The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (64 page)

Young John’s four brothers stayed in Louisiana. Henry became a cotton broker; William, a Bayou Teche planter. In 1816, however, Edward died of yellow fever in the
New Orleans counting-house where he worked. George caught a pistol ball in an 1824 duel. Death by hot-blooded dueling did not happen in the orderly, morally improving Boston of the
North American Review
. But the brothers stayed in contact. John G. Palfrey visited at the height of the 1830s boom, traveling on the steamboat
Southerner
. The letters he sent to Louisiana afterward asked ironically
after enslaved people in the terms of racist parody: How are “my sooty friends?” When William contemplated visiting Boston, John the younger warned him to bring his own slave: “The black servants you can hire here are good for nothing.” The Palfreys agreed
on national politics. All were sensible Whigs, supporters of the party’s project of national social and moral uplift. Henry sold copies of
John’s
Review
to his planter clients, who perhaps squirmed to read an English author’s claim that “the continuance of slavery” in the United States was a disaster. But the author’s claim that American problems were caused by too much democracy surely found secret assent.
³

Of course, the
Review
didn’t pay the bills any better than serious magazines ever have. When the Panic of 1837 hit, subscriptions
dropped and bills multiplied. Henry helped the
Review
stay afloat, sending young John $1,000 from Louisiana and convincing their father to lend $5,000 to the magazine. Slavery financed John Palfrey’s Massachusetts literary project. However, the question of whether slavery should grow or shrink was about to strain the brothers’ bonds. As John the elder aged, the Louisiana Palfreys took care to
advise their brother that he would, by the terms of their state’s Napoleonic civil code, inherit one-third of his father’s property. Most of the value of that property was in slaves. The best way to turn this share into money usable in Massachusetts would be to sell the people he inherited. But “you might incur the risk,” wrote William, “of some busy abolitionist . . . report[ing] that the Revd. Dr.
P. had been selling human flesh etc etc or living on the income of slave labor.”
⁴

Ties of blood linked John G. Palfrey to the southern slave-owning elite, and so did ties of economic growth. Northern growth in general and the fortunes of its middle and upper classes in particular were built on the forced labor of people like those whom John would inherit from his father. But moderate northern
Whigs had grown increasingly disturbed by southern politicians’ domineering aggression. By late 1843, Louisiana Whigs were salivating over impending Texas annexation, but the constituents of the Massachusetts Whigs were holding a rash of angry meetings. They were spewing anger at New England “Cotton Whigs” whose close ties to the state’s textile manufacturing interests supposedly predisposed them
to cave in to enslavers’ endless demands.
⁵

In the autumn of 1843, one of the season’s first cotton ships arriving in Boston also brought news from New Orleans. Old John Palfrey had died. John Gorham Palfrey now owned twenty human beings, a mixed crew ranging in age from Margery’s unnamed infant child to Old Sam, sixty-five. At the current price level in New Orleans slave markets, their value
approached $7,000—but John the younger had decided that he didn’t want any more money from slavery. This new conviction tells us something about his conscience. But it also tells a story about the outcomes of cotton-driven change in the United States over the first half of the nineteenth century, one in which
northern and southern brothers began to argue uncontrollably in the 1840s precisely because
they had helped each other to thrive for the preceding half-century.

From the 1790s, the continually increasing productivity of enslaved hands had generated the most important raw material in the world economy at a constantly declining real price. This had made southern enslavers incredibly wealthy, and powerful, too. They were able to attract massive quantities of investment capital in the 1830s.
Enslavers also exerted disproportionate influence over the national government, ensuring the creation and implementation of policies that benefited them. Yet the same work of hands that built a wealthy South enabled the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution. This one began in the cotton mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. From the mills, the development of the northern
economy spiraled outward to transform wider sectors. After the South’s economy grew into a bubble, and then exploded, the North recovered while the South floundered. And the main reason for the North’s quicker recovery was that northerners had reinvested profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy.

