The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (82 page)

Angered by southern
whites’ unwillingness to admit that they had lost the verdict of war, northern Republicans in Congress, led by a faction called the “Radicals,” took control of Reconstruction. Overriding Johnson’s objections, they refused to seat the newly elected southern representatives and senators. They passed a series of bills that took the vote away from most ex-Confederate officers, and they extended the
power of the army and the “Freedman’s Bureau” to impose new labor systems on the cotton South. The Freedman’s Bureau sent agents into southern counties to mediate between land-owning, cash-poor planters and the formerly enslaved. African Americans wanted, above all, to avoid anything like the pushing-system or the whipping-machine: no more driver’s lash, no weighing-up and recording, nothing that
resembled that. They wanted mothers to have a chance to care for their babies and tend their gardens. They wanted men to be able to plow without other men riding behind them with guns on their hips. They wanted children to go to school instead of doing field work all year. And African Americans throughout the South usually wanted their own land, on which they could grow subsistence crops and live
as what, in another country, we would call independent peasant farmers.

The freedpeople’s dream of land went largely unfulfilled. The US economy still needed the overseas earnings generated by the South’s power in
the world cotton market. Therefore, just as had been presaged in South Carolina and Louisiana during the early years of the war, neither postwar federal policymakers nor white landowners
were interested in seeing the freedpeople become landowning small farmers. Instead, Freedman’s Bureau agents—including many with “Radical” political views—forced formerly enslaved people and former enslavers to sign and keep wage-labor contracts for 1866. Over the next few years, a compromise system emerged across the South: various permutations of “sharecropping,” which meant that African-American
households worked individual plots of land as tenants, in exchange for paying the landlord a share of the cotton crop they grew. Landowners and local store owners advanced goods on credit to the sharecroppers, but at high interest rates, often trapping freedpeople in permanent debt. For sharecroppers, however, there was no scale, no chalk, and no whip at the end of the day. And that was no
small thing.
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Yet the Radicals also convinced Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which by making former slaves equal citizens of a multiracial republic did what no other postslavery settlement had ever done. It wrote into the Constitution a nationwide standard of birthright citizenship that would eventually enable future generations—descendants of slaves and immigrants alike—to undermine
racial and cultural supremacy. Although the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t extend the vote to women, Congress, state constitutional conventions, and the press all debated the possibility. In that heady postwar time of rewriting the basic bargains of American political economy, anything seemed possible.
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In the short term, African-American voting permitted male former slaves to make policy in state
legislative halls where once deals had been brokered to securitize their own blood and seed. African Americans represented southern states in the same Congress where compromises had formerly kept the door open for more slave trades, more first days in the cotton field, more stained dirt by the gin stand. Between 1866 and the early 1870s, Reconstruction in the South seemed like it might produce
a radically transformed society. White resistance was brutal and widespread, but the national commitment to emancipation kept federal troops stationed in the South. But after 1873, when the industrial economy fell into a deep depression, white America’s conscience wavered. Consumed by labor disputes in the North, Republican leaders were increasingly unlikely to see the free laborers of the South
as people with whom they shared interests.

African Americans were watching the promise of emancipation, the heady days of eagles on brass buttons and unions under the flag, slowly begin to sag
and fade—like Thomas Faro and Liza, who moved to New Orleans after the war. She built up a business selling food to travelers on steamboats, and she bore Thomas two children. They struggled on to make free
lives, but the world turned, compounding the universal tragedies of human life, amplifying failures and speeding hope’s decay.

Thomas died in the 1870s during a smallpox epidemic that swept through black Louisiana. Liza then moved to St. John the Baptist Parish and got a steady job working on the plantation of John Webb. She met Cade McCallum, who was a supervisor there. The war had battered
his body, and he could only do hard labor sporadically, but he drew the workers’ respect. One day in the late 1870s, Cade’s old army brother Amos Gale came to see him, at “rice-cutting time.” He met Liza, who had moved herself and her two children in with Cade. Although there was nothing to eat in the house but “a dried alligator hanging up there,” Cade and Liza cut it down, cleaned it, and shared
it with Amos.

Outside the cabin, the dark was coming down. Across the South, night riders went out—hooded in white, burning, raping, beating, and killing. They stole one state’s elections after another. They torched the houses of black folks bold enough to buy land, or even bold enough to paint their own house, for that matter. They rode to Washington and made deals. To resolve the disputed presidential
election of 1876, northern Republicans made a corrupt bargain with the South’s Democratic rulers to let the latter have “home rule.” The “Redeemers,” as the white southern Democrats called themselves, changed the laws to roll back as much of Reconstruction as they could. By 1900, they had taken away the vote from most black men, and many of the less reliable white men as well. They also
lowered the boom of segregation—“Jim Crow,” as people would come to call it—an array of petty and brutal rules. This forbade African Americans from, for instance, drinking from the same water fountains as whites, eating at the same restaurants, and attending the same schools—that is, from enjoying the civil right to move in public spaces as equals or have access to the same educational and economic
opportunities as whites.

