The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (50 page)

Image 7.1. In this image, slaveholders imagine African women as sexualized goddesses who come west across the Atlantic to serve white men as slaves in the New World. All her divine panoply—the cherubs, the sea creatures pulling her half-shell chariot—is a wink that reminds the white male viewer how different her status is from that of white women symbolized by Venus, the goddess whose apotheosis this one mocks. “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” from Bryan Edwards,
The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies
(London, 1801), vol. 2.

In the nineteenth-century US South, two factors stood in the way of white men who wanted to play out Edwards-style fantasies. One was the fact that American religious reformers had begun to identify nonmarital sexuality
as a major social problem, in part as a reaction to the way the increased mobility of young adults brought new temptations into their lives. Commercial quickening turned New York and other cities into hunting grounds for prostitutes looking for traveling businessmen, and vice versa. The solution, said authors of literature on the topic, many of them female, was that girls and women needed to refuse
sexual contact outside of the guarantee for the support that marriage provided. Young men, meanwhile, needed to learn the self-control such authors thought necessary to make the young republic a moral paragon by avoiding illicit sex and masturbation.
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The Victorian complex of ideas about sex soon became the consensus view of respectable society. And enslaved people themselves often resisted,
setting limits on the ability of white men to fulfill their desires. Their resistance was strengthened by strategies developed over generations of experience in southeastern communities. African-American family networks and ties to white patrons gave some girls and women allies who could intervene to
prevent horrific abuse. The best-known case is that of Harriet Jacobs, whose Edenton, North Carolina,
enslaver pursued her from the time she began puberty in the mid-1820s. For a decade, Jacobs deflected his advances with the help of white and black allies. Ultimately, she sought refuge in the attic of her grandmother, a free woman of color.
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Of course, some women of African-American descent used their sexuality to create a little leverage for themselves. Nor was the shift toward a more “Victorian”
way of thought the only reason why, for instance, white women felt anger and competition when their husbands had sex with enslaved women. And despite respectable condemnation of “concubinage,” the coercion of enslaved women continued in the nineteenth century. In one case, South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond bought a woman and her daughter. The mother became his sexual partner. When
her daughter reached twelve, he made the girl his victim as well. (He also molested his four white nieces, creating a scandal that ruined their marital prospects. Its effects on him were temporary, however, and he was elected to the US Senate.)
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Still, men like Hammond became increasingly circumspect in the Southeast. But the southwestern region was different, in several key ways. Many migrant
whites came with the idea already in their heads that slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground. “To be a gentleman here,” wrote one visitor to New Orleans, “one must patronize a yellow miss. . . . [I]f a young buck has one or two discarded lemans, his credit rises in proportion to the number.” Supposedly, in arrangements called
plaçage
, young white men contracted with mixed-race
women for long-term sex work. More temporary associations were arranged at balls that were limited to white men and nightgown-clad women of color, who were, as one irate white woman fumed, “Heaven’s last, worst gift to white men.”
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The complaints about New Orleans reflected the fact that many southwestern whites wanted proper forms of sexual morality to govern the public culture of the region.
But that plan collapsed. The explosive growth of the interstate slave trade relentlessly forced the commodification of enslaved women’s sexuality into view. And no individuals were more directly responsible for that than the nation’s biggest slave traders during Jackson’s presidency: Tennessee-born Isaac Franklin and his partners—who included, in a way, both Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson.
During Jackson’s first term in office, as impending Indian removal made it clear that new markets for slaves were about to open, Franklin’s firm rode the rising demand to become the biggest slave-trading firm in the United States. By 1832, B.U.S. lending in the Lower Mississippi Valley was sixteen times the 1824 level, because that
was where Biddle saw the opportunity to give “the great staple
of the country”—cotton—“assistance in bringing [it] into the commercial market.” The massive injection of capital directly and indirectly financed an equally massive expansion of the internal slave trade. The well-connected Franklin firm, for instance, drew up to $40,000 at a time from the B.U.S. to buy more slaves in the East. In fact, about 5 percent of all the commercial credit handled by the
B.U.S. in 1831–1832 passed at some point through the smooth hands of this single slave-trading partnership.
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Yet somehow Franklin and his business partners John Armfield and Rice Ballard viewed themselves as lawless outsiders. When Ballard wrote Franklin asking for an infusion of cash to pay short-term debts, Franklin wrote back, “It would be hard if two such old robbers as yourself and John
[Armfield] could not sustain yourselves.” By “robber” Franklin meant a “smooth hand” at the entrepreneurial business of the frontier, including the various legal and quasi-legal ways to take money from other people. Ballard could expertly “financeer,” “shave” notes (sell people’s debt to third parties for a profit), lose $4,000 in one round of cards and take $5,000 on the next, and judge a hand in
the market, then drive her hard once he bought her. Sure, they took risks, but “if they Loose everything” one day, said Franklin, on the next “they can Robb far more.” Even their competitors, and the bill-brokers, land speculators, and bank schemers who populated their circles, were “robbers”: “land pirates,” they sometimes called each other.
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Perhaps land pirates viewed themselves as outsiders
because some southeastern elites, reacting to the new abolitionist criticism of the early 1830s, were beginning to scapegoat slave traders again. Or maybe because Ballard was the sort of man who threatened to shoot a powerful Mississippi politician on sight if the man didn’t start paying his debts. Politicians, meanwhile, passed laws restricting slave traders when it suited their needs, and Franklin
and his friends habitually bent and broke those laws. And maybe the slave traders cultivated a sense of rule-breaking because of the way entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of economic expansion tend to sneer at old-fashioned risk-averse people. Less savvy slave-buyers were, to Ballard, “thick-headed gumps” who were not alert to the intricacies of skinning and shaving.
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The ultimate reason why
the slave traders felt the kind of power experienced by an outlaw who gets away was half-hidden, but everybody knew about it. In 1834, Isaac Franklin wrote Rice Ballard from New Orleans, where Nat Turner panic had worn off and the trade in hands was once again going full tilt. Talking about himself in the third person—or not exactly as a person—Franklin wrote: “The way your Old One Eyed friend looked
the
pirate was a sin to Crockett,” he said. “Sin to Crockett” was a slang term meaning “astounding”—Davy Crockett was a frontiersman-turned-stage-performer-turned-congressman and author of a spectacularly exaggerated autobiography. And “One Eyed friend”—well here, Franklin meant himself, but also, a penis.
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In the same vein, Franklin continued, “The fancy Girl from Charlottesville, will you
send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her? Say Quick, I wanted to see her. . . . I thought that an old Robber might be satisfyed with two or three maids.” Starting in the early 1830s, the term “fancy girl” or “maid” began to appear in the interstate slave trade. It meant a young woman, usually light-skinned, sold at a high price explicitly linked to her sexual availability and attractiveness:
“For Sale: A coloured girl, of very superior qualifications . . . what speculators call a fancy girl; a bright mulatto, fine figure, straight, black hair, and very black eyes; very neat and cleanly in her dress and person.”
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Abolitionist Ethan Allen Andrews toured John Armfield’s Alexandria, Virginia, slave pen in 1835 and reported that he was told that “though mulattoes are not so much valued
for field-hands, they are purchased for domestics, and the females to be sold as prostitutes.” Ironically, it was a wave of new white abolitionists, inspired by William Lloyd Garrison and by the black voices he promoted in the pages of
The Liberator
, who did much to make sure everyone knew about the fancy. In a national campaign of pamphlets and antislavery books that blitzed the nation’s postal
networks in the 1830s, abolitionist critique focused on the way slavery disrupted family relationships and forced enslaved women into nonmarital sex. The concerns of white moral reformers about the sexualized sale of women, especially almost-white ones, probably revealed much about the critics’ preoccupations and repressions. But they didn’t make it up, and enslavers were also preoccupied. Even
before Andrews’s depiction of the trade as forced prostitution, the customers and the impresarios of the slave market were writing with a leer about the women they used. “I sold your fancy maid Alice for $800. There are great demand for fancy maid. I do believe that a likely Girl & a good seamstress could be sold for $1100,” Isaac Franklin wrote to Ballard in 1833. He wanted Ballard to send more:
“I was disappointed in not finding your Charlottesville maid that you promised me,” he wrote in 1834, referring to Ballard’s latest shipment from his jail at Richmond. Soon, though, Isaac would have his turn, and then James Franklin, who two months later wrote to Ballard: “The Old Man sent me your maid Martha. She is inclined to be compliant.”
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Breaking the rules of evangelical public propriety
delivered to these men the sense of illicit discovery that accompanies pornography. For many white southern men, and not just slave traders, the existence of “fancy girls” put a piratical middle finger in propriety’s face, which mattered not only because it irritated meddling abolitionists but because it irritated white southern women. Calls for sexual morality implied that women were the arbiters
of domestic moral authority. This struggle over who would rule was the real meaning of the “Petticoat War” in Jackson’s Cabinet, and in it the president leveraged male resentment of female claims to power. Who were politicians’ wives to say whether or not John Eaton was a moral man for marrying Peggy, a former waitress who had, rumors suggested, offered more than drinks? There was no better way
to show pious white women that they governed nothing than by buying a woman for sex.

