The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Image 7.1. In this image, slaveholders imagine African women as sexualized goddesses who come west across the Atlantic to serve white men as slaves in the New World. All her divine panoply—the cherubs, the sea creatures pulling her half-shell chariot—is a wink that reminds the white male viewer how different her status is from that of white women symbolized by Venus, the goddess whose apotheosis this one mocks. “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” from Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (London, 1801), vol. 2.

  In the nineteenth-century US South, two factors stood in the way of white men who wanted to play out Edwards-style fantasies. One was the fact that American religious reformers had begun to identify nonmarital sexuality as a major social problem, in part as a reaction to the way the increased mobility of young adults brought new temptations into their lives. Commercial quickening turned New York and other cities into hunting grounds for prostitutes looking for traveling businessmen, and vice versa. The solution, said authors of literature on the topic, many of them female, was that girls and women needed to refuse sexual contact outside of the guarantee for the support that marriage provided. Young men, meanwhile, needed to learn the self-control such authors thought necessary to make the young republic a moral paragon by avoiding illicit sex and masturbation.46

  The Victorian complex of ideas about sex soon became the consensus view of respectable society. And enslaved people themselves often resisted, setting limits on the ability of white men to fulfill their desires. Their resistance was strengthened by strategies developed over generations of experience in southeastern communities. African-American family networks and ties to white patrons gave some girls and women allies who could intervene to prevent horrific abuse. The best-known case is that of Harriet Jacobs, whose Edenton, North Carolina, enslaver pursued her from the time she began puberty in the mid-1820s. For a decade, Jacobs deflected his advances with the help of white and black allies. Ultimately, she sought refuge in the attic of her grandmother, a free woman of color.47

  Of course, some women of African-American descent used their sexuality to create a little leverage for themselves. Nor was the shift toward a more “Victorian” way of thought the only reason why, for instance, white women felt anger and competition when their husbands had sex with enslaved women. And despite respectable condemnation of “concubinage,” the coercion of enslaved women continued in the nineteenth century. In one case, South Carolina Governor James Henry Hammond bought a woman and her daughter. The mother became his sexual partner. When her daughter reached twelve, he made the girl his victim as well. (He also molested his four white nieces, creating a scandal that ruined their marital prospects. Its effects on him were temporary, however, and he was elected to the US Senate.)48

  Still, men like Hammond became increasingly circumspect in the Southeast. But the southwestern region was different, in several key ways. Many migrant whites came with the idea already in their heads that slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground. “To be a gentleman here,” wrote one visitor to New Orleans, “one must patronize a yellow miss. . . . [I]f a young buck has one or two discarded lemans, his credit rises in proportion to the number.” Supposedly, in arrangements called plaçage, young white men contracted with mixed-race women for long-term sex work. More temporary associations were arranged at balls that were limited to white men and nightgown-clad women of color, who were, as one irate white woman fumed, “Heaven’s last, worst gift to white men.”49

  The complaints about New Orleans reflected the fact that many southwestern whites wanted proper forms of sexual morality to govern the public culture of the region. But that plan collapsed. The explosive growth of the interstate slave trade relentlessly forced the commodification of enslaved women’s sexuality into view. And no individuals were more directly responsible for that than the nation’s biggest slave traders during Jackson’s presidency: Tennessee-born Isaac Franklin and his partners—who included, in a way, both Nicholas Biddle and Andrew Jackson. During Jackson’s first term in office, as impending Indian removal made it clear that new markets for slaves were about to open, Franklin’s firm rode the rising demand to become the biggest slave-trading firm in the United States. By 1832, B.U.S. lending in the Lower Mississippi Valley was sixteen times the 1824 level, because that was where Biddle saw the opportunity to give “the great staple of the country”—cotton—“assistance in bringing [it] into the commercial market.” The massive injection of capital directly and indirectly financed an equally massive expansion of the internal slave trade. The well-connected Franklin firm, for instance, drew up to $40,000 at a time from the B.U.S. to buy more slaves in the East. In fact, about 5 percent of all the commercial credit handled by the B.U.S. in 1831–1832 passed at some point through the smooth hands of this single slave-trading partnership.50

