The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (74 page)

Typical among the entrepreneurs who helped to shape this new frontier was North Carolina enslaver Paul Cameron, who bought land in Greene County, Alabama, in the 1840s
and transferred several score of his hundreds of enslaved African Americans there. But this project disappointed Cameron,
though he was already one of the two wealthiest men in his home state. By the early 1850s, the Greene County labor camp was still yielding only 180 bales of cotton per year. Cameron began doodling slave names in the margins of letters: potential lineups for the project he now
had in mind. Land speculators got wind of his plans and started to write ingratiating letters. Cameron ultimately bought a huge Tunica County tract in the Mississippi Delta. In late 1856, he selected some of the younger adult slaves from Alabama and North Carolina and moved them to Tunica. They were supposed to build levees, clear trees, and make cotton under the kind of hard driving needed to
realize the ten-bales-per-hand yield he had heard about. Cameron hired an overseer named Jeter. Local reputation measured Jeter as “too tight” even for delta enslavers, and Cameron’s agent returned from the new site saying, “Youre slaves were very much dissatisfied when I left.”
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Soon Jeter drove them beyond their ability to endure. One day in the field, Jacob tackled Jeter and held him down.
The other men took his whip and tried to flog him. They knew they would suffer for it, but they could not endure his wild, unpredictable violence. But every overseer armed himself with multiple weapons before he left the house in the morning, and Jeter had a hidden knife to pull. He tried to stab Jacob, who fled to the woods. Jeter leapt up, ran to get his dogs, and soon had not only recaptured
Jacob but beaten the other rebels as well. “Complete subordination” had been achieved, reported Cameron’s business agents in Memphis.
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Yet the reality was that no matter how many times Jeter snapped his whip across arms shaking with malaria-induced chills, he never quite beat the Cameron people down. So once all the land was cleared and ditched and ready to yield ten bales to the hand, Cameron
dismissed Jeter and got another overseer. The boss now wanted each hand to reach 200 pounds of cotton picked per day. The new man tried to make it happen, but the enslaved pushed back. In the hard picking season of 1859—the best ever for enslavers, the most Lawler-like of all years yet, in which enslaved people gathered in 4.5 million bales of cotton—Lem and Betsy snuck out of the quarter in the
middle of the night, reached the river, and stole a canoe. A couple of weeks later, Cameron’s overseer, W. T. Lamb, got the message that they’d been caught in Arkansas. “After getting them,” Lamb wrote Cameron, “will manage Lem to the best of my ability (but not cruelly).” Two weeks passed before he let Lem out of the iron box and “put hobbles”—heavy iron ankle weights—on him. Lamb also hammered
a heavy iron staple into the exterior logs of his own house, and—this was in December—chained Lem to the staple all night. Lamb did suggest that Cameron could use the slave market to liquidate the
risk represented by this “troublesome negro that you might probably loose by being drowned or meet his death at some other way.” (Perhaps it was far too late; an appraiser had already advised that Lem’s
health was “so bad and he had been so badly cut with the whip that it was impossible to sell him for anything like his value.”)
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In a letter he wrote to his friend Paul Cameron, lawyer D. F. Caldwell said, “I often wish my slaves were in Africa.” In the early 1850s, men like Caldwell and Cameron were usually still Whigs. So were their sisters and wives. Wealthy southern women had favored the
Whigs for years, even though they couldn’t vote. From their politics, white men and women of this class came into a heritage of politely poor-mouthing the institution of slavery. But when he finished up his legal work on the day after Christmas in 1854, Caldwell wrote to Cameron that he was heading to Alabama to check on his cotton crop. To his wish that the people he owned were “returned” to Africa,
he added just one little caveat: “provided that I could realize two thirds of their value.” By the time Caldwell returned four weeks later he had sold one of his two Alabama labor camps and now had “an eye on the Mississippi lowgrounds.”
