January clenched his teeth, trying to endure any amount of pain rather than confirm submission with tears. On slavery’s frontier, however, the blood that ran usually showed a white man’s potency. And it was running down January’s chest and back. Not for him was the right to say “enough”; to act on his own desires rather than his master’s. Each stroke was meant to force him to crawl. But still he held out. “What’s the matter with you, nigger?” growled the white man. “Don’t it hurt?”
Maybe the slave owner’s arm was getting tired. But after a decade in which millions of measured lashes had doubled cotton production, he knew that consummation was coming. William could remember his own agony at this moment, how with head on knees he had “sat on my mammy’s and pappy’s step a cryin’,” sobbing with each choking grunt that came from his brother’s clenched teeth. He could not articulate it, but William was coming to understand what the scene implied for him, and for the dreams he didn’t even dream yet. The others had seen this script rehearsed a thousand times. “Some of ’em couldn’t stand it; they had to go inside their cabins.” Like the fathers and brothers in the cabins, January could not be for long the man that he had imagined himself becoming as he had returned, elated, from his rendezvous with that girl. “After a while January couldn’t stand it no more hisself, and he say in a hoarse, long whisper: ‘Massa! Massa! Have mercy on this poor nigger!’” Eighty years later, William cleared his throat, paused for a moment, and changed the subject.1
THE DRAMAS OF WHITE manhood inflicted havoc not only on black women’s lives but on African-American men as well. Those dramas cut and stained enslaved men specifically as men, systematically denying them the opportunity to assert traditionally masculine roles. Lewis Clarke, an escapee from the whipping-machine, once told northern white audiences that his most visceral experience in slavery was learning that “A SLAVE CAN’T BE A MAN.” Like free men, enslaved men also felt that manhood required them to defend self and family and other victims from violence. When Samuel Ford bullied the men on Jacob Bieller’s cotton camp, deep in the Louisiana woods, they tried to puncture his domineering-overseer act. He told them he would whip them, and “they swore not a negro on the place should be touched for it. They have gone so far as to shake sticks over my head and threaten my life,” wrote Ford to Bieller, his boss. All along slavery’s frontier, African-American men pushed back against assault and humiliation, the two master teeth of the whipping-machine’s gear: “Washington who was in the woods come up this morning,” wrote a Louisiana overseer. “I undertook to whip him for his conduct, [and] he raised his hoe at me and swore I should not whip him.”2
“Such conduct as that I cannot stand on a place that I have to manage,” Ford had concluded in the letter to his employer. Enslavers might not have understood everything about enslaved men, but Ford and his peers knew that allowing assertive behavior to stand would only lead to further boldness both there and all along Bayou Boeuf. Leaving a threat unpunished also carved a wound in the enslaver’s persona. Look at the letter written by enslaver Joseph Labrenty of Alabama: “Rather than take $700 for Alfred,” a runaway who had escaped recapture, “I would rather go into the woods and mall [sic] rails for the next twelve months to pay the reward to have him shot. . . . I wish to god that I could get within 40 yards of him with a double barreled and if I did not stop him I am much mistaken.”3
Image 8.1. William Colbert in the 1930s, about eighty years after the beating and humiliation of his brother. This photo was taken at the time of his interview by Works Progress Administration workers. Library of Congress.
