In December 1837, John Stevens traveled to New Orleans to take soundings at the disaster’s epicenter and start buying cotton bales for his employer, Prime, Ward, and King. European factories’ stockpiles had finally shrunk. “The Planting States must in a short time recover from the shock of last year,” wrote a southern banker. Van Buren wouldn’t come to the aid of the cotton-centered entrepreneurial economy, but other players stepped into the breach. First among them was Nicholas Biddle. After the B.U.S. charter expired in 1836, his home state rechartered it as the “Pennsylvania Bank of the United States.” Though much reduced in power, the “B.U.S.P.” was still the largest private financial entity in the United States, and Biddle had hoarded its cash reserves through the panic.33
So now Biddle attempted the greatest creative-destructive play of all time. The B.U.S.P. issued millions of dollars in “post-notes”—promises to pay the holder of the note in a year or eighteen months for the face value of the note plus 6 percent interest. This was a bet placed by both parties on the revival of the cotton trade. The post-notes would remonetize the cotton trade and serve as a currency to be traded for the next year and a half, by which time Biddle’s revenues from the sale of the cotton he bought would allow him to redeem the post-notes. Biddle and his intermediaries (other high-level commercial banks, such as Brown Brothers) provided the state-chartered banks with post-notes on credit. Taking the place of the bankrupt southwestern merchants, they bought up local planters’ crops. The Commercial Bank of Natchez bought $643,000 of cotton for Liverpool on its own account, for instance, while the Planters’ Bank of Mississippi purchased 60,000 bales of cotton from local planters and shipped the bales to Liverpool. There Biddle’s allies sat on the cotton.34
Cotton climbed from 9 cents a pound at the beginning of 1838 to almost 13 cents as enslavers across slavery’s frontier prepared to plant for 1839. And they planted a lot, because they’d soon need cash. As William Rives wrote from Clinton, Mississippi, eventually “immense sums have to be made by the Sheriffs . . . and much of it will be made by the sale of property.” So enslavers drove their right and left hands hard in the summer of 1839. “The number of hands I have gathering cotton,” wrote A. G. Alsworth in Mississippi, “frequently average over 200 and on the 4th inst they picked as high as 214[,] two of them picked [a combined] 625.” James Haywood went into the field and, beside his slaves, “picked cotton from August to the term, because I knew our situation and was anxious to be extricated from debt. . . . No overseer [would have] toiled as I have.”35
When all was said and done, enslavers shipped 1,650,000 bales of cotton in 1839—225,000 more than in any previous year. But once again, a rise in supply shook the commodity’s price, and it started downward. Cotton dropped from a high of 14 cents per pound in the spring of 1839. By September it was at 10 cents. Once the scope of the vast 1839 crop emerged, the price plummeted all the way to 7 cents a pound. As it fell, it crushed Biddle’s B.U.S.P., which had bet everything on being able to redeem post-notes by selling cotton at high prices. The end came fast. On October 9, Biddle’s last bank shut its doors. With it fell all the other institutions that had participated in his leveraged bet.36
“Our Banks are likely to fall to pieces,” wrote Robert Carson, an Alabama enslaver, in August 1839. The Panic of 1839 was an even deeper collapse than the one two years earlier, and from this one, most southwestern banks never reopened. In Tallahassee, when the officers of the Union Bank of Florida ignored a legal judgment ordering them to pay an outstanding bill of $197.23, the court dispatched marshals to auction off its building, the bank’s only remaining asset. As the marshals approached the front steps, followed by a crowd of onlookers ready to gloat, the door opened. Officials emerged, carrying sacks of nickels, dimes, and pennies they’d literally scraped off the bottom of the vault. It barely covered the debt. Meanwhile, the money that the Mississippi Union Bank had received for its bonds in late 1838 washed away like a sand castle when the tide of falling cotton prices came in. One observer predicted that “Mississippi will get out of debt about the year of Christ 1897.” As it turned out, this was an overoptimistic prediction.37
