The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (61 page)

From 1837 to the mid-1840s, desperately indebted enslavers looted the riches stored and nurtured by enslaved people’s blood relationships. Alexander McNutt, Mississippi’s repudiationist governor, had—back in 1835—purchased $20,000 worth of enslaved
people from fellow Virginia native George Rust. McNutt promised to pay Rust principal plus 10 percent annual interest over the next several years. Ten years later, McNutt had entered and left office, and some of the twenty-odd men and women who had survived the adjustment to life in his Mississippi slave labor camp had married and had children. For instance, Lewis and Mary, preteens in 1835, were
now married and raising four-year-old Anderson and toddler Louisa. Between the endless hours they spent toiling in McNutt’s cotton field, Lewis and Mary had also spent years working to make sure their blood survived. But the governor had not paid Rust back. Fearing that McNutt would slip away to Texas with the slaves, the Virginia creditor demanded that the now ex-governor cash out
his debt. So
in May 1845, early enough that potential buyers could use them to pick that year’s cotton crop, twenty-two survivors of the group that had come out from Virginia a decade before were auctioned. Families, new and old, were broken on the block, like the one whose seven-year-old Nathan was sold off on his own to a bidder named A. J. Paxton for $300. Another couple—Nelson and Prissy—were sold together,
but their son, Jefferson, a boy of less than ten, was sold to a different buyer.
⁶⁶

Enslaved people in the southwestern states talked about the ways in which whites’ decisions and failures inflicted consequences on the enslaved themselves, as if they were commodities. “He drank us up.” “He said: ‘I’ll put you in my pocket.’” If one enslaved person heard a white man and a woman in the house “talking
about money,” everybody in the quarters understood that “money” meant “slaves,” and that “slaves” were about to be turned into “money” (“Massa say: ‘they’s money to me’”). “They [black folks] knew that mean they [white folks] gonna sell some slaves to the next nigger trader that come round.”

The talk showed how well the enslaved understood the forces that structured their lives. But they experienced
financial manipulation and devastation as men and women with blood pulsing in every vein. When historians have written about the role of family in the lives of the enslaved, they have talked about the way blood relationships gave structure to life; ensured care for children, even when parents were lost; and provided knowledge about the world that was a true alternative to the system of lies
spun by planters. Indeed, kinship could do some of those things, sometimes. Even when the early-1840s disruptions, coming after a quarter-century of a growing slave trade, created a cumulative set of challenges not seen since the heyday of the Middle Passage, many adults could scramble and gamble in response to disrupted situations. And sometimes by doing so, they could protect their families. Already
sold once, from Georgia to Alabama, Josiah Trelick heard that his enslaver, Charles Lynch, was in serious financial trouble and planning to sell him again. Lynch thought Trelick’s “abroad” wife, “a small dark skind woman,” as Lynch described her, “was very homely and ignorant.” But she and her child were everything to Josiah. So Trelick dug up some money he’d buried, bought a small wagon and
team, and slipped away along back roads to get his family from the other enslaver who owned them.

Then there was the clever light-skinned slave about whom Felix Street’s stepmother told stories: this man started an impromptu auction when his owner was in the vicinity but not paying much attention. Before anyone realized it, the “white-looking” slave had sold off the owner. Or there was
Cynthy,
a midwife in Tennessee—free, but “apprenticed” to white guardians who skimmed off her earnings. While on a job a day’s journey from the cotton labor camp where her enslaved husband lived, she consulted a fortuneteller, whose cards told Cynthy that her husband’s indebted owner had “run” him to Mississippi. The cards spoke true, but luckily there was a happy ending: her husband was stubborn and not
worth much in the cotton field, and his owner was glad when Cynthy’s employers made an offer to buy him.
⁶⁷

But enslavers still held the aces. A story told by one formerly enslaved person showed white folks’ willingness to manipulate the powers of ownership, breaking any and every relationship, starting with bonds they gave to their creditors. “Old Cleveland,” said the former slave, “takes a lot
of his slaves what was ‘in custom’ and brings them to Texas to sell. You know, he wasn’t supposed to do that, cause . . . he borrowed money on you, and you’s not supposed to leave the place until he paid up. ‘Course Old Cleveland just tells the one he owed money to, you had run off, or expired out there.” Newspapers and court documents recorded the details of how freshly reestablished blood ties
in slave communities could be broken as a result of crises in white families created by the financial collapse or other factors. So-and-so’s slaves, valued at $23,845, for example, went for $16,000. And African Americans remembered their own histories of the crash. In the 1930s, a white employee of the Works Progress Administration in Jasper, Texas, typed up a summary of his interview with an elderly
woman named Milly Forward. “She has spent her entire life in [this] vicinity,” he began. But the text of her interview reveals something different. “I’s born in Alabama,” she recalled. “Mammy have just got up,” from giving birth, “when the white folks brung us out west. Pappy’s name Jim Forward and Mammy name May. They left Pappy in Alabama, because he belonged to another master.”
⁶⁸

