The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Turning this wheel of cause and effect were moving feet—those of Charles Ball, of the thirty-two other men to whom he was connected, of the nineteen women roped together behind them, and others still growing toward sellable height. From old Maryland and Virginia, which were crumbling beneath the glossy veneers offered to the world by their politicians, the coffle-chains and the people who toted them clanked across hundreds of miles into a new world where everything was flux and frolick. Forced migration and the expansion of slavery became a seemingly permanent and inevitable element of the mutually-agreed-to structure of lies that, defended by the agile legal realism of Marshall and the myth of diffusion, made the nation. To put the machine in motion, Washington could now rely on a set of chaining experts, Georgia-men who took the financial and physical and status risks of moving enslaved people. Charles Ball could now be moved more easily in every sense, with less political, ideological, legal, and personal friction.

  Thus the coffle chained the early American republic together. In South Carolina, Charles Ball’s neck and hands were finally freed of the coffle’s chains, but only so his owner could finish the chain’s work of converting Charles and the other remaining Maryland slaves into market goods. Because they had left sweat from pores and pus from blisters on the road, and had drawn down their meager stores of body fat, the Georgia-man rested them for twenty days at a property owned by a cotton farmer. Ball and his companions were given butter to eat so they would become sleek and “fat.” The lice were driven from their bodies and clothes by repeated washing. And soon, white people began to come and examine them, ask them questions, speculate on their bodies. Here, the Georgia-man was among people who respected him, calling him “merchant” instead of “negro driver” or “Georgia trader.” Here he was needed, and not as the scapegoat for other enslavers’ sins. He even let his name drop from his tight lips: “My name is M’Giffin, sir,” he said in response to a prospective buyer’s inquiry.56

  After two weeks, M’Giffin moved the drove of slaves south into Columbia. There, on the Fourth of July, the local jailor auctioned them off in front of a crowd of hundreds who had just finished eating a fine banquet and listening to a patriotic speech. The sale eventually narrowed down to the last three, the stoutest men, including Ball. The jailor now theatrically announced that if M’Giffin did not get $600 for each man, he would take them to Georgia and sell them there. An “elderly gentleman” announced that he would pay that amount for “the carpenter.” Ball was not really a carpenter, but many lies were told on that day that celebrated freedom from tyranny: not one of the slaves for sale had ever run away, or stolen from their masters, or been whipped. Each was sold by a fine Maryland or Virginia gentleman who had sadly fallen into debt.

  The other whites deferred to this “elderly man.” Ball pegged him as a major slave-owner. He was actually one Wade Hampton, among other things a major Yazoo investor. Having inherited rice plantation wealth in the low country, Hampton was in the process of shifting his slaves into cotton—for now, on acres he owned near Columbia, South Carolina. Later, his quest for wider vistas would lead him into Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana endeavors. Today, however, Hampton was drinking, and celebrating the Fourth. He told Charles to find a corner of a stable and go to sleep. The next day, they would make the trip to Hampton’s nearby property—one last step of the journey that Ball’s feet had made from the old to the new.

  2

  HEADS

  1791–1815

  THE LOGS BOBBED AROUND the pilings of the customhouse. The hut stood on legs, a chicken up to its drumsticks in shallow water, besieged by a continent’s stew. Anything that could last a month in water ended up down here at the “Balize,” the flats at the Mississippi’s mouth: bark; sticks; whole trees, if they didn’t get hung up along a thousand miles of snags. Deer and drowned wild cattle didn’t make it; catfish and turtles ate them long before they could come this far. The heaviest load of all flowed under the rippling corduroy of forest waste: a mighty subsurface plume of water, fresh but not sweet, sagging with its load. Iron from the far north, silver from Rocky Mountain lodes, and most of all, dirt. Humus rinsed from the banks of ten thousand forest tributaries, tumbled past Jefferson’s would-be sixteen states, stirred with black soil from the delta. For an eon the river had piled up silt, marching its outlet southward on its own. But for the past decade, the runoff slurry had been thickening. Upriver, someone was plowing, planting, harvesting.