  Yet somehow Franklin and his business partners John Armfield and Rice Ballard viewed themselves as lawless outsiders. When Ballard wrote Franklin asking for an infusion of cash to pay short-term debts, Franklin wrote back, “It would be hard if two such old robbers as yourself and John [Armfield] could not sustain yourselves.” By “robber” Franklin meant a “smooth hand” at the entrepreneurial business of the frontier, including the various legal and quasi-legal ways to take money from other people. Ballard could expertly “financeer,” “shave” notes (sell people’s debt to third parties for a profit), lose $4,000 in one round of cards and take $5,000 on the next, and judge a hand in the market, then drive her hard once he bought her. Sure, they took risks, but “if they Loose everything” one day, said Franklin, on the next “they can Robb far more.” Even their competitors, and the bill-brokers, land speculators, and bank schemers who populated their circles, were “robbers”: “land pirates,” they sometimes called each other.51

  Perhaps land pirates viewed themselves as outsiders because some southeastern elites, reacting to the new abolitionist criticism of the early 1830s, were beginning to scapegoat slave traders again. Or maybe because Ballard was the sort of man who threatened to shoot a powerful Mississippi politician on sight if the man didn’t start paying his debts. Politicians, meanwhile, passed laws restricting slave traders when it suited their needs, and Franklin and his friends habitually bent and broke those laws. And maybe the slave traders cultivated a sense of rule-breaking because of the way entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of economic expansion tend to sneer at old-fashioned risk-averse people. Less savvy slave-buyers were, to Ballard, “thick-headed gumps” who were not alert to the intricacies of skinning and shaving.52

  The ultimate reason why the slave traders felt the kind of power experienced by an outlaw who gets away was half-hidden, but everybody knew about it. In 1834, Isaac Franklin wrote Rice Ballard from New Orleans, where Nat Turner panic had worn off and the trade in hands was once again going full tilt. Talking about himself in the third person—or not exactly as a person—Franklin wrote: “The way your Old One Eyed friend looked the pirate was a sin to Crockett,” he said. “Sin to Crockett” was a slang term meaning “astounding”—Davy Crockett was a frontiersman-turned-stage-performer-turned-congressman and author of a spectacularly exaggerated autobiography. And “One Eyed friend”—well here, Franklin meant himself, but also, a penis.53

  In the same vein, Franklin continued, “The fancy Girl from Charlottesville, will you send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her? Say Quick, I wanted to see her. . . . I thought that an old Robber might be satisfyed with two or three maids.” Starting in the early 1830s, the term “fancy girl” or “maid” began to appear in the interstate slave trade. It meant a young woman, usually light-skinned, sold at a high price explicitly linked to her sexual availability and attractiveness: “For Sale: A coloured girl, of very superior qualifications . . . what speculators call a fancy girl; a bright mulatto, fine figure, straight, black hair, and very black eyes; very neat and cleanly in her dress and person.”54

  Abolitionist Ethan Allen Andrews toured John Armfiel
d’s Alexandria, Virginia, slave pen in 1835 and reported that he was told that “though mulattoes are not so much valued for field-hands, they are purchased for domestics, and the females to be sold as prostitutes.” Ironically, it was a wave of new white abolitionists, inspired by William Lloyd Garrison and by the black voices he promoted in the pages of The Liberator, who did much to make sure everyone knew about the fancy. In a national campaign of pamphlets and antislavery books that blitzed the nation’s postal networks in the 1830s, abolitionist critique focused on the way slavery disrupted family relationships and forced enslaved women into nonmarital sex. The concerns of white moral reformers about the sexualized sale of women, especially almost-white ones, probably revealed much about the critics’ preoccupations and repressions. But they didn’t make it up, and enslavers were also preoccupied. Even before Andrews’s depiction of the trade as forced prostitution, the customers and the impresarios of the slave market were writing with a leer about the women they used. “I sold your fancy maid Alice for $800. There are great demand for fancy maid. I do believe that a likely Girl & a good seamstress could be sold for $1100,” Isaac Franklin wrote to Ballard in 1833. He wanted Ballard to send more: “I was disappointed in not finding your Charlottesville maid that you promised me,” he wrote in 1834, referring to Ballard’s latest shipment from his jail at Richmond. Soon, though, Isaac would have his turn, and then James Franklin, who two months later wrote to Ballard: “The Old Man sent me your maid Martha. She is inclined to be compliant.”55

