The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (5 page)

Now, however, the consequences of war and independence were threatening the economic future of the enslavers. Marching armies had destroyed low-country rice-plantation infrastructure. Up to 25,000 enslaved Carolinians had left with the British. Britain blocked North American trade from its home and imperial markets. Though
tobacco markets in continental Europe were still open, the price of that product went into free fall in the 1780s.
⁴

Slavery was also caught up in the most divisive political issues raised by the Revolution. The weak federal government was buried in debts owed to creditors all over the nation and Europe, but southern and northern representatives to the Continental Congress disagreed over whether
the apportionment of tax revenue by population should count southern slaves. More broadly, the Revolution raised the question of whether slavery should even exist, since rebellion had been justified with the claim that human beings had a God-given right to freedom. Petitions flooded northern state legislatures in the 1770s and 1780s, charging that slavery violated natural rights. And Thomas Jefferson,
who admitted that “the Almighty has no attribute which can take a side with us” against the demands of the enslaved, was not the only prominent southerner who acknowledged the contradictions.
⁵

Yet during the 1780s and 1790s, the possibilities that enslaved people represented, the wealth they embodied, and the way they could be forced to move themselves would actually forge links that overrode
internal divisions. Marching feet increased the power of enslavers, and the beginning of forced movement south and west created new financial links and new kinds of leverage. And even among a million pairs of feet one can find the first steps: the moves and decisions that opened up new territories to slavery after the American Revolution. Kentucky and Mississippi could have been closed
to slavery.
Instead, during the 1780s, the early days of the American republic, decisionmakers in Philadelphia, New York, at Monticello, and elsewhere took crucial first steps that would allow slavery to spread.

BACK-AND-FORTH RAIDING DURING THE
Revolution had stopped white settlement short of the mountains in South Carolina and Georgia. Few settlers had crossed the Appalachians into the Virginia and North
Carolina districts that would become Kentucky and Tennessee. But potential migrants knew something about what lay beyond the bloody fringe of settlement. Since the early eighteenth century, white traders had walked deep into the woods of present-day South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, their mules laden with beads, guns, and liquor. Sometimes these merchants walked with enslaved African or African-American
assistants. Those who returned alive told of rich soil and broad rivers. Further north, a trickle of settlers began to follow hunter Daniel Boone’s reports of rich lands across the mountains that rose west of the Shenandoah Valley.
⁶

Only after the American victory did waves of migration begin to surge west across the mountains. By the early 1780s, settlers were sending word back east of Kentucky
acres that yielded a hundred bushels of corn apiece, an “Elysium . . . the garden where there was no forbidden fruit.” But Native Americans called the region the “dark and bloody ground,” a land of rich hunting over which they had long fought. In 1782, Indians began to raid the settlements, taking slaves with them as they retreated. Potential settlers became wary of the land, and of the journey
there. The “Wilderness Road” through the mountain passes was slow, difficult, and dangerous. Shawnee and Cherokee killed dozens of travelers on the Wilderness Road every year. In winter, there were fewer Indian war parties about. But on their winter 1780 trip, John May and an enslaved man passed thousands of thawing horse and cattle carcasses in the “rugged and dismal” mountains, casualties of failed
cold crossings.
⁷

That year North Carolina enslaver Thomas Hart wondered whether he should send slaves to clear the land that he claimed in Kentucky: “to send a parcel of poor Slaves where I dare not go myself” seemed a kind of extreme taxation without representation, not in keeping with the ideals of the ongoing Revolution. But Hart changed his mind. He brought enslaved pioneers across the mountain
road, even though the toil he planned for them to do in the woods, cutting down the forest and planting clearings with corn and tobacco, left them exposed to danger. “Lexington, Kentucky, August 22,” read a 1789 newspaper story based on a letter from the western frontier. “Two
negro children killed and two grown negros wounded at Col. Johnson’s.” Sometimes the Shawnees scalped prisoners, and sometimes
they took them back alive. Three Indians captured an enslaved man from a forge on the Slate River in Kentucky during 1794. They bound his arms, made him walk, and told him they were taking him to Detroit (where the British still maintained a fort, in defiance of the Treaty of Paris) to sell him for “taffy”—tafia, cheap rum. When they stopped to rest near the Ohio, they untied him and sent
him to gather firewood, which was when he escaped.
⁸

Over the 1780s, the invaders from the coastlands fought hundreds of battles. One such fight took place in 1786. Virginia-born migrant Abraham Lincoln (the sixteenth president’s grandfather) was clearing a field on his land west of Louisville. The regular
thunk
of the axe was suddenly broken by the crack of a musket. Lincoln fell. The Indian
emerged cautiously from the forest. Abraham’s son Thomas, who had been playing in the field, crouched behind a log. The sniper searched. Where was the little white boy with the dark hair? Suddenly, another
crack
. The Indian, too, dropped dead. Lincoln’s teenage son Mordecai had shot him from the window of a log cabin on the clearing’s edge. And as the settlers won more and more little battles
like this one, eventually fewer and fewer Shawnee came south across the Ohio.
⁹

Back on the east side of the mountains, meanwhile, slavery in the old Virginia and Maryland tobacco districts was increasingly unprofitable, and even some enslavers were conceding that enslavement contradicted all of the new nation’s rhetoric about rights and liberty. In his 1782
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Virginia
governor Thomas Jefferson complained that slavery transformed whites “into despots.” Jefferson’s first draft of the 1776 Declaration of Independence had already railed against British support for the Atlantic slave trade. Despite his ownership of scores of enslaved African Americans, Jefferson recognized that the selling of human beings could turn his soaring natural-rights rhetoric into a lie
as sour as the hypocrisies of old Europe’s corrupt tyrants. Eventually, Jefferson embraced the hypocrisy, even failing to free the enslaved woman who bore his children. “Sally—an old woman worth $50,” read the inventory of his property taken after his death. Yet in 1781, his Declaration’s claim that all were endowed with the natural right to liberty provided a basis to push the Massachusetts Supreme
Court into conceding—in the case of a runaway slave named Quock Walker—that slavery was incompatible with the state’s core principles.
¹⁰

