The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (8 page)

Image 1.1. “The First Cotton Gin,”
Harper’s Weekly
, December 18, 1869, p. 813. This image of the creation of one of the founding technologies of slavery’s post-Revolution expansion was drawn after the Civil War by an artist who—judging by the grinning workers and watching child—couldn’t decide whether slavery was businesslike or idyllic. Library of Congress.

There were two chief Yazoo
schemes. The first was launched in 1789, when it began to seem likely that Georgia would surrender the land south of Tennessee to the federal government. Indeed, the ratification of the US Constitution, and North Carolina’s relinquishment of Tennessee to the federal government, made this step seem imminent. To establish a claim to as much of this land as possible, financiers put together three
investment companies: the South Carolina Yazoo Company, the Tennessee Yazoo Company, and the Virginia Yazoo Company. The last was headed (on paper) by revolutionary
firebrand Patrick Henry. Each was, boosters claimed, a company of most “respectable” gentlemen, whose endeavors would open up a vast and “opulent” territory for the “honor” of the United States. The companies struck a deal with the
legislature of Georgia, acquiring 16 million acres for $200,000: twelve and a half cents an acre. And what a land it was rumored to be. Boosters claimed that it could produce all the plantation crops a North American reader could wish for in 1789. Indigo, rice, and sugarcane grew luxuriantly in the Yazoo of the mind: two crops a year! The most fertile soil in the world! A climate like that of classical
Greece! Land buyers would flock there! And, “supposing each person only to purchase one negro,” wrote one “Charleston,” as he called himself in a Philadelphia newspaper, this would eventually create “an immense opening for the African trade.” Charleston suggested that each planter of tobacco and indigo could trade slave-made crops for more slaves: “After buying one negro, the next year he can
buy two, and so be increasing on.”
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In 1789, investors’ expectations already marked off the Yazoo for slavery, and investors attracted by Yazoo expectations counted on slavery’s wealth-generating capacity to yoke together the interests of many parties across regional boundaries. People from the free states who might dislike the political ramifications of the Three-Fifths Compromise had few qualms
about pumping investment into a slave country; they expected to make money back with interest from land speculation, from financing and transporting slaves, and from the sale of commodities. Investors nationwide bought the bonds of these land companies and put their securities into circulation like paper money.
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The 1789 Yazoo sale eventually collapsed, but within six years, the Georgia legislators
found a second set of pigeons. Or perhaps it was the Georgia power-brokers who were the ones conned. Or, yet again, maybe the citizens of Georgia were being fleeced. In 1795, the Spanish government signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, surrendering its claim to the Yazoo lands. A newly formed company—the Georgia-Mississippi Land Company—moved quickly to make a new deal. The roster of the company’s
leaders included a justice of the US Supreme Court, a territorial governor, two congressmen, two senators (Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and James Gunn of Georgia), and Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who was on his way to becoming the richest man in the country. Since the federal government would surely soon extinguish Georgia’s western claims, speculators then would be dealing with a legislature
that would be more expensive to bribe than a state. So the company sent Senator Gunn swooping down on Augusta, the Georgia state capital, with satchels of cash.
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Within days, Gunn persuaded the legislature to sell 35 million acres of land between the Chattahoochee and the Mississippi Rivers for $500,000 in gold and silver. The Georgia-Mississippi Land Company immediately sold the titles to other
speculative entities, especially the Boston-based New England–Mississippi Land Company. That company, well provided with venture capital, broke up land into smaller parcels, which it then sold in the form of paper shares to investors. These Yazoo securities created a massive scramble in Boston, driving up the price of stock in the New England–Mississippi Land Company and creating paper fortunes.
But in Georgia, people were furious. James Jackson, Gunn’s fellow senator and political rival, pronounced the entire operation a fraud. Although he was a notorious land speculator in his own right, Jackson organized resentment of the Yazoo sale into a tidal wave at the next state legislative elections. In 1796, new representatives passed a statute overturning the previous legislature’s land grant.
They literally expunged by fire the record of sale from the 1795 session book of the legislature.
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The legal consequences of the sale itself remained unsettled. What was clear, however, was that people around the United States were willing to pour money onto slavery’s frontier. They anticipated that slave-made commodities would find a profitable market. So did migrant enslavers, and so they
demanded more slaves. In 1786, John Losson wrote to a Virginia planter whose Georgia land he managed. Crops were fine, he reported, impending war with the Indians promised more land acquisitions, and “likely negroes is the best trade for land that can be.”
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Indeed, access to large supplies of “surplus” slaves from the Chesapeake was the best form of currency for buying land that one could possess.
To get land in Wilkes County, Georgia, Virginian Edward Butler traded the promise of “three likely young negroes” who were still in Virginia. The buyer wished, Butler reminded himself in his diary, “one of the S[ai]d three negroes to be a girl or young wench.” Back in Virginia, Butler hired Thomas Wootton to transport thirteen more enslaved people down to Georgia. Wootton delivered three “likely
young negroes” to their purchaser and settled the rest on Butler’s thus-purchased land. In this kind of process, less wealthy white men, such as Wootton, perceived a growing opportunity for those who were willing to buy slaves in the Chesapeake and march them south for sale. Such white men began to strike out on their own in greater numbers with each year in the 1780s and 1790s. So the “Georgia-man,”
an all-too-real boogeyman, became a specific type of danger in the oral book of knowledge of enslaved African Americans.
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Thus, as he sat mute and bound in the bow of a rowboat that had been hired to take him across the Patuxent River from Ballard’s Landing, Charles Ball already knew his fate. The way enslaved African Americans talked about “Georgia” and “Georgia-men” was their way of describing
the new economic, social, and political realities that were destroying the world they had built in the Chesapeake. Yet twenty years of fearing the Georgia-men did not make the instantaneous demolition of his family and future any easier. And while he had always feared the slave trade, Ball was beginning to realize that the Georgia-man who faced him across the body of the sweating oarsman was
building a machine even more cunning than he had imagined.

