The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (80 page)

Afterword

THE CORPSE

1861–1937

L
IZA MCCALLUM WALKED SLOWLY
back from the lawyer’s office. Just a few days had passed since her second husband, Cade, had died. Now he lay in a whitewashed, above-ground New Orleans tomb. The February wind, cold for Louisiana, bit her seventy-three-year-old bones. It blew a freak flurry across the city of the dead, sweeping stray flakes like tiny sheets
of paper over the whitewashed wall and toward Liza’s slow walk along nearby Oak Street.

She was probably thinking about the cold mechanics of how to keep living. Since 1890, Cade had been receiving a pension from the federal government as a former soldier of the Union Army. To get it transferred to her, she had to prove they had been legally married. So now the lawyer would mail her deposition
to Washington, where bureaucrats would judge it. A clerk would eventually file the document with all the other paper that made up the McCallum case. Then he would put Bundle 11, Can 53367, back in its place between 53366 and 53368 on the shelf, in a warehouse full of shelves.

On those shelves still sleep the biographies of a million men who had defended the nation against those who had fought
for the slaveholders’ right to expand slavery. The bundles and cans also contain the stories of soldiers’ families, friends, fellow-soldiers, and communities. And yet they hold clouds of silence, too, fogs that seep from their pages and weigh on the dark air between and under the shelves. For instance, Liza’s own life story, which she told in the depositions she gave to support her claim to Cade’s
pension, also revealed that she simply couldn’t know all of Cade’s biography. Cade McCallum, Liza told the lawyer, had been born somewhere near the Atlantic. An army friend, who also submitted to an interview for the pension claim, had once said Cade was born in North Carolina, but all Liza remembered was
stories about catching fish from a boat. Maybe he had told her Maryland. Like each of the
millions of individuals whose biographies together composed the great epic of the expansion of slavery’s body, he could have explained to Liza how forced migration had destroyed the life into which he’d been born. He could have told her that story every night for decades. But when they both closed their eyes to sleep, no one but Cade—to borrow the words of another survivor of enslavement—could truly
“guess the awfulness of it” for him in his own life. Perhaps half of every story is forever unheard.
¹

Yet Liza knew some essential facts. She knew that in 1850, when Cade was already a grown man, his enslaver sent him to Richmond. Turned into money, shipped on to New Orleans, and sold as a hand, by 1861 Cade was toiling on the Iberville Parish slave labor camp of a woman whom he remembered as
“Madame Palang.” Liza, for her own part, was in 1861 the property and chief capital investment of a Boonville, Missouri, storekeeper. When news of Fort Sumter came, the Missouri state government immediately split in two halves, pro-Union and pro-Confederate. When the Union Army gained control over the area around St. Louis, antislavery writers in the northern press pushed President Lincoln to use
war powers for emancipation. Lincoln refused, announcing, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky,” and countermanding Union general John Frémont’s preemptive assertion of emancipation in Missouri—like Kentucky, a border state. But Liza’s enslaver already saw how (just as at Fortress Monroe in Virginia) the presence of Union troops at St. Louis could tempt enslaved African Americans
to escape. Hearing that a man named Daniel Berger was buying up slaves to take them south, he cashed Liza out for US dollars. By the late summer of 1861, she was “in the traders’ yard” in the town of Plaquemine, coincidentally in Iberville Parish.

By that time, Cade McCallum was still on Palang’s farm, though he was probably no longer picking cotton. In 1861 and 1862, southern cotton producers,
believing that their collective monopoly on the international cotton market gave them leverage that would sway European powers to their side if they induced a “cotton famine,” quit planting and selling their great staple. Most grew food crops for Confederate Armies instead. By early 1862, the number of bales received at Liverpool fell to 3 percent of the 1860 level. The sudden dearth of cotton
on the world market raised prices, ironically rendering cotton from other production zones price-competitive with the yield of enslaved hands for the first time in the nineteenth century. In West Africa and in Brazil, cotton production expanded dramatically. And in Egypt, farmers turned the rich soil of the Nile delta into a huge cotton plantation. They
took their earnings from 1861 to Cairo and
purchased slaves brought down the Nile from Sudan or across the desert in caravans from Darfur. One historian estimates that the slave trade to Egypt expanded from less than 5,000 per year in the 1850s to more than 20,000 by 1865.
²

Even before the end of 1861, the Confederacy lost control of its oldest cotton region, South Carolina’s Sea Islands. When Union ships bearing an invasion force arrived
off the coast south of Charleston in the summer of 1861, enslavers fled. Union forces occupied the coast around Hilton Head. African Americans, who made up over 90 percent of the local population, began talking about dividing the plantations where they had toiled for generations into individual farms. But federal and other northern policymakers feared that the South would follow the Jamaican
precedent. There, after Britain’s 1834 empire-wide emancipation, formerly enslaved people refused to participate in sugar-plantation labor, wrecking Jamaica’s commodity-export economy. To prevent a repetition of that process, as the 1862 crop season loomed, the Treasury Department claimed authority over the abandoned lands and rented them to northern entrepreneurs who proposed to reorganize and revive
cotton production on the Sea Islands.

