New Orleans entrepreneur William Kenner, for instance, could use bills of exchange, promises to pay that originated with a British merchant firm, to buy cotton bales from his planter trading partner John Minor. Kenner could then ship the bales to Liverpool and sell them there to a merchant house, which would in turn credit Kenner’s account and “redeem” the bills of exchange from the original firm. The merchant house could allow Kenner to “draw” on his account by writing checks, or “drafts.” It could also, if its partners believed in Kenner’s financial future, allow him to write his own notes of hand and “negotiate” them in the United States, using them as his source of credit. Kenner could sell such a note for cash here at Maspero’s, or trade it for goods—or people—if the seller believed that the Liverpool firm would “honor” Kenner’s hand. How much the person accepting the note of hand believed in it—how much he or she credited its magic—determined not only whether he or she would accept it as money, but also how much money one believed it to be. Bills traded at a “discount” on the face value of the note, a floating value that also served as an interest rate. (One might give $96 for a bill that one could then, in six months, exchange for $100. One has just lent and been repaid at about 8 percent annual interest, in other words.) The buying and selling of promises to pay was itself a business. Vincent Nolte’s newspaper advertisements proclaimed his willingness to buy “exchange” on Paris, New York, or London—notes that were payable in those cities, which Nolte could send to pay his own bills there.29
But belief in credit must be created. People must come to trust in its institutions and in the reliability of their trading partners in order for credit to spring into life as money and serve as fuel for explosive growth. And like every other faith, credit has a history, and Rachel came to Maspero’s at an important moment in that story.
Jeffersonian Republicans had killed off the first Bank of the United States in 1811, but during the War of 1812, financial chaos made it very difficult for James Madison’s government to raise the money it needed to fight the war. Following the country’s close call, in 1816 the Republicans chartered (for twenty years) the Second Bank of the United States. The “B.U.S.” was intended, in fact, to anchor the broad economic program advanced by the “National Republican” faction—a group of young leaders who were elbowing out the old Jeffersonians. They included Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina’s cotton frontier, and their plan to use federal power to create a modern economy in the United States pivoted on the bank’s ability to lure foreign investment in its bonds, stabilize the financial system, and feed credit into entrepreneurs’ hands. Their “American system,” as Clay termed it, also included a planned network of “internal improvements”: canals, roads, and river-clearance projects to lower the cost of transportation and encourage production for distant markets. A tariff that protected domestic textile production would allow the American economy to follow the British model of industrialization.30
The new B.U.S., headquartered in Philadelphia, also established branches in major trading centers such as New Orleans. But most of the branches ignored their mandate to regulate financial flows. Instead, as local banks sprang up like fungus—the Kentucky state legislature chartered forty banks in 1818 alone—the B.U.S. allowed credit to slosh into every cranny of the expanding nation. In the short term, a runaway burst of prosperity silenced traditionalists, who warned that paper money and banks were scams. In April 1814, there were 38 flatboats from upriver tied up alongside the New Orleans levee; four years later, there were 340. Financial giants Baring Brothers, Hope and Company, and other European cotton buyers injected millions of pounds of credit to pay Nolte and his peers. Textile and other merchants looking to unload their wartime backlog of goods advanced millions more in merchandise to American distributors. The B.U.S. directly lent huge amounts of credit to land speculators, and the bank’s directors and employees borrowed from the cashbox for their own endeavors.31
For enslaved people like Rachel, the sudden growth in financial confidence did not mean liberation, but the opposite. The bank helped both white Americans and overseas investors to have faith in a future in which the debts of slave buyers would be paid off by ever-growing revenues from the cash-earning commodities that industrializing Britain wanted. One could see the visible signs of this quickening right-handed power all across the southwestern United States, not just in Maspero’s but also, for instance, in Huntsville, Alabama, a frontier village into which a dust-caked Virginian named Francis E. Rives rode on the same January 1819 day on which Rachel and William arrived on the levee. Soon Rives would sit in the state legislature in Richmond, but today he was leading a train of twenty-odd enslaved people whom he and his employees had marched from Southampton County, Virginia. Rives and the employees who helped guard the coffle were explorers of a new country of credit and trade. Searching out ways to extract new yield from human energy stored in the slave cabins of Virginia’s Southside, their expedition extended Georgia trades west by hundreds of miles. Following Cherokee trails from the left corner of North Carolina across the spine of the Smoky Mountains, they had now descended into the valley of the Tennessee River, which flowed by Huntsville.32
The Tennessee could carry cotton-laden flatboats into the Mississippi, so Huntsville was tied to the invisible cord of trade and credit attached to New Orleans. And thanks to the investments channeled through the Bank of the United States and the possibilities of trade, the valley that lay before Rives’s coffle was suddenly blooming with both schemes and cotton. Anne Royall, an acerbic Pennsylvania travel writer who went to Alabama in 1818 to get material for a new book, found that her usually dismissive authorial voice cracked when she crested the same ridges that Rives’s forced migrants now descended into Huntsville. “The cotton fields now began to appear. These are astonishingly large; from four to five hundred acres in a field!—It is without a parallel! Fancy is inadequate to conceive a prospect more grand!”
