The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (51 page)

In the southeastern states, enslaved husbands and male lovers possessed limited power to defend women, but at least they were impediments that white men had to calculate. Southwestern male predators enhanced their power by stripping away husbands and
other allies on whom women might call. At thirteen, Louisa Picquet was the property of a Mr. Cook, whose bankruptcy reduced him to living in a Mobile boardinghouse. He spent mornings sleeping off the previous night’s drinking and gambling, and afternoons trying to get Louisa alone in his room. For a while, the white landlady protected Louisa. Instead of sending the slave girl, the woman took Cook
the things he demanded: salt, a washbasin, his mended clothes. But eventually Cook’s creditors caught up to him. They sold light-skinned Louisa at the Mobile slave market to a Mr. Williams of New Orleans. He paid $1,400, a “fancy” price. Then Williams told Louisa that “he and his wife had parted,” and they boarded the next coastal steamer going to Louisiana. “Soon as we started for New Orleans,
Mr. Williams told me what he bought me for,” Louisa later said.
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The word “fancy” can mean something highly decorative, or one can “fancy” something—desire it, as something or someone to acquire. White men fancied a Louisa; white men used her to decorate their lives as commodities to be displayed. But being fancied carried over into the descriptions and pricing of all women, light or dark, house
servant or field hand. Although descriptions of men emphasized size, and sometimes skills, evaluations of women discussed their attractiveness. “Girls and ordinary women” bring $350 to $400, wrote Isaac Franklin in 1832, “and a few of superior appearance at $500.” “Two boys have a mother here,” wrote a New Orleans dealer to a man who had already bought the sons. “[She is] about thirty six years
old fine teeth without any grey hairs a mulatto—she is very anxious to go with them—shall I buy her? . . . She [is] very likely of her age and young looking.” Another trader described a “13 year old Girl, bright color, nearly a fancy for $1135.” She had potential. Another: “a girl[,] size of Gilmer’s girl”—so far so good, evidently—“but rough faced,” reducing her value. Even for field hands like
John Knight’s dark women, looks changed prices. Male buyers imagined times between days, hidden spaces between cotton rows.
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For the female half of the enslaved people traded and moved, sexual assault and exploitation shaped price and experiences. Traders manipulated buyers’ fancies to make sales. “We anticipate tolerably tough times this spring
for one eyed men
,” wrote James Franklin to Rice Ballard in 1832. “I have seen a handsome Girl since I left Va that would climb higher hills & go further to accomplish her designs
than any girl to the North & she is not too apt to leave or loose
her gold
& the reason is because she carries her funds in her lovers purse or in Bank & to my certain knowledge has been used & that smartly by a one eyed young man about my size & age,
excuse my foolishness
.” Franklin, a one-eyed man, would use her lover’s purse until he could manipulate other men’s single-focused desires and get
them to transfer their funds to his bank account.
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To understand why a slave trader would call himself a one-eyed man, one must view him in the context of a slave-frontier world where white men saw their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved, feminized. The slave trader, as a one-eyed man, wasn’t just raping the women he bought and sold.
He was also metaphorically raping his competitors. This was the same metaphorical world in which less wealthy white men opposed banks that used their deposits and taxes and productivity in order to create credit. Said banks then lent said credit to wealthy would-be aristocrats, men who wanted to replicate Granville County–style hierarchies on the frontier. This is why ordinary white men called on
Andrew Jackson to save the country from inchoate but horrible threats to them as manly citizens. They wanted him to help Potterize the B.U.S., and all the other targets of resentment, before it raped ordinary male citizens. And just as consequentially for what happened in the 1830s, Franklin and Ballard slipped incessantly between talking about the financial risk-taking of credit and collections,
on the one hand, and sex with enslaved women, on the other. The exploitation of enslaved women had existed since the beginnings of slavery in North America, but what was now emerging was different. The new trade branded and marketed the ability to coerce sexuality, priming white entrepreneurs to believe that the purchase of enslaved-people-as-commodities offered white men freedoms not found in ordinary
life. Fancy branded slave-trading as sexy for sellers and buyers.

