The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (11 page)

Bushrod Washington also got good mileage from Jefferson’s diffusion story. His decision to sell off enslaved people was, he insisted, not a tale of
greed but a demonstration of how forced migration protected white lives. As the African Americans living at Mount Vernon grew in number, he claimed, they had become insubordinate. A couple of Washington’s slaves escaped to the
North, using their feet to undermine his right to property. The rest came to believe that when he died they would be free. And the justice began to fear that they were speculating about where the sharpest knives were, and how they might hide poison in his food. No more Bushrod, no more slavery. Jefferson had blurted analogous fears, famously speaking of a possible “reversal of fortunes” and describing
the situation of Chesapeake slaveholders as being like riding a “wolf [held] by the ears[;] . . . we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Even if whites had agreed to general emancipation, whites had “deeply rooted prejudices,” and blacks “ten thousand recollections.” “New provocations” would divide and whip them into an apocalyptic race-war crescendo. These “convulsions” would end
only with “extermination of the one or the other race.”
⁵⁴

So Jefferson and Washington and other white Virginians stuck to a third choice, a financially profitable one: to “diffuse” enslaved African Americans south and west. And the existence of the Georgia-men allowed such respectable leaders to draw alleged emotional and moral distances between themselves and the unpleasant side of “diffusion.”
They wrung their hands as coffles and Georgia-men passed. Or they asserted that slaves lived better in the new states than in the old. But while Washington contended that forced migration was carried out for the benefit of enslaved people, one observer, who stood in Leesburg in August 1821 and watched as Bushrod Washington’s coffle went by, saw “unhappy wretches,” among whom were “husbands [who]
had been torn from wives and children, and many relatives left behind.” Those left at Mount Vernon whispered bitter words to tourists who visited the national father’s home.
⁵⁵

BETWEEN THE END OF
the American Revolution and the
Fletcher v. Peck
decision in 1810, slavery’s expansion linked the nation together. The needs of the nation encouraged the growth of a complex of institutions and patterns—and,
just as significantly, excuses—that made national political and financial alliances possible. The needs of individual enslavers and others who hoped to profit from the expansion of all sorts of economic opportunities encouraged the growth of a more powerful set of national capabilities, more market-friendly laws, and more unified markets. The needs of national expansion, plus the ability of
chained people to walk, trapped enslaved people as absolutely held property in the political compromises, political alliances,
and financial schemes of the United States and in the very map of the young country. Slavery, and specifically, the right of enslavers to sell and to move their slaves into new territory, became a national practice: as a strict definition of property under constitutional
law, as habit and expectation, and as a pattern of political compromise.

Turning this wheel of cause and effect were moving feet—those of Charles Ball, of the thirty-two other men to whom he was connected, of the nineteen women roped together behind them, and others still growing toward sellable height. From old Maryland and Virginia, which were crumbling beneath the glossy veneers offered to
the world by their politicians, the coffle-chains and the people who toted them clanked across hundreds of miles into a new world where everything was flux and frolick. Forced migration and the expansion of slavery became a seemingly permanent and inevitable element of the mutually-agreed-to structure of lies that, defended by the agile legal realism of Marshall and the myth of diffusion, made the
nation. To put the machine in motion, Washington could now rely on a set of chaining experts, Georgia-men who took the financial and physical and status risks of moving enslaved people. Charles Ball could now be moved more easily in every sense, with less political, ideological, legal, and personal friction.

Thus the coffle chained the early American republic together. In South Carolina, Charles
Ball’s neck and hands were finally freed of the coffle’s chains, but only so his owner could finish the chain’s work of converting Charles and the other remaining Maryland slaves into market goods. Because they had left sweat from pores and pus from blisters on the road, and had drawn down their meager stores of body fat, the Georgia-man rested them for twenty days at a property owned by a cotton
farmer. Ball and his companions were given butter to eat so they would become sleek and “fat.” The lice were driven from their bodies and clothes by repeated washing. And soon, white people began to come and examine them, ask them questions, speculate on their bodies. Here, the Georgia-man was among people who respected him, calling him “merchant” instead of “negro driver” or “Georgia trader.”
Here he was needed, and not as the scapegoat for other enslavers’ sins. He even let his name drop from his tight lips: “My name is M’Giffin, sir,” he said in response to a prospective buyer’s inquiry.
⁵⁶

After two weeks, M’Giffin moved the drove of slaves south into Columbia. There, on the Fourth of July, the local jailor auctioned them off in front of a crowd of hundreds who had just finished
eating a fine banquet and listening to a patriotic speech. The sale eventually narrowed down to the last three, the stoutest men, including Ball. The jailor now theatrically announced that
if M’Giffin did not get $600 for each man, he would take them to Georgia and sell them there. An “elderly gentleman” announced that he would pay that amount for “the carpenter.” Ball was not really a carpenter,
but many lies were told on that day that celebrated freedom from tyranny: not one of the slaves for sale had ever run away, or stolen from their masters, or been whipped. Each was sold by a fine Maryland or Virginia gentleman who had sadly fallen into debt.

The other whites deferred to this “elderly man.” Ball pegged him as a major slave-owner. He was actually one Wade Hampton, among other things
a major Yazoo investor. Having inherited rice plantation wealth in the low country, Hampton was in the process of shifting his slaves into cotton—for now, on acres he owned near Columbia, South Carolina. Later, his quest for wider vistas would lead him into Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana endeavors. Today, however, Hampton was drinking, and celebrating the Fourth. He told Charles to find
a corner of a stable and go to sleep. The next day, they would make the trip to Hampton’s nearby property—one last step of the journey that Ball’s feet had made from the old to the new.

