The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (21 page)

Yet despite its inadequacies as a cage, Maspero’s was the pole around which the market in enslaved people orbited between 1815 and 1819. Even if the man or woman wasn’t physically present, the buyer could read the enslaved person’s name in the
Louisiana Courier
as he sat here. He
mentally compared the description to the others who were paraded here. The seller came here to meet him and arrange the sale. The papers changed hands here in the barroom. The forces generated in this long, low, smoky room changed the lives of thousands of Rachels and Williams. The acts of New Orleans entrepreneurs also changed their own lives, and not simply by enriching their
account balances.
For men like the entrepreneurs in Maspero’s, the birth of the modern world opened access to powers that few who were not absolute monarchs had ever felt before.

These sensations were generally only available to those with the luck of being born white, male, in the right place, and to the right family. Still, old mercantile alliances and families were being bypassed as new men created new money-making
empires. Imagine the luck of a boy like Henry Palfrey, son of a failed father, who became a clerk for Beverley Chew and Richard Relf of New Orleans at age twelve. As Palfrey grew to manhood in the environment of Maspero’s, internalizing its desires, he would write commands and requests. He sent them as letters, and in consequence things happened that his father, a frustrated merchant of an
earlier generation, could not make happen. Huge quantities of cotton bales moved. People were sold away from their families, piles of cloth and iron loaded, money transferred.
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The way entrepreneurs assimilated that environment’s values and came to see those values as normal reveals much about why they devoted their lives to creating an “extended commerce” in the southwestern United States.
They spoke as if their own bodies were doing the things that their deals—sales of cotton, purchases of land or slaves, payments of money on the other side of the ocean—made happen. Yet not their whole bodies. There was one specific part of the body they talked as if they were using. They wrote notes and letters that informed their correspondents that they held slaves “on hand” and money “in hand.”
Important letters “came to hand.” They got cotton “off [their] hands” and into the market. In 1815, waiting for prices to rise, John Richards offered the Bank of the State of Mississippi a note to ensure that he would not yet have to sell “the cotton that I now have in hand.” Individual promises-to-pay that drew upon credit with other merchants were “notes of hand.”
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Few parts of the body have
a more intimate and direct connection to the mind than the hands, and when entrepreneurs used words to grasp the control ropes of the new economy, they described the sensation as if the new world’s powers were held in their own like puppet strings. They produced concrete results at distance, using words that their hands wrote on pieces of paper. The fingers at the end of the writer’s arm might
not actually hold the material thing—the bales of cotton, the stacks of coin, the ship whose captain and crew were directed to carry them—that the figurative language of trade said it grasped. But in a very real sense, the writer controlled these things, these people.

These writers’ hands could grasp much more than the hands of merchants and traders in the past because the new dynamic growth
of Western
capitalism was producing massive quantities of what the great twentieth-century theologian Robert Farrar Capon called “right-handed power”: the strength to force an outcome. Capon identified right-handed power as being like the idea of God held by many believers of many religions: a deity working in straight-line ways, exerting crushing force, throwing the wicked into the flames, drowning
the sinful earth. Right-handed power is the power of domination, kings, weapons, and the letter of the law. In the early nineteenth century, those societies and individuals who were winning in the sorting-out of power and status accumulated unprecedented right-handed strength. They got more guns and bullets, more soldiers, the ability to knock down other peoples’ defenses and force them to
trade on the terms most favorable to the West. They dominated other peoples to a degree unprecedented in human history, and within victorious new modernized nations, right-handed power was increasingly distributed in a lop-sided fashion. Members of the new leading classes—people like the men at Maspero’s, but also the cotton-mill owners of Manchester, the merchants of New York, the bankers of London—got
most of that power in their hands.
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So if one had to pick the hand to which letter-writers referred as they sat there at Maspero’s, one might say “right.” Even though the effects of entrepreneurs’ decisions sometimes played out a long way from the places where the decisions were taken, they were still straight-line effects. The letter is written and sent, the Maryland trading partner reads it,
deposits the bill of exchange, goes to the probate auction, buys a woman advertised as a house servant, and takes her to the next Louisiana-bound ship. So the exchanges of the cotton economy, wrote one white man (to whom Louisiana success, he said, had given a new “sense of independence”), “put it in
your
power”—into your hands, he told his relative—“to enrich yourself.” A man presses a button
(with his
right
index finger) on the machine of the trading world, with its new markets and opportunities, and things happen to benefit him—things involving sterling bills, a huge pile of cotton, or a long roster of slaves. The emerging modern world strengthened the right hands of these men, offering them the opportunity to make everything new and different, to shape it along the lines of their
desires.
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Much of the muscular power in right hands was nerved by credit, itself a phenomenon almost as magical-seeming as the idea that one could direct far-off events with one’s hands. Credit is
belief
(the word comes from the Latin
credere
) that brings value today in exchange for a promise to pay in the future. Credit allowed entrepreneurs and others to spend tomorrow’s money today, accomplishing
trades and investments that would (the borrower believed)
make more wealth tomorrow. When granted on easy terms, credit was what allowed trade to spread, to move smoothly, and to enrich people around the Atlantic basin.

