Ball himself acted—sooner rather than later. As soon as he settled in a bit at Congaree, in fact, he was given by Wade Hampton to the planter’s recently married daughter. She and her husband deployed Ball on a new slave labor camp deep in the woods of frontier Georgia. Within a year, he became a driver, charged with forcing others to keep the pace. Ball did so well at this that by the summer of 1808 his owner’s brothers-in-law began to feel he was getting too much confidence. They beat him severely. Ball resolved that the time had come to leave.42
Enslaved migrants ran away all the time, hiding in the woods to escape violence. The number, not surprisingly, peaked during cotton-picking season. But most of them eventually came back to the slave labor camp. Slave patrols caught them. Random whites caught them. Other slaves betrayed them. Most of them didn’t know the way back to wherever they had come from. And in between stood thousands of armed white people who would not be their friends. As for the free states, they were even farther away. The number of enslaved migrants who made it from the depths of the cotton and sugar frontiers all the way to the free states probably numbered under a thousand during all the years of slavery. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of all forced migrants. Most of those who did make it got away by hiding on steamboats, oceangoing ships, and later, on railways.43
In Georgia, Ball was six hundred miles by foot from Maryland’s Calvert County. He decided to try anyway. In early August he packed a small bag with food, flint, and tinder. He tied his faithful dog, who he feared might give away a hiding place, to a tree near the cabins of the labor camp. He fed his pet one last time and set off north through the woods.
Night after night Ball walked, sometimes wandering in circles until he could find a road or get his bearings from Polaris through the ragged clouds. By day he hid in the woods. He stole ripe corn from the fields. When October came he was still only at Columbia, South Carolina. And his memory told him that it had taken him more than a month on the high roads coming south there from Maryland. There were many miles still to go.
Ball crept across North Carolina in the dark. Each morning the cold sunrise found him looking for groves of evergreen holly where he could shiver in safety through the day. A nighttime attempt to ford the frigid Roanoke River turned into a disaster. It was deeper and swifter than he remembered, and he had to swim for it. He made it to the other shore, but almost went into hypothermic shock before he could get a fire going. But now Ball was in Virginia. One day north of Richmond, a white man spotted him hiding near the high road. Within a few hours, Ball was locked in the Caroline County jail. The normal procedure was to try to ascertain where the runaway had come from and then “advertise” him or her in newspapers likely to be read there. Ball refused to say who he was, and no one there recognized him. He had already come farther than any of the jailers would have believed.
After thirty-nine days in jail, in early February 1809, Ball broke out of the flimsy building and headed northeast. At the Potomac, he found a small boat tied up on the shore. Rowing himself across, Ball hiked to the Patuxent and did the same thing. At one in the morning he reached the door of his wife’s cabin. Ball stood there in shock. Perhaps he’d been replaced. Finally he summoned the courage to knock, and heard his wife respond “Who’s there?” He said “Charles.” And she said, “Who is this that speaks like my husband?” Like, but not the same. For his tongue sounded different now.
6
BREATH
1824–1835
THE COLD STARS OF the southern night glittered high above the quarters in the Tennessee cotton belt. Three hundred miles away, a man followed a northbound path by their light. Down here, the adults and youths were sitting on three log benches, pulled into a triangle around a fire that burned low. The younger children slept in the cabins. But there weren’t many of them. Most of the young people were big enough to work all day. They’d been sold here away from their parents. So who would send them to bed? And things were being said that they needed to hear—and there were also things they needed to tell.
Iron spoons clanked on tin cups of cornmeal mush and rationed salt pork. It was almost contradictory that low laughs, punctuating rumbling speech, meant that what the speaker said wasn’t funny. That night there were many grim chuckles. Now a girl’s voice, tired from the field, began to tell a story that a child named Hettie Mitchell—not born, not even thought of yet—would eventually hear. This was the night when Hettie’s one-day-to-be mother first told her own tale—how “she had been stole” from her parents in South Carolina. How the last sight anyone on the home place saw of her was a glimpse of a child getting bundled into a covered wagon. One hundred years later, Hettie herself would be telling the tale that got her mother to Tennessee. This night, the words her future mother spoke began to weave their way into the story of everyone else on the benches, of everybody scattered under the southern stars across ten thousand clearings like this one.1
If one could sit there with them, one would learn that as soon as forced migrants could understand each other’s tongues, they tried to make sense of the destruction and chaos inflicted upon them. One would also hear them remembering the lost, hoping, too, that the lost would also not forget them. For they were all lost. And one would notice another thing: the same phrases, again and again. “I saw them travel in groups. . . . They looked like cattle.” “They was taking them, driving them, just like a pack of mules.” “I seen people handcuffed together and drove along the Williamsburg Road like cattle. They was bought to be took south.” The stories of those who endured coffle, block, and whipping-machine were as like to each other as two links forged as part of the same iron chain. But enslaved people also forged their own links. They borrowed catchphrases that resonated with their own or their relatives’ experiences: “My mother and daddy done told me all about it. . . . Sold just like cows, honey, right off the block.” Every teller owned a piece of this story, for the experiences and forces that the words tried to describe had shaped every teller’s life. They did far better than professional historians have done at identifying the common ways that forced migration shaped their lives and that of the United States. Indeed, the storytellers concluded that forced migration was slavery’s truest measure.2
Year after year, night after night, survivors talked and listened, creating a vast oral history that was also an argument about the nature of slavery. One million tongues were providing anyone willing to listen with an explanation for why these things had happened to them, and who was to blame. Their talking assembled them, at least for the time of the storytelling, into one body that breathed the vast and devastating common experience of slavery’s expansion. For the way that enslaved migrants explained their common situation helped them to unite, cementing a baseline of solidarity that was fundamental to African-American survival. The stories that enslaved migrants whispered on the night air would also, when carried north on the tongues of intrepid messengers like Charles Ball, be powerful enough to breathe fire into the disparate elements of anti-slave-expansion sentiment in the free states. One day, enslaved people’s own acts might thus bring allies to their beleaguered cause.
