The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (70 page)

Only Richard and Ben were there. But the most important question about a miracle isn’t whether it happened, but what it meant. For without meaning a miracle is just a convenient accident. Richard and Ben had surely heard, in a
Virginia Baptist church, the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 17. That fish story has a meaning. It begins with Jesus’s disciples asking if they should pay taxes to the Romans. The children of God don’t have to pay taxes, Jesus responds, “but so that we may not cause offence, go to the lake and throw out your
line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth, and you will find a four-drachma coin.
Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

One way to interpret Matthew’s text is to read it as instruction on how to live as a saint in a world of sinners. There’s another interpretation. In this one, the fish is itself the parable, a sign that tells disciples that God will provide what they need, even enough to survive an oppressive regime. Grace will come in prosaic ways, like the
ways that working men catch fish, or the way that two boys kill a snake.
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But fish swim in dark waters. Down there hide monsters. Eighteen centuries had rolled after Matthew was written by the time Richard and Ben’s ancestors crossed the waters. Spit out on the Virginia shore, sticky and gasping from the slave-ship’s belly, somehow they survived. To them were born children. To their children
were born children. Until at last this day another beast came from the deep for their great-great-grandchildren. And its purse held a fortune as forked as the serpent’s tongue.

“I gave my cousin one and I took one,” Richard remembered. Richard’s penny grew lucky and luckier still as the years ran, as if its grace kept the serpent from swallowing him. As the domestic slave trade reached a new
peak in the 1850s, he grew to adulthood unsold. One day, he looked down to the same river’s edge to see boats full of blue-clad men. They marched up to Richard Eppes’s big house, and on that day Slaughter claimed his freedom. Soon he put on his own blue uniform. For two years he carried a musket in the US Army, fighting battles, bringing freedom to his people. Afterward he made his own, richer life,
learning to read and write, traveling the world, eventually returning to Virginia and settling into a routine as a fisherman who plied the same waters beside which he had once played.
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Richard reclaimed the parable. But Ben had drawn the other penny. Eppes “never sold but one man, that I can remember,” Richard told his interviewer. “That was my cousin Ben. Sold him South.” Ben carried his unlucky
coin to Richmond. A third generation of dealers in young humans now worked from Bacon Tait’s old jail in Shockoe Bottom, where another round of innovations was under way. There, an enslaver could send instructions like these, which were received by slave broker Richard Dickinson: “If you have not sold Charles, try and get him to talk higher,” and that meant getting him to say the kinds of things
that made him seem earnest and hardworking. “Probably you will have to get him whipped a few times before he will do.” Take out an insurance policy in the meantime—an economic innovation that, like the slave broker’s business of holding and selling without owning, reduced risk. So Ben played his role, too, talking high and higher as another sellable product of old Virginia. A few days later he
was sweating in a boxcar, rolling
toward the cotton belt. The South had missed out on railroad-building in the 1840s. The North surged ahead, and the slave states wallowed. But now the South was back on track, laying rails faster than the northeastern states during the 1850s. Iron roads and horses carried bales, planters, and hands, all at a far higher speed than Charles Ball’s raw feet walked
the coffle-machine’s brass locks south to Congaree.
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They sold Ben in Alabama. As his years mounted, his reach grew longer, and the pounds he put up on the slate climbed higher. When weighing-up ended, he crept back to his cabin, pulled a soft, furtive cloth from between the logs, unwrapped the hidden penny. Lying down in darkness, he rubbed the copper, praying as it hummed with connection to
the far-off state of his birth. Outside, through the starlit woods, in the dark cut where the railroad ran, extruded copper newly strung from pole to pole was talking circles around him. The telegraph hauled instant news of politicians’ fights over slavery’s expansion, descriptions running faster than the fugitives they named, price quotes for cotton pounds, purchase-orders for twelve-year-old boys.

For seventy years so far of slavery’s second life in the United States, the people who raised Ben and Richard had wrestled with the snake. They struggled each in their way with the evil that confronted them. Some ran. Some gave up. Some died. And some died and were yet reborn in new friendships, new marriages; new God, new self. But in the 1850s slavery’s expansion revived, too. Another 250,000
were on the slave trail to the southwest.