“There has not been a single . . . person settling in this country who has anything of a capital who has not become wealthy in a few years,” claimed Virginia-born migrant John Campbell. He clearly suffered from the “Alabama Fever,” as people called it—the fervent belief that every white person who could get frontier land and put enslaved people to work making cotton would inevitably become rich. And it was credit that raised their temperature. Most of the settlers in Alabama were squatting on land that had once been included in the Yazoo purchase, had later been surrendered by the Creeks at Fort Jackson, and was now being sold by the federal land office in Huntsville to purchasers who typically relied on credit. By the end of 1818, the land office had dealt away almost 1 million acres, which officially brought in $7 million. But speculative purchasers, including Andrew Jackson, James Madison, and the chief employees of the local land office, paid only $1.5 million up front. Of that amount, $1 million was in the form of scrip that the federal government had given to investors who had received compensation after the 1810 Fletcher v. Peck decision. Thus government-supplied credit had financed 93 percent of the cost of the land in the valley before Rives—money that would have to be repaid from sales of cotton not yet planted by slaves not yet bought. No wonder Rives marched these enslaved people to Huntsville. Here was a prime hunting ground for slave sales.33
Credit appeared to be turning enslavers’ Alabama dreams into reality. Alabama was already third in the United States in total cotton produced and first in per capita production. And not just Alabama enslavers: between 1815 and 1819, settlers transported nearly 100,000 unfree migrants to southern Louisiana, central Tennessee, and the area around Natchez, Mississippi. These slaves cleared fields bought on spec, grew cotton to make interest payments and keep new loans flowing, and served as collateral besides. The dramatic increase in the ability of would-be entrepreneurs to borrow money had extended their right-handed reach across time and space, over mountains, and across seas.34
BACK IN NEW ORLEANS, where plenty of credit was available fo
r the right hands of those who bought and sold, the bells of the St. Louis Cathedral on the Place d’Armes—just around the corner from Maspero’s—rang out at noon, resounding through the conspiratorial coffee-house buzz. Then one of the wizards of the credit process arose. This was Toussaint Mossy, one of the city’s most popular auctioneers. Until now he had been sitting at a table, observing the people who leaned in a rough line against the wall, puffing on his pipe and glancing occasionally at a sheet of paper. On it were written names, ages, and phrases, some of which might be true. Standing, he turned to face the room. In French-accented English, he explained to the expectant audience that twenty-three slaves would now be sold by auction. The newspaper had simply said “terms will be made known at the time of sale.” Enslaved people sold as part of an estate often were sold on longer-term credit of a year or more granted from local seller to local buyer, usually with a mortgage to protect the lender. Sellers like McLean, who had probably bought his slaves in the Chesapeake with short-term credit that soon would be due, wanted bank notes or easily traded credit in the form of bills of exchange. Mossy then explained that the auction would take place outside. He turned and walked out the door.35
Rachel and William blinked in the sunlight that beat down on the St. Louis Street wall. The first person to be pulled out might have been John—at about fifty, the oldest in the group. Mossy pointed him to the low bench. Tall and light-skinned, John stepped up on the box as white folks filed out of Maspero’s and surrounded him in a semicircle. Passers-by paused: women with market baskets, men striding up from other stores, children white and black, flatboat men from up the river. Enslaved people stood at the back of the crowd, faces blank. A hush settled, broken by creaking wagon wheels and muffled shouts from stevedores on the levee. The moment was here, the one that made trees fall, cotton bales strain against their ropes, filled the stores with goods, sailed paper across oceans and back again, made the world believe.36
Mossy began to speak. But not in everyday talk. Auctioneers persist long past Mossy’s day. One knows what they sound like, but their skills seem antique in a time when most auctions are held impersonally online. But there are two important things to remember about Mossy’s job. First, an auction is the purest moment of supply meeting demand and thus sorting out prices in the capitalist market economy. John, facing the crowd, was a test of the demand for a fifty-year-old male human being in New Orleans on a Thursday in January when cotton sales had been strong and credit elastic. Buyers and sellers who heard its outcome would hang a whole array of prices on the amount paid for him. This lesson would shape private sales, affect bidding in later auctions, weigh the numbers inked by slaves’ names on estate inventories. Mossy’s cajoling, whispered collusions between potential buyers in the crowd, nods and raised hands that signified bids, prices of credit and cotton—all were shaped by and in turn blew back and forth the cloud of information and belief that was the market for slaves.
