The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (13 page)

By the middle of 1802, the first wave of French forces had withered away. Napoleon reluctantly diverted the Louisiana army to Saint-Domingue. Then this second expedition to the Caribbean was also destroyed. So even as Toussaint Louverture
shivered in his cell across the ocean, the army he
left behind became the first to deal a decisive defeat to Napoleon’s ambitions. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies,” the first of the whites was heard to grumble into his cup at a state dinner. On April 7, 1803, Louverture’s jailer entered the old warrior’s cell and found the first of the blacks seated upright, dead in his chair. The same
day, Monroe’s ship hove into sight of the French coast. And on April 11, before Monroe’s stagecoach could reach Paris, a French minister invited Livingston to his office.
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Napoleon’s minion shocked Livingston almost out of his knee breeches with an astonishing offer: not just New Orleans, but all of French Louisiana—the whole west bank of the Mississippi and its tributaries. Now the United States
was offered—for a mere $15 million—828,000 square miles, 530 million acres, at three cents per acre. This vast expanse doubled the nation’s size. Eventually the land from the Louisiana Purchase would become all or part of fifteen states. It still accounts for almost a quarter of the surface area of the United States. By the late twentieth century, Jefferson’s windfall would be feeding much of
the world. One imagines that Livingston found it hard to hold his poker face steady. He immediately agreed to the deal.
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So it was that as 1804 began, two momentous ceremonies took place. Each formalized the consequences of the successful overthrow, by enslaved people themselves, of the most profitable, most fully developed example of European imperial sugar slavery. One of the ceremonies took
place in Port-au-Prince and was held by a gathering of leaders who had survived the Middle Passage, slavery, revolution, and war. On January 1, they proclaimed the independence of a new country, which they called Haiti—the name they believed the original Taino inhabitants had used before the Spaniards killed them all. Although the country’s history would be marked by massacre, civil war, dictatorship,
and disaster, and although white nations have always found ways to exclude Haiti from international community, independent Haiti’s first constitution created a radical new concept of citizenship: only black people could be citizens of Haiti. And who was black? All who would say they rejected both France and slavery and would accept the fact that black folks ruled Haiti. Thus, even a “white”
person could become a “black” citizen of Haiti, as long as he or she rejected the assumption that whites should rule and Africans serve.
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Not only did Haitian independence finish off Napoleon’s schemes for the Western Hemisphere, but it also sounded the knell for the first form of New World slavery. On the sugar islands, productivity had depended on the continual resupply of captive workers
ripped from the womb of Africa. Many Europeans who had not been convinced of the African slave trade’s
immorality were now convinced that it had brought destruction upon Saint-Domingue, by filling it full of angry men and women who had tasted freedom at one point in their lives. British anti-slave-trade activism, frightened into a pause in 1791 by heads severed by the Saint-Domingue rebels and
Paris guillotines, became conventional London wisdom. In 1807, the British Parliament passed a law ending the international slave trade to its empire. In the near future, Britain’s government and ruling class, confident that their own abolition of the trade had provided them with what historian Christopher Brown has aptly called “moral capital,” would use the weight of their growing economic influence
to push Spain, France, and Portugal toward abolishing their own Atlantic slave trades.
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Meanwhile, the US Congress had already been pushing forward its own bill to ban the international slave trade to the United States—starting in 1808, the first year that the Constitution permitted it. But this slave-trade ban, urged by Thomas Jefferson in his 1806 annual message to Congress, was a political
possibility in part because the Middle Passage was no longer seen as an economic necessity. Feet marching west, south, and southwest enabled slaveholders in the new western districts of South Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere to buy from an endless coffle of people like Charles Ball. Thus, the bill’s passage did not mean that the southern representatives who voted for it believed that slavery was
wrong. As one of them insisted proudly, “A large majority of people in the Southern states do not consider slavery as a crime.”
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In any case, the Haitian Revolution had already made it possible for the United States to open up the Mississippi Valley to the young nation’s internal slave trade. About ten days before the declaration of independence in Port-au-Prince, on December 22, 1803, Louisiana’s
new territorial governor had accepted the official transfer of authority in New Orleans. American acquisition depended on the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of African men, women, and children who in Saint-Domingue rose up against the one social institution whose protection appeared to be written into the US Constitution—the enslavement of African people. This reliance on the success of
the Haitian Revolution was a profound irony. Jefferson, whose argument for “diffusion” relied in part on exploiting white fears of slave revolt, did not acknowledge that Toussaint’s posthumous victory made the nation’s—and slavery’s—expansion possible. The only voice pointing out that the republican president was an emperor without clothes came from Jefferson’s old rival Alexander Hamilton, who
wrote that “to the deadly climate of St. Domingo, and to the courage and obstinate resistance made by its black inhabitants are
we indebted. . . . [The] truth is, Bonaparte found himself absolutely compelled”—and not by Jefferson—“to relinquish his daring plan of colonizing the banks of the Mississippi.”
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Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without
admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery. The great continent would incubate a second
slavery exponentially greater in economic power than the first.