Over the years since Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, which prompted the secession of cotton states that led to the Civil War and emancipation, authors have unleashed floods of ink attempting to explain white southerners’ actions. The authors already know how the story ends: with the blue-coated soldiers, Abraham Lincoln, and Richard Slaughter winning.
Often, borrowing from the economic analysis of 1840s critics such as Joshua Leavitt, they assume that the South was a premodern economic system, and therefore that its defeat was inevitable—both on the field of economic competition, and on that of war. To cite again the words of the white abolitionist and orator Wendell Phillips, the South was a Troy destined to fall. Which then raises the question:
What sort of madness would prompt supposedly conservative planters to start a war that would hasten the collapse of their own walls? Perhaps even more puzzling, what led the three-quarters of the white southern population who didn’t own slaves to fight, and hundreds of thousands to die, for such doomed madness?

From the 1780s onward, enslavers, along with other white southerners who supported
them with votes and participated in the coercion of enslaved people, had consistently pressed to expand slavery’s territory. Lifetimes of
experience had taught all of these white people to associate slavery’s expansion with its prosperity, with the growth of their own wealth and power, and even of their own pleasure. The Compromise of 1850 did not clearly permit future expansion, so enslaver-politicians
spent the 1850s trying relentlessly to advance their agenda, even though many Americans had celebrated the Compromise because they were told it offered a “final” end to argument about precisely that issue. Such leaders were trying to implement a strategy that Calhoun and others had initiated in the previous decade: that of using political capital in the Democratic Party, the institutional
power of the federal government, the threat of disunion, and constitutional argument to force the rest of the United States to acknowledge a southern “right” to expand slavery as far as enslavers wanted it to go. Their goals were evolving, but over the course of the 1850s, enslavers concluded that they wanted to see slavery expansion written into the laws of the nation and the covenants of its
political parties, enforced in the territories by executive policy, and stated as constitutional fact by the Supreme Court. They convinced themselves that anything less meant that their future in the Union would not be secure.

For so long as active antislavery opposition could possibly shape government policies in the future, nothing could reassure anxious entrepreneurs that expansion could continue
forever. This was despite a rupture between idealist older white abolitionists, who wanted to keep the antislavery movement untainted by party politics, and increasingly independent and pragmatic African-American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who sought to inject antislavery ideas into northern party politics. Indeed, during the 1850s, Douglass and others who saw an opening in
the political party system that had bound national interests to the expansion of slavery were proved correct. A growing number of white northerners heard stories carried by cotton-frontier refugees, or remained angry about post-1837 frauds and repudiations, or reacted to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Whatever the reason, they left the collapsing Whig coalition. As an electoral
vehicle, the new political formation they created—the Republican Party—could contain most of the enslavers’ free-state opponents, at least for a while. And northern economic and demographic growth had now made it possible that such an anti-southern party could, in theory, lose every southern vote and yet win national elections.

But enslavers did not see their own system as something antique,
destined to fall before the onrushing future. Instead, they saw themselves as modern people who were running a highly successful, innovative sector of a world economy that was growing faster than ever before. For all the while,
through all of the nagging political conflicts of the decade of the 1850s, slavery’s productivity kept expanding. Demand for their products stayed high in the longest sustained
cotton-price boom of the pre-Civil War era. Slavery’s entrepreneurs kept making more money. The only question was, Which fork in the road would the South choose, the one that kept it in the United States by securing a deeper national commitment to the expansion of slavery, or the one in which the region as a whole seceded in order to gain control of expansion for themselves?

