Rachel would also have seen how they looked—how they gazed at her, and yet through and beyond her, too, appraising her and fitting her into calculations that stretched on to the future’s horizon. Here’s how William Hayden felt on the receiving end of that gaze. Sold to Kentucky as a boy in the 1790s, he was dealt again in 1812 to a man named Phillips. This new owner, a Mississippi Valley version of a Georgia-man, carried people down the river to sell them from his flatboat to planters in Natchez, at New Orleans, and in small Louisiana towns. One day a merchant named Castleman came to talk to Phillips. Castleman “was anxious to secure me,” Hayden remembered, and his smile revealed “the joy that the wolf feels when pouncing upon a lamb.”14
Wolves. Rachel felt their eyes. The key to all the commodities sold at Maspero’s, even cotton, was flesh. When she had boarded the Temperance, she had already known that she was going to be sold in New Orleans. African Americans in Maryland were learning about “New Orleans” just as they had learned about “Georgia.” Rachel could now see the line of men, women, and children standing against the far wall, and she saw that Maspero’s was the place where the sale would happen. But even had she been blind, the palpable anticipation in the air would have revealed the place’s nature. That desire was not for her alone as a slave, or as a woman—though both of those desires were part of the combustible mixture. The anticipation was part of the identity of the specific white men who waited in the room. They weren’t slave traders in the same sense that the term describes either a Georgia-man like M’Giffin or a Phillips, or their successors who would work in New Orleans in later years. Those were people who specialized in buying enslaved people in one place, taking them to another, and selling them there. As of 1819, professional slave traders were rare in New Orleans. No specialist kept a private jail, like the two dozen that would cluster by the 1850s along Gravier and Baronne Streets, just southeast of where the New Orleans Superdome now stands. Nor would one find at the levee in 1819 dedicated slave ships like those that eventually plied the waters between the Chesapeake and the Mississippi.15
On an 1817 journey down the Mississippi, an Englishman noticed that in the taverns where businessmen met along the way to New Orleans, “there are many men of real, but more of fictitious capital. In their occupations they are not confined to any one particular pursuit, the same person often being farmer, store and hotel-keeper, land-jobber, brewer, steam-boat owner, and slave dealer.” Most important: “All are speculators; and each man anticipates making a fortune, not by patient industry and upright conduct, but by ‘a lucky hit.’” Such were the men who collected here at Maspero’s. Take the one in black, sipping cold water, for John McDonogh was an abstemious Presbyterian. McDonogh had come from Rachel’s own Baltimore, two decades earlier—not as goods for sale, but with a cargo owned by merchant employers. He sold it, remitted the proceeds, and struck out on his own. Rivals claimed that McDonogh and his business partner, Richard Shepherd, intentionally planted land-sale rumors in Maspero’s, gossip that raised the price of McDonogh’s own property holdings, which covered much of Louisiana. Yet McDonogh was neither a landlord, nor—though he bought and sold slaves—a slave trader. McDonogh was an entrepreneur. He modestly clothed his desires in solemn black broadcloth. But he was a disruptive, destructive force that broke and remade the world, just like a more flamboyant man whose gaze Rachel also crossed.16
No single man was more influential in shaping the New Orleans cotton trade into the world’s biggest one than Vincent Nolte. He first came at the behest of the Anglo-Dutch firm Hope and Company before 1812, bringing half a million pounds in paper backed by the Bank of England. With this stake he built a circuit of cotton and capital between the Old World and the New. After the War of 1812 ended, he linked up with Baring Brothers, the massive London commercial bank that had financed the US purchase of Louisiana, and whose pressure had convinced American and British negotiators to swallow pride and sign the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814. Barings’ money allowed Nolte to accumulate huge piles of cotton on the levee after 1815, and by 1819 he was buying 20,000 to 40,000 bales per year—4 to 8 percent of US exports, and up to a quarter of what passed through New Orleans.17
