The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (47 page)

“They’re mighty free with pistols down there,” an escaped slave told an audience in 1842. “If a man don’t resent anything that’s put upon him, they call him ‘Poke-easy.’” The way white men saw it, being poke-easy was for
men toiling in the field, and
for the women out there, too—people either forced or willing to be the helpless target. Dirks, pistols, and physical assault asserted that one was un-poke-able. Little boys in the southwestern towns learned to fight for their honor as soon as they could walk. “Catch him down,” said a Florida father watching his son fight another boy, “[then] bite him, chaw off his lip”—or else “you’ll never be
a man.” A man must be ready to fight on almost any day, from cradle to grave. And old men dying of alcoholism scrabbled frantically under their beds for stashed revolvers, to shoot the phantoms that still rushed toward them.
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Wealthy men well-positioned to grab the right-handed rewards generated by ever-growing productivity in the cotton fields committed more than their share of frontier violence.
But also characteristic was the type of Alabama employer-employee conflict that John Pelham described to his North Carolina uncle in 1833: “I had a falling out with Mr. Bynum (I was not quite as submissive as he would wish an overseer). He threatened to
cane me
(he has three sons grown). I told him the whole family could not
doe that
and
dared
them to try it.” Bynum wanted deference, but Pelham
refused to be submissive. He was an employee, but also, he asserted, an equal. You don’t cane an equal. You cane someone to prove that they are not your equal. Pelham made Bynum back down, and now the rich man had to find another overseer. Meanwhile, Pelham found someone willing to give him credit—to believe his claim-to-status—“I had money and friends and determined to alter my business I went
to Florence . . . and bought me a good assortment of grocerys and brought them to this place where I find I am doing a good business.”
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In personal encounters, less wealthy white men who moved to the new states became increasingly confrontational toward those who dared to act like their betters. Tens of thousands of Pelhams, just like the original Potter, also wanted to force political recognition
of their equality. When property-owning citizens in South Carolina and Kentucky decided in the 1790s to expand the franchise to all adult white men, regardless of their property-owning status, they probably assumed that educated, wealthy men from the upper class would still hold all offices and set the agenda of politics. This is essentially what happened at first. Many successful frontier
politicians were like George Poindexter. He arrived in Mississippi from Virginia in the first decade of the nineteenth century and became the author of Mississippi’s first legal code and the Natchez river–county elite’s political champion. The “Natchez Nabobs” were few in number, but they controlled the state legislature, and so they made Poindexter their US senator.
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Yet, by the time Poindexter’s
star was reaching its zenith, the impact of poor white migrants from the old states on frontier elections began to change the political game. The 1832 Mississippi state constitution removed the last few restrictions on white male voting. The broadened electorate brought in a state legislature that told Poindexter to cast his Senate votes against banking policies that benefited his cronies.
He responded with the claim that the common voter could not tell him what to do: “If . . . the people of Mississippi desire to be represented in the national legislature by a mere machine, to be wielded by the arm of [popular] power, they have made an unfortunate selection in me.”
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Elite politicians also tried to distract attention from policy programs that served oligarchic factions by painting
their opponents as poke-easies undeserving of voters’ respect. Florida territorial governor Richard K. Call, leader of a clique of land speculators, described his campaign strategy as “riding” his opponent “with a stiffer bit and a ranker rowel” than he had been ridden before—verbally humiliating him and threatening violence until the opponent backed down, tail between legs.

