The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (42 page)

Walker insisted that the dynamism of nineteenth-century slavery made it worse than earlier forms:
the ancient Spartans did not lock the Helots in coffles and drag them “from their wives and children, children from their parents, mothers from their suckling babes.” In 1776, “there were but thirteen States in the Union,” but after half a century, “now there are twenty-four, most of which are slave-holding States, and the whites are dragging us around in chains and in handcuffs, to their new States
and Territories to work their mines and farms, to enrich them and their children.” He’d read, in white Carolinians’ newspapers, stories decrying the way the Turks denied the Greeks their independence, and “in the same paper was an advertisement, which said ‘Eight well built Virginia and Maryland
Negro fellows
and four
wenches
will positively be sold this day
to the highest bidder!
’”

“Americans!
I ask you candidly,” wrote Walker, “was your sufferings under Great Britain one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?” Turning to black readers, he proclaimed that “freedom is your natural right.” Walker was playing with fire. He knew how dangerous whites could become. Even white abolitionists feared that violent resistance would turn white audiences against
emancipation. But whites had treated enslaved Africans as if it were no crime to bind them “with chains and hand-cuffs,” and then “beat and murder them as they would
rattle-snakes
.” Thus black people had the same right to defend themselves against crimes and oppressions claimed by America’s revolutionaries. “It is no more harm for you to kill a man who is trying to kill you than it is for you
to take a drink of water when thirsty.” And so he praised “Hayti[,] the glory of the blacks and the terror of tyrants . . . men who would be cut off to a man, before they would yield to the combined forces of the whole world.” So: “Act like men.” Prepare, Walker commanded slavery-survivors in the tones of an Old Testament prophet, to inflict the consequences of sin if justice was not done, even if
that meant facing one’s own death in the effort. Once the battle was joined, once they saw that victory was possible, slaves would be willing to pay the cost: “Let twelve black men get well armed for battle, and they will kill and put to flight fifty whites. . . . Once you get them started, they glory in death.” For enforced submission disguised mighty rage beneath: “As Mr. Jefferson wisely said,
they have never
found us out
.”
⁴¹

Walker’s statements required real courage in an era when Granville Sharp had morphed into Granville Sharp Pierce. “If any wish to plunge me into the wretched incapacity of a slave, or murder me for [telling] the truth, know ye, that I am in the hand of God,” he wrote. “What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.” Hoping to get a rebellion started, Walker
stuffed copies of the pamphlet into the pockets of pants and jackets that he sold to sailors. Some knowing, some not, they carried the spore of Walker’s words into the harbors of the slave states, where almost all American merchant ships made annual pilgrimages to pick up cotton bales.
⁴²

In March 1830, authorities in Savannah, New Orleans, and Charleston began to find copies of Walker’s
Appeal
in the possession of free blacks. They immediately went into panic mode. Seeking to quarantine the pamphlet like a contagious disease, southern state governments banned free black sailors from disembarking from their merchant vessels. They panicked at rumors of slave revolts from New Bern, North Carolina, to the other end of the pipeline of stolen people in Opelousas, Louisiana. Georgia and Mississippi
passed laws imposing the death penalty on free black people who disseminated
antislavery materials. State legislatures planned to ban the teaching of literacy to enslaved African Americans. Instruction in basic mathematics would remain legal, however, so that black drivers would be able to subtract the number of pounds of cotton picked from the quota, thus deriving the requisite number of lashes
to deliver.
⁴³

Unlike other political questions, abolition talk carried with it the seed of revolutionary violence. Therefore, southern officials and newspaper writers claimed, it was not protected speech. Savannah’s mayor sent a letter to his Boston counterpart, Harrison Otis, asking the conservative New England politician to arrest the old-clothes dealer for publishing “such a highly inflammatory
work.” Though sympathetic to the request, the Boston mayor had to refuse. Walker had broken no Massachusetts law. Rumors in Boston claimed that various southern state governments had put a bounty of $3,000 on Walker’s head—double that if he was brought south still alive. In August 1830, at the age of thirty-three, he collapsed in the doorway of his shop and died in convulsions. Many African
Americans in Boston believed that he had been poisoned, though no direct evidence for this survives. The official cause of death was consumption—probably what we would call tuberculosis. Or perhaps Walker had simply breathed too much cotton dust.
⁴⁴

Even with Walker dead, and black sailors locked on board their ships, the language of being “stolen” was already making its way by secret pathways
out of lands that were being remade by the whipping-machine and the speculators who fed it with human flesh. Beginning in the mid-1830s, an abolitionist movement finally emerged. Much of its moral force and most trenchant analysis came from former slaves such as Frederick Douglass and other African Americans living in northern communities, including David Walker’s Boston. Of them, many, like Douglass,
were Southern refugees who had been pushed to escape from the slavery zone, usually as fugitives, by the new expansion of the slave trade. The new movement would also be led by white allies, most especially William Lloyd Garrison and the host of white women who signed petitions and wrote books. However, the white abolitionists would always be a small minority inside a white northern population
that mostly wanted to ignore slavery.
⁴⁵