That “Mississippi
men” were untrustworthy liars may have been news to John Roberts the debt collector, but it was not exactly a revelation to enslaved people, for whom slavery itself was “stealing.” But this historical epoch was devastating all the same. If their first movement to the cotton frontier had brought revelation, this second one went down in enslaved people’s vernacular history as a storm of chaos
that swept away much of the work that survivors of the first round of disruptions had accomplished. Men had created new ways of being men, and the consequence of both women’s and men’s efforts coursed through children who lived, relationships that bloomed, blood ties linked in presence and remembered absence. But now stepparents and half-siblings were split in the dark of night. And whites’ mutual
deceptions meant that enslaved children weren’t sure about the basic facts of what had
occurred. “He stole me,” remembered an aged Betty Simmons, of her indebted Alabama owner who made her hide in the woods. Then “he sell me [in New Orleans] so the creditors couldn’t get me.” In Mississippi, toddler Henri Necaise wandered every day down to the gate where he last saw his mother leaving. But he
never found her. Only his sister was there to comfort him, and he was lucky to have her.
⁶⁹

“They was always fearing something terrible was going to happen, from some sign they had saw, or something they had heard,” Robert Laird remembered of parents and grandparents. As such children looked back from old age, they sometimes felt that these secondary forced migrations during the decade of planter
disaster had isolated and atomized them, stealing their optimism and teaching them the devastating lesson that their blood ties could be broken into unknowable pieces. One Louisiana ex-slave told the tale he had “heard” of Pierre Aucuin—who was sold by his mother’s owner at the age of two. Years later, when freedom came, Aucuin married a woman named Tamerant. The couple had three children. One
day, his regular barber was unavailable, so he sat down and Tamerant got out the scissors. As she stood behind him, cutting it close to the scalp, she saw something she had never before noticed. “You know, Pierre, this scar on the back of your head sets me a-thinking way back when I was a gal . . . I had a little brother then. . . . [T]he master sold my little brother from us, and five years later
they sold me from my ma and pa. Since then I ain’t seen none of my folks.” Tamerant continued, not yet realizing what she was saying: “One day my little brother and me was playing, and he hit me and hurt me. I took an oyster shell and cut him on the back of his head right where you got that scar.”
⁷⁰

In their quest to make something beautiful, two people who had lost their personal and family
histories stumbled, terribly, over the shards of the past. And variations of this brother and sister story appear several times in the Works Progress Administration interviews. In each case, the storyteller is saying: Listen, enslaver-generated chaos could ultimately, if it went on long enough, steal one’s capacity to recognize even one’s closest kin. If you didn’t know your family, you didn’t know
yourself. And if you didn’t know yourself, what sort of disasters could you bring down on yourself and others? So history taught orphaned children to hold such fears alongside all their bravery. Adult survivors of whites’ financial disaster saw their own new lives, built through the practice of ordinary virtues to each other and through the rebuilding of ties of blood, ripped apart again. They found
themselves alone, bearing another set of survivors’ scars. This does not agree with the picture of southern African Americans as a traditional people comforted by a
deep and resilient web of kinship. Yet it is precisely what happened to people whose family trees had been clear-cut.
⁷¹

