The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (40 page)

THE DOCUMENTS CREATED IN
William Boswell’s New Orleans notary office reveal another reason why the Missouri crisis was not even a blip on the long upward climb of slavery’s expansion, which in the 1820s saw the transfer of 150,000 enslaved people from the southeastern states to the southwestern states and territories and an
increase in US cotton production from 350,000 four-hundred-pound bales in 1819 to more than 800,000 in 1830. The name with which Ellen’s seller acknowledged his receipt of Barthelemy Bonny’s $450 was a strange one, especially for a man who fished the seas of Kent County and its surroundings. Granville Sharp Pierce’s parents had chosen to name him after a different kind of disciple: the eighteenth-century
Anglican priest Granville Sharp. That original Granville had been known for several things, including his research on the grammar of biblical Greek. But Sharp was most famous as an international abolitionist. In the early 1770s, James Somersett, an enslaved man born in Virginia, was brought by his enslaver to London. There he escaped and sought Granville Sharp’s help: the runaway wanted to
sue for freedom in a London court. Somersett won the case. The
decision ruled that slaves became free the moment they set foot on Great Britain itself, although slavery remained legal in the rest of Britain’s empire. Sharp next attempted to convince the British authorities to prosecute the captain of the slave ship
Zong
for ordering his crew to murder 122 Africans in the middle of the Atlantic
when water supplies were running low. Sharp also helped to found the colony of Sierra Leone, where the Royal Navy (once the British government abolished British participation in the international slave trade in 1808) would land Africans recovered from captured slave ships.
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Granville Sharp was emblematic of an earlier generation of English-speaking antislavery activists. Their late eighteenth-century
offensive targeted the first slavery, especially that of the sugar islands. That system depended, above all, on the Middle Passage, they charged, and they sought to limit slavery by ending the Atlantic trade. The American version of this long-gone antislavery movement had helped to emancipate slaves in marginal areas of the North. What these movements had in common was that they were composed
of elite men who were trying to convince centralized power—Parliament, Congress, state legislatures elected by property-owning citizens—to mandate change through legislative or royal decree. Despite its elitism, Granville Sharp’s generation did shift the center of polite society’s opinion against the Middle Passage. By 1808, the governments of both the United States and Great Britain had outlawed
their citizens’ participation in the international slave trade. Sharp and his allies had concentrated on the international slave trade because they believed that without the continual importation of new slaves from Africa, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean would die out.
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Yet even as northern states were freeing most of their last slaves in the 1820s, the claim that slavery harmed the American
political economy looked less persuasive every day in light of cotton’s astonishing profits. The interstate slave trade mocked the hopes of the abolitionists that slavery would die on its own. And Granville Sharp’s generation had not been replaced. No substantive opposition to the expansion of slavery existed among white Americans. After the Missouri Compromise, active white opposition to
slavery dwindled toward the vanishing point. Most of those who conceded that slavery was morally wrong in the abstract refused to do anything concrete about it. It was easy to blame Georgia-men for “excesses,” as all the while the speculator upgraded the Georgia-man. It was easy to propose the transportation of African Americans “back” to an Africa that they had never seen. It would never happen.
John Quincy Adams, for instance, only needed to calculate on his fingers to see that hoping for an end to slavery through “colonization”
was a “day-dream.” And all the while, every new hand in every new cotton field meant markets for northern produce, more foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials for northern industry, and more opportunities for young Vermonters and Pennsylvanians who moved to
Natchez. Slavery’s defenders had won the arguments that mattered. Even a man whose parents had named him after Granville Sharp had become a speculator.
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In the 1820s, enslaved people on slavery’s frontier faced the yoked-together powers of the world economy, a high demand for their most crucial commodity, and the creatively destructive ruling class of a muscular young republic. And they faced
it all alone. For many years, enslaved people could only push back with hushed breaths around ten thousand fires on the southwestern cotton plantations—or in the Southeast, among those left behind. Although they had to keep them from white ears, the words that made up their critique of slavery mattered tremendously to them and to the future. Around the fires, or late at night with a mouth pressed
to the ear of the person with whom one shared a bed, or coded in the testimony of the faithful at all-black religious meetings, enslaved people said the word “stole,” and so described a history that undermined all of the implicit and explicit claims enslavers made to defend slavery. Among those with whom they now spoke a common tongue, they dared to disagree with the claim that slavery would expand,
and that no one should do anything much to interfere. They rejected the claim that God, nature, or history had destined them for slavery. They exposed the assumption that white people’s needs ought to trump their own, or the idea that money ought to trump conscience, pitting this word of their own against every word written on papers like the ones Granville Sharp Pierce carried with him to William
Boswell’s office.