From fancy maids to slave-trading in general, they went on to financial risk in general. In the 1830s, when the real-world test subjects on slavery’s entrepreneurial frontier, primed by the sexual arousal built into the human-commodity market, met with opportunities to buy more slaves, take out loans to expand their operations,
or sell cotton, they were more likely than ever to chase short-term gains with little thought for the future. North Carolina migrant Moses Alexander thought so, seeing the slave frontier as the epicenter of multiple types of profligacy. “To raise my children in Alabama, I may
possibly tell you my greatest objection—but I cannot write it,” Alexander noted in a letter, but he saw southwestern sexual
license as part and parcel of risky southwestern economic behavior. “Speculation is the order of the day and stalks abroad in the country,” he warned. Events would reveal that his estimate of one-eyed enslavers was correct. Stimulated by the domestic slave trade to think of themselves as rule-breaking “one-eyed men” who could always have their fancy, southwestern entrepreneurs were planting the
financial seeds of still more irrational choices. Enslavers would soon insist on taking on immense debt. But they underestimated the downside of that risk, and eventually not only because they had been trained to feel that the universe had loaded the dice in their favor. People almost always misjudge downside risk when the prices of assets (such as slaves) are rising. They know intellectually that
asset prices that have climbed in the past—whether Dutch tulip bulbs, Yazoo Company stock, or subprime mortgage securities—have formed bubbles that eventually popped. But this time is always different.
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Image 7.2. Auction of enslaved baby. African-American and white abolitionists identified family separations and the exposure of women to sexual abuse as two of the most devastating impacts of the domestic slave trade. Henry Bibb’s autobiography described his own misery at being separated—like the parents and spouses crying and pleading here—from his wife and children.
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave
(New York, 1849), 201.

To most one-eyed men, the B.U.S. seemed like a maiden-aunt chaperone who frowned at any sign of a creeping hand. Enslavers benefited from bank-induced stability and steady credit expansion, but the B.U.S. limited credit
expansion and favored only a few entrepreneurs. Of course, there were other important reasons—even
“rational” ones—why enslavers wanted to borrow more money. The more slave purchases they could finance, the more cotton they’d make, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded product. It had an unending market. So the more cotton they made, the more they’d sell, and thus the more money they’d make. Owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be
collateral for even more borrowing.
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At the same time, it made sense that people with money wanted to lend it to entrepreneurs on slavery’s frontier. People who have money want to lend it if they can make still more money doing so, especially if they can feel certain of repayment. Lending to the South’s cotton economy was an investment not just in the world’s most widely traded commodity, but
also in a set of producers who had shown a consistent ability to increase their productivity and revenue. In other words, enslavers had the cash flow to pay back their debts. And their debts were secure, since enslavers owned a lot of valuable collateral. In fact, they owned the biggest pool of collateral in the United States: 2 million slaves worth over $1 billion. Not only was that almost 20 percent
of all the wealth owned by all US citizens, but it was the most liquid part of that wealth, thanks to the efficiency of markets manned by professional slave traders and supplied with credit by a B.U.S.-governed financial system (see
Table 7.1
).

Potential lenders—such as the banks of Western Europe and their investors, the old and new upper classes, whose savings Baring Brothers and the Bank of
England pooled—wondered whether Biddle was perhaps not investing aggressively enough, or passing on sufficient profits to Europeans who bought B.U.S. bonds. Enslavers, meanwhile, wanted to transform their control over enslaved people’s bodies into authority over their own credit. In 1827, a Louisiana enslaver had created a tool that might answer both tasks at once. J. B. Moussier was facing a lawsuit
by Rogers and Harrison, Virginia-based slave-trading partners to whom he owed $21,000 for seventy men, women, and children he had bought on a short-term, high-interest loan. What if, Moussier wondered, planters used slaves as collateral to raise capital overseas, from people who needed American cotton and sugar, and then used the capital to build a lending institution that enslavers themselves
could control? Moussier took his idea to New Orleans politician-entrepreneurs Edmund Forstall and Hugues Lavergne, who engineered it into the charter of the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana (C.A.P.L.), chartered by the state legislature in 1827.
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TABLE 7.1. ENSLAVED PEOPLE AND TOTAL US WEALTH

*
Author’s estimate.

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States: 1789–1945
(Washington, DC, 1949); Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds.,
Cambridge Historical Statistics of the U.S.
(Cambridge, MA, 2006).

Here are the nuts and bolts of the C.A.P.L. First, potential borrowers would apply to buy stock in the
“Association.” Their application accepted, they could mortgage slaves and land to the C.A.P.L. in order to pay for the stock. The stock would entitle them to borrow C.A.P.L. bank notes of up to half the value of the mortgaged property. To ensure that people would take these bank notes at face value, the founders needed a large reserve of hard cash. They planned to raise it by selling bonds on the
financial markets of the Western world. Each bond would be $500 in face value—about the average price, in the 1820s, of a young enslaved man. A bond would reach maturity in ten to fifteen years, and it would pay investors 5 percent in annual interest.
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