But in contrast to earlier, more half-hearted white critics, the new abolitionists now agreed that slavery needed to end, and it needed to end as soon as possible. Much of the new urgency now pulsing in their veins had been transmitted to them from formerly enslaved people who had survived the new slave trade—many of whom also became significant actors
in the movement. Running beneath abolitionist activity and critique, like the spinal
plates under a mountain range, were the words that forced migrants themselves chose to use to understand their history. The language of being “stole” was everywhere in those words, so that in 1849, African-American abolitionist William Wells Brown would assert that his “master” was in fact merely a “man who stole
me as soon as I was born.” Brown had first heard that phrasing not in the printed rhetoric of abolitionists, but in the philosophy of the illiterate forced migrants among whom he had once been numbered.
⁴⁶

YET THE ABOLITIONISTS
’
HOPE
for a dramatic change was implicitly premised on the idea of converting a significant portion of the nation’s white majority to their antislavery cause. In the meantime,
could anything limit the damage being inflicted by the juggernaut of slavery expansion, in whose path still lay more than 2 million lives? To many enslaved African Americans, only one phenomenon seemed to offer much immediate help. And this phenomenon, this ally in the cause of ending slavery, came with several drawbacks: it was invisible, it was lacking in physical power, it was prone to
giving commands unenforceable by law, and it was often silent.

Go back to the sale that Samuel Cornish witnessed on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but do not focus on Cornish, an educated free man confronted by the hypocrisies of the slave republic. Put aside the mental maps that draw lines of correspondence and credit to connect nodes like Baltimore to New Orleans. Brush aside, for a moment, price
curves of hands sold by a professionalized slave trade. Instead, focus on the existential situation of the man that Mr. W* bought: William, a member of the Methodist church. “[Woolfolk] ordered William to stretch out his hands in order to be tied. [William] rather shrank from this, as every
honest
man would do[;] however[,] with much piety and resignation, he submitted.” Watching this, his friends,
fellow church members, “began to weep bitterly.” William turned: “Don’t cry for me! God is everywhere!” Then Woolfolk led him away.
⁴⁷

William believed that underneath the surface world, where all the powers of the world arrayed themselves against him, lay a world of the spirit where the real value would be measured. It was perhaps the same world through which an enslaved girl moved in a vision
she had at a Tennessee prayer meeting, one which, as an old woman, eighty years later, she would recount to an interviewer. Clear as day, she remembered what she had seen: “I was traveling along a big road. Down on each side I saw the souls in torment. Many of them were people I had known in life. They were just roaming and staggering along. They were saying ‘Oh, how long?’ I met on the road a great
host, some walking, some on mules, some going down to hell.”
⁴⁸

Image 6.3. White abolitionists and enslaved migrants both focused on the possibility—and for thousands of individuals, the reality—that free African Americans in the Chesapeake and border states were being kidnapped by criminals attracted by the new profits offered by the market in human beings. The man who has been kidnapped here wears respectable work clothes no different from those who have seized him and plan to sell him to the cotton frontier. George Bourne,
Picture of Slavery in the United States
(Middletown, CT, 1834), 120.

For those taken, for those left behind and bereaved, for all who knew that they, too, could be stolen, the acceleration of slavery’s expansion was hell—separation from all that gave life in the world meaning. By the late 1820s, hell was more real
than ever. William professed his faith that God was everywhere, but surely he must have wondered if God would come with him on the road through hell, into the holds of the ships tacking around Florida into the Gulf, if he would climb with William onto the block and stand beside him in the notary’s office in New Orleans.

David Walker, writing in his old-clothes shop in Boston, saw the coffles
in his mind’s eye, and prophet-like, predicted that God would arrive on the frontier. And when he did, he would come in the form of an angel of slave rebellion to drown sinners in fire and blood, a right-handed avenging God bringing justice through the sword. Yet the failure of the 1811 revolt on Louisiana’s German Coast illustrated what most individuals who had been stolen
away to the frontier
of slavery had breathed in as knowledge taught from the cradle. Redemption by revolt was impossible. So many enslaved migrants chose a different exit from hell on earth.

The vast expansion of slavery in the United States happened in tandem with the emergence of evangelical Protestantism. At the time of the American Revolution, most Americans had not participated actively in organized religion.
Though most were nominally Protestant, few outside of New England attended church services on a weekly or even monthly basis. But by the 1850s, half or more of all white Americans had come to participate regularly in some sort of church. The vast majority were in evangelical denominations, among which the Methodists and Baptists were the most popular choices. This evangelical Christianity was not
exactly like the twenty-first-century version. Unlike many of its descendants, it was usually not fundamentalist in theology. Yet like its twenty-first-century descendants, it did use an informal liturgy. And the evangelical preachers who spread across the continent (and eventually, across the oceans) insisted that those who would be redeemed needed to undergo an individual conversion experience.
Instead of placing their faith in a special ceremony or in some sort of inscrutable predestination, evangelical theologies made the believer’s individual choice to come to God for forgiveness the key moment of salvation.
⁴⁹