The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (12 page)

All of this was certain, but for the doubt raised by one big question: whether the United States and all the entrepreneurs who wanted to expand slavery into the great river valley in the middle of the continent could actually hold onto North America’s interior. That outcome
was still in doubt, even in 1807. In fact, it had been in doubt since the 1790s, and would continue to be so for almost a decade more. For this reason, slavery’s expansion was not a foregone conclusion. And four great episodes of violence, three of them played out along the river system whose flow rocked the
Adventine
at anchor, would decide its fate.

As of 1807, four out of every five people
who came from the Old World to the New had come from Africa, not Europe; chained in the belly of a ship, not free on its deck. Huddled masses in steerage class, yearning to breathe free of the famine and poverty of Ireland, Italy, or Russia’s shtetls—they came later. Ten million Middle Passages of African captives had shaped the New World
and its interactions with the Old. The only other shift
on a similar scale was the death of millions of the hemisphere’s original inhabitants. From the twin realities of demographic catastrophe and Middle Passage, empires emerged to dominate the first three centuries of American history: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British. Once all the gold and silver had been thoroughly stolen, the empires found even greater sources of wealth by laying a belt of
plantation colonies from Brazil north to Virginia. Many were small in size, but all were huge in economic and political significance. In 1763, in the first Treaty of Paris, France traded all of Canada for the island of Guadeloupe.
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What was made on such islands, and what made much of Europe’s new wealth before 1807, was sugar. The Portuguese brought sugarcane to Brazil at the beginning of the
sixteenth century. They’d already learned how to crush it, boil the sap, and crystallize it on Atlantic islands such as Madeira or Sao Tomé. There, Europeans had first combined the volatile ingredients of sugarcane, fertile land, chattel slavery, and enslaved Africans carried far from their homelands. In Brazil, this solution precipitated not only crystallized sucrose from vats of bubbling cane juice
in the brutally demanding
safra
, or sugar harvest, but also immense revenue. Prestige consumers in the economies of late sixteenth-century Western Europe ate sugar and more sugar. Brazil was, for a time, early modern Europe’s Silicon Valley, the incubator of techniques for making massive profits, a synonym for sudden wealth. Robinson Crusoe was going to become a Brazil planter when shipwreck cast
him on his desert island.
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Within fifty years, Barbados shoved Brazil from the top of the sugar heap. The heyday of Barbados lasted only a few decades, for Jamaica rose next to command credit and fame. On island after island, Europeans and their pathogens killed the natives, slave ships appeared on the horizon, and cane sprouted in the fields. Streams of survivors crawled forth from slave ships
to replenish the cane-field work gangs of men and women as they died. But enslavers grew fabulously rich. On each island, the richest crowded out others. Then a new island came online, offering entrepreneurs the chance to get in on the ground floor with fresher soil, offering investors novelty that attracted new credit. The sugar-island process of destruction and implantation shaped the geopolitics,
economics, and culture of the first three centuries of the New World. Virginia and South Carolina were different from the islands, yet they were channels of the same current. The northern colonies were irrelevant until they evolved trades that the islands needed—shipbuilding, grain-growing, and livestock-raising—and started distilling sugarcane molasses into rum, carrying slaves, and trading
in slave-made products.
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In European shops and kitchens, sugar started as a luxury for the rich. By 1700, it was becoming the sweetener for the new middle class’s coffee and tea, also imperial tastes. By 1800 the English poor could sometimes indulge in sugar as a luxury, as a stimulant that got one through a hard day of labor, or a treat to quiet the crying child. Sugar and slavery quickened
European trade, broadened the financial capital available to entrepreneurs, whetted the appetite for profit, and increased the revenue and power of centralizing states. But sugar and slavery had not definitively lifted the economies of Western Europe above those of the rest of the planet. China, which also consumed sugar, remained the massive gravitational center of world trade during much of the
eighteenth century. Like the rest of the world, most Europeans were only one bad season from starvation. They all grew food by local traditions of agriculture that in technological complexity, efficiency, and productivity were closer to the year 0 than to 1900. The great masses of the poor and the peasantry were as short as the man in the collar, for living standards for most people had not risen
since the dawn of the agricultural era.