Political honor-violence
could be as meaningful to voters as policy programs and oratory. Yet new voters who built their log cabins on the poor land far from the rivers did not want their representative to tell them he wasn’t going to listen to them. Sometimes voters could be as brutal with their rebukes as the Georgia constituent who assassinated a Yazoo-man state senator for giving away his birthright of land yet-to-be-stolen
from the Creeks. Given the option, poor white men preferred politicians like Franklin Plummer. Plummer arrived in Mississippi with no more money than Poindexter, settling in the hardscrabble piney woods of the state’s southeast, rather than Natchez. When he decided to run for Congress in 1829, the state’s ruling factions “considered it a great piece of impertinence,” as a fellow politico
from those days later recalled. The Natchez machine sent notorious duelists to heckle him during speeches, seeking to humiliate him as an unmanly coward. Plummer “coolly took the stump and routed them” with clever mockery. His ability to connect with the common voter made him virtually invincible. During one election campaign, Plummer traveled the district in company with a competitor, and one
night the two of them stayed at the same settler cabin. When Plummer’s opponent walked outside early the next morning, he found the woman of the house milking, while Plummer—grinning at his rival—held the cow’s hungry calf back by its tail. At another stop Plummer helped a farmer’s family pick parasitic red bugs out of their toddler’s hair. In
a different campaign he printed up a mock advertisement
that asked readers for help in locating opponent Powhatan Ellis’s allegedly lost trunk, which supposedly contained such items as “6 lawn handkerchiefs; 6 cambric shirts; 2 [cambric] night [shirts]; 1 nightcap; 1 pr. Stays; 3 pr. Silk stockings.” Ellis lost the election.
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THE KIND OF WHITE
man who supported Franklin Plummer—or Bob Potter—wanted even more than mockery of the arrogant. That kind
of white man wanted politics to change—to incorporate white male equality in both political practice and policy outcomes. Ironically, no Potterizing politician planted more fruitful seeds of that kind of change than a Tennessee cotton planter and slave trader, a man who on March 5, 1829, woke up aching in Washington, DC. The capital was in the middle of a long, deep cold snap. Local firewood stockpiles
had gone up the capital’s chimneys. Andrew Jackson’s wiry old body felt the frost. He had never quite recovered from his campaigns, and under the knife scars that cicatrized his body was a void in his heart, where Rachel fit. Jackson believed that the scurrilous pamphlets published by John Quincy Adams’s campaign had killed his wife. Mortified by charges that she had committed adultery when
she took up with Andrew in the 1790s before finalizing her divorce from her abusive first husband, Rachel declined rapidly after Jackson’s November victory.

Now, as Jackson rose to his feet, a slave waiting outside the door heard the old man and entered the room. A few minutes later, the president-elect emerged: washed, shaved, and buttoned into mourning-black pants, waistcoat, coat, and overcoat.
On his head, where Jackson had once favored a white beaver hat, he settled a black one. At the bottom of the stairs he found a group of younger men whom he and Rachel, a childless couple, had essentially adopted. Many had served as his officers. As they breakfasted, people collected in the cold outside the hotel at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Right on time at 11 a.m., Jackson opened
the front door. A deafening shout of joy erupted.

The president-elect and his soldiers pushed their way down the steps in a loose tactical formation. “A military chieftain,” his critics had sneered, implying his appeal was that of the despot on horseback, whose forcefulness thrills the ignorant. But there was more to him. He and his allies and supporters were making a new kind of government.
Not a dictatorship, not a republic, it built white men’s equal access to manhood and citizenship on the disfranchisement of everyone else. Yet it was still the first mass democracy in
world history. And as he proceeded onto Pennsylvania Avenue’s frozen mud, Jackson didn’t ride. He walked.
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Jackson and his supporters had fought through two bitter national elections to reach this day. In 1824,
Jackson had won a plurality of the popular votes, but he had been outmaneuvered in Congress after no candidate won an electoral-college majority. By 1828, however, he had joined forces with New York’s Martin Van Buren and his “Bucktail” faction. It was the Bucktails who had created the new state constitution in 1821, the one that disfranchised most property-owning African Americans and enfranchised
all white men. New York votes were essential to Jackson’s 1828 victory. Jackson had also let his northern allies in Congress lock in their states’ votes in the spring of 1828 by passing a tariff bill laden with specific protections for Pennsylvania and New Jersey manufacturing districts. But his greatest strength came from slave-frontier states, including Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee. Here
in the southwestern states, virtually universal support for the victor of New Orleans among non-planter white men made and sustained Jackson as a national force.