Second, auctioneers then as now were expected to weave a spell of excitement about the act of purchasing. Mossy wanted to get the highest possible price, but he also created a community of buyers and sellers there at Maspero’s. This kind of market-making trained buyers to think about the enslaved in certain ways. As Mossy announced key numbers for John and each of the other subjects of sale who would follow him onto the bench—height, age, and price—he also taught buyers how to see the features this community considered most valuable in an enslaved person. Height was the easiest to learn. You could see it. Enslavers usually paid more for tall men than for short ones. Height was less important for shaping women’s prices, but age mattered for both men and women. Enslavers generally paid their highest prices for young men between eighteen and twenty-five, or for women between fifteen and twenty-two. At going rates in January 1819, McLean might realize between $900 and $1,100 for Ned or William, while women of the same age usually sold for at least $100 or $200 less. Mossy would have to work to get $400 for fifty-year-old John.37
Although enslaved people born in the southwestern United States were considered less likely to die from disease than were new migrants to the region, African Americans from Virginia and Maryland were already important to this market, too. There were simply not enough local prime-age men and women available to meet the demand. And unlike seasoned but savvy locals, a youngster from Virginia might seem like a malleable piece of one’s right-handed dreams: Alexander McNeill, for example, told the man selling teenager Henry Watson that he “wanted to bring up a boy to suit himself.” Moreover, in Maryland at about this time, enslaved men in their early twenties sold for about $500. In New Orleans, Ned or William might bring twice the Chesapeake price. Transport costs averaged less than $100 per slave, so entrepreneurs who secured enslaved people from older states could undersell locals while still pocketing a huge profit.38
Image 3.2. At auctions, enslavers and the credit that they wielded formed a community of entrepreneurs, who here stand—both men and women—around the main event. But the auction also shaped a market that measured people as commodities—like the men, women, and children who slump on the bench in the foreground, waiting their turns. George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (Middletown, CT, 1834), 144–145.
The transactions of the auction, and indeed of any sale, were more complicated than a simple sale of good x by seller (1) to buyer (2) for price y or z. Going by fifties, tens, or smaller numbers still, bidders competed with each other in ways that were sometimes more about proving oneself than about buying a slave. Methodist minister Wilson Whitaker reported what happened at a North Carolina auction when John Cotten battled with a man the preacher knew only as “Dancy.” The two first clashed over who would win a cornfield. Then they ran the price of a male slave up to $1,400—New Orleans prices, in North Carolina. Dancy could go no higher. But then he called Cotten “a dam’d scoundrel,” and went for the winner with a whip. So Cotten pulled out his pistol and shot him. The victor fled, leaving a friend to take possession of the enslaved man.39
At the same time, the auction was a place for finding out how malleable an enslaved person would be in the buyer’s right hand, how well they suited the buyer’s schemes. Young Louis Hughes remembered how the buyers pressed him and dozens of other slaves who stood in a formation at a Richmond slave pen. Shoppers “passed up and down between the lines looking the poor creatures over, and questioning [the women,] . . . ‘What can you do?’ ‘Are you a good cook? seamstress? dairymaid?’ . . . [and to the men,] ‘Can you plow? Are you a blacksmith?’”40
Image 3.3. Inspection was part of the process of establishing a human being as a “hand” available and ready for sale. This was serious business, but here the enslaved person was required to play a role—standing still, not resisting, answering questions with the most market-friendly responses and behaviors. Illustrated London News, February 16, 1861, p. 138.
Private sales, made not in public auctions but in one-on-one negotiations, sometimes gave a person the chance to size up his or her would-be consumer. On the one hand, if the scuttlebutt in the warehouse told you a prospective buyer lived near the place where you had heard your wife or child or parent had been sold—well, then make yourself the brightest-eyed and most compliant in the bunch. On the other hand, you might not want to be noticed in some cases. To the frightened teenager Henry Watson, Alexander McNeill appeared “the very man . . . from whom I should shrink, and be afraid . . . sharp, grey eyes, a peaked nose, and compressed lips.” “He was a very bad-looking man,” Watson said years later, and Watson “never wish[ed] to look upon his face again.” But be careful: If the seller caught you not “selling yourself,” you would get whipped.41
At auctions, the number of white eyes concentrated on one slave’s body emboldened questioners and intimidated the questioned. Interrogations replaced coy flirtations: “What sort of work can you do? Have you ever run away?” The seller might have primed the slave with answers, but a room full of aggressive entrepreneurs pressed, trying t
o get slaves to stumble and spill the truth: “Who taught you how to lay brick?” John might have been struck off in five minutes so that Mossy could get to the more delectable parts of the bill of fare, but others had to endure half an hour or even longer before they could step down. This was too long to game the questions and answers. To add to the pressure, when whites sensed fatigue, they’d press a man on the block to share a fake-companionable swig of brandy, forcing the enslaved to lower his or her defenses and submissively swallow the spit of the people who sold them.42
No, on the block, only the most desperate plays had a chance. At fifteen, Delicia Patterson gave this speech, literally from the stump: “Old Judge Miller,” she said, “don’t you bid for me, cause if you do, I would not live on your plantation, I will take a knife and cut my own throat from ear to ear before I would be owned by you.” Others wailed from the lines where they waited—keep me near my children; buy me, man who is not as harsh as that other one, I will be a good worker. Some tried a bravado approach, laughing and joking—see, you cannot break me. But while Judge Miller dropped his bid for Delicia, when the young woman’s father begged his current owner to buy his daughter, the man cited her public defiance and refused. Stubbornness could also lead to physical assault. Martha Dickson, sold at an auction in St. Louis, refused to speak when she was ordered to describe herself. The auctioneer had her whipped until she talked.43
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