“My mother and uncle Robert and Joe,” said Margaret Nickerson of Florida, “[they] was stole from Virginia and fetched here.” Lewis Brown explained his own genealogy in this way: “My mother was stole. The speculators stole her and they brought her to Kemper County, Mississippi, and sold her.” Over and over, enslaved people said that when they were sold, or otherwise forced to
move, they had been “stolen.” In so telling their personal histories, they accomplished two things. First, they used a newly common tongue to make their own personal histories part of a larger story. And second, they made it clear that this common story was a crime story. Buying and selling people was a crime. Buyers and sellers were criminals.
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Critiques of slavery as theft had been made before.
But the context was different now. The international slave trade was closed, and enslavers could pose as the architects of a “domesticated” system no longer sustained by wars
of enslavement in Africa. Meanwhile, the New Orleans notarial records, like all the legal records of southern slavery, described the rupture that Granville Sharp Pierce imposed on Ellen’s life as a legitimate transaction
in legally held property. Most whites, whether in the North or the South, believed that slave owners had obtained their slaves by orderly business transactions, well recorded in law. And as the economy changed, they were suggesting that owners of property should be able to do whatever they wanted with what they legally owned. In such a context, when enslaved people said to each other, “We have been
stolen,” they were preparing a radical assault on enslavers’ implicit and explicit claims to legitimacy, one that would lay an axe to the intellectual root of every white excuse—even ones that hadn’t yet been dreamed up. For describing slavery and its expansion as stealing meant that slavery was not merely an awkward inconsistency in the American republican experiment, or even a source of discourse
about sectional difference. Slavery was not, then, merely something that pained white people to see. Instead, “stealing” says, slavery is a crime.

One word, “stole,” came to be a history—an interpretation of the past and how it shaped the present—from Maryland to South Carolina to Texas and everywhere in between. Enslaved people recognized that the slavery they were experiencing was shaped by
the ability of whites to move African Americans’ bodies wherever they wanted. Forced migration created markets that allowed whites to extract profit from human beings. It brought about a kind of isolation that permitted enslavers to use torture to extract new kinds of labor. It led to disease, hunger, and other kinds of deadly privations. So as these vernacular historians tried to make sense of their
own battered lives, the word “stole” became the core of a story that explained. It revealed that what feet had to undergo, and the way the violence of separation ripped hearts open and turned hands against body and soul, these were all ultimately produced by the way enslavers were able to use property claims in order to deploy people as commodities at the entrepreneurial edge of the modern world
economy.