Southern whites built monuments to the defeated generals of their war for slavery, memorialized the old days of the plantation, and wrote histories that insisted that the purpose of the war had been to defend their political rights against an oppressive state. They were so successful at the last goal that they eventually convinced a majority of white Americans, including
most historians, that slavery had been benign and that “states’ rights” had been the cause of the Civil War. Yet the kingdom that the South’s white lords had regained
was a starved one. They themselves were much poorer than they had once been. Their violence was more self-destructive, and less profitable.

Even the new story about the old past was a kind of fool’s gold. The valorization of causes
lost, the delusional praising of fathers’ treason—these things did not make one better adapted to the modern world. White entrepreneurs vigorously promoted a “New South.” But the region’s economic decisionmakers struggled to adapt to two postslavery realities. First, neither African Americans nor anyone else would do hand labor at the breakneck, soul-scarring pace of the whipping-machine. Many
white yeoman farmers, impoverished by war and unable to pay debts or taxes, lost their land and became tenants and sharecroppers themselves. The total number of bales produced in the United States didn’t surpass 1859’s peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cotton
pickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day.
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Second, both because productivity was now declining instead of rising, and because of the political-economic isolation that
the South’s white rulers inflicted upon their region in order to protect white power, the South sank into subordinate, colonial status within the national economy. Although many southerners wanted to develop a more diverse modern economy that went beyond cotton, for nearly a century after emancipation they failed to do so. Despite constant attempts to industrialize, the South could only offer natural
resources and poverty-stricken laborers. It did not have enough local capital, whether of the financial or the well-educated human kind, and it could not develop it. Although a textile industry sprang up in the piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, and an iron and coal industry in Alabama, they offered mostly low-wage jobs. Non-textile industries suffered in the competition with more heavily
capitalized northern industries, which literally rigged the rules—such as the price structures that corporations used to ensure that Pittsburgh’s steel would cost less than Birmingham’s. Extractive industries, including coal mining and timber, devastated the landscape and depended on workforces oppressed with shocking violence. The continued small size and poverty of the nonagricultural working
class also limited urban and middle-class development. Thus, in the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of both black and white southerners were poor and worked on farms—often farms that they did not own.
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LIZA WAS IN HER
forties when she and Cade got together. Sarah to his Abraham, she still bore two children by him. In 1882, the couple finally got officially married. A few
years later they moved to New Orleans. In 1890, sixty-eight years old, he first applied for an invalid pension from the federal government, which had committed itself to support old soldiers and their widows after the soldiers died. On his application he listed many ailments. Some were typical of old age. Some were especially likely among those who had suffered through forced migration, hard labor,
and soldier’s service in mud and rain: intestinal disorders, old injuries, a fluttering heart that left him exhausted. After sixteen years in the Carrolton neighborhood, he died. It was February 1906. The family laid him out in his blue uniform. The old veterans from the neighborhood came by to pay their respects, and they slowly walked him to his tomb.

On that cold day as Liza walked back from
the cemetery to the house where she would now have to live with her son and his family, not only was Cade McCallum lying dead in his tomb; what was worse was that he seemed to have been defeated, and Liza, too. Slavery was gone, but Jim Crow was alive. Almost all southern African Americans were shut out of the ballot box and the political power it could yield. Segregated public accommodations and
schools promised that they and their descendants would be second-class citizens for the foreseeable future. The young people who took the train north to Chicago and New York found that even outside of the South, they faced segregated workplaces and neighborhoods, a door of opportunity only intermittently and partially open.

But the body of African America, stretched, and chained, and stretched
again, the body whose tongue and spirit and blood had developed alongside slavery’s expansion, was still alive. For the history in which Cade and Liza and millions of others had been caught up, the history that had been stolen from them and which people were always trying to steal from them, was not over, and in many ways, still is not. Slavery and its expansion had built enduring patterns of poverty
and exploitation. This legacy was certainly crystal clear in Liza’s early twentieth-century South. African-American households had virtually no wealth, for instance, while a substantial portion of the wealth held by white households, even after emancipation, could be traced to revenue generated by enslaved labor and financing leveraged out of their bodies before 1861.

More broadly, the history
of feet and heads, hands, tongues, breath, seed, blood, and backs and arms had made all of African America, the United States, and the modern world. The shaping began in the 1780s. The possibility of profit from forced migration kept the United States together through the lean years after the American Revolution. The Constitution’s compromises built a union on slavery and embedded its expansion—some
thought temporarily, some thought permanently—in the fabric of the American political economy. For the three score and ten years that followed, a full biblical lifespan, enslaved people were marched and shipped south and west. African Americans’ hands and creativity, turned against themselves and even against each other at times, made commodities and built an archipelago of slave labor camps,
a literal organism of economic production.