  It was the beginning of 1807. Looking over the side of the Adventine, as it bobbed at anchor in the ship channel, was a short, dark man. He had been the only slave on board since Charleston. The crew paid him no mind. He was neither a threat nor the main cargo. He still didn’t understand what they said, and they did not understand him. But they no longer feared that he’d jump, like the Africans they’d wrestled back over the rails on Atlantic crossings. There were two startling things about him. One was that when he slept, he always curled up in the same position. The other was that he wore an iron collar around his neck, inscribed with the words, “Property of Hugh Young.”1

  Behind his eyes, he remembered. Coming from Africa to South Carolina, he had gone through what 10 million other forced migrants to the New World had already survived: captured or kidnapped, or simply bought, marched to the coast, sold by strange men to even stranger men (some milky-colored, some angry red, some tan with dark curly hair). Out of the darkness of the dungeon in chains, hand and foot, one of a whole stick of African men bundled by the white sailors into the big coastal canoe. Feeling the salt spray as it flushed over the gunwales. They plunged through rough waves to a floating structure and were hauled on board the Rhode Island ship. Herded below with shoves, they took dainty, quick steps to stay balanced under a four-foot ceiling, too short for even these men, who barely averaged five feet. The air stank from men already curled on the floor in front of them. Their predicament showed the new arrivals how to lie: spoon-fashion, on the left. Easier on the heart that way, captains believed.

  In 1787, the Constitutional Convention had allowed the trade to go on. In the twenty years since, citizens of the new nation had dragged 100,000 more people from the African coast. Always, some fought. They clung to the doorposts of the dungeons and barracoons. They threw themselves in chained groups over the gunwales of the boats to drown together in the surf. They grabbed at the clubs the sailors used to beat them down onto the slave deck. They rushed the barricade when the crew let them out for exercise. Ten percent of Atlantic slave-trade voyages experienced major rebellions. But resistance almost always failed. Sailors fired grapeshot cannon into surging masses of desperate men and women in the midships. The scuppers ran with blood. The sharks ate.2

  Now the man remembered how he had lain in vomit and shit and piss. How he had eaten from the bucket they brought. He heard the women on the other deck crying for a dying baby or sister; heard them fight as the sailors took them into the crew’s quarters one by one, to be raped. He saw them drag out men who had gone stiff and grinning. The angel’s fingers clawed at him, too. He puked up everything down to the bile, barely survived the dysentery that emptied out a hundred, sweated from cargo fevers. He panted, waiting for the water pail’s ladle. He could’ve died like millions of others. But he lived on.

  Perhaps he was lucky. At last the ship dropped anchor in Charleston harbor. Then, they sold him to a New Orleans merchant’s local agent, who locked him into the iron collar that bore the merchant’s name. Another white man walked him up East Bay Street toward the Adventine’s dock. Signs creaked in the wind that brought the stench of his old ship from Gadsden’s Wharf. The buzzards lighting and flapping on the other side of the Cooper River knew where the harbor current piled bodies against the sandbar. That year alone, seven hundred Africans died on the twenty-five different ships that spent time waiting there in quarantine.3

  Now, after another voyage, the rowboat eased up to the Adventine’s hull. The white customs officer scrambled up the rope ladder. The man in the iron
collar watched everything. He could tell that the slave who rested on the oars had gone through dark waters, too. Behind unblinking eyes, the oarsman gave back the collared man’s gaze, and remembered the feel of the slave deck’s sweating wood pressing against his ritually scarred cheek.

  Yet this new arrival’s experience would be different. Slavery itself was changing from the first story, the sugar-island model that had shaped everything in the New World to this point. This man would carry his collar not to an island or to an isolated belt of settlements clinging to the coast. He was headed into a vast continent. Behind the mists on the mud flats, enslavement would find no geographical limit, only political ones—and enslavers had structured politics to their advantage. Citizens, not colonials, would own him. Owners’ property interests—owners who got to vote and run for office and govern—would drive decisions about him, not the plans of distant imperial bureaucrats. And because the man in the iron collar and all who followed him into the depths of the continent would make not a luxury product but the most basic commodity in a new kind of endlessly expanding economy, there would also be no limit to the market for the product of his labor. This meant that there was no numerical limit to the number of enslavers, or to the number of investors who would want to chase enslavement’s rewards. Only conscience, or the inability of the world’s investment markets to deploy enough savings, could impede the transfer of capital to slavery’s new frontiers.