Now, having built a brave new world on the product
of the cotton fields, northerners such as John G. Palfrey were convincing themselves that slavery was a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy. This was an inaccurate generalization from an accurate observation. Northern observers and antislavery activists saw the slower recovery of the southern economy and thought it proved that slavery was an economic incubus and not an engine of
growth. But they also had some powerful emotional reasons to look at slavery in this way. By 1843, enslaver-politicians had begun to lunge at Texas and beyond, hoping to implement once again their classic formula: new land, new credit sources, a new boom. This time around, however, northern brothers decided that there was a “Slave Power” bent on tyrannical domination, and not just of enslaved hands.

So Palfrey consulted with several Boston acquaintances. The first was a political and legal mentor, US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Just the previous year, Story’s opinion in the case of
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
had strengthened southerners’ claims that the US Constitution protected slavery. Edward Prigg, a Maryland enslaver, had tried to recover an enslaved woman who had run to Pennsylvania
with her children to escape sale to slave traders. State authorities blocked him. The case went to the Supreme Court. It put Story under pressure from two sources: slavery expansionists, on the one hand, and African Americans who resisted being stolen, on the other. He did
not want to write the ruling, but he had no choice. In
Prigg
, the Court ruled that the Constitution required northern states
to hand over escapees, undermining northern states’ laws that ended slavery within their own borders.

Palfrey also met with the young “Conscience Whig” politician Charles Sumner. If Story warned him of the difficulty of getting the moral responsibility of slavery off one’s back, Sumner helped stiffen John’s spine for heavy lifting. Without notifying his brothers, John petitioned the Louisiana
state legislature to let him free the twenty slaves and allow them to stay in the state. The brothers learned of John’s actions from a New Orleans newspaper story reporting the legislature’s rejection of his request. Henry wrote angrily to John: the whole story would “be published in the Attakapas paper on Saturday.” Local planters would read it. William and Henry would hear questions. Their Attakapas
neighbors knew that meddlers were choking Congress with petitions accusing slaveholders of being rapists, torturers, and slave traders. If the Palfreys’ brother was an abolitionist, the local Whig Party, in which the brothers were stalwarts, would suffer. Meanwhile, proposing emancipation for twenty people at old John’s camp would render the other forty unmanageable. They’d send the news up
and down the Attakapas by the grapevine telegraph, talk back to overseers, or run to New Orleans to find a lawyer for a freedom suit. “Better to let them remain quietly at work and time will gradually settle all difficulties,” Henry insisted.
⁶

Henry knew that enslaved people acted as someone else’s hands because they had no other choice. If the grip slackened, African Americans seized opportunities.
As the domestic slave trade surged in the 1830s and the flood of new bodies taxed whites’ ability to surveil the captives, the number of southwestern fugitives also spiked. Some made it all the way to the North. These new fugitives, who were also migrants—though against the grain of slave-trade and credit-circle flows—invigorated northern antislavery organizations. William Lloyd Garrison,
taught by slavery-survivors, had helped to mobilize politically effective petition campaigns that portrayed enslavers as opponents of whites’ freedom—particularly whites’ freedom to disagree with policies promoting the expansion of slavery. Still, Garrison insisted that abolitionists should reject politics, which required compromises of the sort that in his view rendered the Constitution “a covenant
with death and an agreement with hell.” But by 1840, a new wave of survivors of slavery’s frontier, including activist fugitives such as William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb, was steadily pushing abolitionism into the current of political fight.

Runaways pressured Judge Story, and runaways pushed enslaver-politicians to demand that other whites never disagree with them about
slavery or its expansion.
Palfrey’s brothers didn’t think he needed to contribute to the fuss. Especially not when his grandstanding with their father’s inheritance would cause them trouble. They had heard that Massachusetts Whigs were squabbling, but they were shocked by the force of the leverage that John was willing to apply to enforce his changing convictions. In 1843, their world was one of hard times and G.T.T.,
and Henry’s firm was bankrupt. They could not fathom how John—who only a few years ago had been asking for
their
help—could leave $7,000 on the table.