Previous inaugurations had attracted few spectators. But on this day, it seemed as if every single white rural laborer, tenant farmer, and urban workingman in the United States had come to Washington. The Jackson voters, sneered Massachusetts
senator Daniel Webster, “really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” Uniformed officers flanked Jackson as he marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, but so did a self-nominated escort of firewood carts and farm wagons. When Jackson reached the Capitol and entered via a basement door, the ocean of citizens lapped around the base of the building. Then the east doors
swung open. The inauguration party walked from the Senate chamber onto the portico. Twenty thousand people jostled forward a few steps.
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When the tall man emerged from the pack of dignitaries and stood before them, they began to shout: “Huzza! Huzza!” Suddenly every man in the multitude took off his hat at once; a sign of respect for the apotheosis of their equality, their sovereign citizenship,
their manhood. Every breath was drawn in. Cannons erupted in a twenty-four-gun salute. The Marine band struck up a tune. And the hero of New Orleans stood erect above the mist of twenty thousand exhaled breaths, and looked at the upturned white sea of faces. Then he bowed low.
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Andrew Jackson had risen spectacularly. Yet he still lived as simply as possible for the owner of more than a hundred
slaves. Rachel had even smoked
a pipe. And instead of insinuating that his voters were beneath him, he used Potterizing violence to defeat attempts to dishonor either him or his white male constituents. They gloried in vicarious wish-fulfillment as they heard about his confrontational behavior, like the time when his steamboat narrowly escaped a collision, prompting the presidential candidate
to run on deck to threaten the other vessel’s reckless pilot with a loaded rifle. But Jackson also delivered more than the posture of white male equality. His victories at Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans had made Jefferson’s paper empire for white liberty into fact. On the millions of Indian acres he seized, tens of thousands of white men now strove to escape crusty hierarchies by becoming landowners.

When Jackson became president, the symbolism of his actions would become even larger. In 1832–1833 he stared down South Carolina’s elites (including his own vice president, John C. Calhoun) when they asserted that their state could simply “nullify” federal laws—in this case, the tariff of 1828. While claiming that he opposed tariffs in principle, Jackson took the nullifiers’ action as a direct
challenge to the power of a national majority. So did a Tennessee constituent, who said, delighting in Old Hickory’s humiliation of the South Carolina planter elite, “The old chief could rally force enough . . . to stand on Saluda Mountain [in northwestern South Carolina] and piss enough to float the whole nullifying crew into the Atlantic Ocean.” The way he saw it, Carolina’s planters blustered
about mobilizing the militia and blocking federal tariff enforcement until the collected penises of Jackson’s supporters, like himself, cowed them, and they backed down.
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So Jackson stood tall before his supporters, symbolizing who they wanted to be—the unpretentious but assertive man who dominated his household and forced arrogant bullies into feminized submission. And as he took out his paper
and began to read his first inaugural address, he was delivering to his faithful supporters a down payment of democracy, and not just in the pageantry of white male equality. His policies, he promised, would not cater to the powerful. He planned, he said, to correct “those abuses that have brought the patronage of the Federal Government into conflict with the freedom of elections.” This reminded
voters of the chicanery that had been carried out in the House of Representatives four years earlier, which overruled popular will and elected John Quincy Adams. More important than any specific measure, however, was the fact that while Jackson was in office, his politically innovative allies, such as Martin Van Buren, used Jackson’s popularity to create new national political structures that put
white male equality into gritty practice. They created the routines of a party system, welding ordinary
citizens into mass electoral forces through precinct-level organization and emotional appeals for loyalty. The historical consequences of the Jacksonian reorganization of politics, which leveraged these Potterizing resentments on slavery’s frontier, were momentous. They stretch from that cold
March day to our own.