In this critique, slaveholders were not innocent heirs of history, which is what Jefferson had made them out to be. Instead, slavery’s expansion was consciously chosen, a crime with intent. Years after slavery ended, former slave Charles Grandy reflected on the motives of the enslavers who had shipped him from Virginia to New Orleans for sale. After a lifetime, he had made it back to
Norfolk. Now he asked his interviewer, an African-American academic just like Claude Anderson of Hampton University, if the young man understood the significance of the statue of the Confederate soldier that
loomed on a high pillar down by the harbor. Grandy himself had once passed the statue’s eventual site in the hold of a slave ship. “Know what it mean?” Grandy asked. But the question mark
was rhetorical, he already had an answer ready: it meant, he told the interviewer, “Carry the nigger down south if you want to rule him.”
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The statue stood as a post-hoc justification for the same desires that had led whites to steal him from his Virginia life, or Hettie Mitchell’s mother from her Carolina parents. For if you want to
rule
a person,
steal
the person. Steal him from his people
and steal him from his own right hand, from everything he has grown up knowing. Take her to a place where you can steal everything else from her: her future, her creativity, her womb. That was the true cause working behind the history of the nineteenth century, Grandy insisted, from slavery’s expansion to its political defense, and to the war that its proponents eventually started. Talk about “stealing”
forces a focus on the slave trade, on the expansion of slavery, on the right hand in the market, on the left picking ever faster in the cotton fields. In this story there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner, only the ability of the strong to take from others. Stealing can never be an orderly system undergirded by property rights,
cushioned by family-like relationships. There is no balance between contradictory elements. There is only chaos and violence. So when enslaved people insisted that the slave trade was the crystalline form of slavery-as-theft, they ripped the veils off a modern and modernizing form of slavery, one that could not be stabilized or contained. Constant disruption, creation, and destruction once more:
this was its nature.

“I heard this over again so many, many times before grandmother died,” said Helen Odom of her grandmother’s story about being taken to Arkansas and sold—“the greatest event in her life.” Talking with each other night after night about how slavery’s expansion had shaped their own lives, enslaved people, taken away or left behind, created a vernacular tradition of history that
encouraged storytellers to bend every migration tale around the fulcrum of theft. And almost every tale fit. The standard methods used by slave traders were, indeed, much like kidnapping, just as the tales said. If you had been seized, tied to the saddle of a horse like a sack of meal, and ridden off without a chance to kiss your wife goodbye forever—this is what happened to William Grose of Virginia
in the 1820s—you might compare your experience to that of being kidnapped.
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Some African Americans who toiled in the cotton and sugar fields had in fact been literally “stolen” even within the framework of whites’ property
claims. John Brown watched slave trader Starling Finney and his men abduct a girl from her owner in South Carolina. The thieves kept her in the wagon on the way down to Georgia,
partly so that they could repeatedly gang-rape her, but also to hide her from potential pursuit by the girl’s owner. Julia Blanks said that her grandmother was freeborn in Virginia or Maryland, but whites lured her into a coach in Washington, DC, drove her to the White House, and presented her as a gift to Andrew Jackson’s niece. Still other slaves, who had been expecting freedom under the
gradual emancipation laws of northern states, found themselves in Louisiana or Mississippi when unscrupulous owners sold them south before their freedom came. Between 1825 and 1827, Joseph Watson, the mayor of Philadelphia, pursued at least twenty-five cases in which free African Americans from his border-state area had been abducted and taken to Mississippi and Alabama. Most were children. Watson
hired lawyers in Mississippi, wrote letters to slave-state government officials, and tried to organize prosecution of the alleged kidnappers, to little avail.
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Sometimes enslaved people conflated kidnapping and plain old-fashioned slave dealing because, like Carey Davenport’s father, they were unsure of their actual legal status. Davenport’s father was supposedly promised freedom by his “old,
old master” in Richmond. But after the old man’s death, his son “steal him into slavery again,” said Davenport. People who claimed to be kidnapped free men or women might have been looking for some sort of individual “out” from the shame of slave origins. Not I, someone like James Green might suggest, I did not belong in slavery, because I, as an individual, was kidnapped. His father, he said, was
a “full-blooded Indian.” His mother’s owner, “Master Williams,” who “[called] me ‘free boy,’” walked “free” James down the street to the Petersburg, Virginia, auction block one day and had him sold to Texas. Green spoke as if it had all been a mistake.
He
never should have been subjected to slavery’s humiliations. But Green’s daughter called him on his self-deception. She “took exception,” remembered
the interviewer who met them both, “to her father’s claim that he was half Indian.” She knew that her father’s lighter skin and ambiguous status (“I never had to do much work [in Virginia] for nobody but my mother”) revealed that “master Williams” had actually put his own son on the auction block.
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