The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (83 page)

Image A.3. Convention of former slaves, left to right: unidentified, Anna Angales, Elizabeth Berkeley, and Sadie Thompson, 1916. Library of Congress.

From markets built on the labor and the bodies of enslaved people, and from the infrastructure laid down to ship the product in and out, came economic growth. But from this economic growth came not only wealth, but also political power
in the councils of the nation. Poor white men insisted that they, too, should enjoy the psychic rewards of right-handed power on slavery’s frontier, and from that came temporary defeat for arrogant planters. Yet clever political entrepreneurs, most notably Andrew Jackson, turned assertively populist energies into the channels of political power, too. They created a new interregional political alliance
that yielded decades more of compromise and that enabled the South to maintain its disproportionate power within the federal government. Still, both South and North depended
on slavery’s expansion. The products generated from the possibilities of co-exploitation explain much of the nation’s astonishing rise to power in the nineteenth century. Through the booms and the crashes emerged a financial
system that continuously catalyzed the development of US capitalism. By the 1840s, the United States had grown into both an empire and a world economic power—the second greatest industrial economy, in fact, in the world—all built on the back of cotton.

Dependence on cotton stretched far beyond North American shores. A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed
the occupation of the continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible. The steadily increasing productivity of hands on the cotton frontier kept cheap raw materials flowing to the world’s newest and most important industry, the cotton textile factories of Britain, Western Europe, and the North.
Theft of days, years, labor, of the left hand’s creative secrets helped provide the escape velocity for the fledgling modern world to do what no other historical society had done before and pull away from the gravitational field of the Malthusian cul-de-sac. Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War. It made the
nation large and unified, and it made the South’s whites disproportionately powerful in that nation. Enslavers had turned right hand against left to achieve not only productivity but also power that few other dominant classes in human history had possessed.

Yet from the epic of theft and survival, of desire and innovation, came the Civil War, too. Expansion’s profits and power made southerners
willing to push for more expansion. This made some northern whites into allies who recognized their dependence on cotton profit and were willing to do what was necessary to keep it flowing. These were southern whites’ allies. But southern power frightened other northern whites. Some feared that slavery, acceptable enough when it remained a southern institution, would invade the places they lived
or wanted to live. Others believed that slavery corrupted everything, and that its expansion fed the rot in American society, American freedom, the American soul—whatever category was their touchstone for everything good. Still others believed that the financial disasters of the late 1830s and early 1840s showed that slavery was economically derelict, doomed, a drag on the capitalist economy’s future.

All those groups united in the Republican Party of the late 1850s behind the one policy position on which they could all agree: that slavery’s expansion must be stopped. For white southerners, who had always been able to find new frontiers, the victory of that party in a national election was too much.
Buoyed by their other successes in the 1850s, by the nearly complete consensus of white southerners
behind the slaveholder political bloc, and their overwhelming power within the national Democratic Party, enslaver-politicians made decisions for secession and then for war.

It has been said that the Civil War was “unnecessary” because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite direction.
Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it. If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results. Forced labor that is slavery in everything
but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management
studies) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we also live on the gains that were stolen from them.
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Nor is it obvious that slavery’s expanders would have been politically defeated,
outnumbered, or boxed in. In the 1850s, slavery-expansion’s promoters were making continued expansion defensible in constitutional terms that the North found quite acceptable long after the war. In addition, the vast enslaved body was the biggest store of wealth in the American economy. So long as law and normal politics reign, wealth-holders typically find ways to preserve their wealth. Successful
revolt from within was impossible, so war was the only way slavery would end in the United States. War is what the enslavers, in their right-handed arrogance, launched, and it was—for them—a tremendous mistake.

YET CADE MCCALLUM WAS
dead in his tomb. So were many of the men and women who with him had seized the finally-here chance that enslavers’ overreach had opened up to enslaved men and women—a
generation that had made sure that they would finally see the end of it. But dead, too, it seemed, were the dreams of equality, independence, of redeeming the thefts of slavery’s deepest, longest journeys. Liza, toiling up the street in the cold,
might have seen little chance of reversing that process of decay. In 1937, when Claude Anderson came to talk to Lorenzo Ivy, she might have still said
the same thing.

Indeed, though former enslavers and their descendants had lost much of their power through defeat in the Civil War, they had regained some of it by the early twentieth century. Southern white elites continued to wield disproportionate power through the next one hundred years. The willingness of many white southerners to unite around the idea of hanging on to racial power made
the South a swing region, and white southerners a defined interest group, willing to join whichever national party was willing to cater to its demands. That was only one of the ways in which the bitter fruit of the southern elites—and their defense of slavery and of their own power—continued to gall democracy everywhere in the country. In another case, the federal judiciary took the Calhounian argument
for the independence of slave property from majority control and made it, in the form of the so-called Lochner Doctrine, a defense of rampant industrial power in the face of attempts to regulate workers’ safety, consumer health, and environmental impact. In yet another case, scientific racism had a long history after the fall of the Confederacy. It was used to justify anti-Semitism, the extermination
of native peoples around the world, brutal forms of colonialism, and the exclusion of immigrants. And it continued to be used to justify discrimination against the descendants of the enslaved.

