The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (24 page)

TABLE 3.3. AGE GROUP DISTRIBUTION OF ENSLAVED PEOPLE SOLD IN NEW ORLEANS, 1815–1820

Source:
Hall Database,
www.ibiblio.org/laslave/
. “Known to be imported” includes those with a non-Louisiana origin, as noted by the database. “Not known to be imported” clearly includes a large number of those imported. Some of these we can identify from newspaper advertisements. If they have a similar age profile to those in the “Known to be imported” group, and were moved to that group, then the difference between the two rows might be even starker.

Skills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past. African Americans sent to New Orleans came to Maspero’s with individual job-related identities. But they came out with those skills erased, at least from the perspective of a claim that they could make on the enslaver.
Many a newspaper advertisement for a man from the Chesapeake stated these skills. For example: “ANTHONY, 23,” who was to be sold January 5, 1819, at Maspero’s, was identified as a “sawyer, plough man, driver and good axeman” who had been “working in a brickyard.” “NORA, 22,” was advertised as an “excellent house servant, good seamstress, washer and ironer, good disposition and careful mother.”
All fifteen women advertised for that particular sale were described as possessing house-servant skills—washing, cooking, cleaning, ironing, caring for children. Yet none appeared as a house servant on the bill of sale. Of the thirty-four men offered, the newspaper advertisement claimed that twenty-seven possessed skills: carpenter, cooper, blacksmith, teamster, and so on. Not a single one had
a skill listed upon his sale document, even though enslavers listed skills on similar bills for enslaved people of local origin. Only 1.5 percent of the bills of sale for enslaved people shipped from Norfolk and sold in New Orleans in 1815 to 1820 list a skill. The other 98.5 percent might not have come from the fields, but field hands they now were.

The “handness” of Virginia and Maryland slaves—the
English (not French) names of the men, their greater stature, the plain kerchief of the women (not an artfully tied chignon like the ones Anglo visitors to New Orleans always noted), the claim that every one of them was raised waiting the table of a Virginia gentleman who had fallen on hard times—such narratives suggested that here was a standard story who could be forced to become a standard
hand: “Very smart and willing. . . . [You] can turn his hand to anything. . . . [A] most valuable subject.” You could take away their pasts and make them seem both the ready instrument and the object of the entrepreneur’s right-handed power. Enslavers counted on the massive geographic shift over land and water to the southwest, the separations, the silencing, the distance, and the shock of the
process of sale to produce isolation and helplessness. That made human beings look—to buyers—like hands. Resistance to handification certainly happened. Many forced migrants from Chesapeake and Kentucky ran away from purchasers in the Lower Mississippi Valley in the late 1810s, as numerous newspaper ads testify. But they also seem to have been far more likely than locals to be caught quickly, to
return, or to die in the process. They had fewer—or no—places to hide, and surely fewer people to help them hide.
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“The sugar and cotton plantations[,] . . . we knew all about them,” said Lewis Hayden, remembering a childhood in Kentucky in the 1810s. “When a friend was carried off, why, it was the same as death.” One way or another, the sale at Maspero’s marked one as a hand and meant that an old life was over. Right here, on this January day, for instance, William was about to be torn from the last few people
who had known him in Maryland. As the bidding on him crept upward—six hundred, seven hundred—something piqued the interest of a white man in the crowd. Though several bidders already contested the prize, when Louisiana enslaver James Stille made his entry, he did so with determination. The numbers rose higher as Mossy chanted. When Stille’s bid hit nine hundred, a typical price at this time for
a man of William’s age, a hush settled on the crowd. Would someone go higher? At last Mossy’s hammer came down to break the silence. (Where did it hit—the wall of the building? Perhaps he tapped it on William’s head. Some auctioneers did this, infuriating the people they sold.) A white helper stepped forward to lead William down off the bench and walk the new hand back into the shop as Stille continued
shopping. After the sunlight, the darkness disoriented William. The white man sat him down against a wall. Beyond a new clamor outside, William could surely hear the earlier-sold people who now sat next to him: perhaps a woman sobbing, a man panting. Or was he making those noises himself?
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Meanwhile, Rachel stepped up, onto the bench.

IF SHE COULD GET
her eyes to focus, Rachel tried to read
the faces. In the East, the constant exchange of information among the enslaved made it possible for the people being sold to know the reported characters of many possible masters. But Rachel was trapped in full view in a new place where the face of every enslaver was unknown to her. She did not know, for instance, as the auctioneer’s voice rose, that one of the men bidding for her was William Fitz,
a merchant trading here and in Baton Rouge.