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On the quarterdeck, the white customs officer huddled with the captain. They walked over and stared at the man in the iron collar together, talked gibberish. The captain signed a paper, and the customs officer clambered back down. The man was still unnamed in white folks’ documents, but ink had captured his presence again. The rowboat slipped back toward
the house. The
Adventine
’s sailors pulled and hoisted. Anchors clanked and sails flapped. The wheel spun. The brig slid out into the ship channel.

The man in the iron collar watched from the rail. The mist peeled back and a low, flat landscape came into view. For the next few days, the
Adventine
tacked with the river’s winding turns through the new land made by the Mississippi. Slowly the banks
rose. Low levees protected the flat land that lay behind. Mud gave way to green cane. First he saw occasional huts, and then large houses surrounded by huts. Three days later, the river turned right and straightened, and a small forest grove of masts came into view. They were at New Orleans.

In 1800, French traveler Pierre-Louis Duvallon had seen a smaller forest of masts. But he saw enough to
prophesy that New Orleans was “destined by nature to become one of the principal cities of North America, and perhaps the most important place of commerce in the new world.” Projectors, visionaries, and investors who came to this city founded by the French in 1718 and ceded to the Spanish in 1763 could sense the same tremendous possible future. Sitting at the mouth of a river system greater in economic
potential, according to Duvallon, than the Nile, the Rhine, the Danube, or the Ganges,
New Orleans would be “the great receptacle” of the “produce” of half a continent. Even “fancy in her happiest mood cannot combine all the felicities of nature and society in a more absolute degree than will actually be combined” in New Orleans, Duvallon said.
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Yet powerful empires had been determined to keep
the city from the United States ever since the thirteen colonies achieved their independence. Between 1783 and 1804, Spain repeatedly revoked the right of American settlers further upriver to export their products through New Orleans. Each time they did so, western settlers began to think about shifting their allegiances. Worried US officials repeatedly tried to negotiate the sale and cession of
the city near the Mississippi’s mouth, but Spain, trying to protect its own empire by containing the new nation’s growth, just as repeatedly rebuffed them.
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Spain’s stubborn possession of the Mississippi’s mouth kept alive the possibility that the United States would rip itself apart. Yet something unexpected changed the course of history. In 1791, Africans enslaved in the French Caribbean colony
of Saint-Domingue exploded in a revolt unprecedented in human history. Saint-Domingue, the eastern third of the island of Hispaniola, was at that time the ultimate sugar island, the imperial engine of French economic growth. But on a single August night, the mill of the first slavery’s growth stopped turning. All across Saint-Domingue’s sugar country, the most profitable stretch of real estate
on the planet, enslaved people burst into the country mansions. They slaughtered enslavers, set torches to sugar houses and cane fields, and then marched by the thousand on Cap-Français, the seat of colonial rule. Thrown back, they regrouped. Revolt spread across the colony.
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By the end of the year thousands of whites and blacks were dead. As the cane fields burned, the smoke blew into the Atlantic
trade winds. Refugees fled to Charleston, already burdened by its own fear of slave revolt; to Cuba; and to all the corners of the Atlantic world. They brought wild-eyed tales of a world turned upside down. Europeans, in the throes of epistemological disarray because of the French Revolution’s overthrow of a throne more than a millennium old, reacted to these events with a different but still
profound confusion. Minor slave rebellions were one thing. Total African victory was another thing entirely—it was so incomprehensible, in fact, that European thinkers, who couldn’t stop talking about the revolution in France, clammed up about Saint-Domingue. The German philosopher Georg Hegel, for instance, who was in the process of constructing an entire system of thought around the idealized,
classical image of a slave rebelling against a master,
never spoke of the slave rebellion going on in the real world. Even as reports of fire and blood splattered every weekly newspaper he read, he insisted that African people were irrelevant to a future that would be shaped by the newly free citizens of European nation-states.
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Yet the revolution in Saint-Domingue was making a modern world.