One could argue that as much as any great inventor, factory owner, or banker, it was Vincent Nolte who made modernization possible. He shaped the patterns and institutions of the most important commodity trade of the nineteenth century, the one that fed Britain’s mills with the most important raw material of the industrial revolution. The huge quantities of money he channeled from Britain into this room at Maspero’s stimulated greater and greater cotton production along the river valleys that fed New Orleans. Nolte’s modernization of the trade incidentally made it both more efficient and more open to new players. He gathered and disseminated information about the state of Mississippi Valley markets by creating a printed circular that quoted the going price for all sorts of goods in New Orleans—what his contemporaries called a “Price-current.”18
Usually we think of the architects of modern capitalism as rational. They might be greedy and they might be profit-seekers, but they reject gambling and achieve accumulation through self-denial and efficiency. Accounts of economics usually teach that people are driven by calculations about “utility” and price, and that market behavior is predictable and rational. Nolte, however, was unquestionably a gambler. He didn’t care about efficiency; he wanted piles of money, and he wanted to win. Make no mistake: He didn’t think he was trusting to luck. He believed that he understood the game of speculation well enough to know its secrets. But he rolled the dice. Over the decades, Nolte gained and lost vast sums of money. He even put his life at stake for his prospect of gain, fighting four duels with business rivals in 1814 and 1815.19
If Nolte wanted to make an incomparable fortune, it wasn’t because he thought success equaled salvation, or because profit was an end in itself, exactly. Nolte’s actions spurred economic modernization—ever-more-efficient exploitation of ever-greater amounts of resources—by stimulating the production of enormous quantities of cotton. In the real history of the real modern world, change has been jolted forward again and again by people like Nolte, who in their dice-rolling bids to make massive profits disturb existing equilibriums by introducing new elements. The new elements they introduce as levers of dominance might be technological innovations, but entrepreneurs rarely create these innovations themselves. Instead, they figure out how to reap their benefits in order to rip market share and profits away from other capitalists who are invested in status-quo technologies and staler business models. They are architects of the dynamic of “creative destruction” that iconoclastic economist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the core engine of capitalism’s growth. Creative destruction produces wrenching shocks, devastating depressions following dramatic expansions, wars and conquests and enslavements. Here, in New Orleans, cotton—and slaves—enabled creative destruction to produce the modern economy.20
Nolte said he did what he did because of something he wanted to feel—what he called “the charm,” the spell he wove upon himself by knitting a “vast web of extended commerce” with himself at the center. And Maspero’s was a room full of Noltes, for whom creative destruction was motivation as much as process. Along with McDonogh and Shepherd and Nolte, their ranks at the tables included such men as Beverley Chew and Richard Relf, William Kenner, Stephen Henderson, and French-speakers like merchant Louis Lecesne and broker P. F. DuBourg, who cut deals with Creole planters. They, too, loved the sense of power they got from exerting what Nolte called the “enterprising mercantile spirit”: cutting out rivals, knowing that people far away were bending to their wills. They bought cotton from the interior and shipped it to Liverpool. They bought cargoes from England and Germany and sold their contents to stores strung like beads on the rivers all the way up to Louisville.21
Using geographical position, special knowledge, and special access to essential commodities, these nonspecialized, flexible entrepreneurs organized from sc
ratch a massive increase in the global economy’s most important raw material. Over the course of the five years that began in 1815, southern cotton became the world’s most widely traded commodity, and New Orleans became the gravitational center of the system of buying and distributing it. The city doubled the amount of cotton it shipped, soon surpassing the southeastern ports of Charleston and Savannah.