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Great investments, of course, demanded greater increases in productivity. Men like Paul Cameron could get them at arm’s reach, from the far remove of their
home state, tuning the whipping-machine by remote control. And as long as Cameron and his peers could make money by slavery, and would lose their wealth by its ending, they were going to make the kinds of moves that big wealth makes: investing, expanding operations and their margins, finding new sources of credit and new markets. Cameron, Caldwell, Ballard, and other megaplanters, already among the
wealthiest Americans, got wealthier still as their reinvigorated investments began to pay off. They invested so much more in captive human beings in the 1850s, in fact, that one can put aside any belief that men like Cameron or Caldwell truly feared (much less hoped for) an end to the enslavement of African Americans. They seemed, instead, increasingly confident in slavery’s future.
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To at least
some extent, the success of the richest also came at the expense of other whites—and not just by pushing subsistence farmers off land made marketable by the railroad, but also by raising barriers to entry in larger-scale cotton production through increased prices for hands, high-quality land, and credit. Over the course of the 1850s, cotton production and slave ownership became increasingly concentrated
among those who owned fifteen or more slaves.
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This skewing of white southerners’ benefits from slavery and of their investment in it inspired forebodings in enslavers, practical
political economists who depended on white unity. So did the continued southward shift of enslaved human beings. Perhaps the declining percentage of slaves and slave owners in the upper southern states would eventually
lead to border-state legislatures filled with non-slaveholders, who might decide to impose emancipation. Such anxieties inspired interest in economic diversification to create slave labor industries in Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, raising the in-state price of slaves and slowing out-migration. Other southwestern enslavers suggested that the South force Congress to reopen the international
slave trade in order to bring down the price of slaves and allow other whites to buy into the system.
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The Compromise of 1850 did not mean either peace or an end to pressure for the expansion of slavery. White southerners assumed that new territory was what they needed to ignite a new, inclusive economic boom. The only problem was that they couldn’t agree on where to focus their efforts. Many
wanted Cuba. Some talked of splitting California into two states. In the meantime, almost by happenstance, southern politicians lined up behind a different strategy, one based on Calhoun’s substantive-due-process insistence that slavery should be legal in all US territories. Their choice determined Ben Slaughter’s fate, and Richard’s as well.

BY 1853, WHEN FRANKLIN
Pierce took office as the fourteenth
president, South Carolina native James Gadsden had been promoting the idea of a transcontinental railroad from New Orleans to Los Angeles for five years. This line would spread slaveholding along its path, Gadsden hoped, for he believed that “Negro slavery, under educated and Intelligent masters,” has always “been the Pioneers and basis of the civilization of Savage countries,” and also
that “without an enduring & well regulated labor the agriculture of the Pacific will never be developed.” California’s state constitution prohibited slavery, but a group of politicians known as the “Chivalry” was pressing the state to reconsider. Indeed, despite existing law, about 1,000 African Americans were already enduring extremely well-regulated labor as slaves in the California goldfields.
Nor did the Chivalry plan to stop with converting California into a slave state. They plotted to acquire land on the other side of the Mexican border for a slaveholding settlement that would, Gadsden anticipated, “add Cotton corn and rice to the Gold export.” The Pierce administration joined in, sending Gadsden to Mexico City to negotiate for enough Mexican land to ensure that a southern railroad
route would run well within US territory, and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sent military surveying parties to map out this pathway for the iron horse.
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Gadsden arrived in the Mexican capital just as a gang of mercenary adventurers, recruited in San Francisco by a megalomaniacal Tennesseean named William Walker, invaded northwestern Mexico. Walker declared the independent republic of Lower
California. However, only sixty-two locals renounced their Mexican citizenship and swore allegiance to his flag. Soon Walker and his filibuster band heard that the Mexican army was on its way. They fled across the Sonoran Desert toward the United States. Eventually they staggered into Fort Yuma, “nearly in a naked and starving condition,” as one observer put it.
