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.”37
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.38
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.39
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!”40
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.41
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.
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p; 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.”
Neal was recaptured on the Ohio shore and executed. Others had already tried the same thing, such as the enslaved men who in autumn 1799 killed a Georgia-man named Speers in North Carolina. He’d spent $9,000 buying people in northern Virginia—money embezzled from the Georgia state treasury by a legislator, as it turned out. If Speers had brought the men all the way to the end of the trail and sold them, perhaps the money could’ve been replaced, and no one would have been the wiser. But he forgot to close a lock one night, and as a newspaper reported, “the negroes rose and cut the throat of Mr. Speers, and of another man who accompanied him.” Ten slaves were killed in the course of local authorities’ attempts to recapture them.42
Every enslaved prisoner wanted to “rise” at one point or another. Properly closed locks disabled that option. Cuffs bound hands, preventing attack or defense. Chains on men also made it harder for women to resist. Isolated from male allies, individual women were vulnerable. One night at a tavern in Virginia’s Greenbrier County, a traveler watched as a group of traders put a coffle of people in one room. Then, wrote the traveler, each white man “took a female from the drove to lodge with him, as is the common practice.” Ten-year-old enslaved migrant John Brown saw slave trader Starling Finney and his assistants gang-rape a young woman in a wagon by a South Carolina road. The other women wept. The chained men sat silently.43
Chains enabled another kind of violence to be done as well. Chains saved whites from worrying about placating this one’s mother, or buying that one’s child. Once the enslaved men were in the coffle, they weren’t getting away unless they found a broken link. For five hundred miles, no one had to call names at night to ensure they hadn’t run away.
Men of the chain couldn’t act as individuals; nor could they act as a collective, except by moving forward in one direction. Even this took some learning. Stumble, and one dragged someone else lurching down by the padlock dangling from his throat. Many bruised legs and bruised tempers later, they would become one long file moving at the same speed, the same rhythm, no longer swinging linked hands in the wrong direction.
Of course, though they became a unit, they were not completely united. Relationships between the enslaved could play out as conflict, or alliance, or both. People were angry, depressed, despairing, sick of each other’s smell and the noises they made, how they walked too fast or slow, how no one could even piss or shit by themselves. At night, lying too close, raw wrists and sore feet aching, men in chains or women in ropes argued, pushed, tried to enforce their wills. John Parker, chained in the coffle as a preteen, remembered a weaker boy named Jeff who was bullied until John came to his aid, helping him stand up against a big teenager who was taking food from the younger children.44
None of that mattered to the Georgia-man as long as the chain kept moving, and Ball led the file down through Virginia into North Carolina at a steady pace. As the days wore on, the men, who were never out of the chains, grew dirtier and dirtier. Lice hopped from scalp to scalp at night. Black-and-red lines of scabs bordered the manacles. No matter: The Georgia-man would let the people clean themselves before they got to market. In the meantime, the men were the propellant for the coffle-chain, which was more than a tool, more than mere metal. It was a machine. Its iron links and bands forced the black people inside them to do exactly what entrepreneurial enslavers, and investors far distant from slavery’s frontier, needed them to do in order to turn a $300 Maryland or Virginia purchase into a $600 Georgia sale.
Image 1.2. Coffle scene, from Anonymous, The Suppressed Book About Slavery (New York, 1864), facing p. 49. The coffles marched south and west, with men linked together by a long chain, manacled hands, and women following them, under guard. Fiddles, songs, and whiskey were typical expedients to keep the chain moving forward.
At some point after they crossed the Potomac, Ball decided that as long as he was in the coffle, he could only do two things. The first was to carry the chain forward like a pair of obedient, disembodied feet. That, of course, benefited the Georgia-man, and a whole array of slave-sellers, slave-buyers, and financers-of-the-trade, while carrying him farther from home and family, and he had to do it whether he wanted to or not. The second thing, unlike the first, was something he could choose whether to do or not do. Charles decided to learn about his path, because understanding the path might eventually be for his own benefit. So he carefully watched the dirt roads of Virginia and North Carolina pass beneath his feet. He whispered the names of rivers as he lay in irons at night. He noted how far the cornfields had gone toward making ears as May crawled toward June. And he tried to draw out the grim man who sat on the horse clop-clopping beside the line. Day after day, Ball emitted a stream of exploratory chatter at the Georgia-man’s ears, blathering on about Maryland customs, growing tobacco, and his time in the Navy Yard.