That was the meaning, for instance, of the gesture that slave trader Theophilus Freeman made when he received visitors to his New Orleans house while lying in bed with his purchased mistress Sarah Connor. Take that, conventional white society, he said. For you’ll never stop buying slaves from me. The lip-licking
letters of Franklin and Ballard’s firm, meanwhile, reveal their gleeful disdain for white women’s social authority: “I am getting dam[n]ed tired of company,” wrote a Ballard employee, briefly trapped at the high-toned White Sulphur Springs resort in Virginia. “I tell you it would be a great relief to be at the forks of road among the darkies.” After dining with a recently married couple, a Ballard
associate, Bacon Tait, wrote that he “had not sit at table in a private house with [white] Ladies for more than twenty years.” And Isaac suggested that two women he purchased “could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house . . . for the Exclusive benefit of the concern and its allied agents.”
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Slave traders were not the only sexual pirates, they were just more likely than planters to
testify about such things in their letters to one another. And dark-skinned women were no safer from this form of violence than “mulatto” ones, whether from slave traders or other white men. “Put a single man” on a plantation as an overseer, “and you will see trouble enough,” wrote an Alabama planter, for “they become intimate with the negro girls, and then all order is at an end.” The white men
who initiated such encounters in the southwestern areas seemed to feel more entitled to them than those in the southeastern states, and less concerned about keeping such things secret. Louisiana planter Jacob Bieller carried on a lengthy relationship with “bright mulatto” Mary Clarkson, his slave. When Bieller’s wife complained,
he responded by threatening to beat her. In 1834, Mrs. Bieller finally
ran away and sued for divorce. But to no small extent, the southwestern region was a free-fire zone where white men exerted power without rules.
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