Now, as they neared the other side, Ball saw a group of African Americans huddled on the bank. They were his fifty-one fellow captives. Nineteen women were linked together by a rope tied to the cord halters that encircled their necks. Thirty-two men were in a different situation, and Ball was about to be joined to them. A blacksmith waited
with iron for him: iron collar, manacles, chains. The buyer cut loose the tight cords around Ball’s wrists. Ball stood “indifferent” to his “fate,” as he later remembered, while the two white men fitted the collar on his neck and slid the hasp of an open brass padlock through a latch in the front. Then they passed a heavy chain inside of the curve of metal and pushed the hasp and the body of
the padlock together. Click.

The same heavy iron stringer now joined Ball to the other thirty-two men, sliding like fish strung through the gills. Then, for the last step in the process, the blacksmith took two bands of iron, put them around Ball’s wrists, and pounded down bolts to fasten the manacles. He attached the manacle on Ball’s right wrist by a short chain to the left manacle of the next
man on the neck chain. The two of them would have to walk in step and next to each other. Ball was now becoming one moving part of something called a “coffle,” an African term derived from the Arabic word
cafila
: a chained slave caravan. The hammer pounded hard, and the bolt pinched the wrist of Ball’s chainmate, who began to cry. Ball sat stoically, but on the inside, his emotions ran just as
wild. His mind raced uncontrolled, from “the suffering that awaited” him in a place that he believed had long since killed his mother to even more despairing internal sentences:
I wish I had never been born. I want to die. I cannot even kill myself, because of these chains
.
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They waited on the bank. The blacksmith yawned. By the time a flat-bottomed boat approached the bank, Ball’s heart had
stopped racing. “I concluded,” he said as an old man, telescoping a recovery in reality more painfully won, “that as things could not become worse—and as the life of
man is but a continued round of changes, they must, of necessity, take a turn in my favor at some future day. I found relief in this vague and indefinite hope.”