Maspero’s was the first center of the New Orleans cotton trade. It was also the site around which another new market was coalescing. As the Gazette de la Louisiane reported, at Maspero’s you could buy a cargo of Irish and English cloth; a pilot-boat; a piece of land on Chartres Street; a brick house; a plantation (that of Madame Andry, Manuel’s widow, in fact), and les esclaves. One could buy people here, on any day save Sunday, by bidding at auctions or negotiating with these entrepreneurs. In addition to their other activities, all these men sold and bought substantial numbers of slaves there. Kenner and Henderson sold at least 150 slaves at Maspero’s between 1815 and 1820. McDonogh’s trading partner Shepherd sold 97. Scottish cotton merchant Thomas Urquhart sold 76 people. And so on. And as with cotton, at Maspero’s these creative destroyers established access to supply, stimulated demand, and created a place where a purchaser could always count on finding what he wanted. In other words, they made a market, one that—though centered in the Lower Mississippi Valley—stretched far beyond this specific place to creep tendrils of incentive reaching into Maryland farms, Alabama cotton docks, New York banks, and London parlors. This slave market would continue to develop over the next four decades in dynamic relationship with the development of the cotton economy.22
As we trace Rachel’s path, we can see how that market-making happened. Her transport depended on the actions of federal and state governments. The compromises of the Constitution permitted the transport of slaves across state lines. Congress also protected transport with its 1793 law that blocked non-slaveholding states from sheltering runaways. Meanwhile, like most other enslaved people transported from the southeast to New Orleans in the pre-1820s period, Rachel came by a route that resembled the paths of other commodities to the levee. Southwestern entrepreneurs asked their southeastern contacts to buy them slaves. Sometimes these were specific requests—a blacksmith from Maryland for Stephen Minor of Natchez, for instance—but usually they were general, as in, “Procure [me] hands from Virginia.” For now, the people procured were sent on regular merchant ships, such as the Clio, on which Benjamin Latrobe sailed from Norfolk in 1818. The Clio also carried regular merchandise and one Doctor Day, who was moving to the Red River to become a cotton planter. While Day transported twelve of his own slaves, the ship also bore Tom, who had been consigned, like Rachel, by Baltimore merchant David Anderson. Tom cost Anderson $800, plus a fare of $30, but he died off the coast of Florida. Watching the Clio’s sailors throw his body into the water, white passengers speculated that he would have brought close to $1,200 in New Orleans. Anderson’s New Orleans consignee had lost quite an investment.23
After reaching New Orleans, slaves like Rachel and tall William were often kept on board their vessels until they could be sold. In other cases, entrepreneurs locked captives in stables, in the city jail, or with other commodities in counting-houses and warehouses. William Kenner kept people at his own slave labor camp until he considered them “seasoned” enough to sell. Slave-sellers also locked people in Maspero’s—in the ballroom adjacent to the bar, or upstairs in the meeting room, the same one where Andrew Jackson had berated the gathered city fathers for quailing in the face of Pakenham’s redcoats. But Maspero’s made a poor jail. In October 1819, the Roman brothers, local enslavers who branded any person they bought, purchased a woman named Maria for the high price of $1,500. They left her in Maspero’s keeping while they finished their town business. Reluctant to endure the hot iron the Romans were paying so much to inflict on her, Maria escaped. Seven weeks later, she was still running.24
Yet despite its inadequacies as a cage, Maspero’s was the pole around which the market in enslaved people orbited between 1815 and 1819. Even if the man or woman wasn’t physically present, the buyer could read the enslaved person’s name in the Louisiana Courier as he sat here. He mentally compared the description to the others who were paraded here. The seller came here to meet him and arrange the sale. The papers changed hands here in the barroom. The forces generated in this long, low, smoky room changed the lives of thousands of Rachels and Williams. The acts of New Orleans entrepreneurs also changed their own lives, and not simply by enriching their account balances. For men like the entrepreneurs in Maspero’s, the birth of the modern world opened access to powers that few who were not absolute monarchs had ever felt before.