Thus, from the vantage
point of a post-1865 world, after the day when Richard Slaughter put on the blue uniform and shouldered a gun, after the day when survivors danced in Danville, it can be hard to see how the world looked before the cotton states seceded. But from the perspective of the 1850s cotton field, the account book, the train full of slaves, and the dark cabin where Ben clutched the unlucky penny, the
future looked like one long rising serpent-curve of expansion. For the snake by the river ate parables. And all decade long, it never got full. Never once did Richard see his beloved cousin again. Yes, as they had always done in the selling states, they continued marrying and being given in marriage, being born, giving birth. But mothers disappeared faster than ever. Others raised the babies, and
then the babies vanished, too. In those days, Lulu Wilson, along with her mother and siblings, lived in a Kentucky cabin. First the white folks disappeared Lulu’s father down the river on a steamboat. As cotton prices stayed high down at the bottom of the map, the older siblings trickled down, too. Clever, clever owner. He showed the merchandise, negotiated the deal, shipped the child off with the
trader—all in one workday. Every time, Lulu’s mother got home from the field to find it was already over. “Oh Lord,” she screamed, falling on the cabin’s dirt floor, begging on her knees by the empty bed, “let me see the end of it before I die.”
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Lulu never forgot the scream, or the fear that the end of the begging and losing would never come. Her mother had little power, as an individual, to
achieve freedom. She had less still to save her children. Under the new Fugitive Slave Act passed as an element of the Compromise of 1850, white people and their federal government were now obligated to pursue runaways from one end of the country to another. Collective revolt against slavery also seemed long since foreclosed by patrols, militias, armories full of powder and ball that ensured that
any future Nat Turner was like a bug waiting for the hammer. And the rebels would wait alone. Relentless rhetoric had convinced almost all white Americans that African-American rebellion was unacceptable. Sure, white critics of slavery depicted slavery’s immorality, and sneered
at the allegedly backward economy that slavery produced. They may have felt better. But they had no endgame to offer.

Maybe Frederick Law Olmsted, who during the Civil War would run the American Sanitary Commission—a quasi-governmental agency that tried to ameliorate the squalid living conditions endured by federal soldiers—thought he was the slaves’ ally. Yet he was just another Yankee tourist in the South. As he traveled from Virginia to Texas in the 1850s, gathering material for a book, thousands of other northerners
roamed the South: railroad mechanics, cotton brokers, women on their way to marry planters’ sons whom they had met in New York. Most of them managed to get along fine, especially if their services added to southern whites’ balance sheets.
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Along the trails of Mississippi’s northern delta, poor northern men back-packed factory goods—ribbon, thread, locks—into a wilderness of cotton too new for
stores. Rich men weren’t interested and shooed the tramping Yankees away from the big houses. The peddlers passed a field where a hundred people (heads down) picked like machines. Dripping, the travelers sat down on their packs, in the treeline at the end of a row. The peddlers “were treated badly by the rich planters,” remembered Louis Hughes, and “hated them, and talked to the slaves. . . . ‘Ah!
You will be free someday.’” But the white-haired ones looked up from their sacks, saying, “We don’t b’lieve dat; my grandfather said we was to be free, but we aint free yet.” Far across the field, the slumped overseer lurched awake in his saddle. The peddlers shrugged their packs up onto their shoulders and were gone.
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Olmsted could hardly have hidden the way his ears pricked up every time a
companion at the steamboat rail or the men in the train seat behind him brought up the subject of slavery. He primed himself to find evidence that slavery was inefficient. So when he saw twenty-two enslaved men on a New Orleans street who had just been bought by an enslaver, it made him think, but not simply about the remarkable fact that some southern white men could borrow $20,000 and drop it on
one gang of “hands” who would make cotton faster than any forty free men. He believed that a society laid down on a foundation of slavery had a limited capacity for expansion. So, “Louisiana or Texas,” he thought, counting the fingers of his mind’s right hand, “pays Virginia twenty odd thousand dollars for that lot of bone and muscle,” but beyond the levee a steamboat of German immigrants was chugging
up the river toward Iowa. These free laborers, who cost nothing to import, built a society diverse in its production and consumption, laced together by “mills and bridges, and schoolhouses, and miles of railroad,” because they had incentive to work, to save, and to rise. The only thing left behind those
twenty-two enslaved Virginians—when, after twenty years of mining Texas soil for cotton, their
enslavers marched them west and south again to some new frontier—would be decaying cabins, divided families, and tangled debit accounts.
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