YET WHETHER THE POTENTIAL emergence of allies for tough but disarmed survivors could derail the most kinetically forceful economic phenomenon in the nineteenth-century world—the growth of cotton production and its transformation into textiles—was an open question that seemed to be closing in the wrong direction. For even as the disparate elements of enslaved African-American populations on slavery’s frontier knitted together the words of a new common cultural tongue into a story, the powers of their world were growing even more menacing. There was no new day on the horizon on November 5, 1829, when Granville Sharp Pierce stood in the New Orleans office of public notary William Boswell. Pierce was dealing in much more tangible transactions and effects than were the people who sat around fires talking. He was at the office to file two specific documents. Together those two pieces of paper left a trail that maps all we know about Ellen, the short s
eventeen-year-old woman whose name was on the documents Pierce handed to Boswell. The first document was a deed. It recorded his sale of Ellen to Barthelemy Bonny. In other states, slave sellers and buyers retained deeds of sale themselves, and most of those papers did not survive the passing years. Louisiana’s Napoleonic legal code, however, required notaries to keep a record of every local slave trade. Almost all the New Orleans ledger books have survived, and they are now stored in the city’s Notarial Archives on the fifth floor of the Amoco building on Poydras Street.
Pierce’s transactions help to show how, even as Hettie’s mother told her story, her story itself, and Ellen’s too, was changing from the one Charles Ball or Rachel would have told. For the ways in which the enslaved were stolen and driven were changing. Through the 1820s, building on the ad hoc speculations of Georgia-men and Louisiana entrepreneurs, an emergent crop of professional slave traders knotted together an innovative trading system that would supply even more enslaved people to slavery’s frontier and help keep slaveholding profitable everywhere. The new professionals had created a true national slave market, lungs to bring in huge gulps the oxygen of slave labor into the southwestern region, where enslavers were willing to spend the most for hands. Those lungs would keep inhaling until the end of the Civil War.
The documents accumulated by Louisiana notaries help give a clear picture of how the trade worked, in New Orleans and elsewhere, by the time Ellen got there in 1829. From 1804 to 1862, the 135,000 recorded New Orleans notarial sales map a fascinating overall profile of the changing price patterns of the slave trade at its pivot point, its biggest market. For instance, in 1820, the average price of a male “hand” between twenty-one and thirty-eight years of age had been $875 (see Figure 6.1). In 1824 that average had fallen to $498. By 1829, prices had risen again, to an average of $596. In fact, if we compare slave prices to cotton prices multiplied by the output of cotton per enslaved person—an output that was, as we know, rising under the influence of the whipping-machine—we can see that by the 1820s the price of slaves had begun to track closely with the revenue generated by the average cotton hand (see Figure 6.2). Demand from cotton-state slave buyers increased when the product of two factors multiplied together—the number of pounds picked times the price per pound—was high.3
Figure 6.1. Average Price of Slaves, New Orleans, 1804–1862. Source: New Orleans Slave Sale Sample, 1804–1862, compiled by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester, ICPSR07423-v2 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor]), 2008-08-04, doi:10.3886/ICPSR07423.v2. Price is an average of prices for all enslaved men between twenty-one and thirty-eight years of age.
Figure 6.2. Price of Cotton, Price of a Slave, and Value of Cotton Output per Slave, 1805–1860. Source: Adapted from Roger Ransom, Conflict and Compromise (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 56.