These sensations were generally only available to those with the luck of being born white, male, in the right place, and to the right family. Still, old mercantile alliances and families were being bypassed as new men created new money-making empires. Imagine the luck of a boy like Henry Palfrey, son of a failed father, who became a clerk for Beverley Chew and Richard Relf of New Orleans at age twelve. As Palfrey grew to manhood in the environment of Maspero’s, internalizing its desires, he would write commands and requests. He sent them as letters, and in consequence things happened that his father, a frustrated merchant of an earlier generation, could not make happen. Huge quantities of cotton bales moved. People were sold away from their families, piles of cloth and iron loaded, money transferred.25
The way entrepreneurs assimilated that environment’s values and came to see those values as normal reveals much about why they devoted their lives to creating an “extended commerce” in the southwestern United States. They spoke as if their own bodies were doing the things that their deals—sales of cotton, purchases of land or slaves, payments of money on the other side of the ocean—made happen. Yet not their whole bodies. There was one specific part of the body they talked as if they were using. They wrote notes and letters that informed their correspondents that they held slaves “on hand” and money “in hand.” Important letters “came to hand.” They got cotton “off [their] hands” and into the market. In 1815, waiting for prices to rise, John Richards offered the Bank of the State of Mississippi a note to ensure that he would not yet have to sell “the cotton that I now have in hand.” Individual promises-to-pay that drew upon credit with other merchants were “notes of hand.”26
Few parts of the body have a more intimate and direct connection to the mind than the hands, and when entrepreneurs used words to grasp the control ropes of the new economy, they described the sensation as if the new world’s powers were held in their own like puppet strings. They produced concrete results at distance, using words that their hands wrote on pieces of paper. The fingers at the end of the writer’s arm might not actually hold the material thing—the bales of cotton, the stacks of coin, the ship whose captain and crew were directed to carry them—that the figurative language of trade said it grasped. But in a very real sense, the writer controlled these things, these people.
These writers’ hands could grasp much more than the hands of merchants and traders in the past because the new dynamic growth of Western capitalism was producing massive quantities of what the great twentieth-century theologian Robert Farrar Capon called “right-handed power”: the strength to force an outcome. Capon identified right-handed power as being like the idea of God held by many believers of many religions: a deity working in straight-line ways, exerting crushing force, throwing the wicked into the flames, drowning the sinful earth. Right-handed power is the power of domination, kings, weapons, and the letter of the law. In the early nineteenth century, those societies and individuals who were winning in the sorting-out of power and status accumulated unprecedented right-handed strength. They got more guns and bullets, more soldiers, the ability to knock down other peoples’ defenses and force them to trade on the terms most favorable to the West. They dominated other peoples to a degree unprecedented in human history, and within victorious new modernized nations, right
-handed power was increasingly distributed in a lop-sided fashion. Members of the new leading classes—people like the men at Maspero’s, but also the cotton-mill owners of Manchester, the merchants of New York, the bankers of London—got most of that power in their hands.27
So if one had to pick the hand to which letter-writers referred as they sat there at Maspero’s, one might say “right.” Even though the effects of entrepreneurs’ decisions sometimes played out a long way from the places where the decisions were taken, they were still straight-line effects. The letter is written and sent, the Maryland trading partner reads it, deposits the bill of exchange, goes to the probate auction, buys a woman advertised as a house servant, and takes her to the next Louisiana-bound ship. So the exchanges of the cotton economy, wrote one white man (to whom Louisiana success, he said, had given a new “sense of independence”), “put it in your power”—into your hands, he told his relative—“to enrich yourself.” A man presses a button (with his right index finger) on the machine of the trading world, with its new markets and opportunities, and things happen to benefit him—things involving sterling bills, a huge pile of cotton, or a long roster of slaves. The emerging modern world strengthened the right hands of these men, offering them the opportunity to make everything new and different, to shape it along the lines of their desires.28
Much of the muscular power in right hands was nerved by credit, itself a phenomenon almost as magical-seeming as the idea that one could direct far-off events with one’s hands. Credit is belief (the word comes from the Latin credere) that brings value today in exchange for a promise to pay in the future. Credit allowed entrepreneurs and others to spend tomorrow’s money today, accomplishing trades and investments that would (the borrower believed) make more wealth tomorrow. When granted on easy terms, credit was what allowed trade to spread, to move smoothly, and to enrich people around the Atlantic basin.
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 14