The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (25 page)

An increasingly efficient market for hands was the core of the process
that enabled the new men of New Orleans, from Vincent Nolte to Toussaint Mossy to James Stille and William Fitz, to knot together a nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit. The effects of their endeavors reached far beyond both Maspero’s and the expanding southwestern United States itself. Cotton bales were the cheap oil of the nineteenth century. Here their outflow met the influx of credit to
yield a new thing: ever-increasing production and thus ever-increasing economic growth. And to keep schemes and trades bubbling along from Manchester to Liverpool to New Orleans to the newly-staked-out faraway tracts of plantation-land-to-be way up the Tennessee River in Alabama required a mighty belief. The flow of hands into the market made would-be lords of commerce and new planters believe. As
hands, Rachel and William were also credit: promissory notes on their sellers’ and buyers’ future possession and use of right-handed power.

There was one more crossroads here at the corner of Chartres and St. Louis. But to map this one, we cannot look in the documents that slave-buyers had to file after they won the auction. Instead, we must use a slave-sale memory handed down to us, one that
originated with a woman who stood up above this crowd to be the object of inspection and bidding. Forty years after the year when Rachel stood on the bench, a dying grandmother (we do not know her name) reached up from the corn-shuck mattress where she lay under the roof of a Louisiana slave cabin. She grabbed her frightened granddaughter Melinda by the wrist, and she said the last words Melinda
would ever hear her speak: “First thing I can remember is that I was standing on a slave block in New Orleans alongside my ma.” The place must have been Maspero’s. The time was the moment of sale that had separated her from her mother and everything that had come before. Maspero’s shaped the rest of her life, and she had to pass that moment on to her own granddaughter in order for Melinda to know
her and herself. Here was the crossroads of time and space where Melinda’s family history had to begin again. So would it be for thousands of other family histories.
⁵⁹

TOUSSAINT MOSSY BROUGHT DOWN
the hammer. The last heartbeat of Rachel’s old life trickled out of its chamber. Her past and her future had just been killed for the profit of others. William Fitz won her at about $800.

Fitz had
bought one other person—a man named Frank Boyd—and Fitz was ready to walk his two new slaves back toward the levee and the boat that would carry them up to Baton Rouge. People sold could sometimes hold on to small things that helped them to remember: a pair of gloves worn by a dead
mother; a small blanket, split with a sister. Perhaps Rachel had an opportunity to say goodbye to William and the
others from the
Temperance
. But from this point forward, she disappears from known documents.
⁶⁰

Not so for William, at least not quite yet. He had to wait for James Stille to arrange payment for Perry, a young man from the
Emile
’s cargo. At the same auction, McLean also sold Stille a young woman named Maria and her infant daughter, America, consigned by Virginian William Coles. And over the next
few days, Stille also bought Jacob, Murray, Jefferson, and the nine-year-old boy Braxton, plus eleven slaves from New Orleans merchants Jackson and Reynolds, and six from Virginia residents John Stiles and Thomas Wily. So in less than a week, Stille spent over $20,000—mostly on credit—on new “hands.”
⁶¹

A day or two later, Stille collected the twenty-five people whom he had purchased from the
city jail and the warehouses where they had been stowed while he shopped. He marched all twenty-five back to the levee. The chained city slaves leaned on their shovels, watching a different sort of coffle pass. Past the posts, the leaflets flapping in the wind, William walked across a different gangplank onto a steamboat that could churn steadily upriver against the current. Hands loaded barrels purchased
by upstream customers. The bell rang, steam rose, the boat began to back away from the levee. The last passengers sprinted to leap the widening gap, papers fluttering in their hands. The steamer gathered headway upstream past moored flatboats and sailing ships.
⁶²

From its deck the bound passengers watched the landscape unroll. Behind the levee, each mile studded with a bare pole, they saw rectangular
fields of stubbled cane stretching back. Right before the Red Church, they passed Destrehan’s manor, the double galleries that belted the house shining with new paint. More big houses were visible now than before 1811. Near each were cabins and long, low barracks in sprawling clusters.

After the first day the cotton fields began to appear. Gangs of laborers moved slowly among the winter-brown
and bare stalks, hoeing them under. The boat passed Iberville Parish, and there were few sugar plantations. By the time it reached Baton Rouge, there were only cotton fields and woods. But by then, Stille had already disembarked his hands. William and all the rest had vanished into the slave country, a land populated almost entirely by walking, working hands.

4

LEFT HAND

1805–1861

O
N JULY
5, 1805, almost fifteen years before William disappeared into the cotton country with James Stille, Charles Ball jogged down a South Carolina road. Ball had carried iron chains on his wrists and neck for five hundred miles down to South Carolina. Then the slave trader, M’Giffin, had sold him to Wade Hampton at a Columbia inn as part of the local Fourth
of July celebration. Now it was late the next morning. Hampton sat low between the two wheels of a stylish horse-drawn chaise, periodically flicking a long, thin whip. He had told Ball to keep up, so Ball and the horse ran. Years later, Ball bragged that in his youth he could cover fifty miles a day. Still, he surely began to flag after two or three hours. What Ball eventually remembered most about
that long day’s run, however, was not his ragged breath, but the groves of huge trees through which the road periodically wound. He anticipated each one, grateful that he’d be jogging in the shade for a few minutes. The smell of the trees reached him before he even saw them. Once he was under them, the magnolias’ sweet, musky odor overwhelmed him.
¹

