The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Southwestern whites suddenly realized that their system had inhaled tens of thousands of people who had been stolen from Southampton and similar counties that had been devastated by the professional slave trade over the past decade. Alabama’s governor activated the state militia. Newspapers in New Orleans suppressed reporting of the rebellion until authorities could collect enough weapons to defeat copycat attacks, but word still got out. In Louisiana’s West Feliciana Parish, a white widow heard a rumor that the slaves on a nearby labor camp “had armed themselves and claimed their liberty.” “She instantly started screaming and crying as loud as she could,” a calmer neighbor recorded in her diary. The widow demanded that a male neighbor go find out what was happening, but instead, he called out the members of the local militia, who assembled and marched to the alleged epicenter. There they “found the overseer and the Negroes very busy at gathering the crops,” picking cotton “as peaceable as lambs.”68

  “The proper officers of the state should take measures to prevent the importation of slaves” from “the infected section of the country,” wrote the New Orleans Bee. The editor had stopped trusting certificate laws to filter the old states’ most rebellious enslaved people from the stream of the slave trade. Despite opposition from ambitious cotton and sugar entrepreneurs, an emergency session of the state legislature banned the slave trade. (Reading the writing on the wall, traders rushed in 774 more slaves before the special session ended.) The Alabama legislature also raced into session and prohibited the trade. The next spring, Mississippi held a constitutional convention. There were so many enslaved migrants around booming Natchez, said planter-banker Stephen Duncan, that “we will one day have our throats cut in this country.” Elitist representatives from the Natchez area and delegates from the poor-white “piney woods” formed an unusual alliance and incorporated a slave-trade prohibition in the new constitution.69

  Of course, buyers and sellers immediately began to poke loopholes in the slave-trade prohibitions. Buyers traveled to the Chesapeake. Traders filled out declarations swearing that the slaves they were transporting were for their own use only. Legislators from the newer cotton counties in Mississippi, who still wanted slaves, blocked implementation of that state’s constitutional ban, so the biggest traders moved their headquarters from New Orleans to the “Forks in the Road” market just north of Natchez. But back East, Virginia—the site of the rebellion and still the home of the South’s largest slave population—had called a state constitutional convention to consider emancipation. In the course of the deliberations, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Randolph proposed a statewide referendum of white voters on whether Virginia should initiate gradual emancipation.70

  Randolph’s plan would have made all slaves born after July 4, 1840, into state property upon adulthood. Virginia would then hire out these slaves, saving the wages to pay, ultimately, for the expenses involved in exiling them “beyond the limits of the United States.” Under this plan, many Afro-Virginians would have still been enslaved in the early twentieth century, although Randolph assumed that before then, most enslavers would cash out by selling them south. Randolph was proposing to revive his grandfather’s dream: the exile of Virginia’s slave population and the creation of an all-white Old Dominion. Many, such as fellow delegate Thomas Marshall, son of John Marshall, the chief justice of the US Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, supported Randolph’s proposal, believing that slavery was “ruinous to whites.” The “industrious population” of non-slaveholding whites was emigrating in order to flee a state whose biggest business was raising people for the southwestern market. And if they continued, Marshall predicted—invoking the fate of Saint-Domingue whites—“the whole country [of Virginia] will be inundated by one black wave . . . with a few white faces here and there floating on the surface.”71

  Yet other delegates warned that the state’s entire economy depended on the price point of a single commodity: that of hands at New Orleans. If the Randolph plan passed, Virginia enslavers would rush to sell their human property south at one time and the price would plummet. Slave owners were vested in the slave market, and most of them wanted the government to defend and expand their right to nearly unfettered use of their property—not to limit it. The Virginia convention rejected Randolph and approved the status quo, though it added new limits on slave literacy and on free black life. Over the next three years, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Maryland imposed similar restrictions. Enslavers had already imposed the like in the southwestern states.72