Enslaved people trained themselves all their lives in the art of discovering information from white people. But Ball couldn’t pry loose even the name of the man who played this role of “Georgia-man.” That role already did not have the best reputation among white folks in Virginia and Maryland. Some resented the way coffles, driven right through town, put the most unpleasant parts of slavery right in their faces. Others resented the embarrassment the traders could inflict. In the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent, John Adams, and the federal government shifted to the District of Columbia—and so the heart of the United States moved to the Chesapeake. Clanking chains in the capital of a republic founded on the inalienable right to liberty became an embarrassment, in particular, to Virginia’s political leaders. Northern Federalist newspapers complained that Jefferson had been elected on the strength of electoral votes generated by the three-fifths clause of the Constitution—claiming, in other words, that, Virginia’s power came not from championing liberty, but from enslaving human beings.45
Sometimes both Georgia-men and the enslaved intentionally irritated that particular sting. A few years after Ball was herded south, a slave trader marched a coffle past the US Capitol just as a gaggle of congressmen took a cigar break on the front steps. One of the captive men raised his manacles and mockingly sang “Hail Columbia,” a popular patriotic song. Another such occasion relied for its emotional punch not on the sarcasm of captives but on the brashness of captors. Jesse Torrey, a Philadelphia physician, was visiting the Capitol when he saw a coffle pass by in chains. A passer-by explained that the white “drivers” of the caravan were “Georgy-men.” The doctor walked up to one and inquired (in what must have been an accusatory tone), “Have you not enough such people in that country yet?” “Not quite yet,” was the sneering reply.46
Another incident even became something of a media scandal. In the early nineteenth century, Americans were redefining the role of women, arguing that mothers needed to teach their sons the principles of self-sacrifice if the young men were to grow up to be virtuous citizens of the young republic. In December 1815, an enslaved woman named Anna dramatized the way in which slavery’s expansion did not allow her to do that. Sold to a Georgia-man, separated from her husband and all but two of her children, she had been locked in a third-floor room at George Miller�
��s tavern on F Street in Washington, DC. Squeezing through a garret window, she was either trying to escape or jumping from despair. Whichever it was, gravity took over and Anna fell twenty-five feet, breaking her spine and both arms. Dragged into a bed, she said before dying, “I am sorry now that I did it, they have carried my children off with ‘em to Carolina.”47
Image 1.3. “Hail Columbia!! View of the Capitol at Washington,” illustration from Theodore Weld, American Slavery As It Is (New York, 1839). Though published in 1839, this image attempts to depict an incident that was first reported in the late 1810s. A coffle of enslaved people marching through Washington, DC, in plain view of congressmen taking a cigar break on the Capitol steps, saluted those representatives of a free people with an ironic rendition of the patriotic American song “Hail Columbia.”
Jefferson and his allies wanted to neutralize discussion of slavery. With the help of northerners, they were eventually able to do just that. Jefferson and his allies had fought their Federalist opponents over many things in the 1790s: the French Revolution; the Federalists’ perceived desire to centralize power in the federal government; whether political opposition to the president was treason. But they almost never fought over slavery. During the 1800 election, a few northern Federalists charged Jefferson with keeping a “harem” of enslaved lovers at Monticello, but southern Federalists—and most northern ones—kept the slavery question sheathed. They did so because of interest. Slavery’s expansion was one topic in which political leaders from all sides could find common interest. In Congress, prominent southern Federalists, led by Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, blocked Georgia’s 1796 attempt to repeal the Yazoo sale. Together with northern advocates for financial capital, such as Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton, Harper insisted that a contract was a contract, and a sale was final. Both investors and the cause of developing the southwestern United States should be protected from a legislature elected by popular demagoguery and out to overturn a legal transaction.48
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 6