The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (7 page)

Some forced migrants marched through the mountains to Wheeling (in Virginia then, but now in West Virginia) on the Ohio River, while others floated down the Monongahela in Pennsylvania. Although Pennsylvania’s glacial emancipation plan allowed slavery to exist for decades more, by the 1790s some white Pennsylvanians along the route to Kentucky had
allegedly organized a “negro club” that sought to free enslaved people. In 1791, three Virginia slave owners, named Stevens, Foushee, and Lafon, on a flatboat with a group of enslaved men and women, heard someone on the shore calling them to come “take a dram.” A chance to knock back a shot of whiskey and trade news in the wilderness sounded like a damn good idea. Soon the boat was scraping onto the
gravel of the riverbank. That’s when the white men on the bank pulled one of the slave men out of the boat and ran with him into the woods. The slave owners shoved hard on their steering poles, propelling the boat into the downstream current, while catcalls rang from the trees. In another case, when winter weather trapped a party of slaves and their owner at an inn in Redstone, Pennsylvania, three
enslaved people slipped away. The
Virginia enslaver accused local whites of “seducing” the African Americans to escape. He returned to Redstone with allies, and local authorities arrested him for trying to recapture the people who had been “kidnapped” from him. The Redstone incident developed into a federal-level confrontation between Virginia and Pennsylvania. In 1793, southerners in Congress
solved the crisis by passing the first comprehensive fugitive slave act.
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Once enslavers got their captives through the mountains and onto the Ohio River, these escape attempts declined. The flatboats didn’t stop until they reached the growing frontier port of Louisville. From there, travelers made their way to Lexington and the Bluegrass region. This area was beginning to look like a more prosperous
Piedmont Virginia, complete with economic winners and losers. In the counties around Lexington, 60 percent of all whites owned no land. There were two slaves for every white man over the age of twenty. Enslaved people toiled in fields that were lusher than Virginia’s, growing tobacco, corn, and wheat. They also raised hemp, which enslaved workers made into cordage and rigging at the “rope-walks”
around Lexington and Louisville. The US government, newly empowered by the federal constitution, rewarded Kentucky enslavers for their willingness to stay in the union by working to open the mouth of the Mississippi River to trade. The Treaty of San Lorenzo, signed with Spain in 1795, enabled planters to export shipments of tobacco, rope, and other products by taking them down the Mississippi
to the world market via New Orleans.

The 1792 state constitution had made it illegal to bring slaves into Kentucky just to sell them, but this ban proved as porous as dozens of similar ones that would follow it. In 1795, William Hayden—a nine-year-old boy who would spend the next thirty years in the slave trade, first as commodity and then as a slave trader’s employee—was sold at Ashton’s Gap
in Virginia. The man who purchased him brought him along the Wilderness Road and then sold him to Francis Burdett of Lincoln County, Kentucky. At his new owner’s place, Hayden comforted himself by watching the reflection of the rising sun every morning in a pond, as he had done with his mother back in Virginia. He told himself that somewhere, she was watching, too. Meanwhile, slave buyers spread
across the Southeast as far as Charleston, where Kentucky-based purchasers bought Africans from the Atlantic trade and marched them west to toil in the lead mines north of Lexington.
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The fact that slavery was now thriving in Kentucky enabled the new state to attract more people like John Breckinridge, folks whom George Nicholas, one of the key forces behind the 1792 state constitution, called
“valuable emigrants from the five S. states.” Such emigrants tuned the state’s institutions
to help them maintain an ever tighter grip on human property. “Associations”—regional groups of Baptist and other churches—began to punish ministers who preached against slavery. Ordinary white farmers, discouraged by the wealthy settlers’ control over the processes of land law, moved away. Thomas Lincoln,
whose father had been murdered in the field as the boy played, was now grown, and he hoped to have a farm of his own. But he repeatedly lost claims on land he had cleared and planted in lawsuits launched by speculators who lived as far away as Philadelphia. In 1816, he moved his young family, including seven-year-old son Abraham, across the Ohio. Thomas’s retreat was part of a wider defeat for
a vision of Kentucky as land for yeoman farmers rather than as a region for high-capital speculation in land and human bodies. And as young people like Francis Fedric and William Hayden marched west, another set of forced migrations started coming out of Maryland and Virginia.
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ON A BRIGHT SPRING
Maryland morning in 1805, Charles Ball rode comfortably on the board seat of a wagon, the lead rope
of his owner’s yoke of oxen in his hands. He was driving the team to a little town on the bank of the Patuxent River. Ball’s latest owner—he’d had five in his twenty-five years—was a hard man: Mr. Ballard would make a slave work in the woods on the snowiest of days, with no boots. But Ball had hopes. All through the neighborhood, he was known as a strong, intelligent worker with a steady temper,
unlike his irascible African grandfather or his runaway father. Charles Ball had been hired out to the Washington Navy Yard—and had come back, instead of running away like so many others had done when they had worked “abroad.” Ball could figure out faster, smarter ways to do any job. He had incentives: a wife and children, owned by another white man. Ball’s extra hours supplied his family with
food and clothing. Although he would later laugh at his younger self, the twenty-five-year-old Charles Ball hoped for his own and his family’s freedom. And he was not alone. In Maryland’s decaying tobacco economy, enslavers were allowing many African Americans to buy their freedom. The free constituted 5 percent of the state’s 111,000 people of African descent in 1790, and 22 percent of 145,000 by
1810. Maryland was becoming a “middle ground” between a slave society and a free one.
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When Ball reached the little town, he followed his master’s instructions, tying the team of oxen up by the store that Ballard owned there. His owner eventually appeared on horseback, went inside, and sat down to breakfast with the storekeeper. Soon Ballard emerged and told Ball to come in and
finish the leftovers.
As Ball sat down, he saw, through the wavy glass of the kitchen window, his owner talking emphatically with another white man.

