The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (37 page)

Ball crept across North Carolina in the dark. Each morning the cold sunrise found him looking for groves of evergreen holly where he could shiver in safety through the day. A nighttime attempt to ford the frigid Roanoke River turned into a disaster. It was deeper and swifter than he remembered,
and he had to swim for it. He made it to the other shore, but almost went into hypothermic shock before he could get a fire going. But now Ball was in Virginia. One day north of Richmond, a white man spotted him hiding near the high road. Within a few hours, Ball was locked in the Caroline County jail. The normal procedure was to try to ascertain where the runaway had come from and then
“advertise” him or her in newspapers likely to be read there. Ball refused to say who he was, and no one there recognized him. He had already come farther than any of the jailers would have believed.

After thirty-nine days in jail, in early February 1809, Ball broke out of the flimsy building and headed northeast. At the Potomac, he found a small boat tied up on the shore. Rowing himself across,
Ball hiked to the Patuxent and did the same thing. At one in the morning he reached the door of his wife’s cabin. Ball stood there in shock. Perhaps he’d been replaced. Finally he summoned the courage to knock, and heard his wife respond “Who’s there?” He said “Charles.” And she said, “Who is this that speaks like my husband?” Like, but not the same. For his tongue sounded different now.

6

BREATH

1824–1835

T
HE COLD STARS OF
the southern night glittered high above the quarters in the Tennessee cotton belt. Three hundred miles away, a man followed a northbound path by their light. Down here, the adults and youths were sitting on three log benches, pulled into a triangle around a fire that burned low. The younger children slept in the cabins. But there weren’t many of
them. Most of the young people were big enough to work all day. They’d been sold here away from their parents. So who would send them to bed? And things were being said that they needed to hear—and there were also things they needed to tell.

Iron spoons clanked on tin cups of cornmeal mush and rationed salt pork. It was almost contradictory that low laughs, punctuating rumbling speech, meant
that what the speaker said wasn’t funny. That night there were many grim chuckles. Now a girl’s voice, tired from the field, began to tell a story that a child named Hettie Mitchell—not born, not even thought of yet—would eventually hear. This was the night when Hettie’s one-day-to-be mother first told her own tale—how “she had been
stole
” from her parents in South Carolina. How the last sight
anyone on the home place saw of her was a glimpse of a child getting bundled into a covered wagon. One hundred years later, Hettie herself would be telling the tale that got her mother to Tennessee. This night, the words her future mother spoke began to weave their way into the story of everyone else on the benches, of everybody scattered under the southern stars across ten thousand clearings like
this one.
¹

If one could sit there with them, one would learn that as soon as forced migrants could understand each other’s tongues, they tried to make sense of the destruction and chaos inflicted upon them. One would also hear them remembering the lost, hoping, too, that the lost would also not forget them.
For they were all lost. And one would notice another thing: the same phrases, again and
again. “I saw them travel in groups. . . . They looked like cattle.” “They was taking them, driving them, just like a pack of mules.” “I seen people handcuffed together and drove along the Williamsburg Road like cattle. They was bought to be took south.” The stories of those who endured coffle, block, and whipping-machine were as like to each other as two links forged as part of the same iron chain.
But enslaved people also forged their own links. They borrowed catchphrases that resonated with their own or their relatives’ experiences: “My mother and daddy done told me all about it. . . . Sold just like cows, honey, right off the block.” Every teller owned a piece of this story, for the experiences and forces that the words tried to describe had shaped every teller’s life. They did far better
than professional historians have done at identifying the common ways that forced migration shaped their lives and that of the United States. Indeed, the storytellers concluded that forced migration was slavery’s truest measure.
²

Year after year, night after night, survivors talked and listened, creating a vast oral history that was also an argument about the nature of slavery. One million tongues
were providing anyone willing to listen with an explanation for why these things had happened to them, and who was to blame. Their talking assembled them, at least for the time of the storytelling, into one body that breathed the vast and devastating common experience of slavery’s expansion. For the way that enslaved migrants explained their common situation helped them to unite, cementing a
baseline of solidarity that was fundamental to African-American survival. The stories that enslaved migrants whispered on the night air would also, when carried north on the tongues of intrepid messengers like Charles Ball, be powerful enough to breathe fire into the disparate elements of anti-slave-expansion sentiment in the free states. One day, enslaved people’s own acts might thus bring allies
to their beleaguered cause.

YET WHETHER THE POTENTIAL
emergence of allies for tough but disarmed survivors could derail the most kinetically forceful economic phenomenon in the nineteenth-century world—the growth of cotton production and its transformation into textiles—was an open question that seemed to be closing in the wrong direction. For even as the disparate elements of enslaved African-American
populations on slavery’s frontier knitted together the words of a new common cultural tongue into a story, the powers of their world were growing even more menacing. There was no new day on the horizon on November 5, 1829, when Granville Sharp Pierce stood in the
New Orleans office of public notary William Boswell. Pierce was dealing in much more tangible transactions and effects than were the
people who sat around fires talking. He was at the office to file two specific documents. Together those two pieces of paper left a trail that maps all we know about Ellen, the short seventeen-year-old woman whose name was on the documents Pierce handed to Boswell. The first document was a deed. It recorded his sale of Ellen to Barthelemy Bonny. In other states, slave sellers and buyers retained
deeds of sale themselves, and most of those papers did not survive the passing years. Louisiana’s Napoleonic legal code, however, required notaries to keep a record of every local slave trade. Almost all the New Orleans ledger books have survived, and they are now stored in the city’s Notarial Archives on the fifth floor of the Amoco building on Poydras Street.

Pierce’s transactions help to show
how, even as Hettie’s mother told her story, her story itself, and Ellen’s too, was changing from the one Charles Ball or Rachel would have told. For the ways in which the enslaved were stolen and driven were changing. Through the 1820s, building on the ad hoc speculations of Georgia-men and Louisiana entrepreneurs, an emergent crop of professional slave traders knotted together an innovative
trading system that would supply even more enslaved people to slavery’s frontier and help keep slaveholding profitable everywhere. The new professionals had created a true national slave market, lungs to bring in huge gulps the oxygen of slave labor into the southwestern region, where enslavers were willing to spend the most for hands. Those lungs would keep inhaling until the end of the Civil War.

The documents accumulated by Louisiana notaries help give a clear picture of how the trade worked, in New Orleans and elsewhere, by the time Ellen got there in 1829. From 1804 to 1862, the 135,000 recorded New Orleans notarial sales map a fascinating overall profile of the changing price patterns of the slave trade at its pivot point, its biggest market. For instance, in 1820, the average price
of a male “hand” between twenty-one and thirty-eight years of age had been $875 (see
Figure 6.1
). In 1824 that average had fallen to $498. By 1829, prices had risen again, to an average of $596. In fact, if we compare slave prices to cotton prices multiplied by the output of cotton per enslaved person—an output that was, as we know, rising under the influence of the whipping-machine—we can see
that by the 1820s the price of slaves had begun to track closely with the revenue generated by the average cotton hand (see
Figure 6.2
). Demand from cotton-state slave buyers increased when the product of two factors multiplied together—the number of pounds picked times the price per pound—was high.
³

Figure 6.1. Average Price of Slaves, New Orleans, 1804–1862.
Source: New Orleans Slave Sale Sample, 1804–1862
, compiled by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester, ICPSR07423-v2 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor]), 2008-08-04, doi:10.3886/ICPSR07423.v2. Price is an average of prices for all enslaved men between twenty-one and thirty-eight years of age.