2

HEADS

1791–1815

T
HE LOGS BOBBED AROUND
the pilings of the customhouse. The hut stood on legs, a chicken up to its drumsticks in shallow water, besieged by a continent’s stew. Anything that could last a month in water ended up down here at the “Balize,” the flats at the Mississippi’s mouth: bark; sticks; whole trees, if they didn’t get hung up along a thousand miles of snags. Deer
and drowned wild cattle didn’t make it; catfish and turtles ate them long before they could come this far. The heaviest load of all flowed under the rippling corduroy of forest waste: a mighty subsurface plume of water, fresh but not sweet, sagging with its load. Iron from the far north, silver from Rocky Mountain lodes, and most of all, dirt. Humus rinsed from the banks of ten thousand forest tributaries,
tumbled past Jefferson’s would-be sixteen states, stirred with black soil from the delta. For an eon the river had piled up silt, marching its outlet southward on its own. But for the past decade, the runoff slurry had been thickening. Upriver, someone was plowing, planting, harvesting.

It was the beginning of 1807. Looking over the side of the
Adventine
, as it bobbed at anchor in the ship channel,
was a short, dark man. He had been the only slave on board since Charleston. The crew paid him no mind. He was neither a threat nor the main cargo. He still didn’t understand what they said, and they did not understand him. But they no longer feared that he’d jump, like the Africans they’d wrestled back over the rails on Atlantic crossings. There were two startling things about him. One was
that when he slept, he always curled up in the same position. The other was that he wore an iron collar around his neck, inscribed with the words, “Property of Hugh Young.”
¹

Behind his eyes, he remembered. Coming from Africa to South Carolina, he had gone through what 10 million other forced migrants to the New World
had already survived: captured or kidnapped, or simply bought, marched to the
coast, sold by strange men to even stranger men (some milky-colored, some angry red, some tan with dark curly hair). Out of the darkness of the dungeon in chains, hand and foot, one of a whole stick of African men bundled by the white sailors into the big coastal canoe. Feeling the salt spray as it flushed over the gunwales. They plunged through rough waves to a floating structure and were hauled
on board the Rhode Island ship. Herded below with shoves, they took dainty, quick steps to stay balanced under a four-foot ceiling, too short for even these men, who barely averaged five feet. The air stank from men already curled on the floor in front of them. Their predicament showed the new arrivals how to lie: spoon-fashion, on the left. Easier on the heart that way, captains believed.

In
1787, the Constitutional Convention had allowed the trade to go on. In the twenty years since, citizens of the new nation had dragged 100,000 more people from the African coast. Always, some fought. They clung to the doorposts of the dungeons and barracoons. They threw themselves in chained groups over the gunwales of the boats to drown together in the surf. They grabbed at the clubs the sailors
used to beat them down onto the slave deck. They rushed the barricade when the crew let them out for exercise. Ten percent of Atlantic slave-trade voyages experienced major rebellions. But resistance almost always failed. Sailors fired grapeshot cannon into surging masses of desperate men and women in the midships. The scuppers ran with blood. The sharks ate.
²

Now the man remembered how he had
lain in vomit and shit and piss. How he had eaten from the bucket they brought. He heard the women on the other deck crying for a dying baby or sister; heard them fight as the sailors took them into the crew’s quarters one by one, to be raped. He saw them drag out men who had gone stiff and grinning. The angel’s fingers clawed at him, too. He puked up everything down to the bile, barely survived
the dysentery that emptied out a hundred, sweated from cargo fevers. He panted, waiting for the water pail’s ladle. He could’ve died like millions of others. But he lived on.

Perhaps he was lucky. At last the ship dropped anchor in Charleston harbor. Then, they sold him to a New Orleans merchant’s local agent, who locked him into the iron collar that bore the merchant’s name. Another white man
walked him up East Bay Street toward the
Adventine
’s dock. Signs creaked in the wind that brought the stench of his old ship from Gadsden’s Wharf. The buzzards lighting and flapping on the other side of the Cooper River knew where the harbor current piled bodies against the sandbar. That
year alone, seven hundred Africans died on the twenty-five different ships that spent time waiting there in
quarantine.
³

Now, after another voyage, the rowboat eased up to the
Adventine
’s hull. The white customs officer scrambled up the rope ladder. The man in the iron collar watched everything. He could tell that the slave who rested on the oars had gone through dark waters, too. Behind unblinking eyes, the oarsman gave back the collared man’s gaze, and remembered the feel of the slave deck’s sweating
wood pressing against his ritually scarred cheek.

Yet this new arrival’s experience would be different. Slavery itself was changing from the first story, the sugar-island model that had shaped everything in the New World to this point. This man would carry his collar not to an island or to an isolated belt of settlements clinging to the coast. He was headed into a vast continent. Behind the mists
on the mud flats, enslavement would find no geographical limit, only political ones—and enslavers had structured politics to their advantage. Citizens, not colonials, would own him. Owners’ property interests—owners who got to vote and run for office and govern—would drive decisions about him, not the plans of distant imperial bureaucrats. And because the man in the iron collar and all who followed
him into the depths of the continent would make not a luxury product but the most basic commodity in a new kind of endlessly expanding economy, there would also be no limit to the market for the product of his labor. This meant that there was no numerical limit to the number of enslavers, or to the number of investors who would want to chase enslavement’s rewards. Only conscience, or the inability
of the world’s investment markets to deploy enough savings, could impede the transfer of capital to slavery’s new frontiers.