Virginia politicians shot down Governor Jefferson’s feeble suggestions of gradual emancipation, but as he moved into the new nation’s legislature, he still hoped to ensure that the western United States would be settled and
governed by free, self-sufficient
farmers—not an oligarchy of slave-driving planters. In 1784, a committee of the Continental Congress, headed by Jefferson, proposed an “ordinance” for governing the territories across the Appalachians. Many in Congress feared that the western settlements might secede or, worse yet, fall into the arms of European empires. As Britain’s Indian allies raided south from their base at Detroit, Spain claimed
the English-speaking settlements around Natchez. In 1784, Spain also closed the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, the main trading route for western US territories. Eastern states also disagreed vehemently over how to sort out their overlapping claims to blocks of western land, which legislators hoped to sell in order to pay bonds issued during the Revolution. In the area that became Kentucky,
still technically part of Virginia, the confusion generated by the uncertain government made it hard for small farmers like the Lincolns to make hard-won homesteads good. There was no logical system of surveying, so claims overlapped “like shingles.” Old Dominion attorneys steeped in Virginia’s complex and arcane land laws swarmed across the mountains to sort out conflicts—in favor of the
highest bidder.
¹¹

The western issues that the Continental Congress faced in 1784 thus had implications for everything from the grand strategy of international relations to everyday economic and legal power. Jefferson’s Ordinance of 1784 aimed to define them in favor of young Thomas Lincoln and everyone like him. It proposed that the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River
would become as many as sixteen new states, each equal to the original thirteen. And a second act that Jefferson drafted—the Ordinance of 1785—created a unified system of surveying, identifying, and recording tracts of land. This design eliminated the possibility of shingling over post-Kentucky territories with contradictory claims.
¹²

The small farmer whom Jefferson imagined as the chief beneficiary
of western expansion was as white as Abraham Lincoln, but the 1784 proposal also stated “that after the Year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states.” That would have put Kentucky and what eventually became Tennessee on the road to eventual emancipation, perhaps along the lines of the statewide emancipations already under
way in New England. The cluster of farms and plantations near Natchez on the Mississippi relied even more heavily on slavery. By 1790, there were more than 3,000 enslaved Africans in the disputed Natchez District. If Jefferson’s proposal passed, presumably emancipation would have been mandated there as well. Yet under the Articles of Confederation, the wartime compromise that shaped the pre-Constitution
federal government,
a majority of state delegations in Congress had to consent for any proposal to become law. A majority of delegations, including his own Virginia one, rejected Jefferson’s antislavery clause even as they accepted his other principles—that Congress should make rules for the territories, that the territories could become states, and that rational systems of land surveying and
distribution should prevail. Frustrated, Jefferson sailed off to France to take up the position of American minister.
¹³

Jefferson returned from France in September 1789. He had watched the Bastille torn down stone by stone, and he had seen ominous hints that the French Revolution would turn murderous. He had also started a relationship with a young enslaved woman. But the political changes he
found upon his return gave him perverse incentives to think differently about the question of planting slavery in the western United States. Support for slavery’s expansion had already become one of the best ways to unite southern and northern politicians—and Jefferson wanted to build a national political alliance that would defeat the older networks of power dominated by Federalist planting and
mercantile gentries.

Congress had in the meantime taken one action to prevent slavery’s expansion. In 1787 it reconsidered Jefferson’s 1784 ordinance and passed it for the territories north of the Ohio, with the antislavery clause included. Perhaps this was no great moral or political feat. Few, if any, slaves had been brought to Ohio. Moreover, a handful of people would remain enslaved in the
Northwest for decades to come, and the ordinance contained internal contradictions that left open the option of extending slavery into the states carved from the territory. Still, the ordinance became an important precedent for the power of Congress to ban slavery on federal territory.
¹⁴

Yet in the four years between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the establishment of the Northwest
Territory by Congress in 1787, the Congress had been able to accomplish precious little else to stabilize matters on either the western or the eastern side of the mountains. Chaos ruled: thirteen different states had thirteen different trade policies, currencies, and court systems. The Articles of Confederation, created as a stopgap solution for managing a war effort by thirteen different colonies
against the mother country, had never allowed the federal government to have real power: the power to coerce the states, the power to control the currency, the power to tax. The result was not only economic chaos but also, wealthy men with much to lose feared, the impending collapse of all political and social authority. In rural Massachusetts, former Continental soldiers shut down courts after
judges foreclosed on farmers who couldn’t pay debts or taxes because of economic
chaos. In other states, angry majorities elected legislatures that were ready to bring debt relief to small farmers and other ordinary folk even if it meant economic disaster for creditors.

So after Congress adjourned in early 1787, delegates from twelve states converged on Philadelphia. Their mission was to create
a stronger federal government. The participants included future presidents George Washington and James Madison; Alexander Hamilton, who did more to shape the US government than most presidents; and Benjamin Franklin, the most famous American in the world. As May ended, they went into Independence Hall, closed the shutters, and locked the doors. By the time they emerged in late summer they had created
the US Constitution, a plan for welding thirteen states into one federal nation. Once it was approved by the states, its centralizing framework would finally give Congress the authority it needed to carry out the functions of a national government: collecting revenue, protecting borders, extinguishing states’ overlapping claims to western territory, creating stable trade policy, and regulating
the economy. A deal struck between the big states and the small ones allowed representation by population in the House of Representatives while giving each state the same number of delegates in the Senate.
¹⁵