  All of this was certain, but for the doubt raised by one big question: whether the United States and all the entrepreneurs who wanted to expand slavery into the great river valley in the middle of the continent could actually hold onto North America’s interior. That outcome was still in doubt, even in 1807. In fact, it had been in doubt since the 1790s, and would continue to be so for almost a decade more. For this reason, slavery’s expansion was not a foregone conclusion. And four great episodes of violence, three of them played out along the river system whose flow rocked the Adventine at anchor, would decide its fate.

  As of 1807, four out of every five people who came from the Old World to the New had come from Africa, not Europe; chained in the belly of a ship, not free on its deck. Huddled masses in steerage class, yearning to breathe free of the famine and poverty of Ireland, Italy, or Russia’s shtetls—they came later. Ten million Middle Passages of African captives had shaped the New World and its interactions with the Old. The only other shift on a similar scale was the death of millions of the hemisphere’s original inhabitants. From the twin realities of demographic catastrophe and Middle Passage, empires emerged to dominate the first three centuries of American history: Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British. Once all the gold and silver had been thoroughly stolen, the empires found even greater sources of wealth by laying a belt of plantation colonies from Brazil north to Virginia. Many were small in size, but all were huge in economic and political significance. In 1763, in the first Treaty of Paris, France traded all of Canada for the island of Guadeloupe.4

  What was made on such islands, and what made much of Europe’s new wealth before 1807, was sugar. The Portuguese brought sugarcane to Brazil at the beginning of the sixteenth century. They’d already learned how to crush it, boil the sap, and crystallize it on Atlantic islands such as Madeira or Sao Tomé. There, Europeans had first combined the volatile ingredients of sugarcane, fertile land, chattel slavery, and enslaved Africans carried far from their homelands. In Brazil, this solution precipitated not only crystallized sucrose from vats of bubbling cane juice in the brutally demanding safra, or sugar harvest, but also immense revenue. Prestige consumers in the economies of late sixteenth-century Western Europe ate sugar and more sugar. Brazil was, for a time, early modern Europe’s Silicon Valley, the incubator of techniques for making massive profits, a synonym for sudden wealth. Robinson Crusoe was going to become a Brazil planter when shipwreck cast him on his desert island.5

  Within fifty years, Barbados shoved Brazil from the top of the sugar heap. The heyday of Barbados lasted only a few decades, for Jamaica rose next to command credit and fame. On island after island, Europeans and their pathogens killed the natives, slave ships appeared on the horizon, and cane sprouted in the fields. Streams of survivors crawled forth from slave ships to replenish the cane-field work gangs of men and women as they died. But enslavers grew fabulously rich. On each island, the richest crowded out others. Then a new island came online, offering entrepreneurs the chance to get in on the ground floor with fresher soil, offering investors novelty that attracted new credit. The sugar-island process of destruction and implantation shaped the geopolitics, economics, and culture of the first three centuries of the New World. Virginia and South Carolina were different from the islands, yet they were channels of the same current. The northern colonies were irrelevant until they evolved trades that the islands needed—shipbuilding, grain-growing, and livestock-raising—and started distilling sugarcane molasses into rum, carrying slaves, and trading in slave-made products.6

  In European shops and kitchens, sugar started as a luxury for the rich. By 1700, it was becoming the sweetener for the new middle class’s coffee and tea, also imperial tastes. By 1800 the English poor could sometimes indulge in sugar as a luxury, as a stimulant that got one through a hard day of labor, or a treat to quiet the crying child. Sugar and slavery quickened European trade, broadened the financial capital available to entrepreneurs, whetted the appetite for profit, and increased the revenue and power of centralizing states. But sugar and slavery had not definitively lifted the economies of Western Europe above those of the rest of the planet. China, which also consumed sugar, remained the massive gravitational center of world trade during much of the eighteenth century. Like the rest of the world, most Europeans were only one bad season from starvation. They all grew food by local traditions of agriculture that in technological complexity, efficiency, and productivity were closer to the year 0 than to 1900. The great masses of the poor and the peasantry were as short as the man in the collar, for living standards for most people had not risen since the dawn of the agricultural era.7