Often the lessees’ agenda went beyond profit alone. For example, there was the group of Vermont entrepreneurs who assured the Treasury that their “New England skill and energy” could “direct these persons [to] grow cotton 25% cheaper when employed by fair wages than when compelled to do it as slaves.” Thus they could prove that enslavers not only were politically
imperialistic, destroying the rights of other white people, but also had operated an inefficient, backward system. Indeed, they believed, “so faforable [
sic
] an opportunity to prove this will probably not occur again for ages.” Should $6 per month prove insufficient motivation to convince newly liberated African Americans to enter the cotton wage-labor market, instead of growing corn and yams
to eat, the New Englanders also asked permission to use “the ball and chain” to enforce “authority.”
³

The experiment didn’t work, at least not on the terms of northern plantation lessees. They signed contracts to pay workers by the month, only to find that at the end of 1862, half of the cotton was rotting in the fields—cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed. Unwilling to
admit that wage labor might not be as efficient in all cases as slave, some experimented with paying pickers by the pound, withholding monthly wages until the end of the harvest, or haranguing the workers—telling them that if they failed to work well, “I shall report them to Massa Lincoln as too lazy to be free.” Yet neither Sea Island experiments nor distant continents came close
to spinning
Lancashire’s mills back up to speed. Cotton remained scarce on the world market, and cotton prices sky-high.
⁴

Across this particular continent, the Union and the Confederacy fought bigger and bloodier battles with almost every passing month. By late 1862, the two warring republics, one slave and the other still part-slave, had between them almost a million men under arms. The Union barely blunted
a southern invasion in a battle when 3,600 soldiers died and 17,000 were wounded on a single September day at Antietam Creek in western Maryland.

Most of the press focused on the eastern theater of war. Much of the nation’s historical memory continues to focus on the drama and the generals of that front of battle. Yet the war was also decided on the cotton frontier of the Mississippi Valley,
the theater where many of the fundamental dramas of American economic development had been played out. And the key event here occurred at the end of April 1862, when a Union fleet—succeeding where the British had failed—broke through the Mississippi River’s collar of forts and reached New Orleans. Confederate officials fled the South’s biggest city, and Union troops disembarked on the same levee where
Rachel and so many others had landed.

Soon after the Union captured New Orleans, “contrabands” began to leave nearby slave labor camps and stream into the army’s Camp Parapet just west of the city. Parapet’s Union commandant resisted enslavers’ entreaties for him to sort out the bondpeople of “loyal” masters and send them back. So many thousands of runaways thronged the facility that the army
soon built a second camp in St. Charles Parish at Bonnet Carré, not far from the 1811 slave revolt’s epicenter.

Since the beginning of the war, Lincoln had been working to convince politicians in the loyal border states to agree to gradual or compensated emancipation plans. His efforts already represented a more active support for freedom than those of all previous presidents combined. In April
1862, Congress passed a law freeing—in return for payments to enslavers totaling $1 million—all 3,000 people enslaved in the District of Columbia. Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky politicians refused to bend, holding out for permanent slavery. Yet after the Union won its narrow victory at Antietam, Lincoln felt that he could act more decisively against slavery. He released a document he’d written
months before.
⁵

The Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation would prove to be the most important executive order ever issued by an American president. It announced that as of January 1, 1863, any slaves in rebel-held areas would be free. The Proclamation wasn’t complete. It excluded the enslaved in Union-held
territory, which meant not only the border states, but also the western Virginia counties
that were forming themselves into a separate pro-Union state. Also exempted was southern Louisiana, where Union leaders were trying to create a “reconstructed” state government and didn’t want to antagonize local whites.

Yet the Emancipation Proclamation offered the possibility of freedom to enslaved people held in the giant prison that was the Confederacy. So its tide ran ahead of the blue-coated
army. Liza’s Iberville Parish enslaver tried to move Liza farther from the flood, to Texas. African Americans called this maneuver “refugeeing.” At any moment after early 1862, thousands of people were being refugeed all over the South to make it more difficult for them to trek to Union lines. But as the column of slaves was passing through Opelousas, Union raiders swooped down, scattering the
Confederate guards. Marching the newly liberated people back to the river, the soldiers put Liza and hundreds of liberated African Americans onto boats bound for New Orleans.

Because Liza had been in the Confederate zone, the Proclamation officially freed her. But after being disembarked on the New Orleans levee, she and the others were herded into the city’s cotton warehouses. “From there,”
Liza remembered, decades later, “we were all scattered about” to different Union-controlled plantations to do forced labor: “I went on the McCall place near Donaldsonville.” There she met a man named Thomas Faro. They started a relationship. They went out into the field every day, demonstrating to Union officials “a disposition to work” that entitled them to receive government rations. Others resisted,
and went hungry. This was not quite freedom. Still, enslaved people had been knocking on the portal of freedom for decades, in any way possible. Now, in a single moment, the Emancipation Proclamation had unbarred the door. Next, African Americans would force it all the way open.

That opportunity was even more tangible because, as Lincoln made emancipation the policy for a long-term war that could
only end with the fall of slavery’s empire, another policy shifted, too. Since the beginning of the war, free northern blacks had been pushing for enlistment. The federal government, afraid of the reaction of the border states, resisted. Policymakers knew that as much as many northern whites hated the idea of disunion, many feared even more that Frederick Douglass had been right when he’d insisted
that “let the black man get upon his person the brass letters US . . . a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
⁶