But the legal documents of New Orleans allow us to take an even more accurate measurement of the new traders’ creation—and they show that something else was happening in the 1820s. Whereas most 1815–1819 sales there had been made by entrepreneurs who traded in other goods as well, now specialized slave traders began to dominate the notarial records. These professional traders dramatically increased the scale of the forced migration of people. And when we combine the information from the first document that Boswell recorded—the deed or act of sale, which showed that Pierce was selling Ellen to Barthelemy Bonny of Orleans Parish for $420—with a second one, we can see that in the 1820s enslavers had also come as close to fully monetizing human bodies and lives as any set of capitalists have ever done. Starting in the fall of 1829, buyers and sellers also had to comply with a new Louisiana law that required everyone who imported an out-of-state slave for sale to create and file a “certificate of good character,” which had to be witnessed by two property owners from the slave’s home county. Louisiana state legislators were worried that the rapidly expanding trade between slavery’s oldest states to slavery’s newest ones was bringing in rebellious troublemakers. This certificate had to list the names of the original seller and purchaser, the sale site, and a general description of the person sold: name, age, sex, color, height. So we can see from the certificate Pierce filed with Boswell that Pierce bought Ellen in Davidson County, Tennessee—Nashville—on the 22nd of September, from Garrison Lanier. Lanier was a Davidson County resident who owned six slaves before selling Ellen.4
The law was in force until late 1831, and the trade concentrated mainly in the post-malaria months of late November to April, so the certificates give us two “selling seasons.” In those two seasons, more than 4,200 certificates of good character entered the books of thirteen different New Orleans notaries. Add them all up, sort them, test them with statistical software, and they yield a census that is unique in the records of the internal slave trade in the United States. Such a database allows us to see, for these two years, precisely whom the slave trade pulled to the Mississippi’s mouth, where they came from, and who had sold them back in the old states. This knowledge can shed new light on how professional slave traders replaced the multitasking entrepreneurs of the 1810s. The data from the notarial records can also contextualize the experiences of the people who were inside the slave trade, helping us to see what shaped the stories Ellen told when she got to Barthelemy Bonny’s slave labor camp. (See Tables 6.1 and 6.2.)5
To begin with, the enslaved people sold in New Orleans in 1829–1831 by slave traders like Pierce were overwhelmingly from the older states that constituted the heart of slavery and the African-descended population in the United States. In 1815–1819, 33 percent of the enslaved sold in New Orleans had come from the Chesapeake and the Carolinas. Now more than one-third of all the certificates were issued in one state—Virginia—which one of its natives, Louis Hughes, called the “mother of slavery.” “When I was placed upon the block,” Hughes remembered, “a Mr. McGee came up and felt of me and asked me what I could do. ‘You look like a right smart nigger,’ said he, ‘Virginia always produces good darkies.’” In fact, more than two-thirds of the people transported to New Orleans between July 1829 and the end of 1831 came from the three states of North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland. The combined share for North Carolina and the Chesapeake—the oldest districts of slavery in the United States—amounts to 3,009, or 77 percent of the total (Table 6.2).6
Image 6.1. In 1829, the Louisiana state legislature passed a law that required all enslaved people brought into the state to be sold to be accompanied by a “certificate of good character.” These contained personal information about the enslaved person in question, making possible an unprecedented analysis of where they came from, when they had been sold to the slave trader in question, and other key characteristics of their personal forced migrations. Source: New Orleans Parish, Acts of William Baswell, Vol. 7, p. 299, Certificate of Good Character for Ellen, Notarial Archive, New Orleans.
TABLE 6.1. CERTIFICATE ORIGINS BY STATE, 1829–1831, NEW ORLEANS, AND 1826–1834, NATCHEZ
Source: Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans and Port Register, Adams County, Mississippi (in private hands).
* Number of persons
** Percent of column total
TABLE 6.2. CERTIFICATE ORIGINS BY GROUPS OF STATES, 1829–1831, NEW ORLEANS, AND 1826–1834, NATCHEZ
Source: Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans and Port Register, Adams County, Mississippi (in private hands).
In counties along the James, the Roanoke, and the Potomac, African grandparents, great-grandparents, and even further-back parents had, over the decades and centuries since they had survived the Atlantic slave trade, created the traditions and networks that enabled enslaved families to survive. They had even thrived, living longer and raising more of their own babies to healthy adulthood. But by the 1820s, enslavers had been pulling up stakes and heading southwest across the mountains to places where money could be made for three decades. As of 1850, 38
8,000 whites born in Virginia would live in other states. Human property, generated by enslaved people’s own commitment to raising and protecting children, often represented for the enslavers who remained in the Southeast their only real wealth. Only markets in Georgia or Louisiana could render those slaves as liquid value. And by 1829, a new set of entrepreneurs was building on the earlier development of market institutions in New Orleans to create a powerful and efficient trade that unlocked the monetary value stored in the family bonds that enslaved people had built so richly in the Chesapeake and Carolinas.7
As early as the mid-1820s, people who visited the Mississippi Valley had been noticing this new breed of entrepreneurs. They were young men who were getting rich fast by specializing in one commodity—humans. Buying masses of enslaved people for low prices in Virginia and Maryland, these young men “thrust them into the prison-house for safe-keeping,” drove their enslaved purchases “handcuffed through the country like cattle,” and boated them down the rivers and around the cape of Florida to New Orleans or elsewhere to the southwest. The new entrepreneurs were efficiently connecting stored wealth to markets by handling the entire middle portion of the forced migration process. And African Americans gave them a new name. Robert Falls heard it from his mother, who told him that her enslaver sold her “to the slave speculators,” who drove her and the rest of a coffle “like a pack of mules, to the market.” They went through North Carolina, where, Falls later said, “she began to have fits. You see they had sold her away from her baby.”8
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 25