Today, Saint-Domingue is called Haiti, and it is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. But Haiti’s revolutionary birth was the most revolutionary revolution in an age of them. By the time it was over, these people, once seemingly crushed between the rollers of European empire, ruled the country in which they had been enslaved. Their citizenship would be (at least in theory) the most radically
equal yet. And the events they pushed forward in the Caribbean drove French revolutionaries in the National Assembly to take steadily more radical positions—such as emancipating all French slaves in 1794, in an attempt to keep Saint-Domingue’s economic powerhouse on the side of the new leaders in Paris. Already, however, the slave revolution itself had killed slavery on the island. An ex-slave
named Toussaint Louverture had welded bands of rampaging rebels into an army that could defend their revolution from European powers who wanted to make it disappear. Between 1794 and 1799, his army defeated an invasion of tens of thousands of antirevolutionary British Redcoats.
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By 1800, Saint-Domingue, though nominally still part of the French Republic, was essentially an independent country.
In his letters to Paris, Toussaint Louverture styled himself the “First of the Blacks.” He was communicating with a man rated the First in France—Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of the Republic, another charismatic man who had risen from obscure origins. Napoleon, an entrepreneur in the world of politics and war, rather than business, used his military victories to destroy old ways of doing things.
Then he tried to create new ones: a new international order, a new economy, a new set of laws, a new Europe—and a new empire. But after he concluded the Peace of Amiens with Britain in 1800, the ostensible republican became monarchical. He set his sights on a new goal: restoring the imperial crown’s finest jewel, the lost Saint-Domingue. In 1801, he sent the largest invasion fleet that ever
crossed the Atlantic, some 50,000 men, to the island under the leadership of his brother-in-law Charles LeClerc. Their mission was to decapitate the ex-slave leadership of Saint-Domingue. “No more gilded Africans,” Napoleon commanded. Subdue any resistance by deception and force. Return to slavery all the Africans who survived.
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Napoleon had also assembled a second army, and he had given it
a second assignment. In 1800, he had concluded a secret treaty that “retroceded”
Louisiana to French control after thirty-seven years in Spanish hands. This second army was to go to Louisiana and plant the French flag. And at 20,000 men strong, it was larger than the entire US Army. Napoleon had already conquered one revolutionary republic from within. He was sending a mighty army to take another
by brute force. As for the third republic, when his second army landed in Louisiana, its presence at the head of the Mississippi would destabilize the United States along the fracture line that divided west and east.
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In Washington, Jefferson heard rumors of the secret treaty. To keep alive his utopian plans for a westward-expanding republic of independent white men, he was already compromising
with slavery’s expansion. Now he saw another looming choice between hypocritical compromise and destruction. No memory rankled Jefferson more than a humiliation he had endured back in 1786, when he and John Adams had been presented to the British royal court as the rebel republic’s ambassadors. When a periwigged herald had brayed out the American envoys’ names, George III, still furious, ostentatiously
turned and waddled away as courtiers snickered. And yet, as Jefferson now instructed his envoy to Paris, Robert Livingston, “there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.” Jefferson had to open the Mississippi one way or another. Should a French army occupy New Orleans, wrote Jefferson, “we must marry ourselves to the
British fleet and nation.”
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Napoleon had his own visions. He ignored Jefferson’s initial offer for the city at the mouth of the Mississippi. So the president sent future president James Monroe with a higher bid: $10 million for the city and its immediate surroundings. Yet, in the end, Paris would not decide this deal. When LeClerc’s massive army had disembarked in Saint-Domingue, the French
found Cap-Français a smoldering ruin, burned as part of scorched-earth strategy. LeClerc successfully captured Toussaint by deception and packed him off to France to be imprisoned in a fortress in the Jura Mountains. Resistance, however, did not cease. The army Louverture had built began to win battles over the one Napoleon had sent. French generals turned to genocide, murdering thousands of suspected
rebels and their families. The terror provoked fiercer resistance, which—along with yellow fever and malaria—killed thousands of French soldiers, including LeClerc.