In the 1820s, enslaved people on slavery’s frontier faced the yoked-together powers of the world economy, a high demand for their most crucial commodity, and the creatively destructive ruling class of a muscular young republic. And they faced it all alone. For many years, enslaved people could only push back with hushed breaths around ten thousand fires on the southwestern cotton plantations—or in the Southeast, among those left behind. Although they had to keep them from white ears, the words that made up their critique of slavery mattered tremendously to them and to the future. Around the fires, or late at night with a mouth pressed to the ear of the person with whom one shared a bed, or coded in the testimony of the faithful at all-black religious meetings, enslaved people said the word “stole,” and so described a history that undermined all of the implicit and explicit claims enslavers made to defend slavery. Among those with whom they now spoke a common tongue, they dared to disagree with the claim that slavery would expand, and that no one should do anything much to interfere. They rejected the claim that God, nature, or history had destined them for slavery. They exposed the assumption that white people’s needs ought to trump their own, or the idea that money ought to trump conscience, pitting this word of their own against every word written on papers like the ones Granville Sharp Pierce carried with him to William Boswell’s office.
“My mother and uncle Robert and Joe,” said Margaret Nickerson of Florida, “[they] was stole from Virginia and fetched here.” Lewis Brown explained his own genealogy in this way: “My mother was stole. The speculators stole her and they brought her to Kemper County, Mississippi, and sold her.” Over and over, enslaved people said that when they were sold, or otherwise forced to move, they had been “stolen.” In so telling their personal histories, they accomplished two things. First, they used a newly common tongue to make their own personal histories part of a larger story. And second, they made it clear that this common story was a crime story. Buying and selling people was a crime. Buyers and sellers were criminals.24
Critiques of slavery as theft had been made before. But the context was different now. The international slave trade was closed, and enslavers could pose as the architects of a “domesticated” system no longer sustained by wars of enslavement in Africa. Meanwhile, the New Orleans notarial records, like all the legal records of southern slavery, described the rupture that Granville Sharp Pierce imposed on Ellen’s life as a legitimate transaction in legally held property. Most whites, whether in the North or the South, believed that slave owners had obtained their slaves by orderly business transactions, well recorded in law. And as the economy changed, they were suggesting that owners of property should be able to do whatever they wanted with what they legally owned. In such a context, when enslaved people said to each other, “We have been stolen,” they were preparing a radical assault on enslavers’ implicit and explicit claims to legitimacy, one that would lay an axe to the intellectual root of every white excuse—even ones that hadn’t yet been dreamed up. For describing slavery and its expansion as stealing meant that slavery was not merely an awkward inconsistency in the American republican experiment, or even a source of discourse about sectional difference. Slavery was not, then, merely something that pained white people to see. Instead, “stealing” says, slavery is a crime.
One word, “stole,” came to be a history—an interpretation of the past and how it shaped the present—from Maryland to South Carolina to Texas and everywhere in between. Enslaved people recognized that the slavery they were experiencing was shaped by the ability of whites to move African Americans’ bodies wherever they wanted. Forced migration created markets that allowed whites to extract profit from human beings. It brought about a kind of isolation that permitted enslavers to use torture to extract new kinds of labor. It led to disease, hunger, and other kinds of deadly privations. So as these vernacular historians tried to make sense of their own battered lives, the word “stole” became the core of a story that explained. It revealed that what feet had to undergo, and the way the violence of separation ripped hearts open and turned hands against body and soul, these were all ultimately produced by the way enslavers were able to use property claims in order to deploy people as commodities at the entrepreneurial edge of the modern world economy.
In this critique, slaveholders were not innocent heirs of history, which is what Jefferson had made them out to be. Instead, slavery’s expansion was consciously chosen, a crime with intent. Years after slavery ended, former slave Charles Grandy reflected on the motives of the enslavers who had shipped him from Virginia to New Orleans for sale. After a lifetime, he had made it back to Norfolk. Now he asked his interviewer, an African-American academic just like Claude Anderson of Hampton University, if the young man understood the significance of the statue of the Confederate soldier that loomed on a high pillar down by the harbor. Grandy himself had once passed the statue’s eventual site in the hold of a slave ship. “Know what it mean?” Grandy asked. But the question mark was rhetorical, he already had an answer ready: it meant, he told the interviewer, “Carry the nigger down south if you want to rule him.”25
The statue stood as a post-hoc justification for the same desires that had led whites to steal him from his Virginia life, or Hettie Mitchell’s mother from her Carolina parents. For if you want to rule a person, steal the person. Steal him from his people and steal him from his own right hand, from everything he has grown up knowing. Take her to a place where you can steal everything else from her: her future, her creativity, her womb. That was the true cause working behind the history of the nineteenth century, Grandy insisted, from slavery’s expansion to its political defense, and to the war that its proponents eventually started. Talk about “stealing” forces a focus on the slave trade, on the expansion of slavery, on the right hand in the market, on the left picking ever faster in the cotton fields. In this story there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner, only the ability of the strong to take from others. Stealing can never be an orderly system undergirded by property rights, cushioned by family-like relationships. There is no balance between contradictory elements. There is only chaos and violence. So when enslaved people insisted that the slave trade was the crystalline form of slavery-as-theft, they ripped the veils off a modern and modernizing form of slavery, one that could not be stabilized or contained. Constant disruption, creation, and destruction once more: this was its nature.