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Walker’s incursion soured Gadsden’s
chance to make the southern route the most obvious one. Mexican officials refused to sell more than a fraction of what Gadsden had wanted to acquire for both Baja cotton colonies and railroad. And though it seemed that all politicians believed that the federal government should help to build an iron link between the Mississippi Valley and the Pacific Coast, they all also realized that the
route chosen would create path-dependence by tying the West Coast into national markets along a specific geographic axis. The future orientation of the American political economy was in the balance. In spring 1853, congressional opponents blocked federal funding for a southern intercontinental railroad line. Advocates of the southern route now vowed to spoil the northern ones, which were being championed,
above all, by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois.
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Douglas’s Chicago landholdings would rise dramatically in value from federal commitment to a northern route, but success on a transcontinental scale would also dwarf the political value of all previous internal improvement projects. Political reporters called Douglas the “Little Giant” because, at five-foot-five, and built like a sweaty tank,
he managed with energy and invective to dominate a Congress filled with taller, better-looking, and better-born men. He only had to solve one legislative problem in order to unite a coalition behind one route—although he’d been trying to solve that problem since Polk was president.

Douglas had repeatedly proposed a bill to organize a federal territory west of Missouri and Iowa, because the railroad
needed to run through a territory and not an “unorganized” Indian land. But in each of the previous eight years, southerners had blocked him, because the creation of a free territory on Missouri’s western flank would leave that state an isolated slaveholding salient. Only 10 percent of Missouri’s white households still owned slaves. Working-class St. Louis whites usually voted against those
they considered to be representatives of slaveholder power. Yet many wealthy Missourians remained invested in slavery, such as US senator David Atchison, a Democrat
whose power base lay in the state’s slavery-dense western counties that locals called “Little Dixie.” He wanted to keep them from the dilemma reported by a Missourian who moved “to Mississippi on account of the Negroes,” because “he
was near the Illinois line and his negroes became too troublesome running over to Illinois.’
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The struggle over the western border was being waged by enslaved people long before 1853. Over the preceding decade, hundreds of African Americans—such as Elsa Hicks—had launched freedom suits in the St. Louis courts. In 1834, Hicks’s owner took her from Virginia to Wisconsin. Seven years later, he
moved her to St. Louis—back to slave territory as a slave. This was, her petition argued, “contrary to the Ordinance of 1787 passed by the Congress of the United States that had established the Northwest territory as free.” In her claim that residing in a free territory had changed her own status, Hicks had precedent on her side. By the 1840s, state and federal courts had repeatedly ruled that when
their owners took them to free territory with the intention of “relocating,” as opposed to mere “sojourning,” enslaved people became free. Both here, and in the possibility of a new free territory on Missouri’s western border—one that would more quickly dissolve Missouri slavery—a question arose that Calhoun’s idea of substantive due process also highlighted. Did the Constitution protect slave property
nowhere, or everywhere?
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By 1854, forced migrants Harriet Scott and her husband, Dred, had been waiting for years to hear how their own freedom suit would turn out. Born in Virginia in 1795, Dred was moved to an Alabama cotton camp, and then, in the 1820s, to Missouri. His enslavers sold him to an army doctor named Emerson, who then moved to present-day Minnesota—free territory by virtue of
the Missouri Compromise slavery-exclusion line. There Dred met Harriet Robinson. They married, she changed her name to Scott, and Emerson bought her. The doctor then took the couple by steamboat down the Mississippi River to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, where the doctor courted a visiting St. Louis woman named Eliza Irene Sanford. These two also married. The doctor died in 1843, after which Harriet, Dred,
and their children lived with the widow in St. Louis.

The Scotts’ experience of multiple migrations to slavery’s many frontiers was not unusual, and they knew of the dozens of lawsuits launched by enslaved people whose commodification had taken them through free territory. In fact, Harriet and Dred first asked Emerson’s widow, Eliza, to let them purchase their freedom, avoiding a freedom suit.
Instead, staking out a position as a Calhounian political activist, Eliza asserted her “right” to take property
wherever she pleased. When the Scotts responded by suing for their freedom, Eliza fought back with a commitment that surpassed her own specific financial stake in them. When she lost at one level of the judiciary, she pushed for an appeal to the next higher court. She was attempting
to impose a constitution that universalized slavery on her own household.
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