The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (63 page)

In May 1846, news reached Washington that Mexico had rejected the Slidell offer three months earlier. Polk and his Cabinet prepared a war message to be sent to Congress. But the message was superseded by the sudden arrival of news from Texas: US and
Mexican troops had fought a battle in the disputed territory. “American blood has been shed on American soil,” was the way Polk spun it to Congress. He asked for a “war bill” (not, technically, a declaration of war). He got it, despite vocal dissent from Joshua Giddings, John Quincy Adams, and other antislavery Whigs. To them, this war was proof that an expansionist slaveholding cabal was controlling
US policymaking. To much of the rest of the country, war promised fulfillment: of the nationalist dream of placing the United States among the great expansive powers of the world; of massive new opportunities for settlement and land ownership; of the strange hunger for collective effort that sometimes reveals itself in the fevered early days of a war. Northern Democrats forgot for the moment
Polk’s compromises on the Oregon line. Across the nation, men rushed to form volunteer military companies. This was the first chance in more than a generation to achieve military glory in the field against a regular, European-style army. The war, eager patriots believed, would be the making of many kinds of fortune.

BACK ON THE FIRST
day of January, American troops had been digging in along the
Rio Grande five hundred miles to the west of where old John Devereux, Julien Devereux’s Virginia-bred father, had been starting another volume of his diary in Rusk County, Texas. The day opened year 1846 of the Christian era, noted the old gentleman from his desk at the family’s new slave labor camp, but also year 1259 “of the Higera or flight of Mahomet”
from Mecca to Medina. John on the page
still lived in the curious eighteenth-century Enlightenment, but John the old enslaver dwelled on the rough leading edge of the nineteenth-century economy’s commodity frontier. Between environment and advancing age, John’s language had become less complex, his capitalization sporadic and syntax roughshod. Meanwhile, his son Julien, who like many of their old neighbors had run away from his debts,
was preparing to mix up another brew of credit leverage from worldwide financial networks, heated and transformed by the fuel of labor productivity extracted from commodified people.
⁸⁶

John had fired the previous year’s overseer. Although it was New Year’s Day, all “hands commenced grubbing . . . under management of Negro Scot.” They were clearing land steadily. On the 2nd he heard them “in good
spirits and happy singing & caroling at their work except poor henry who will soon be emancipated from slavery by death.” “It’s a cool frosty morning, and the niggers go to work,” Harriet Jones remembered the men singing on a similar Texas labor camp, “with their hoes on their shoulders and without a bit o’ shirt.” On they toiled to prep as many acres of bare dirt as they could for cotton seeds.
This effort became more high-pitched once John Devereux decided to hire a white overseer. Meanwhile, forced migrants tried once more to shape their lives so that they could survive in this next new place. At the end of January, Devereux captive Eliza Henry Maria married Sam Loftus, a man owned by another local enslaver. On February 23, a runaway from a nearby labor camp, “Bill L.,” showed up “Choctaw’d
drunk.” The “hands” convinced Bill to go back to his owner. Down on the Brazos, where enslavers had already developed a substantial complex of sugar and cotton labor camps, runaways could hope to reach the Mexican border. Bill was too far north and east for that. The people at Devereux’s labor camp probably warned him that his fate could be akin to that of another runaway, a woman who had
been recaptured in nearby Tyler County. Her owner dragged her back home behind his horse and tied her to the bedstead. The next morning he tried to cut off her breasts. Then he rammed a hot iron poker down her throat. Survivors of these East Texas camps remembered that out there on that frontier, one could always “hear the whip a-poppin’.”
⁸⁷

On March 12, John also had a guest: “An old man on
foot”—a white man—“called this morning and got breakfast,” John wrote. The man “had laid out all night in the rain—says he is a millwright and was born in Augusta,” in the Shenandoah Valley into which southwest-bound coffles descended after crossing the Rockfish Gap through the Blue Ridge. He knew “the Springers and the Landrums,” old Augusta families from John’s
childhood. But from there the
barriers of fortune and class lowered on the conversation. The sun rose higher. The poor man stood up and said his goodbye. He walked silently down the road, in his own way representing another life ground under by the rolling frontier of the modern slave economy.

Image 8.4. After the wreck of so many entrepreneurial plans in the wake of the bursting of the slave credit bubble, enslavers increasingly portrayed their own operations as being driven by paternalist, familial impulses—rather than pecuniary ones. And, as the title of this illustration suggests, enslavers rejected abolitionists’ claims that their society was somehow an un-American tumor that should be excised from the national body. Edward William Clay, “America, 1841.” Library of Congress.