Labrenty was “determined to spend double his value to conquer [Alfred],” showing that sometimes the needs of domination could not be comprehended by economic calculation. But all in all, enslaved men had to make different calculations. Sure, they, too, told stories about Potteresque “men of blood” who resisted attempts to humiliate them, like the ones Wiley Childress heard about “Fedd” from the older men. Fedd proved to his enslaver that he wouldn’t crawl or beg, even under the heaviest whipping. When Fedd attempted to run away, some entrepreneurs captured him and figured out a new use for him: they made him their pet prizefighter. Now Fedd could use violence without punishment. He killed a slave from the local ironworks in a match. But looming larger were the stories like the ones told by skulls on display. Martha Bradley remembered how she learned that neither she nor the men she knew could respond to the things white men did and survive. An enslaved man in her neighborhood shot an overseer. Although he taunted his pursuers as he fled, the white folks caught him a few hours later. They tied him up and burned him alive. Martha—then a little girl—and all the other people from local labor camps were marched past his blackened bones.4
“You know if you was raised from birth like this you could stand it,” said another formerly enslaved man, Peter Corn. Yet another, Robert Falls, remembered that in his Mississippi childhood, “We learned to say ‘Yes Sir!’ and scrape and bow, and to do exactly just what we was told to do, make no difference if we wanted to or not.” Whites subjected boys to incessant behavioral modification techniques: making them watch whippings, scaling up physical pain for even the smallest evidence of resistant behavior. Then, when as a man someone tried to run away, the first things the trackers did once the dogs caught him was to re-inoculate him against the disease of self-assertion: “The hounds would bite you and worry you,” remembered Henry Waldon, but the overseer, running up, called out, “If you hit one of them dogs, I’ll blow your brains out!” “They would tell you to stand still and put your hands over your privates,” Waldon said.5
“If I had my life to live over . . . I would die fighting rather than be a slave again,” Robert Falls asserted, looking back across a whole century on Earth. The white world—and, perhaps, the voices inside Falls’s head—insisted that men who submitted were not-men, men who deserved slavery. Then again, Ann Clark could look back, too, at the memory of her father, who always resisted whippings. When his Texas enslaver said it was time for him to take one, on the principle that no slave should remain unbeaten, Ann’s father replied, “You can’t whip me.” Ann remembered the white man’s reply, for she was never the same once she heard it: “But I can kill you.” Ann, describing the incident, said: “He shot my poppa down. My momma took him in the cabin and put him on a pallet. He died.” Thus, if one “fought like a hero,” as did one Mississippi runaway man whom a slave-catcher cornered in a cave in 1848, they’d eventually bury another drained body in its chains. Or they could separate you from your blood another way. Robert Falls’s own father, a famous fighter, had been on his way to the lead-bullet exit from slavery until his enslaver threatened him with sale away from his family unless he stopped fighting back.6
Falls’s father changed. Robert grew up with a father. And so, to save their sons’ blood, elders told young male slaves stories like the one about the man who ran away to escape torture. The dogs bayed after him for days. Eventually the slave catchers began to reel him in. Finally, jaws snapping at his heels, the young man burst out of the woods, into a clearing where men were making bricks, and ran straight into the blazing furnace. Run from hell and you might find yourself in even hotter pain. So, in the Mississippi night, after young Scott Bond heard such stories, he curled up in his single blanket and tried to sleep. He breathed slowly on his pallet. As the world quieted, he could hear, howling in the woods around him, “the blood hounds.” And he thought about how he’d heard the white folks say that the “music they made was the sweetest music in the world.”7
Never did the music ring out louder than it did by the time of the 1836 harvest. Never had white people loved it more. If one could draw a graph that mapped the intensity of the losses that all enslaved men had to suffer, its curve peaked in the 1830s, along with the curves of booming slave prices and cotton revenue per slave. More migration, more speculation, more financial leverage for one-eyed men: all meant more defeats for enslaved men. There were more first lickins at the forks of
the cotton pickin, more old wives and new girlfriends taken away, more sons and daughters lost to the slave trade, more discoveries that being an axeman or coachman or wiseman or preacherman or simply any man who was a slave was only dust blown off the paper that named one as a hand. If white men planted their seed in the boom years, black men lost their blood—their link to the past, their connection to the future.
AS MARCH 3, 1837, turned into March 4—the day when Martin Van Buren would be inaugurated as the eighth president of the United States—Andrew Jackson sat quietly with a few friends in an upstairs room in the White House, celebrating eight years of gains. When the tall clock in the corner struck midnight, the president lit his corncob pipe and raised a glass of dark, thick, red Madeira wine. A recent flare-up of chronic digestive troubles, contracted in the 1814 campaign against the Creeks, had made him abstain for weeks. Tonight Jackson threw caution to the wind.