Ever since the Civil War, magnolias have signaled
plantations, and in popular understandings of what slavery was like—movies, novels, tourism, the pages of
Southern Living
, and even many historians’ scholarly accounts—plantations were places where things didn’t change. But as he ran out of the magnolias’ shadow, Ball passed one newly cleared field after another. On the left was one full of stumps and piles of logs and brush, on the right a black
wreck of charred logs and ashes. He jogged past still another, this one covered with rows of nearly waist-high green plants, slaves among them, bending and rising in lines between the rows.
²

The night before, he had sat outside the inn and talked with an enslaved man who had once lived just across the Potomac River from where Ball had
grown up, a part of Maryland where slaves whispered rumors
to each other, saying that down south where the Georgia-man took you, you’d have to eat cottonseed instead of food. The man told Ball that no, he’d have meat and meal. But the man assured him that his work in the cotton fields would be far more difficult and draining than the long hours of labor he had served in Maryland.
³

The kind of slavery that Ball was encountering and that was emerging on
the frontiers of the early nineteenth-century South was inherently new. For centuries, slavery in the New World had expanded by a process of extension: adding new slaves, clearing new fields from the next sugar island. The southwestern frontier was expanding—in part—via a similar strategy, though on an unprecedented geographic scale: it was not an island, but a subcontinent’s rich interior stripped
from its inhabitants. And not mere battalions, but whole armies of slaves were being moved to new soil. By 1820, whites had already transported more than 200,000 enslaved people to the South’s new frontiers in the years since 1790 (see
Table 1.1
).

What made this forced migration truly different was that it led to continuous increases in productivity
per person
—what economists call “efficiency.”
The two ways out of the Malthusian trap were either to incorporate more “ghost acres”—land outside of industrializing core regions like Britain or, soon, the northeastern United States—or to create systematic increases in efficiency of production. The first slavery had not yielded continuous improvements in labor productivity. On the nineteenth-century cotton frontier, however, enslavers extracted
more production from each enslaved person every year.

The source of this ever-rising productivity wasn’t a machine like the ones that were crucial to the textile mills. In fact, you could say that the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip. And the fact that slave labor was unpaid, and compelled by brute force, was not new. That reality was as old as the human institution of slavery
itself.

Just as old was the fact that those who were compelled to knuckle under to right-handed power used the art of secret resistance—such as slowing the pace of work when overseers were out of sight—to undermine the sway of the dominant. It had been the same in traditional societies for all those millennia when serfs, peasants, and slaves made up most of the labor force of most societies.
Their craft was much like what Protestant reformer Martin Luther in the sixteenth century called “left-handed” power: the strength of the poor and the weak, the secret way of seemingly passive resistance to evil. Peasants and servants broke employers’ tools, lied, played dumb, escaped
from masters. At the same time, they kept their secrets about all their crafts. In older slave regions like the
Chesapeake, where Charles Ball had learned to cut and cradle wheat, a secret way of doing or making was a treasure that gave an enslaved man or woman a kind of leverage in his or her dealings with enslavers.
⁴

Yet in the fields past the magnolia grove, the dynamic of right-handed domination and left-handed resistance, a struggle as old as the Pyramids, was changing. Something profoundly new was
happening. Enslavers were finding ways to turn the left hand against the enslaved. Entrepreneurs redirected left-handed power by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture. All of this repeatedly accomplished enslavers’ ongoing goal of forcing enslaved people to invent, over and over, ways to make their own labor more efficient and profitable
for their owners.

New techniques that extracted ever-greater cotton efficiency radically changed the experience of enslaved people like Charles Ball and the 1 million who followed him into the cotton fields. But they also transformed the world beyond the fields. The amount of cotton the South grew increased almost every single year from 1800, when enslaved African Americans made 1.4 million pounds
of cotton, to 1860, when they harvested almost 2 billion pounds. Eighty percent of all the cotton grown in the United States was exported across the Atlantic, almost all of it to Britain. Cotton was the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created our modern world economy. By 1820, the ability of enslaved people in southwestern frontier fields to produce more cotton
of a higher quality for less drove most other producing regions out of the world market. Enslaved African Americans were the world’s most efficient producers of cotton. And they got more efficient every year, which is why the real price of the most important raw material of the industrial revolution declined by 1860 to 15 percent of its 1790 cost, even as demand for it increased by 500 percent (see
Table 4.1
). Cotton also drove US expansion, enabling the young country to grow from a narrow coastal belt into a vast, powerful nation with the fastest-growing economy in the world. Between the 1790s and 1820, the United States acquired a near-monopoly on the world’s most widely traded commodity, and after 1820, cotton accounted for a majority of all US exports. And all of the transformations
that spun from these facts depended on changes inflicted on the left hand.

A little while before sunset, the chaise finally stopped in the drive before Hampton’s house near the Congaree River. Ball bent over, panting and retching. When he finally raised his head, Hampton’s teenaged son was staring at
him. The boy sneered with contemptuous menace and asked Ball if he knew how to pick cotton. Just
then the elder Hampton walked past. He ordered Ball to put the horse away and help the gardener. In the garden, Ball pulled weeds as his body cooled from the run. As the sun set, a boy came with a message: come to the overseer’s house to find out where to stay that evening. As they walked away from the big house where Hampton lived, they heard the oncoming tramp of feet. From the lowering dusk
strode the slave labor camp’s white overseer. After him straggled 170 black men, women, and children. Behind them, night fell on the fields.
⁵