John G. Palfrey’s personal route to rejecting slave ownership, direct or indirect, was ironic. But it was only somewhat unique. His willingness to act on his own convictions, even at the cost of a substantial sum of money, was unusual, though his
changing convictions were not. Yet he still had to make a literal journey of rejection. Louisiana state legislators had denied his request that they allow the people he inherited to stay among the community they had built in the wake of forced migration. So Palfrey decided to bring them back with him to Massachusetts. In 1844, worried that they would not be able to support themselves, he visited
Massachusetts author Lydia Maria Child and asked her to help him find them new homes in Boston. Child, a women’s rights activist, and also one of the first white women publicly identified as an abolitionist, promised to help. Then he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, and visited Cassius Clay, a relative of Henry Clay and a rare surviving southern proponent of emancipation. Clay had repeatedly fought
off attempts at silencing. One of his speeches degenerated into a knife fight, with attackers rushing the stage. To deter mobs, he loaded a cannon and parked it on his front porch.

Emotionally fortified by Clay’s example, Palfrey traveled to the Ohio River and boarded a steamboat headed to Louisiana. After enjoying a pleasant visit in New Orleans, Palfrey traveled out into the hinterland to brother
William’s home. He found that Attakapas whites were not very tolerant. They threatened him, and William was less cordial than usual as well. Eager to conclude his business, John met privately with each adult slave. All were willing to go North, but they wanted to wait until the end of the year. Cotton prices were low in the early 1840s, and William—like many other southwestern enslavers—was
allowing enslaved people more time to cultivate their own patches of cotton, corn, and garden crops. In turn, they’d eat fewer planter-furnished rations, meaning less ink on the debit side of ledgers. Men and women with small amounts of cash in their hands could also buy their own cloth, clothing, tobacco, and liquor. Like potential runaways waiting until the corn was ripe, Palfrey’s slaves didn’t
want to lose their investments
of time and labor. And if they were to venture into the unknown in the hands of another John Palfrey, they wanted cash in their pockets.

John left for Boston. His brothers had insisted that it would “demoralize” their own labor forces if John’s slaves mixed with theirs once word of impending freedom got out, but William was happy that the short-timers stayed. They
helped gather William’s cotton harvest—for which John promised to pay them back wages for 1844 once they reached Massachusetts. When 1845 arrived, three of the oldest—Amos (age sixty-one), Clara (fifty-five), and Old Sam (sixty-five)—balked at leaving their children and grandchildren, so John had parish officials bribed to permit these three to stay, despite their manumission. The other seventeen
said goodbye to everyone and traveled to New Orleans. From the same levee where they and/or their parents had arrived, they boarded the bark
Bashaw
and set sail for Boston.

After their ceremonial welcome at King’s Chapel, John began to send the newly emancipated people to various “placements” arranged by his abolitionist friends. With Child’s help, he placed Anna and her four children in Canandaigua,
New York, with a nice Quaker lady who needed a maid, and boys to chop her firewood. Amos Marshall was sent to work as a servant in Brooklyn, as was Henry. The others, however, found employment in Boston before Palfrey could disperse them. Local African Americans who remembered their own difficult transitions helped the country migrants to put down roots in Boston’s black neighborhoods.
⁷

Like
most northern whites who adopted antislavery convictions in the 1840s, Palfrey didn’t seem to be antislavery because of a belief in black equality, of either capacity or right-to-choose. Freeing his slaves over his brothers’ objections, however, allowed Palfrey to demonstrate that southern whites could not silence him, as they had tried to silence his fellow Harvard alum John Quincy Adams with the
Gag Rule. Southerners’ political bullying had pushed him into a new conviction that replaced his previous implicit belief in an America where slave-owning and slavery-profiting brothers were united across geographic distance. Now, he concluded—as did other northern whites—that slavery was wrong and that its growth must be stopped because it enabled southern brothers to bully northern ones.