SO THE MAN IN
the iron collar was a sign not of the passing of an old forced migration, but of the conception of a new one. Yet acquisition of territory doesn’t automatically translate to control. Potential wealth doesn’t translate automatically into floods of money. To convert possibility into reality in the Mississippi Valley,
enslavers would have to work together across linguistic and cultural difference; find new sources of slaves, especially after 1807; and defeat challenges to their power. And had we been able to interview William C. Claiborne, governor of the Orleans Territory, on May 15, 1809, he might have had a pessimistic assessment of their chances. On that day, he was frantically scrawling a letter from his desk
in the Cabildo, a white stone structure that stood on the Place d’Armes in New Orleans. Built by the Spanish, the Cabildo now houses the Louisiana State Museum, but in the years after the 1804 “change of flags” it was the nerve center of government on the frontier of empire.

Claiborne was a man in a hurry. The breakneck pace of his political career had rushed forward frenetically with the expansion
of the new United States. Born in Virginia in 1775, he had moved to Tennessee and was in 1795 elected the youngest US representative in history. Powerful Virginia allies had secured him the appointment as federal governor of the newly acquired Orleans Territory, as present-day Louisiana was then termed. But here everything he wanted to accomplish seemed to run aground. Some of it was his fault.
He refused to learn French, for instance. He was brusque and tactless, in an existential hurry like his nation. Even now he leapt up from his seat to look out the window toward the river, then strode hastily back to the desk to scribble, twitching, again.
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For the governor had just received the troublesome news that ships full of slaves had arrived from Cuba and were trying to dock at the port
of New
Orleans, in contravention of the ban on importing slaves into the United States. The question of importing slaves threatened to amplify rivalries inherent to the nature of this territory. French-speaking residents, conscious of cultural difference, fought in the New Orleans streets with English-speaking Protestants about which dances should be performed at a ball—the ones fashionable in
England or the ones popular in France. “American” women (and a few men) complained that here, wealthy white men sometimes lived with mulatto women until it came time to marry a respectable white one. Such things happened in Virginia—Claiborne knew Thomas Jefferson quite well—but they were usually kept under wraps. Meanwhile, new American arrivals used capital from outside the territory to dominate
business that came from New Orleans’s now-unimpeded access to the products and profits of the interior. French Louisianans could only fall back on their control of the territory’s fixed capital, and some tried to shut out American emigrants by refusing to sell them land.
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Cultural conflict kept alive uncertainty about the loyalties of the newly incorporated peoples of Louisiana. The Spanish
Empire still loomed on both the western and eastern frontiers, refusing to give up West Florida. Rumors of plots to detach the Mississippi Valley from Washington’s control implicated Spain, French Louisianans who were disloyal to the United States, and overambitious English-speakers. The most notorious was the 1806 scheme supposedly organized by former vice president Aaron Burr and General James Wilkinson—a
plan to establish a breakaway republic in Louisiana. Although Wilkinson was a paid agent in the service of Spain, he was not arrested. Burr was, but his subsequent trial for treason devolved into a disaster for Jefferson. The president came out looking like a man eager to twist evidence in order to inflict revenge on a rival (the junior partner on Jefferson’s 1800 ticket, Burr had allegedly
tried to steal the presidency by cooperating with Federalists to drive the election into the House of Representatives).
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Most uncertain of all in the wake of the revolution in Saint-Domingue was the future of slavery in Louisiana. The legal records of the Orleans Territory from 1804 through 1810 show a count of 15,927 enslaved people, and scholars have found enough information to make an ethnic
identification in 5,527 of the cases. Of those, 61 percent seem to have been born in Africa, 27 percent in Louisiana, 6 percent in the Caribbean, and 6 percent in Anglo North America (see
Table 2.1
). Ears in New Orleans marketplaces heard dozens of African tongues. Eyes there noted strange “country marks,” tribal scarifications carved in the faces of men and women coming in from the cane fields.
“Strange negroes” from Africa seemed particularly prone to resistance. “Our Quondam friend
Mandingo Charles
alias
Goliah
has again absconded from the
plantation[;] also an Ebo man named
Cracker
,” wrote John Palfrey in 1810 from his property Cannes Brûlées (Burnt Cane) in St. Charles Parish, fifty miles upriver from New Orleans. Palfrey, a merchant from Massachusetts, had moved to Louisiana in
the 1790s to take over his brother-in-law’s sugar operation. At the end of 1810, unable to pull the enterprise out of debt, he sold out to New Orleans entrepreneurs William Kenner and Stephen Henderson and launched a cotton-growing operation in the Attakapas region of Louisiana. Cracker stayed in the St. Charles woods.
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TABLE 2.1. ORIGINS OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE FOUND IN NEW ORLEANS RECORDS, 1804–1810

Source:
Hall Database,
www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
.

*
Search on variable “Origin,” except for number of African groups, in which variable “Birthplace” was used.

Saint-Domingue was present, in spirit, in the Louisiana that Claiborne was trying to govern. Most of the white constables in the streets of New Orleans had been born on the French island. Sugar and sugar specialists had come to Louisiana
from the burned colony, too. In 1794, refugee sugar artisan Antoine Morin helped Etienne Boré become the first Louisiana planter to granulate sugar from cane. A little Saint-Domingue sprang up along the great river’s “German Coast,” which stretched from St. James Parish down to the city itself. Fields of cane replaced fields of corn. Seventy-five sugar mills were in operation by 1804. Along these
one hundred miles of development, army officer Amos Stoddard saw “scenes of misery and distress.” He added, echoing Jefferson, “Wounds and lacerations occasioned by demoralized masters and overseers, most of whom exhibit a strange compound of ignorance and depravity, torture the feelings of the stranger, and wring blood from his heart. . . . Good God! Why sleeps thy vengeance!”
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