampton lawyer named Thomas R. Gray, who recorded Turner’s words and published them as
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and
said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” With his orders clear, Turner gathered a small group of angry, broken men into his confidence and waited for another sign. Then, in early 1831, a
total eclipse blocked out the sun.
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THE FIRST HEADLINES DID
not reach New Orleans until September 1831. But from there the news spread quickly up the river-veins of the slave frontier’s network of steamboats and cotton landings. In Southampton County, on August 22, insurgent slaves had begun killing whites. Almost sixty had been slaughtered in a two-day rampage across Southampton. They included
a baby in a crib and ten children in a log-cabin school. Then masses of white troops descended on Southampton and crushed the revolt. They executed, through shootings, beheadings, and torture, about fifty African Americans, many of whom had not participated in the rebellion. Turner himself was captured two months later, then tried, convicted, and hanged—but not before dictating his confessions
to Gray.
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Southwestern whites suddenly realized that their system had inhaled tens of thousands of people who had been stolen from Southampton and similar counties that had been devastated by the professional slave trade over the past decade. Alabama’s governor activated the state militia. Newspapers in New Orleans suppressed reporting of the rebellion until authorities could collect enough
weapons to defeat copycat attacks, but word still got out. In Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish, a white widow heard a rumor that the slaves on a nearby labor camp “had armed themselves and claimed their liberty.” “She instantly started screaming and crying as loud as she could,” a calmer neighbor recorded in her diary. The widow demanded that a male neighbor go find out what was happening, but instead,
he called out the members of the local militia, who assembled and marched to the alleged epicenter. There they “found the overseer and the Negroes very busy at gathering the crops,” picking cotton “as peaceable as lambs.”
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“The proper officers of the state should take measures to prevent the importation of slaves” from “the infected section of the country,” wrote the
New Orleans Bee.
The editor
had stopped trusting certificate laws to filter the old states’ most rebellious enslaved people from the stream of the slave trade. Despite opposition from ambitious cotton and sugar entrepreneurs, an emergency session of the state legislature banned the slave trade. (Reading the writing on the wall, traders rushed in 774 more slaves before the special session ended.) The Alabama legislature also
raced into session and prohibited the trade. The next spring, Mississippi held a constitutional convention. There were so many enslaved migrants around booming Natchez, said planter-banker Stephen Duncan, that “we will one day have our throats cut in this country.” Elitist representatives from the Natchez area and delegates from the poor-white “piney woods” formed an unusual alliance and incorporated
a slave-trade prohibition in the new constitution.
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Of course, buyers and sellers immediately began to poke loopholes in the slave-trade prohibitions. Buyers traveled to the Chesapeake. Traders filled out declarations swearing that the slaves they were transporting were for their own use only. Legislators from the newer cotton counties in Mississippi, who still wanted slaves, blocked implementation
of that state’s constitutional
ban, so the biggest traders moved their headquarters from New Orleans to the “Forks in the Road” market just north of Natchez. But back East, Virginia—the site of the rebellion and still the home of the South’s largest slave population—had called a state constitutional convention to consider emancipation. In the course of the deliberations, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson
Thomas Randolph proposed a statewide referendum of white voters on whether Virginia should initiate gradual emancipation.
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Randolph’s plan would have made all slaves born after July 4, 1840, into state property upon adulthood. Virginia would then hire out these slaves, saving the wages to pay, ultimately, for the expenses involved in exiling them “beyond the limits of the United States.” Under
this plan, many Afro-Virginians would have still been enslaved in the early twentieth century, although Randolph assumed that before then, most enslavers would cash out by selling them south. Randolph was proposing to revive his grandfather’s dream: the exile of Virginia’s slave population and the creation of an all-white Old Dominion. Many, such as fellow delegate Thomas Marshall, son of John
Marshall, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, supported Randolph’s proposal, believing that slavery was “ruinous to whites.” The “industrious population” of non-slaveholding whites was emigrating in order to flee a state whose biggest business was raising people for the southwestern market. And if they continued, Marshall predicted—invoking the fate of Saint-Domingue whites—“the
whole country [of Virginia] will be inundated by one black wave . . . with a few white faces here and there floating on the surface.”
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Yet other delegates warned that the state’s entire economy depended on the price point of a single commodity: that of hands at New Orleans. If the Randolph plan passed, Virginia enslavers would rush to sell their human property south at one time and the price
would plummet. Slave owners were vested in the slave market, and most of them wanted the government to defend and expand their right to nearly unfettered use of their property—not to limit it. The Virginia convention rejected Randolph and approved the status quo, though it added new limits on slave literacy and on free black life. Over the next three years, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Maryland
imposed similar restrictions. Enslavers had already imposed the like in the southwestern states.
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Limits on literacy and on contact with free blacks aimed to restrict access to ideas about freedom. Proslavery politicians blamed the first appearance of Garrison’s
Liberator
in January 1831 for Nat Turner’s decision later that year to bathe Southampton County in white folks’ blood. The Georgia
legislature
even offered a $5,000 reward for Garrison’s apprehension. But enslavers also feared that African-American Christianity itself might generate danger from within. Governor John Floyd of Virginia wrote that “every black preacher . . . east of the Blue Ridge” had known about Turner’s plot. Misguided white piety had permitted “large assemblages of negroes” at which black preachers had allegedly
read out the “incendiary publications of Walker [and] Garrison.” An Alabama newspaper warned of “shrewd, cunning” slave preachers. Should revolt break out in the southwestern region, “Some crispy-haired prophet, some pretender to inspiration, will be the ring-leader as well as the inspiration of that plot. By feigning communication from heaven, he will rouse the fanaticism of his brethren,
and they will be prepared for any work, no matter how desolating and murderous.”
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Southwestern enslaver-politicians decided to put an end to independent black Christianity. Mobile, Alabama, banned gatherings—including religious ones—of more than three slaves. The punishment for violation was “twenty stripes” on the back. The local newspaper wrote, “The managers of the Mobile Sunday School [have
decided] that hereafter no colored person will be received for instruction who does not bring written permission to that effect from the owner.” The Mississippi state legislature made it illegal for any “slave, free negro, or mulatto . . . to exercise the function of a Minister of the Gospel.” All religious practice, aside from individual prayer, would now be kept under the eyes of enslavers and
their henchmen—which is what evangelical ministers now volunteered to be. White ministers eagerly promised that they would henceforth work harder than ever to make Christianity into a tool that would help enslavers govern their society.
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