DESPITE THEIR STINGING DEFEATS
, southwestern entrepreneurs who had been through previous crises knew how to survive
a downturn. Slave property was mobile, self-supporting, more liquid than any store of value short of sterling bills, and perhaps the most attractive kind of collateral in the entire Western world. If they could keep possession of their slaves, they could take advantage of those elements of enslaved property, especially if new geographical expansion convinced investors to lend their credit—as
they always had before—to entrepreneurially minded planters. And yet, even with all of those reasons to feel confidence in the future, after 1839, as external pressures from abolitionist critics and northern creditors began to increase, a growing number of southern politicians and voters began to show clear symptoms of a deepening siege mentality. A small group of northern congressmen—most notably
John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts and Joshua Giddings of Ohio—repeatedly introduced antislavery petitions to test Congress’s “gag rule.” Although their measures failed, the northern radicals slowly opened cracks in the interregional alliances between southern slavery-expanders and northern expansion-enablers that were the essence of both the Whig and Democratic parties. Meanwhile, the 1840 US Census
showed that high population growth in the free states was erasing the slave states’ ability to control the House. Reapportionment would give northern Whigs and Democrats less reason to do what southerners demanded. The only obvious hope for increasing the number of southerners in Congress was to add Texas, but after Jackson maneuvered the government into recognition of the Lone Star Republic’s
independence in 1837, the Whig Party had blocked its annexation.

Texas annexation looked dead, and there were other problems, too. International pressures, generated by Britain, also threatened future expansion, thus imperiling slavery’s survival. In 1834, Parliament—persuaded by powerful bureaucrats who insisted that free labor would prove more efficient than slave labor—imposed emancipation
in all the empire’s far-flung domains. Still, southern enslavers might have taken comfort in the fact that even as Britain freed 700,000 Caribbean slaves, slavery continued to expand, not only in the United States, where statehood was on the docket for Arkansas and Florida, but in two other places—Cuba and Brazil. Between 1810 and 1840, Cuba had taken the lead in world sugar markets, underselling
sugar producers on the far-less-efficient British islands. Meanwhile, Brazil’s coffee
plantations expanded at an astronomical rate, feeding the world market’s soaring demand for caffeine.

In contrast to the United States, however, internal trades were insufficient to supply the needs of enslaver-entrepreneurs on Cuba’s and Brazil’s frontiers of production. Instead, in almost every year of the
1830s, slave traders carried between 80,000 and 100,000 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Three decades after the much-ballyhooed closing of the Anglo-American Middle Passage, and in violation of existing treaties signed by Spain and Brazil, the open wound in Africa’s side was flowing faster than ever. In 1840, British Prime Minister Robert Peel began to push other
European nations to accept a treaty called the Convention of London. This agreement would allow the Royal Navy to search and seize ships flying non-British flags if they were suspected of participating in the Atlantic slave trade.
⁷²

The British had already extended this kind of pressure to Texas, which, in return for diplomatic recognition from Britain, had agreed to allow the Royal Navy to stop
ships bringing slaves from Cuba to Texas. And actual enforcement of existing treaties banning the Atlantic slave trade would threaten slavery’s viability in Brazil and Cuba. Enforcement would also eviscerate the profits that US citizens were making from the illegal trade. US mercantile firms invested indirectly in slaving voyages to present-day Angola and Nigeria. Slave ships often employed captains
from the United States. Many such vessels flew the Stars and Stripes, because British ships were reluctant to strong-arm vessels sailing under that flag. North American shipbuilding firms sold 64 ships in Rio between 1841 and 1845, most of them for the slave trade.
⁷³

In 1842, Britain sent Lord Ashburton, a.k.a. Alexander Baring, one of the directors of Baring Brothers, as an ambassador to the
United States. His mission was to secure US submission to the terms of the Convention of London. Cynics pointed out that the British Empire’s sugar producers, comparatively disadvantaged by the parliamentary abolition, would benefit from removing Cuban and Brazilian competition. On first glance, small revenue gains in sugar would hardly seem to balance out the losses that Britain—whose economy depended
on an endless supply of cheap, high-quality cotton—might suffer by blocking the further expansion of US slavery. But British politicians wanted to win the votes of reforming evangelicals, who saw worldwide abolition of slavery as a moral goal. Moreover, the recently demonstrated ability of US planters to leverage British dependence on their cotton into credit bubbles and financial crises worried
British industrial cities. British chambers of
commerce petitioned Parliament to incentivize the growth of Indian cotton. Indian peasants had not been able to stand up to competition from southwestern slaves, but in the early 1840s the British colonial government launched experimental farms across western India. They hired twelve American men who claimed to be southern planters and cotton experts.
If Indian cotton failed, an independent Texas might be the solution, freeing British industry from dependence on US planters. Texas land, claimed British agents there, “will yield 3 times as much Cotton as the Carolinas or Georgia to the acre.” Even as Lord Ashburton arrived in Washington, British agents were trying to convince Lone Star citizens to remain outside of the United States.
⁷⁴