Meanwhile, the unbending anger of former Confederates against Reconstruction morphed into their grandchildren’s suspicion of the New Deal, and the insistence on the part of white southern Democrats that
measures against the Depression could do nothing to alleviate black poverty or lessen white supremacy. Compared to their dominance of US politics through much of the antebellum period, and their ability to consume disproportionate quantities of the fruits of antebellum national economic growth, the postwar southern white upper class achieved only a truncated triumph. Yet white folks still kept the
black folks who toiled for them in poverty, forcing African Americans to take the implicit and explicit insults of life in the Jim Crow South in silence, lest they die brutally at the hands of mobs with or without badges. No wonder so many African Americans saw no chance for freedom but to leave.
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Still, there were things that for all their power, even the pre–Civil War enslavers themselves
had not been able to control. They could create a system that seemed to reduce African Americans to body parts: feet walking like a chained machine, hands on the block and hands picking, minds and nervous systems yielding revenue, providing entertainment and pleasure. Yet there
were two ways to look at the body of African America, sutured together in the trauma of slavery’s expansion. The body
had two forms, two instances. One profited enslavers, and in fact, white America, North and South, had again and again agreed to co-exploit this body, which was the new slavery of the cotton fields. This African America, created by expansion, was marked by vast suffering. In it, hundreds of thousands of people died early and alone, separated from their loved ones. Millions of people were lost by
millions of people. By the water’s edge, they parted.

But tongues also spoke words that enslavers did not hear. Lungs breathed a spirit that would not yield. Enslaved men and women watched and guarded and stilled their blood, and trained their seed to wait. Even when enslavers realized, in particular moments, that enslaved people had created something else, an identity, a political unity, a common
culture, a story, and a sense of how it shaped them and made them one, enslavers had forgotten, or willed themselves to forget. So people survived, and helped each other to survive, and not only to survive but to build. Thus, another body grew as the invisible twin of the one stretched out and used by white people. Eventually, the waiting had its reward. The body rose. African Americans took
up arms and defeated the enslavers.

Survival, and this kind of survival, made victory possible. Unlike its predecessors on the North American mainland, and unlike counterparts in most of the New World, the African-American culture that emerged from the crucible of nineteenth-century forced migration within the United States had no alternative but to think of itself as a political unity. Assimilation,
sought by enslaved Africans and their descendants in both Brazil and in many Spanish-speaking societies, was impossible. Escape through individual manumission, an option pursued by enslaved strivers throughout the rest of the New World, was usually impossible. Escape through revolt, relying on old African identities and concepts—the Haitian option—was likewise impossible. All of these options
closed, enslaved African Americans had to develop a sense of unity or crumble. And they did develop that unity, bending a narrative of history that bound them together around a clear-eyed assessment of their situation as victims of a vast crime. They had to recognize that without solidarity they would live only at the whim of a set of structures and practices designed to exploit them in every
possible way.

The political agenda that enslaved people developed, and that they exported in the words of survivors and runaways, was not assimilation, not manumission, but destruction for the whipping-machine and everything that made it work, and the transformation of America into a place that would
redeem its thefts. This agenda, smuggled north in the minds and on the tongues of an intrepid
and lucky few escapees, resurrected a dead antislavery movement in the United States. This agenda set a group of progressive whites on a political collision course with the slavelords and their many northern allies. Even as that political trajectory unfolded, in spaces sacred and secular, during the day and during the night, in pain and in joy, enslaved people were still finding new ways to protect
and defend the human soul in the midst of the still-unfolding chaos of creative destruction. They made survival and form out of terror, theft, and death. They learned to be fast but not hurried, to lose themselves without losing their souls. All this was also the legacy of slavery’s expansion. This was the collective body that survived forced migration even as many bodies did not survive it, or
died in the war that ended it, or suffered through impoverishment and disfranchisement in the wake of Reconstruction.

In the war, survivors ended slavery. When the survivors began to die off, they could pass on to their descendants very little in the way of material wealth. So much had been stolen from them. But African Americans had a story that made them a people. They had a unity that was
ultimately political. This had led them to choose solidarity over individual deals. They had lodged their claim to citizenship in the Constitution, a precedent that would grow in leverage as the century went on and the United States found itself up against enemies eager to point to the hypocrisy of first-class language and second-class practice of civil and political equality. They had, with white
allies, created in the form of abolitionism the ideological template of American dissent, of progressivism, of the faith that social change, pursued with a religious zeal, could make America truer to its ideal self.

At the same time, from lands devastated by forced migration, creativity continued to boil forth in the years after Reconstruction’s collapse. African-American cultural forms permeated
and reworked American popular culture, which then exported these cultural forms to the entire globe. Over the century that followed Cade McCallum’s burial, using all these tools, working in all sorts of métiers, African-American people transformed the world. They remade the social, cultural, and political geography of the United States through their own volition in the course of the Great Migration.
They changed the South and the United States and the world forever through the civil rights movement. And they built a tradition of community organization that eventually led the American electorate, in an astonishing development, to elect a black president who was the son of an African immigrant. As a political force, the solidarity that African Americans first built while still enslaved
remains impressively coherent, generations later, despite two centuries of temptations to give up, turn aside, or dissolve into nihilism.