In the boat was the returning Georgia-man, who ordered them all on board.
The women—Ball now noticed that a couple of them were obviously pregnant—and the sixteen pairs of men, plus one, clambered in with a chorus of clinking. The scow set off toward the south bank of the Patuxent. The slave rowers pulled. Probably they didn’t sing this song that one white traveler heard Chesapeake watermen chanting: “Going away to Georgia, ho, heave, O! / Massa sell poor negro, ho,
heave, O! / Leave poor wife and children, ho, heave, O!”
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A man or woman who discovered that he was being taken south might be desperate enough to do anything. Some ran. Some fought like tigers. William Grimes tried to break his own leg with an axe. No wonder sellers and buyers schemed to take men like Charles Ball unawares. And once buyers bought, no wonder they bolted fetters on men and ran
links of iron through padlocks. Men could march together carrying their chains. But there was no way that they could all run together. There was no way they could leap off a boat and swim to shore, no way thirty-three men hauling one thousand pounds of iron could hide silent in the woods. The coffle-chains enabled Georgia-men to turn feet against hearts, to make enslaved people work directly against
their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope.
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When the scow scraped bottom in the shallows on the other side of the river, and the people awkwardly staggered out, the Georgia-man led them up the bank and onto a road that they walked until evening fell, heading southwest. They stopped at a rough tavern. The proprietor put them in one large room. Fifty-two pairs
of mostly manacled hands managed to share a large pot of cornmeal mush before it was too dark to see.

That night, Ball, nestled between the two men chained closest to him, lay awake for many hours. When at last he slept, his son came to him. In Ball’s dream the little boy tried to break the chain between his father’s manacles to set his father’s hands free, so that he could fix the boy’s broken
world. But the iron held. Charles’s son faded. Then Charles’s grandfather appeared. Born in Africa in the 1720s, he’d been kidnapped as a teenager, and sold to men who brought him across the salt water to Maryland. There they renamed him, and by the time Charles had known him, “Old Ben” was gray with half a century in slavery. Ben never surrendered his own version of Islam, or his contempt for
either the enslavers or the enslaved people who behaved submissively. Charles’s father, in contrast, had tried to play a less defiant part. But after the
1785 sale of his wife and children, the father changed. He spent his free time at Old Ben’s hut, talking about Africa and the wrongs of slavery. The owner grew worried that the younger man would run away. He arranged a posse to help seize Charles’s
father for a Georgia trader. But Old Ben overheard two white men talking about the plan. He crossed three miles of woods in the dark to Charles’s father’s cabin. Handing his son a bag of dried corn and a jug of cider, Ben sent him off toward Pennsylvania. No one in Calvert County ever heard from Charles’s father again.

Ben would have come for his grandson, too. But the old man was dead ten years
gone, and these locks and chains would have defeated even his survivor’s cunning. When the sun came up, it found Ball stumbling forward, trying to keep time with the rest of the coffle.

In the days to come, Ball and the other men gigged on the Georgia-man’s line marched steadily southwest, covering ten to twenty miles a day. The pregnant women complained desperately. The Georgia-man rode on.
After crossing the Potomac, he moved Ball, who was physically the strongest of the men, from the middle of the chain and attached his padlocked collar to the first iron link. With Ball setting a faster pace, the two sets of double lines of people hurried down the high road, a dirt line in the Virginia grain fields that today lies under the track of US Highway 301.

Ball’s emotions continued to
oscillate. Yet slowly he brought his interior more in line with the exterior face that men in coffles tried to wear. “Time did not reconcile me to my chains,” Ball recalled, but “it made me familiar with them.” Familiar indeed—at night, as everyone else slept, Ball crawled among his fellow prisoners, handling each link, looking for the weak one. He found nothing. But sometimes slave traders were
careless—like the ones who were taking Jack Neal down the Ohio River in 1801. They had shackled him to the side of the boat, but one night Neal worked loose the staple that fastened iron chain to wood. He crept along the deck to his sleeping captor, slipped the white man’s loaded pistol from his pocket, and blew the man’s brains out. Neal then went to the far end of the boat, where another white man
was steering, and announced, “Damn you, it was your time once but it is mine now.”