Uneasily swallowing a last mouthful, Ball stood up and walked slowly out. He began hitching up the oxen, fumbling with the leather and rope. Suddenly he felt the presence of several people looming around him. He turned. As out of nowhere, a dozen white men had surrounded
him. Before his eyes had time to flicker from one hard face to the next, his head jerked back as someone seized him by the collar from behind. “You are my property now!” a voice shouted in Ball’s ear, and as Ball whipped his head around, he saw the man with whom Ballard had been whispering. “You must go with me to Georgia!” the stranger snarled.
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Ball stood in shock. White men grabbed and bent
his arms. Quickly someone knotted his hands together behind his back. Mr. You Are My Property Now abruptly shoved Ball forward, and he stumbled. The crowd giggled. The enslaved man was suddenly helpless, barely able to stay on his feet. Playing desperately for time, Ball asked to see his wife and children. “You can get another wife in Georgia,” countered his captor. Ball “felt incapable of weeping,”
and so, he later said, “in my despair I laughed loudly.”

Proslavery writers later sneered at reformers who depicted slave transactions as sentimental tragedies, as if to say: “They laugh when they are sold—how bad can it be?” In their daily lives, enslavers understood that a laugh could be the only way to keep alive the ability to express something, anything. But behind the laugh, the word “Georgia”
was racing through Ball’s mind. Every African American in Maryland knew that word. By 1805, almost every slave had a personal Georgia story. Ball’s was the only thing he remembered about his mother. In 1784, when Charles was four, his mother’s owner went broke as tobacco prices collapsed. Doing the only thing he could do to escape his debts, the man died. And when the day came for the sale
of the dead man’s property, Charles, his mother, and his older brothers and sisters stood in the yard in front of the old Calvert County, Maryland, house.

Ball’s father, who was owned by another man, was not allowed to leave work to see them before they were sold off. This was for safety’s sake. A man who had to see his son stand naked before buyers might do anything. But among those who showed
up were several men who had traveled a long way to Maryland. They came from South Carolina and Georgia. These men wanted to buy workers to work in the rice swamps and indigo fields and to fell the interior forests as the Catawba Indians retreated. Although by 1784 they hadn’t yet figured out what they would plant on that raw new upcountry soil,
they could pay a higher price than any Maryland buyer—what
local sellers called a “foreign price.” Several Carolina men divided up Ball and his brothers and sisters. A Georgia man bought his mother. Charles was too young to be worth carrying five hundred miles. A Maryland man bought the little boy and wrapped him in his own child’s spare gown. Putting Charles up in front of him, the buyer turned his horse’s head toward home. Before he could leave,
Charles’s mother came running up, weeping. She took Charles down into her arms, hugged him, and pleaded through tears for the man to buy them all. She only got a moment to make her case. Down came the Georgia man, running in his heavy boots, wading into her with his whip, beating her shoulders until she handed Charles over. The Georgia buyer dragged her screaming toward the yard. The crying boy
clung to the Maryland man, his new owner.
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Only about 5,000 enslaved people were made to walk down the old Indian-trading trails to South Carolina and Georgia during the 1780s. But their significance was greater than their numbers suggest. They were the trickle that predicted the flood. As tobacco prices plummeted in the 1780s, the prices of long-staple, or “Sea-Island,” cotton rose. Then, in
the early 1790s, Carolina and Georgia enslavers started to use a new machine called the “cotton gin.” That enabled the speedy processing of short-staple cotton, a hardier and more flexible crop that would grow in the backcountry where the long-staple variant would not. Suddenly enslavers knew what to plant in the Georgia-Carolina interior. Down south, enslaved people in Maryland and Virginia began
to whisper to each other, you had to eat cotton seed. To be sold there “was the worst form of punishment,” wrote a man who ran away after hearing that a “Georgia man” had bought him.
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These were rumors on the grapevine, not witness testimonies. Black people did not come back from Georgia. “Georgia-men” like John Springs did, and he brought so much gold for buying slaves that his bouncing saddlebags
bruised his horse’s sides. Georgia-men also brought information about opportunities that lay even farther southwest. Georgia, for instance, claimed the territory that eventually became the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Beginning in the late 1780s, state officials and northern investors launched multiple schemes to sell millions of southwestern acres to a variety of parties. Southwestern
and northeastern entrepreneurs were using the allure of investment in future commodity frontiers developed by enslaved labor, and in the process they created a national financial market for land speculation. The North American Land Company, owned by American financier Robert Morris, a signer of the Constitution, purchased 2 million acres of what was
at best infertile pine-barrens, and at worst
simply fictitious. However, even bigger schemes were to follow, and some speculated on land that was both rich and real—although the multiple claims of states, empires, and Native Americans contradicted each other. The land at stake was the 65 million acres that became Alabama and Mississippi. In the breezy shorthand of land speculators and con men, the region was called “the Yazoo,” after a river
in present-day Mississippi.
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