  On the quarterdeck, the white customs officer huddled with the captain. They walked over and stared at the man in the iron collar together, talked gibberish. The captain signed a paper, and the customs officer clambered back down. The man was still unnamed in white folks’ documents, but ink had captured his presence again. The rowboat slipped back toward the house. The Adventine’s sailors pulled and hoisted. Anchors clanked and sails flapped. The wheel spun. The brig slid out into the ship channel.

  The man in the iron collar watched from the rail. The mist peeled back and a low, flat landscape came into view. For the next few days, the Adventine tacked with the river’s winding turns through the new land made by the Mississippi. Slowly the banks rose. Low levees protected the flat land that lay behind. Mud gave way to green cane. First he saw occasional huts, and then large houses surrounded by huts. Three days later, the river turned right and straightened, and a small forest grove of masts came into view. They were at New Orleans.

  In 1800, French traveler Pierre-Louis Duvallon had seen a smaller forest of masts. But he saw enough to prophesy that New Orleans was “destined by nature to become one of the principal cities of North America, and perhaps the most important place of commerce in the new world.” Projectors, visionaries, and investors who came to this city founded by the French in 1718 and ceded to the Spanish in 1763 could sense the same tremendous possible future. Sitting at the mouth of a river system greater in economic potential, according to Duvallon, than the Nile, the Rhine, the Danube, or the Ganges, New Orleans would be “the great receptacle” of the “produce” of half a continent. Even “fancy in her happiest mood cannot combine all the felicities of nature and society in a more absolute degree than will actually be combined” in New Orleans, Duvallon said.8

  Yet powerful empires had been determined to keep the city from the United States ever since the thirteen colonies achieved their independence. Between 1783 and 1804, Spain
repeatedly revoked the right of American settlers further upriver to export their products through New Orleans. Each time they did so, western settlers began to think about shifting their allegiances. Worried US officials repeatedly tried to negotiate the sale and cession of the city near the Mississippi’s mouth, but Spain, trying to protect its own empire by containing the new nation’s growth, just as repeatedly rebuffed them.9

  Spain’s stubborn possession of the Mississippi’s mouth kept alive the possibility that the United States would rip itself apart. Yet something unexpected changed the course of history. In 1791, Africans enslaved in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue exploded in a revolt unprecedented in human history. Saint-Domingue, the eastern third of the island of Hispaniola, was at that time the ultimate sugar island, the imperial engine of French economic growth. But on a single August night, the mill of the first slavery’s growth stopped turning. All across Saint-Domingue’s sugar country, the most profitable stretch of real estate on the planet, enslaved people burst into the country mansions. They slaughtered enslavers, set torches to sugar houses and cane fields, and then marched by the thousand on Cap-Français, the seat of colonial rule. Thrown back, they regrouped. Revolt spread across the colony.10

  By the end of the year thousands of whites and blacks were dead. As the cane fields burned, the smoke blew into the Atlantic trade winds. Refugees fled to Charleston, already burdened by its own fear of slave revolt; to Cuba; and to all the corners of the Atlantic world. They brought wild-eyed tales of a world turned upside down. Europeans, in the throes of epistemological disarray because of the French Revolution’s overthrow of a throne more than a millennium old, reacted to these events with a different but still profound confusion. Minor slave rebellions were one thing. Total African victory was another thing entirely—it was so incomprehensible, in fact, that European thinkers, who couldn’t stop talking about the revolution in France, clammed up about Saint-Domingue. The German philosopher Georg Hegel, for instance, who was in the process of constructing an entire system of thought around the idealized, classical image of a slave rebelling against a master, never spoke of the slave rebellion going on in the real world. Even as reports of fire and blood splattered every weekly newspaper he read, he insisted that African people were irrelevant to a future that would be shaped by the newly free citizens of European nation-states.11