In two terms in office, Jackson had seen all his major goals fulfilled, and now a nation flooded by cotton and credit wallowed in economic high tide. On the crest of that boom, which enslavers and their political and financial allies themselves had engineered, rode triumphant the southwestern entrepreneurs in whose ranks Jackson was numbered. His administration’s enforcement of the 1831 Indian Removal Act had driven 60,000 of the cotton frontier’s original inhabitants across the Mississippi, opening 25 million acres (an area the size of Kentucky) for speculation and cotton production. His political allies had learned to steer the angry Potterizing resentments of overseers, small farmers, and public-land squatters into the channels of a new institutional party system. And that, in turn, helped southwestern entrepreneurs to convert rank-and-file Jacksonian voters’ demands for an assault on entrenched bank elites into a paradoxical flood of lending to enslavers and cotton speculators, this time pumped through innovative banks that the entrepreneurs themselves controlled. The banks and their borrowers socialized all the risks on distant investors, the general white southern public, and, above all, enslaved people. The result was unprecedented growth. Even factoring in 1833’s Biddle-engineered recession, the economy expanded at an unprecedented rate: 6.6 percent per year between 1830 and 1837.8
Jackson still believed that gold and silver were the only real money and that banks were all scams. But if his precious-metal fetishism prevented him from admitting the role of pet banks in fueling rapid expansion, he did not object to taking credit for national prosperity. And just that morning, he had told representatives from the Republic of Texas that the United States was officially recognizing their independence. Observers believed this was the first step in uniting the fledgling slave owners’ nation to the much larger one to its east. So even wider fields beckoned, ripe for planting with the seeds of creative destruction. But actions have repercussions, and often not the ones for which the actors hope. Over the decade or so that followed 1836, enslavers’ overreach produced literal and figurative blood, pivoting the antebellum history of the United States in unexpected directions.9
Seventeen years earlier, Connecticut-born Moses Austin had ridden from Missouri to San Antonio, which was then one of the easternmost towns in Mexico. Moses died not long afterward, but his son Stephen carried on the Austin scheme of helping Americans emigrate to the vast spaces west of Louisiana. Stephen recruited many southerners, some of whom brought slaves with them. Mexico had made emancipation its national policy, but Texas was many miles from Mexico City. Enslavers also connived to import several boatloads of Africans bought in Havana harbor (Atlantic slave traders brought more than 200,000 Africans to Cuba in the 1830s). By the end of 1835, almost 5,000 enslaved Africans and African Americans lived in Texas, making up 13 percent of the non-Indian population. After a half-hearted 1829 attempt to enforce its emancipation laws in Texas, the central government in Mexico City signaled in 1835 that this time it was serious about ending slavery. Texas enslavers began to arm themselves, and in October, shooting broke out between American settlers and Mexican soldiers.10
In March 1836, a convention gathered at the town of Washington and declared Texas an independent republic. Although Texas rebels announced they were fighting for “Liberty in opposition to slavery,” it was southerners who financed and staffed the quest for independence. Rebel commissioners had already raised $300,000 from New Orleans entrepreneurs, and once independence was declared, merchants advanced war supplies in exchange for freshly printed Texas bonds. Rebels also profited from the services of casualties from earlier waves of expansion. For instance, reeling from a divorce that ended his Tennessee political career, Sam Houston turned up in late 1835 and assumed command of the republic’s fledgling army. Robert Potter also materialized at the Washington convention and proved to be one of the most aggressive proponents of Texas independence. (“He can only float in troubled waters,” wrote one observer at the convention.) After troops under Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna slaughtered the entire garrison of a fort called the Alamo (save five enslaved men, and the women and children), every rumor about other alleged atrocities found an eager US audience. One rumor claimed that Mexican troops had captured the son of Ohio governor William Henry Harrison, castrated him, and then raped him to death with a spear. Each atrocity story brought angry new volunteers across the border to join the rebel army.11
