The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (6 page)

But the Constitution was also built from the timber of another bargain. In this one, major southern and northern power-brokers forced their more reluctant colleagues to consent to both the
survival and the expansion of slavery. The first point of debate and compromise had been the issue of whether enslaved people should be counted in determining representation in the House. Representing Pennsylvania, Gouverneur Morris warned that this would encourage the slave trade from Africa, since the importing states would be rewarded with more clout in the national government. In the end, however,
every northern state but one agreed that a slave could count as three-fifths of a person in allocating representation. The Three-Fifths Compromise affected not only the House, but also the presidency, since each state’s number of electoral votes was to be determined by adding two (for its senators) to its number of representatives in the House. One result was the South’s dominance of the presidency
over the next seventy years. Four of the first five presidents would be Virginia slaveholders. Eight of the first dozen owned people.

Over the long run, those presidents helped to shape the nation’s policy of geographic and economic growth around the expansion of slavery. But those policies were not just enabled by the consequences of compromise over representation. Their roots grew out of the
Constitution itself. As Gouverneur
Morris had suggested, the convention had to consider the issue of the Atlantic slave trade, the cause of a continual influx of people destined for slavery in the New World society. By the 1780s, many white Americans and a growing cadre of British reformers believed that modern civilized nations could no longer engage in the brutalities of the Middle Passage.
In the Constitutional Convention itself, Virginia slaveholder George Mason bragged that Virginia and Maryland had already banned the “infernal traffic” in human beings. But, he worried, if South Carolina and Georgia were allowed to import slaves, the greed of those states would “bring the judgment of Heaven” on the new nation. Mason charged that “every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and
yet the curse might spread. “The Western people”—by which he meant the people of Kentucky and other newly settled areas—“are already crying out for slaves for their new lands,” he said, “and will fill that country with slaves if they can be got thro’ S. Carolina and Georgia.”
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Mason’s critique infuriated politicians from the coastal areas of the deepest South, who leapt to their rights. Mason
claimed to be a freedom-loving opponent of slavery, but he was speaking from self-interest, charged South Carolina’s Charles C. Pinckney: “Virginia will gain by stopping the importations. Her slaves will rise in value, and she has more than she wants.” Pinckney hinted at something new in the history of New World slavery: the possibility of filling a new plantation zone with slave labor from American
reservoirs. This was possible because the Chesapeake’s enslaved population had become self-reproducing. Pinckney then defended slavery in the abstract. “If slavery be wrong,” he said, “it is justified by the example of all the world. . . . In all ages one half of mankind have been slaves.” The Carolinas and Georgia threatened to abandon the Constitutional Convention.

Just as the already hot,
shuttered hall neared the boiling point, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut—a future chief justice of the Supreme Court—rose to dump ice water on the Chesapeake delegates. Having “never owned a slave,” Ellsworth said, he “could not judge of the effects of slavery on character.” Rather than simply attacking the international slave trade’s morality, or bewailing the effects of slaveholding in the moral
abstract, let the economic interest of white Americans dictate whether the Atlantic slave trade should be closed. And, “as slaves also multiply so fast in Virginia and Maryland that it is cheaper to raise than import them . . . let us not intermeddle” with internal forced migrations, either. Concurring with Ellsworth, South Carolina’s John Rutledge—another future chief justice—insisted that “religion
and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question.” “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations,” he said. “The true question at present is whether the
Southern States shall or shall not be parties to the Union. If the Northern States consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of Slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers.” New
plantations within US borders could fill the role of the British sugar islands, to which northeastern merchants had lost access in the American Revolution. So the convention made a deal: Congress would ban the slave trade from Africa, but not for at least another twenty years.
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Years later, Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln, named for his grandfather who had been killed in the Kentucky field,
would argue that a possible slave trade ban—however delayed—was a concession made by men ashamed of slavery. The Constitution, he pointed out, did not even include the words “slavery” or “slaves.” Instead, it used circumlocutions, such as “Person held to service or labor.” Perhaps, however, it was Ellsworth and Rutledge who were right: interest was the governing principle shaping the Constitution.
In the interest of both profit and unity, they and most other white Americans proved willing to permit the forced movement of enslaved people. In straight or in twisted words, the outcome was plain: the upper and lower South would get to expand slavery through both the Atlantic trade and the internal trade. Meanwhile, the Northeast would earn profits by transporting the commodities generated
by slavery’s growth.

There were many Americans, even many white ones, whose interests were not served by those decisions, at least not directly. Yet the consequence of not accepting the deal would be disunity, which would be devastating to their interests in other ways. Allowing slavery to continue and even expand meant political unity. So black feet went tramping west and south in chains, and
the constitutional compromise helped to imprint an economy founded on the export of slave-made commodities onto a steadily widening swath of the continent. Slavery’s expansion soon yielded a more unified government and a stronger economy based on new nationwide capital markets. In fact, instead of finding slavery’s expansion to be something that they just had to accept, to avoid ushering in a kind
of conflict that could break the infant bonds of nationhood, white Americans soon found in it the basis for a more perfect union. Southern entrepreneurship and northern interest were going to be yoked together for a very long time.

IN EARLY 1792, VIRGINIA
enslaver John Breckinridge was worried. He owned considerable land across the mountains, in Kentucky. He knew that over there was sitting a
convention tasked with writing a constitution that would enable Kentucky to emerge from its territorial chrysalis and become
a separate state of the Union. And he had heard that some in the convention might have the same doubts that Thomas Jefferson and George Mason had.