  Limits on literacy and on contact with free blacks aimed to restrict access to ideas about freedom. Proslavery politicians blamed the first appearance of Garrison’s Liberator in January 1831 for Nat Turner’s decision later that year to bathe Southampton County in white folks’ blood. The Georgia legislature even offered a $5,000 reward for Garrison’s apprehension. But enslavers also feared that African-American Christianity itself might generate danger from within. Governor John Floyd of Virginia wrote that “every black preacher . . . east of the Blue Ridge” had known about Turner’s plot. Misguided white piety had permitted “large assemblages of negroes” at which black preachers had allegedly read out the “incendiary publications of Walker [and] Garrison.” An Alabama newspaper warned of “shrewd, cunning” slave preachers. Should revolt break out in the southwestern region, “Some crispy-haired prophet, some pretender to inspiration, will be the ring-leader as well as the inspiration of that plot. By feigning communication from heaven, he will rouse the fanaticism of his brethren, and they will be prepared for any work, no matter how desolating and murderous.”73

  Southwestern enslaver-politicians decided to put an end to independent black Christianity. Mobile, Alabama, banned gatherings—including religious ones—of more than three slaves. The punishment for violation was “twenty stripes” on the back. The local newspaper wrote, “The managers of the Mobile Sunday School [have decided] that hereafter no colored person will be received for instruction who does not bring written permission to that effect from the owner.” The Mississippi state legislature made it illegal for any “slave, free negro, or mulatto . . . to exercise the function of a Minister of the Gospel.” All religious practice, aside from individual prayer, would now be kept under the eyes of enslavers and their henchmen—which is what evangelical ministers now volunteered to be. White ministers eagerly promised that they would henceforth work harder than ever to make Christianity into a tool that would help enslavers govern their society.74

  With independent black preaching now illegal in most places, white Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians offered two legal religious options to the enslaved. The first one was to affiliate with white churches. There, African Americans could look forward to unequal status and discipline. In bigger churches, they’d sit in the upstairs galleries. In the log church that Annie Stanton attended in the Alabama woods, she actually had to sit outside the door with her fellow slaves on benches. After the white preacher’s sermon was done, a black preacher would come out and talk to them, while whites supervised.75

  The second strategy was the creation of “slave missions”: white preachers, funded and regulated by white denominations, would be sent to preach to black congregations. The proslavery sermons that slave missions delivered were the South’s interior version of the arguments that were to be, beginning in the 1830s, increasingly projected at the region’s exterior critics. Ministers developed a theological argument that claimed that Christianity justified slavery. They leaned on the apostle Paul, with his admonitions to servants to obey their masters. Increasingly they also argued that a holistic view of the Bible showed that slavery was not sinful. In fact, they said, God had ordained that the Israelites, and white people in general, could enslave allegedly inferior “Hamitic” peoples (supposedly descended from Ham, one of Noah’s sons), such as Africans, so long as they treated the latter with paternalistic goodness.

  In this view, slavery’s critics were willfully refusing to read the Bible closely enough to
recognize that slavery was God-ordained; abolition doctrines were merely attempts to supplant the word of God with individual will. And this went for potential southern critics as well as northern ones. James Smylie, a prominent Presbyterian minister from Mississippi, and (by 1840) the captor of thirty men, women, and children, argued in 1836 that a slaveholder “whose conscience is guided, not by the word of God, but by the doctrines of men”—i.e., by the anxiety that antislavery Christians might have a point—“is often suffering the lashes of a guilty conscience.” But he should not suffer. God had created some people unfit for freedom. Slavery was God’s will. To worry about slavery was to doubt God. To oppose it was heresy.76

  BY 1835, ISRAEL CAMPBELL, who had been transported from Kentucky to the cotton “system” of Mississippi, had become a “first-rate hand” and more. He drove a work gang on a slave labor camp near the little crossroads town of Mount Vernon. Campbell had been granted as much status as any white Mississippian was willing to give him. Yet one night, when someone pounding on his cabin door jolted him out of sleep, he woke up to discover how little protection he had. Stumbling out of bed, he unlatched the door and tumbled backward as two white men shoved their way in. One grabbed Campbell by the collar and pulled his throat toward the point of a bowie knife. “What do you know about Dr. Cotton’s scrape?” the man growled.