  Breaking the rules of evangelical public propriety delivered to these men the sense of illicit discovery that accompanies pornography. For many white southern men, and not just slave traders, the existence of “fancy girls” put a piratical middle finger in propriety’s face, which mattered not only because it irritated meddling abolitionists but because it irritated white southern women. Calls for sexual morality implied that women were the arbiters of domestic moral authority. This struggle over who would rule was the real meaning of the “Petticoat War” in Jackson’s Cabinet, and in it the president leveraged male resentment of female claims to power. Who were politicians’ wives to say whether or not John Eaton was a moral man for marrying Peggy, a former waitress who had, rumors suggested, offered more than drinks? There was no better way to show pious white women that they governed nothing than by buying a woman for sex.

  That was the meaning, for instance, of the gesture that slave trader Theophilus Freeman made when he received visitors to his New Orleans house while lying in bed with his purchased mistress Sarah Connor. Take that, conventional white society, he said. For you’ll never stop buying slaves from me. The lip-licking letters of Franklin and Ballard’s firm, meanwhile, reveal their gleeful disdain for white women’s social authority: “I am getting dam[n]ed tired of company,” wrote a Ballard employee, briefly trapped at the high-toned White Sulphur Springs resort in Virginia. “I tell you it would be a great relief to be at the forks of road among the darkies.” After dining with a recently married couple, a Ballard associate, Bacon Tait, wrote that he “had not sit at table in a private house with [white] Ladies for more than twenty years.” And Isaac suggested that two women he purchased “could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house . . . for the Exclusive benefit of the concern and its allied agents.”56

  Slave traders were not the only sexual pirates, they were just more likely than planters to testify about such things in their letters to one another. And dark-skinned women were no safer from this form of violence than “mulatto” ones, whether from slave traders or other white men. “Put a single man” on a plantation as an overseer, “and you will see trouble enough,” wrote an Alabama planter, for “they become intimate with the negro girls, and then all order is at an end.” The white men who initiated such encounters in the southwestern areas seemed to feel more entitled to them than those in the southeastern states, and less concerned about keeping such things secret. Louisiana planter Jacob Bieller carried on a lengthy relationship with “bright mulatto” Mary Clarkson, his slave. When Bieller’s wife complained, he responded by threatening to beat her. In 1834, Mrs. Bieller finally ran away and sued for divorce. But to no small extent, the southwestern region was a free-fire zone where white men exerted power without rules.57

  In the southeastern states, enslaved husbands and male lovers possessed limited power to defend women, but at least they were impediments that white men had to calculate. Southwestern male predators enhanced their power by stripping away husbands and other allies on whom women might call. At thirteen, Louisa Picquet was the property of a Mr. Cook, whose bankruptcy reduced him to living in a Mobile boardinghouse. He spent mornings sleeping off the previous night’s drinking and gambling, and afternoons trying to get Louisa alone in his room. For a while, the white landlady protected Louisa. Instead of sending the slave girl, the woman took Cook the things he demanded: salt, a washbasin, his mended clothes. But eventually Cook’s creditors caught up to him. They sold light-skinned Louisa at the Mobile slave market to a Mr. Williams of New Orleans. He paid $1,400, a “fancy” price. Then Williams told Louisa that “he and his wife had parted,” and they boarded the next coastal steamer going to Louisiana. “Soon as we started for New Orleans, Mr. Williams told me what he bought me for,” Louisa later said.58