Breckinridge had no such doubts. He once advised a female relative: “Your land & Negroes let no person on this earth persuade
you to give up.” She wouldn’t, however, be forced to do that by federal decisions. After the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution, the first Congress gathered in New York and immediately began to try to stabilize the chaotic territories. Congress confirmed the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery in what would eventually become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. No
one thought those areas would make the commodities that John Rutledge had promised back at the Philadelphia Convention. South of the Ohio, the new Congress left open a massive new region for enslavers, organizing the Tennessee Territory in 1790 by passing a Southwest Ordinance that was an exact copy of the Northwest one—except that it left out the clause banning slavery.
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In the Natchez District
along the Mississippi, slaves were already growing massive quantities of indigo. And in Kentucky, the first national census in 1790 had counted 61,000 whites and more than 12,000 enslaved Africans. Kentucky was not becoming Jefferson’s dream republic of land-owning white yeomen—especially since the territory’s constitutional convention decided that all land disputes would be referred to a statewide
court of appeals staffed by three elite judges. The twenty-one speculators who owned a full quarter of all Kentucky land surely approved. Meanwhile, convention delegate David Rice—both a slaveholder and a Presbyterian minister—told the convention that slavery inevitably produced theft, kidnapping, and rape. Although a given owner might be a good man, debts could force him to break up families.
Rice also insisted that slavery weakened the new republic by incorporating a group of people against whom citizens had effectively declared war. But the other delegates rejected his emancipation proposal, concluding that slavery actually strengthened Kentucky because it attracted wealthy settlers who would buy land from speculators.
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Once he heard the good news, John Breckinridge prepared to
move his slaves west across the mountains. He wasn’t sure if he would avoid “the perplexity of a Plantation” by hiring out his slaves. He’d heard that in the labor-hungry West, “the hire of your Negroes & rent of your land will far exceed any annual income you ever enjoyed.” Reluctant to do the job himself, he convinced his neighbor John Thompson to lead the Breckinridge slaves across the mountains
to his Kentucky properties. By the morning of April 3,
Thompson was at Fluvanna County on the James River, ready to leave, with Breckinridge’s eighteen enslaved people in tow.
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Francis Fedric remembered such a morning—a morning on which he, too, had begun a forced march to Kentucky. As those who were about to be led away formed up before dawn, he saw men and women fall on the damp ground behind
the old I-style house “on their knees[,] begging to be purchased to go with their wives or husbands.” Some were “abroad husbands,” men owned by other enslavers, but who had been allowed Saturday night visits with their wives—and who were now watching the dawn end their marriages. Some were abroad wives who had risen at 3 a.m. to walk to the plantation, bringing the last change of clothes they
would ever wash for their husbands. Holding the hands of parents who were staying were sobbing sons and daughters. Begging was “of no avail,” remembered Fedric. The man guiding the slaves out to Kentucky—well, this was not his first time. When he was ready, off they went, walking down the road toward the Blue Ridge looming in the distance.
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They walked, indeed. For as long as John Breckinridge
owned people on both sides of the mountain, he also owned the connections between them. He held the carrots, and he held the sticks. For instance, Breckinridge had inherited a man named Bill from his father-in-law, Joseph Cabell. Breckinridge decided that Bill would have to go to the Kentucky farms. So would Bill’s sister Sarah. This was when Bill and Sarah’s mother, Violet, went to her owner Mary
Cabell, Breckinridge’s mother-in-law. Don’t let Sarah “go to Cantucky,” Violet begged, not unless “Stephen her husband,” owned by another enslaver, could go with them. Violet had Mary Cabell’s ear. However, Stephen cost more money than Breckinridge wanted to spend. Keeping Sarah in Virginia was the way for Breckinridge to save himself grief in his own family. So Sarah stayed. But Bill marched
up the Wilderness Road, knowing that if he ran away along the trail, all bets were off. Sarah, and any children she might have, would be gone from Violet’s life. The best he could do was to make the utilitarian calculations of the unfree, so he traded himself for his sister’s marriage and his mother’s last years.
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Thompson led Breckinridge’s slaves across the Blue Ridge by the same pass where
I-64 now soars over the mountain to connect Charlottesville in the Piedmont to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley. Then they marched up the valley until, as Fedric remembered from his own journey, they saw the Alleghenies looming “in the distance something like blue sky.” Looking for the shortest line through the folded hills to the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, the flatlanders climbed up “through
what appeared to be
a long winding valley”: “On every side, huge, blue-looking rocks seemed impending,” thought Fedric—who feared that, “if let loose, they would fall upon us and crush us.” It was April, but a late winter spell lowered upon Breckinridge’s forced migrants. Snow or cold rain came almost every day, and by night, tired bodies shivered around roadside fires. Wolves howled at an uncertain
distance. In the mornings, anger about forced separations bubbled up. “Never till then,” wrote Thompson, “did I know the worth of whiskey.” Indeed, it was valuable all day long: “When the Negroes were wet and almost ready to give out, then I came forward with my good friend whiskey and Once every hour, unless they were asleep I was obliged to give them whiskey.”
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Sleep, however, was broken.
Fedric remembered that “two or three times during the night . . . one of the overseers would call our names over, every one being obliged to wake up and answer.” The men were not chained together, and the enslavers still worried that some wouldn’t refuse the opportunity to escape—even with all the cards enslavers held over the migrants’ families back east of the Blue Ridge. A slave named Mary, for
instance, ran away from Jonathan Stout of Kentucky after Stout got her to the Ohio River. She had fled with a mulatto man, and they crossed the river together and struck out into the Northwest Territory. The causes of her run for freedom were written on her skin, as her enslaver’s advertisement (in a newspaper called the
Herald of Liberty
) revealed: “She is stout made, with a scar over one of
her eyes, and much scarified on her back.”
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