  “Nothing at all, sir,” stammered Campbell. That was true. But he did know who Dr. Cotton was. And that had him shaking. Cotton was a white man who had come from up north to practice as a “steam-doctor”—a “Thompsonian” physician, who claimed he could treat many illnesses and complaints by having the patients inhale large quantities of steam and small quantities of medicine. Though Thompsonian homeopathy was less likely to kill the patient than the massive chemical doses prescribed in those days by traditional physicians, steam-doctors were thought of as itinerants from society’s fringe. And somehow Cotton had given the impression that he was overly friendly with local African Americans. Emphasizing their questioning with a blade pressed against Campbell’s throat, these men told him that “Dr. Cotton and some mean white men and a great many of the negroes were laying plans to rise and kill off the white people and free the negroes.” Then they said that they knew Campbell had recently attended a secret, illegal prayer session in the woods led by “Harris’ old Dave, the negro preacher.” Clearly, they suspected that Campbell was also involved in the alleged plot. How long had he stayed? Did he know if slaves had talked “about getting free and killing the white people?”

  Campbell desperately denied hearing anything of the sort. Somehow he convinced the interrogators that he had nothing to do with a conspiracy. The knife moved away from his throat. The men offered him a convivial shot from their stoneware jug. Campbell’s hand shook as he raised the brandy to his lips. It burned going down, like the drinks auctioneers gave men and women on the block, but the men watched with approval as he took their cup. Campbell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. They warned him that anyone connected with the plot would be shot, and then they clattered off in the night. Campbell watched from the doorway as they rode away. He knew that the excitement and fear he’d seen mingled in their eyes was going to condemn some people to death before the sun rose.77

  If there was a plot, all Campbell knew about it could probably be inferred from the tales he and his peers had told each other about their own stolen lives. The whites had their own feared storyline, which had been seared into their brains long before Southampton. To stop that one from coming to pass, all around the neighborhood that evening, groups of white men were dragging slaves out of cabins and questioning them. In terror, some charged others with crimes that never existed. When the night was over, when enough victims had been rounded up, the vigilantes—most of whom were local planters—began to hang the condemned in Mount Vernon. For two days, they dropped and strangled black preachers and worshippers from a pole between two high Y-shaped posts. They also strung up a few white men who, like Dr. Cotton, had crossed a racial barrier.78

  Afterward, the vigilantes came back and got Campbell. This time, they only wanted him to wait tables at a banquet, where the planters of the area praised themselves for saving Mississippi from destruction. Walking home the morning after the party, Campbell saw the heads of hanged black preachers impaled on roadside stakes. And that was almost the last time Campbell saw Old Dave and his brothers. But not quite. He came face to face with them again once that fall. Not long before Campbell’s owner moved his slaves yet again, this time to Tennessee, Campbell went into the little apothecary’s shop that served as Mount Vernon’s pharmacy, and there he saw the grinning skulls of Dave and his apostles displayed on its shelves.

  Israel Campbell had been seeking God for a long time, “but in Mississippi there were so many drawbacks” that he could not “make my peace with God,” he later said. Indeed, religious seeking had almost made him one of white Mississippi’s bleached trophies. But Campbell was still drawn to chase the same God who didn’t intervene when white people set the buzzards’ table at Mount Vernon. In Tennessee, Campbell tried again. He and his wife attended every nearby religious meeting. Frenetically, he sneaked off twice a day to a “praying-ground” he had cleared at a secret place deep in the woods. On his knees he battled his fear that he was no more than chalk dust in someone else’s hands. Then, late in the fall, a week of frantic cotton-picking earned the slaves of the devout a short break in the harvest: a few days timed to coincide with a nearby Methodist camp-meeting, where white preachers led and black “exhorters” were restricted to warming up the crowd and praying with individual seekers. Israel Campbell and his wife attended. For three days, they begged on their knees for the kind of ecstatic transformation they saw people having all around them. Finally, on the fourth night, Israel’s wife stood up and began to shout with other new converts.