  The word “fancy” can mean something highly decorative, or one can “fancy” something—desire it, as something or someone to acquire. White men fancied a Louisa; white men used her to decorate their lives as commodities to be displayed. But being fancied carried over into the descriptions and pricing of all women, light or dark, house servant or field hand. Although descriptions of men emphasized size, and sometimes skills, evaluations of women discussed their attractiveness. “Girls and ordinary women” bring $350 to $400, wrote Isaac Franklin in 1832, “and a few of superior appearance at $500.” “Two boys have a mother here,” wrote a New Orleans dealer to a man who had already bought the sons. “[She is] about thirty six years old fine teeth without any grey hairs a mulatto—she is very anxious to go with them—shall I buy her? . . . She [is] very likely of her age and young looking.” Another trader described a “13 year old Girl, bright color, nearly a fancy for $1135.” She had potential. Another: “a girl[,] size of Gilmer’s girl”—so far so good, evidently—“but rough faced,” reducing her value. Even for field hands like John Knight’s dark women, looks changed prices. Male buyers imagined times between days, hidden spaces between cotton rows.59

  For the female half of the enslaved people traded and moved, sexual assault and exploitation shaped price and experiences. Traders manipulated buyers’ fancies to make sales. “We anticipate tolerably tough times this spring for one eyed men,” wrote James Franklin to Rice Ballard in 1832. “I have seen a handsome Girl since I left Va that would climb higher hills & go further to accomplish her designs than any girl to the North & she is not too apt to leave or loose her gold & the reason is because she carries her funds in her lovers purse or in Bank & to my certain knowledge has been used & that smartly by a one eyed young man about my size & age, excuse my foolishness.” Franklin, a one-eyed man, would use her lover’s purse until he could manipulate other men’s single-focused desires and get them to transfer their funds to his bank account.60

  To understand why a slave trader would call himself a one-eyed man, one must view him in the context of a slave-frontier world where white men saw their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved, feminized. The slave trader, as a one-eyed man, wasn’t just raping the women he bought and sold. He was also metaphorically raping his competitors. This was the same metaphorical world in which less wealthy white men opposed banks that used their deposits and taxes and productivity in order to create credit. Said banks then lent said credit to wealthy would-be aristocrats, men who wanted to replicate Granville County–style hierarchies on the frontier. This is why ordinary white men called on Andrew Jackson to save the country from inchoate but horrible threats
to them as manly citizens. They wanted him to help Potterize the B.U.S., and all the other targets of resentment, before it raped ordinary male citizens. And just as consequentially for what happened in the 1830s, Franklin and Ballard slipped incessantly between talking about the financial risk-taking of credit and collections, on the one hand, and sex with enslaved women, on the other. The exploitation of enslaved women had existed since the beginnings of slavery in North America, but what was now emerging was different. The new trade branded and marketed the ability to coerce sexuality, priming white entrepreneurs to believe that the purchase of enslaved-people-as-commodities offered white men freedoms not found in ordinary life. Fancy branded slave-trading as sexy for sellers and buyers.

  From fancy maids to slave-trading in general, they went on to financial risk in general. In the 1830s, when the real-world test subjects on slavery’s entrepreneurial frontier, primed by the sexual arousal built into the human-commodity market, met with opportunities to buy more slaves, take out loans to expand their operations, or sell cotton, they were more likely than ever to chase short-term gains with little thought for the future. North Carolina migrant Moses Alexander thought so, seeing the slave frontier as the epicenter of multiple types of profligacy. “To raise my children in Alabama, I may possibly tell you my greatest objection—but I cannot write it,” Alexander noted in a letter, but he saw southwestern sexual license as part and parcel of risky southwestern economic behavior. “Speculation is the order of the day and stalks abroad in the country,” he warned. Events would reveal that his estimate of one-eyed enslavers was correct. Stimulated by the domestic slave trade to think of themselves as rule-breaking “one-eyed men” who could always have their fancy, southwestern entrepreneurs were planting the financial seeds of still more irrational choices. Enslavers would soon insist on taking on immense debt. But they underestimated the downside of that risk, and eventually not only because they had been trained to feel that the universe had loaded the dice in their favor. People almost always misjudge downside risk when the prices of assets (such as slaves) are rising. They know intellectually that asset prices that have climbed in the past—whether Dutch tulip bulbs, Yazoo Company stock, or subprime mortgage securities—have formed bubbles that eventually popped. But this time is always different.61