Whether Rachel experienced the minutes through which she stood on the bench as hate, shame, terror, or exposure, she had to face the crowd. And she faced it alone. If Rachel had a husband, he does not appear to have come in the
Temperance
with her. Neither did any children. Yet, given her age—about twenty-five—and the average age of first childbirth
for an enslaved woman in the Chesapeake—just over twenty—the odds are good that she had children. She was not alone in being alone. Of the twenty-eight slaves sold by McLean at Maspero’s on January 28, only two—twenty-three-year-old Sophie and her young child—had any discernable family relationship to each other.
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Throughout the history of slavery in the Southeast, infants and mothers had typically
been sold, given, moved, granted, and deeded together. The infant followed the mother in condition, since the womb was “slave” and the child of a slave mother was thus also the enslaved property of her owner. Often the infant literally followed the mother from place to place. Here, however, the ideal hand did not come with a family. Slave sellers and buyers conspired to break attachments between
parents and children—usually before their removal to New Orleans, but sometimes at Maspero’s itself. Out of 2,567 women twenty-one years old and up sold by enslavers in New Orleans between 1815 and 1820, we can prove that at least 553 came from outside the city. Of these, enslavers bought 525 without children. Whether women like Rachel did or did not leave children behind in Maryland, they
stood on the block alone. Meanwhile, only in 6 of 553 cases did New Orleans sellers deal the women’s husbands with them. Even if one includes those whose origins we cannot demonstrate from the records of sale, between 1815 and 1820 only 8 women of 2,567 were sold with their husbands, and only 3 with both husband and child. Clearly, more than 1 percent of all the enslaved women over twenty, whether
in Louisiana or throughout the South, were married with children.
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During boom times like these, southwestern buyers were more interested in extracting value now than in the long-term accumulation strategy that healthy childbirth and well-fed childhoods represented. A woman who was alone would waste none of her labor on children. And men were universally sold without family members. So were
many children. On January 5, just three weeks before Rachel was sold, sixty-one slaves from the Chesapeake had been auctioned at Maspero’s. Among the “smart promising boys” of whom may “be anything made of,” as the ad put it, were young brothers Ruffin, eight, and Harry, six. Ruffin went to Jean Armand, up in St. James Parish. Nicholas Hanry bought Harry. Ruffin and Harry probably saw each other for
the last time at the back wall where William now leaned his weight against the interior bricks. From 1815 to 1820, in fact, New Orleans saw 2,646 sales of children under the age of thirteen, of whom 1,001 were sold separately from any family member. Their average age was nine. Many were younger—some much younger.
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Brothers broken apart, mothers taken from daughters and vice versa—all were easier
to move, to “be anything made of,” individual units ready to come to hand in entrepreneurial dreams. To make the parents into mere individuals, children were left back in the Chesapeake to be reared by grandparents and aunts and uncles. So African-American households back East paid the cost of increasing right-handed power in the southwestern United States,
just as those did who now stood on the
block. Purchasers who made complete the conversion of mother into hand did not have to pay, at least not now. They only needed the belief of those who granted them credit, and that could be bought with the promised future value imputed by a person made hand.

Image 3.4. The New Orleans market preferred young people with no attachments. Both in the selling states and in the buying states, the forces of this demand led to separations of parent from child and brother from sister—like Isaac and Rosa, ex-slave children from New Orleans, photographed in 1863 after the Union capture of New Orleans ensured that they would not be sold apart from each other. Library of Congress.

As they created the patterns and expectations of a slave trade that made a uniform commodity—hands—perpetually available, men like William Kenner and Hector McLean were doing more than making profits for themselves. Such entrepreneurs—none of whom were slave-trading specialists—were creating a market for future slave trading, though other entrepreneurs would wrest
it from their hands even as it emerged. The appearance of Francis E. Rives in Alabama—he also made two trips to Natchez in 1818 and 1819—foretold the future. Without planning to do so, the merchants of New Orleans had paved the way for a later, more organized “domestic” trade that linked the techniques of the Georgia-men to the much greater distances and emerging markets of the Mississippi Valley.
They were laying the connecting rails of a national domestic slave market. Before enslaved people were marched to the ship or the flatboat that took them to New Orleans, and long after their first sale at Maspero’s, the patterns of exchange and newly habitual assumptions there made them the perpetual objects of enslavers’ plans.