  Campbell had seen others who shouted in ecstasy. He had heard others say they felt God’s breath in their lungs. What was left of some of them gaped at customers in the apothecary’s shop. It was hard to make peace with that. There were also the bleeding wounds that God had permitted wrongdoers to blast in his own life. Despite all his mother’s prayers, something—whether God, or the universe, or fate—had torn Israel from her, strapped a young man who had once been an infant at her breast into the leather of the whipping-machine. Mississippi Baptists claimed that “dark, mysterious . . . dispensations” excused white Christians’ complicity in slavery’s outrages. But lives that were stolen—this was a crime, not a mystery to be accepted on faith. Perhaps even God was complicit.

  Israel fell on his knees, almost alone. An older black preacher named Reeves stood behind his shoulder. Reeves had survived six weeks of marching in shackles. He had survived white folks’ fear of him. He was thin, made of knots of starved, scarred muscle, draped in rags. He held his face—carved with lines dark from fifteen thousand days under the sunshine—utterly still. As Campbell prayed, Reeves looked straight ahead, impassive as a king. At last some moment only he could judge arrived. He bent down and breathed into Israel’s ear: “Pray on, young brother.”

  7

  SEED

  1829–1837

  SPRINGTIME. THE FIELD SPREADS open. Suddenly it feels as if the insects have always been buzzing here. As if gray January never was. Green crusts the tree branches. The rain falls. The ground drinks the rain. The world shines like a sun.

  The entrepreneur looks out at the fields from the new porch on his cabin, talking. His employee listens, then walks over, picks up a clod of dirt. Smells it. Maybe tastes it. Puts it down.

  The next day it rains hard in the morning, but when it stops the men bring the mules and the plows out. The spongy earth oozes into the hollows, sucking the metal plow points. “Fuck this mud,” the men mutter.

  Fuck. From an Old English word meaning: to strike, to beat. Before that, in an even older language: to plow. To tear open.

  The seeds are waiting.

  In the sack in the shed. Or
maybe safe under the entrepreneur’s high bed. The bed where he fucks his wife. Bed brought by wagon from the landing, bed bought with last year’s crop. Maybe he didn’t bring his wife. Maybe the sack is under the bed where he fucks the sixteen-year-old light-skinned girl from Maryland, also bought with last year’s crop. Maybe she is the same girl who washes the bloodstains from the sheets in the morning. Who carries the chamber pot to the woods. Who turns it over, brings it back empty, sets it by his side of the bed. Bumps her toe on the bulging sack, full of tiny seeds.

  Her toe feels their caress through cotton bagging sewn up with cotton thread. One hundred thousand DNA packets, each one encoding Gossypium hirsutum. One hundred thousand cotton seeds. Oily against each other, warm like Mexico’s Tehuacan Valley, where five thousand years ago Indian women tamed these seeds’ ancestors.1

  Or, to plant. It is the next dry day. The employee brings out the bag. He cuts it open with his long knife. A double handful into her new apron. She lines up barefoot in the field with the rest. One hand pinches apron into pocket. One hand holds seed between thumb and forefinger. The next woman on drags a hoe up the row, trenching the broken dirt. Her turn now, she drops a seed, rakes damp black dirt over it with her naked left heel, presses the ball of her foot down to settle the seed in the dirt. She moves a few inches up the row.2

  Underneath, all is dark. The layers of muck and humus have already quickened with their own yearly cycle. They hum the rhythms of their local history of biological alliances. The outsider seed sits quiet as a tick. In its hull, double helixes lie in suspended animation.