“I heard this over again so many, many times before grandmother died,” said Helen Odom of her grandmother’s story about being taken to Arkansas and sold—“the greatest event in her life.” Talking with each other night after night about how slavery’s expansion had shaped their own lives, enslaved people, taken away or left behind, created a vernacular tradition of history that encouraged storytellers to bend every migration tale around the fulcrum of theft. And almost every tale fit. The standard methods used by slave traders were, indeed, much like kidnapping, just as the tales said. If you had been seized, tied to the saddle of a horse like a sack of meal, and ridden off without a chance to kiss your wife goodbye forever—this is what happened to William Grose of Virginia in the 1820s—you might compare your experience to that of being kidnapped.26
Some African Americans who toiled in the cotton and sugar fields had in fact been literally “stolen” even within the framework of whites’ property claims. John Brown watched slave trader Starling Finney and his men abduct a girl from her owner in South Carolina. The thieves kept her in the wagon on the way down to Georgia, partly so that they could repeatedly gang-rape her, but also to hide her from potential pursuit by the girl’s owner. Julia Blanks said that her grandmother was freeborn in Virginia or Maryland, but whites lured her into a coach in Washington, DC, drove her to the White House, and presented her as a gift to Andrew Jackson’s niece. Still other slaves, who had been expecting freedom under the gradual emancipation laws of northern states, found themselves in Louisiana or Mississippi when unscrupul
ous owners sold them south before their freedom came. Between 1825 and 1827, Joseph Watson, the mayor of Philadelphia, pursued at least twenty-five cases in which free African Americans from his border-state area had been abducted and taken to Mississippi and Alabama. Most were children. Watson hired lawyers in Mississippi, wrote letters to slave-state government officials, and tried to organize prosecution of the alleged kidnappers, to little avail.27
Sometimes enslaved people conflated kidnapping and plain old-fashioned slave dealing because, like Carey Davenport’s father, they were unsure of their actual legal status. Davenport’s father was supposedly promised freedom by his “old, old master” in Richmond. But after the old man’s death, his son “steal him into slavery again,” said Davenport. People who claimed to be kidnapped free men or women might have been looking for some sort of individual “out” from the shame of slave origins. Not I, someone like James Green might suggest, I did not belong in slavery, because I, as an individual, was kidnapped. His father, he said, was a “full-blooded Indian.” His mother’s owner, “Master Williams,” who “[called] me ‘free boy,’” walked “free” James down the street to the Petersburg, Virginia, auction block one day and had him sold to Texas. Green spoke as if it had all been a mistake. He never should have been subjected to slavery’s humiliations. But Green’s daughter called him on his self-deception. She “took exception,” remembered the interviewer who met them both, “to her father’s claim that he was half Indian.” She knew that her father’s lighter skin and ambiguous status (“I never had to do much work [in Virginia] for nobody but my mother”) revealed that “master Williams” had actually put his own son on the auction block.28
To the enslaved, only one other set of events in remembered history seemed as significant as the forced migration that was consuming their families and communities at an accelerating rate in the 1820s. Long after 1808, plenty of people in the South could still talk about how they had been stolen from Africa into the Middle Passage. In 1844, asked to give his age, an African-born Florida man replied, “Me no know, massa, Buckra man steal niggar year year ago.” To understand and explain the expansion of slavery in which they found themselves, American-born listeners borrowed terms from African survivors who had told them of how the first slavery had been made. “They always done tell it am wrong to lie and steal,” said Josephine Hubbard. “So why did the white folks steal my mammy and her mammy from Africa?” “They talks a heap ‘bout the niggers stealing,” said Shang Harris. “What was the first stealing done? It was in Afriky, when the white folks stole the niggers.”29
In the 1820s and 1830s, as the new professional slave trade in hands became institutionalized and expanded exponentially, so did the stories and so did the number of tellers. The themes of theft, the indictment of whites, and the understanding that the personal disruptions drove a new form of slavery all deepened. Anyone, enslaved people came to understand, could be taken and transported southwest. All of those taken were in some way stolen, for the basic rituals of this emerging, modern market society were absurd disguises for thievery. So, for instance, implied the apocryphal tale of a woman named Venus, whose story circulated around southern fires for decades. Shoved onto the auction block by her enslaver, Venus scowled down at those who eagerly bid on her. Then she interrupted the auctioneer’s patter with a sarcastic shout: “Weigh them cattle!” Such stories became classics, delivering again and again a powerful freight of indictment of whites, leading listeners from their own particular experiences into wider criticism of the absurdity of buying and selling human beings as property. “What was the law”—the one that should be, or even, in the case of children kidnapped from free states, the law that white people themselves had written—“what was the law, when bright shiny money was in sight?” asked Charley Barbour. “Money make the train go . . . and at that time I expect money make the ships go”—to New Orleans with slaves, to Britain with cotton. Instead of being individual misfortunes, enslaved people realized their own experiences were part of a giant historical robbery, a forced transfer of value that they saw every day in the form of widening clearings, cotton bales moving toward markets, and slave coffles heading further in.30