In April 1836, Houston’s forces routed Santa Anna’s army at San Jacinto. Southern whites were overjoyed. “Everyone is speaking of emigration to the ‘Far West,’ either Mississippi or Texas,” wrote John Lockhead from Southside Virginia’s moribund tobacco lands. “I should prefer Texas as I feel that there is a greater field for enterprise than in any country at present. . . . All who go there certainly run the risk of stopping a bullet, but if they escape they are handsomely paid for that danger.” Investors in the Texas cause now expected profit from the doors their ground-floor investment would open. “You must not be surprised to see me among you, in a few months,” wrote one to a Texas contact. “I shall soon have a large Cotton farm, perhaps several of them under weigh in Texas.”12
With the war’s end, entrepreneurs of the domestic slave trade jockeyed to send “the tide of emigration . . . flowing rapidly to Texas,” as a North Carolina enslaver put it. In the next five years, the number of slaves in Texas would grow from 5,000 to about 13,000. All Texas needed, enthused Virginia migrant James Cocke, was a bank to print up money and lend it to slave buyers. Credit would convert “floating speculators” into “well-settled planters,” who could extract $1,000 in cotton per hand in a year. The bank could sell bonds on European financial markets, using the C.A.P.L. model of funding credit and a currency with slave-revenue securitization.13
The Texas Revolution also galvanized whites who had heard a different sort of news. Benjamin Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison, and others had awakened to the power of the ever-growing whipping-machine. They had awakened still others. Quietly, almost muted in the background by a national press devoted to the constant drumbeat of political debate over issues such as nullification, tariffs, the bank war, and the formation of new political parties, a small but dedicated group of black and white abolitionists had built up local associations across the North. Beginning in 1835, many of these abolition societies—composed, in many cases, primarily of churchly white women who saw slavery as an affront to morality—sent petitions to Congress, asking representatives to ban slavery in the federally administered District of Columbia.
Southern congressmen reacted with fury, insisting that the petitions could not be read into the public record. But that reaction itself helped the petitions gain a stubborn and canny legislative champion. John Quincy Adams, former president, was now the representative from his home district in Massachusetts, and he saw a chance to get revenge for critiques he’d suffered at the hands of southerners during his presidency. Adams argued that the right of citizens to petition their legislature went back to England’s Magna Carta, and that the petitions should be read into the congressional record. Southerners, with many northern representatives
concurring, responded by passing a “gag rule” that automatically tabled any petition referring to slavery. Yet Adams had a bag of parliamentary tricks that allowed him to keep forcing the petition issue into discussion in the House. And the petitions kept coming. By 1836, many echoed a claim that Benjamin Lundy was making in print: that “the slave holders of this country, (with land speculators and slave traders),” instigated the Texas Revolution “to open a vast and profitable SLAVE-MARKET therein, and ultimately to annex it to the United States.”14
Adams told his constituents that whether they cared about slavery or not, the weight of this massive new slave territory would render New England forever politically irrelevant. And the southern congressmen were making it easy for him to claim that the slaveholders, with their zeal for hushing criticism of slavery, were sacrificing the basic political rights of other white Americans by stifling their rights of petition and free speech. The uproar over the petitions convinced Andrew Jackson to back away from immediate annexation. Still, by March 1837, the fear that Britain might make Texas its client state had enabled the president to manipulate Congress into recognizing the new republic as an independent country, separate from Mexico. So as Jackson sipped Madeira, almost eight years after his first raucous evening at the White House, he confidently expected that Texas would soon become one (or several) states.15
Perhaps the outgoing president was less sanguine about other recent developments. He was certainly eager to deny complicity in the flood of credit sloshing through the nation’s economy. But one of the main reasons why the supply of money in circulation rose by 50 percent between 1834 and 1836 was that he had freed the banks from scrutiny by his veto of the Monster Bank. Now, wrote Burrell Fox from a new Mississippi town, “Everything is at its high water, there was five droves of negroes [sold] this fall . . . fellows at $1200 to $1400 and up . . . times appear to be brisk for everything that can come to market, even apples is selling at Vicksburg for $5 a barrel.” A North Carolina migrant reported that his relatives along the Tombigbee in northeastern Mississippi were “all deranged on the subject of real estate.” Even in the dormitories of the University of Alabama, reported a student, there was “more talk of speculation . . . than anything else. Every[body] is awake to the land speculation, money is plenty.”16
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