John knew that he, too, would die a thousand miles from home. He had more to hope for than an old age of sleeping rough and begging for manuallabor jobs. But the conversation with the wanderer led him to assess his life. John had lost four of his six children, and he was a widower twice over.
Yet he
admitted that he was much better off than, for instance, Job. Each of his own wives had been “worth a cowpen full such as” the complaining spouse who had burdened the Old Testament figure. And perhaps Julien’s second bride would be better than the first. John hadn’t heard from Julien in months, but he was on his way. After the worst of the legal storm blew over, the younger Devereux had
returned to Alabama to pick up several dozen slaves who had been stashed on an ally’s place since 1841. Now, on March 20, “about 12 o’clock,” a white employee arrived with “three wagons and the negroes from Montgomery,” and John relished both their “excitement at meeting with the Negroes here and Julien’s letter giving information that he had sold out and all was coming.” Even better, the letter
told “of the birth of a son.” The news “operated powerfully on my sympathies,” John wrote. Tears choked the old man. Julien, remarried, now had an heir of his blood, and thus John did as well. A new generation of enslavers was emerging.

Just a few days more, and Julien arrived. Overseer, three other employees, Julien, and John: six white men were now at the new house, where only a few months
ago there had been none but the old man. All day and into the evening, the slaves worked the raw East Texas soil around the new cotton shoots. The United States had stretched its borders to incorporate these acres, these white men, and their property. Slave prices were climbing. With the promise that the US government would fund Texas bonds, surely credit would pump again through the veins that oxygenated
the endeavors of southwestern entrepreneurs. Further southwest, cannon boomed and men marched, pushing the border onward. Here, a woman set supper out. All six men sat down to eat, “which,” John noted, “filled all our chairs and table.” The world had come right side up again.

9

BACKS

1839–1850

T
HE GIRL GIGGLED IN
her pew, looking back at seventeen newly emancipated Louisianans, frozen in the church entrance. Mid-step between the doorway and a sea of staring faces stood Anna and her four children; Sarah and Frankey, both eleven, no parents; Betsy and her son; Maria, Margery, and their daughters; Little Sam; Jose; Rose; nine-year-old Amos. The big red turbans
the women wore had been stylish decades ago in New Orleans, when they’d been sold. Now they screamed
country
and
slave
to the Boston streets.
¹

A hand tightened on the knowing girl’s arm, jerked down, pulled her around to face the pulpit. She needed to remember. Here at Unitarian King’s Chapel, on Beacon Street, she was also a visitor—black Bostonians usually spent their Sundays elsewhere, such
as the new A.M.E. church. The day’s assigned lesson was solidarity. Like many of the other visitors in the pews, her mother was what we’d today call an activist. She might have been at 1843’s huge Faneuil Hall protest meeting, two years earlier. Slave-catchers had come up to Boston in disguise. They had found George Latimer, an escapee from Virginia slavery. He and his wife, Rebecca, were living
like free people. The kidnappers had seized the Latimers and thrown them into the Boston jail. But word had gotten out, and soon three hundred free black men were surrounding the Boston courthouse. Their aim was to keep George and Rebecca there until the meeting at Faneuil could raise $600. Eventually, George’s Virginia owner decided that taking the money and making out George’s manumission papers
might be his best option.

Like these seventeen, many of the other African Americans in the church had also been adjusting to Boston. Some were runaways. Others had been forced to leave the South by laws that were designed to make life unbearable
for free people of color. They were all in their way forced migrants, driven by slavery’s expansion, driven to a place that they had built. If these
newest Bostonians looked up in wonder at King’s Chapel’s austerely magnificent vaults, which soared like white wedding cake from pillars to roof, and if they felt intimidated by the rich variety of clothes on the congregants—clothes unavailable on the backwaters of the Attakapas—the migrants had nevertheless spent their lives constructing exactly this world.

They had certainly built the Palfrey
family. John Palfrey the elder had owned them. He was the Massachusetts merchant whose slaves had joined the 1811 rebellion when he lived in St. John the Baptist Parish along the Mississippi River. Palfrey had moved to St. Martin Parish, pursued by debts. The sheriff repossessed some of his slaves. He sold his silver candlesticks and hand-tooled pistols. But after 1815, he could borrow again, so
he bought more enslaved people.

The separations that the seventeen, or their parents, had endured as they had traveled from the Chesapeake Bay area to Maspero’s place in New Orleans, and then the work they had endured in the crop fields of the Attakapas, had rebuilt John Palfrey’s twice-destroyed financial self. His own family was also divided, though not exactly like the families of the people
he bought. His oldest son, John Gorham Palfrey, lived in Louisiana briefly with his father, but then returned to Massachusetts. Talents and birth destined John the son to be a Harvard prodigy. At nineteen, he was ordained a Unitarian minister. Then, in 1830, he became a Harvard professor. Later in the decade he took over the
North American Review
. Economic growth was producing a well-educated
bourgeois that wanted to participate in a national high culture distinct from that of old Europe. Under Palfrey, the
Review
published the authors of America’s emerging literature, from James Fenimore Cooper to William Cullen Bryant.
²