New Orleans entrepreneur William Kenner, for instance, could use bills of exchange, promises to pay that originated with a British merchant firm, to buy cotton bales from his
planter trading partner John Minor. Kenner could then ship the bales to Liverpool and sell them there to a merchant house, which would in turn credit Kenner’s account and “redeem” the bills of exchange from the original firm. The merchant house could allow Kenner to “draw” on his account by writing checks, or “drafts.” It could also, if its partners believed in Kenner’s financial future, allow him
to write his own notes of hand and “negotiate” them in the United States, using them as his source of credit. Kenner could sell such a note for cash here at Maspero’s, or trade it for goods—or people—if the seller believed that the Liverpool firm would “honor” Kenner’s hand. How much the person accepting the note of hand believed in it—how much he or she
credited
its magic—determined not only
whether he or she would accept it as money, but also how much money one believed it to be. Bills traded at a “discount” on the face value of the note, a floating value that also served as an interest rate. (One might give $96 for a bill that one could then, in six months, exchange for $100. One has just lent and been repaid at about 8 percent annual interest, in other words.) The buying and selling
of promises to pay was itself a business. Vincent Nolte’s newspaper advertisements proclaimed his willingness to buy “exchange” on Paris, New York, or London—notes that were payable in those cities, which Nolte could send to pay his own bills there.
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But belief in credit must be created. People must come to trust in its institutions and in the reliability of their trading partners in order for
credit to spring into life as money and serve as fuel for explosive growth. And like every other faith, credit has a history, and Rachel came to Maspero’s at an important moment in that story.

Jeffersonian Republicans had killed off the first Bank of the United States in 1811, but during the War of 1812, financial chaos made it very difficult for James Madison’s government to raise the money
it needed to fight the war. Following the country’s close call, in 1816 the Republicans chartered (for twenty years) the Second Bank of the United States. The “B.U.S.” was intended, in fact, to anchor the broad economic program advanced by the “National Republican” faction—a group of young leaders who were elbowing out the old Jeffersonians. They included Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of
South Carolina’s cotton frontier, and their plan to use federal
power to create a modern economy in the United States pivoted on the bank’s ability to lure foreign investment in its bonds, stabilize the financial system, and feed credit into entrepreneurs’ hands. Their “American system,” as Clay termed it, also included a planned network of “internal improvements”: canals, roads, and river-clearance
projects to lower the cost of transportation and encourage production for distant markets. A tariff that protected domestic textile production would allow the American economy to follow the British model of industrialization.
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The new B.U.S., headquartered in Philadelphia, also established branches in major trading centers such as New Orleans. But most of the branches ignored their mandate to
regulate financial flows. Instead, as local banks sprang up like fungus—the Kentucky state legislature chartered forty banks in 1818 alone—the B.U.S. allowed credit to slosh into every cranny of the expanding nation. In the short term, a runaway burst of prosperity silenced traditionalists, who warned that paper money and banks were scams. In April 1814, there were 38 flatboats from upriver tied
up alongside the New Orleans levee; four years later, there were 340. Financial giants Baring Brothers, Hope and Company, and other European cotton buyers injected millions of pounds of credit to pay Nolte and his peers. Textile and other merchants looking to unload their wartime backlog of goods advanced millions more in merchandise to American distributors. The B.U.S. directly lent huge amounts
of credit to land speculators, and the bank’s directors and employees borrowed from the cashbox for their own endeavors.
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For enslaved people like Rachel, the sudden growth in financial confidence did not mean liberation, but the opposite. The bank helped both white Americans and overseas investors to have faith in a future in which the debts of slave buyers would be paid off by ever-growing
revenues from the cash-earning commodities that industrializing Britain wanted. One could see the visible signs of this quickening right-handed power all across the southwestern United States, not just in Maspero’s but also, for instance, in Huntsville, Alabama, a frontier village into which a dust-caked Virginian named Francis E. Rives rode on the same January 1819 day on which Rachel and William
arrived on the levee. Soon Rives would sit in the state legislature in Richmond, but today he was leading a train of twenty-odd enslaved people whom he and his employees had marched from Southampton County, Virginia. Rives and the employees who helped guard the coffle were explorers of a new country of credit and trade. Searching out ways to extract new yield from human energy stored in the slave
cabins of Virginia’s Southside, their expedition extended Georgia trades west by hundreds of miles. Following
Cherokee trails from the left corner of North Carolina across the spine of the Smoky Mountains, they had now descended into the valley of the Tennessee River, which flowed by Huntsville.
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The Tennessee could carry cotton-laden flatboats into the Mississippi, so Huntsville was tied to
the invisible cord of trade and credit attached to New Orleans. And thanks to the investments channeled through the Bank of the United States and the possibilities of trade, the valley that lay before Rives’s coffle was suddenly blooming with both schemes and cotton. Anne Royall, an acerbic Pennsylvania travel writer who went to Alabama in 1818 to get material for a new book, found that her usually
dismissive authorial voice cracked when she crested the same ridges that Rives’s forced migrants now descended into Huntsville. “The cotton fields now began to appear. These are astonishingly large; from four to five hundred acres in a field!—It is without a parallel! Fancy is inadequate to conceive a prospect more grand!”

“There has not been a single . . . person settling in this country who
has anything of a capital who has not become wealthy in a few years,” claimed Virginia-born migrant John Campbell. He clearly suffered from the “Alabama Fever,” as people called it—the fervent belief that every white person who could get frontier land and put enslaved people to work making cotton would inevitably become rich. And it was credit that raised their temperature. Most of the settlers in
Alabama were squatting on land that had once been included in the Yazoo purchase, had later been surrendered by the Creeks at Fort Jackson, and was now being sold by the federal land office in Huntsville to purchasers who typically relied on credit. By the end of 1818, the land office had dealt away almost 1 million acres, which officially brought in $7 million. But speculative purchasers, including
Andrew Jackson, James Madison, and the chief employees of the local land office, paid only $1.5 million up front. Of that amount, $1 million was in the form of scrip that the federal government had given to investors who had received compensation after the 1810
Fletcher v. Peck
decision. Thus government-supplied credit had financed 93 percent of the cost of the land in the valley before Rives—money
that would have to be repaid from sales of cotton not yet planted by slaves not yet bought. No wonder Rives marched these enslaved people to Huntsville. Here was a prime hunting ground for slave sales.
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