The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Sleep, however, was broken. Fedric remembered that “two or three times during the night . . . one of the overseers would call our names over, every one being obliged to wake up and answer.” The men were not chained together, and the enslavers still worried that some wouldn’t refuse the opportunity to escape—even with all the cards enslavers held over the migrants’ families back east of the Blue Ridge. A slave named Mary, for instance, ran away from Jonathan Stout of Kentucky after Stout got her to the Ohio River. She had fled with a mulatto man, and they crossed the river together and struck out into the Northwest Territory. The causes of her run for freedom were written on her skin, as her enslaver’s advertisement (in a newspaper called the Herald of Liberty) revealed: “She is stout made, with a scar over one of her eyes, and much scarified on her back.”24

  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.25

  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.26

  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.27

  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.28

  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.29

  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.30

  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.31

  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.32

  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.”33

  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.34

  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.35

  Within days, Gunn persuaded the legisl
ature 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.36