African Americans were not confused about what they thought of slavery’s expansion. Yet in the 1820s enslaved people’s vernacular history of being stolen was still hidden on the breath of captives. And these captives had been carried far away from any audience that had the political or economic power to do much about the situation of enslaved people, or about the endlessly multiplied theft that was still in progress. Forced migration taught enslaved people to call slavery stealing, and it provoked them to take extreme measures to escape. In 1826, an ad appeared in the Natchez Gazette offering $50 for anyone who could capture Jim, a slave who had escaped from owner William Barrow. Purchased from Austin Woolfolk late the preceding fall at New Orleans, Jim had now run away, and Barrow suspected he’d try to “pass for free” on steamboats. Jim had a speech impediment, Barrow’s ad pointed out. Geography also impeded escape. Most likely, Jim did not make it, although a few did. The same new technology that sped the passage of enslaved migrants up the rivers of the cotton country could also carry stowaways out.31
The enormity of what was happening in the cotton fields and traders’ jails of the new South was still only beginning to leak out in the 1820s. Runaways would carry most of what was carried: it wasn’t going to leak out with many whites. Most found ways to accommodate themselves to what they saw, to sweep the inconvenient fragments under the rug. “Mrs. Ann Anderson sat by her window and cried,” remembered ex-slave Elisha Green, seeing in his mind again a white woman in the house where he’d worked back in Mayslick, Kentucky. Wagons filled with crying children came down the street as she watched, and then a clanking caterpillar of men in irons followed. The oldest, in the lead, “looked to be about seventy years old, and he sang: ‘Hark from the tomb’”—a doleful hymn that in 1825 was already old-fashioned. So Mrs. Ann Anderson wept. And sat still.32
In the 1820s, a few scattered white dissidents were trying to raise the issue of slavery. But these white folks were in practical terms almost as powerless as white folks could be in this era of American history. For instance, there were the southern Quakers, or at least a few of them. Although Pennsylvania was the settlement of New World Quakers, members of the Society of Friends—as the Quakers officially denominated themselves—had lived in North Carolina since the early eighteenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as other denominations of Protestants in the South accommodated themselves to slavery, many North Carolina Quakers chose slavery over their own religious identity. But a few reacted against slavery’s deepening. There was Rachel Leonard, who became the first white woman to address a mixed male-female gathering on the subject when she read her “Address” to the North Carolina Manumission Society in the 1820s. Then there was Elihu Embree, an eastern Tennessee Quaker, who in the early 1810s saw enslaved people being driven in irons along the roads across the mountains. Embree couldn’t sit by the window. He freed his own slaves and launched a newspaper called The Emancipator. His editorials rejected conventional excuses, such as Thomas Jefferson’s claim that separation from loved ones mattered little to African Americans. No, insisted Embree, enslaved people had as much “sensibility and attachment” to their families as Jefferson did.33
These isolated dissidents were often unable to see beyond the assumptions that they took on board with their own self-identification as white. But at their best, they knew that slavery was changing and moving, and they knew that slavery’s growth troubled them in ways that could not be dealt with in the sphere of normal political calculations and regional rivalries. At the same time, other white southerners began to see dissent as more problematic, especially after the Missouri crisis. By the time Embree died in 1820, some of his local associates, including fellow Quaker Charles Osborn, had already been forced out of Tennessee. Osborn moved to free-state Ohio and established The
Philanthropist, the first newspaper to advocate the unconditional abolition of slavery. He also met a young New Jersey Quaker named Benjamin Lundy. At nineteen, Lundy had gone to the Ohio Valley to practice his trade of saddle-making. In Wheeling, Virginia, which linked the Virginia valleys to the Ohio River and ultimately New Orleans, he realized the extent of the slave-trade network. Wheeling, he wrote, was part of “a great thoroughfare for the traffickers in human flesh. Their ‘coffles’ passed through the place frequently. My heart was deeply grieved. . . . I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress; and the iron entered my soul.” Lundy moved Embree’s Emancipator to Baltimore and renamed it The Genius of Universal Emancipation.34
“Genius” meant “Spirit”—or “breath,” and Lundy’s paper was the first white-run abolitionist newspaper to keep breathing for more than a handful of issues. Initially, Lundy used it to support the program of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which in the 1820s was the only prominent white organization to make a claim to being against slavery. The ACS proposed to solve the problem of slavery by shipping emancipated slaves to Africa and elsewhere. Even this expedient was too antislavery for many whites. The escape of any African American, including the already-free, shrank the potential market in stolen humans. Perhaps that explains the murderous sentiment of the hired captain of an 1826 Quaker-sponsored voyage to resettle freed slaves in Haiti. He told his Quaker employer he’d prefer to tie the forty emancipated African Americans on the ship to the Quaker himself and drown them all in “the Gulph Stream.”35
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