Martin Van Buren’s presidency had been ambushed by first one panic and then another. Congress, sensing weakness, abolished the president’s independent treasury. To the Whigs, the upcoming national election looked like a perfect opportunity to take the White House and unwind the effects of twelve years of Democratic executive dominance. Using the Democrats’ own techniques of popular organization and populist message, the Whigs’ 1840 campaign depicted “Martin Van Ruin” as a contradictorily androgynous Casanova who ate from a ballerific gold table service and ordered the construction of a breast-shaped mound (complete with nipple) in the White House garden. They named as their presidential candidate Ohio’s William Henry Harrison, who had been born into the Virginia aristocracy but portrayed himself as a frontiersman and claimed credit for victory over Tecumseh at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Pairing him with John Tyler, a Virginia planter who had stayed home in the Old Dominion, the Whigs’ leaders proclaimed a ticket of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The Democratic machine continued to turn out votes. Van Buren took almost 47 percent of the popular vote in the presidential election, which turned out 80 percent of eligible voters—still the highest ever. But the Whigs swept the panic-devastated southwestern core of Old Hickory’s support, taking Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and even Tennessee, hauling in 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60.38
Now in control of both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, the Whigs immediately forced their first agenda item through Congress. They passed a national bankruptcy law that would allow federal courts to stop chaotic deleveraging and rationalize the process of debt liquidation and financial recovery. Under it, a debtor could relinquish his property to a court-appointed agent who would sell everything and distribute the proceeds to the creditors. After this, the debtor would be legally free of debt and able to restart business. Samuel Thompson, for example, was the member of a New Orleans cotton-trading partnership that collapsed in 1839. His insolvent firm, according to the documents he filed, owed more than $400,000—not atypically much. It was, also typically, entangled with likewise-flattened creditors, owing $16,000 to the Union Bank of Louisiana, $60,000 to other banks, and even $20,000 for post-notes the firm had borrowed so that it could engage in 1839’s last gasp of cotton speculation. The firm, and Thompson, offered a varied portfolio of real-estate assets to offset debts: a lot on the corner of Camp Street in New Orleans; half an interest in 1,500 acres on Bayou Black; 1,111 never-seen Texas acres. If creditors insisted on cash, the properties were auctioned to the highest bidder. This is what happened to Thomas, Henry, Peter, and Evelina and her son James, who were appraised at $3,000. Although these five brought only $1,125 on the block, the firm also held $100,000 in “receivables”—debt others owed to the firm. Smart creditors could pick through these receivables and figure out which ones were most likely to yield value when squeezed, then grab the juiciest ones in return for canceling out the bankrupt’s debts.39
Fully implemented, the Bankruptcy Act might have limited the financial devastation that southwestern entrepreneurs had brought upon themselves. However, after a month in office, President Harrison, who had contracted a severe cold at his inauguration, died of pneumonia. Now, for the first time, a vice president would succeed a president. Many Whigs assumed that John Tyler, who had, after all, not been elected to lead, would meekly take his direction from Congress. Tyler, however, proved to be mulish in disposition, revealing that he was, after all, essentially a Virginia Democrat. He vetoed the Whig Congress’s 1842 bill for a new B.U.S. The next year, the more Democratic Congress elected at the midterm overturned the bankruptcy bill.
Now, all along slavery’s frontier, the process of collecting debts from individuals began to roll forward with redoubled speed. All had to fend for themselves against desperate banks, bankrupt merchants, outside creditors, and,
above all, each other. On every circuit of every southwestern state’s court system, judges and lawyers rode on the appointed day to whichever county courthouse was next in the rotation and heard the debt docket. Often, little else in the way of business had happened since the court’s last visit, except the filing of thousands of cases. One Alabamian wrote: “Montgomery is completely run down, there is nothing a-doing here but the courts.” Lawyers brought protested notes and unpaid mortgages forward, judges’ gavels came down, and clerks issued legal documents empowering sheriffs to seize property for sale. Some debtors were “sold out by the shff.,” their slaves and land deeds auctioned from the courthouse steps. Although “a great many negros will be sold on the block in the course of this and the next [session],” most expected prices to fall further and were “waiting till the thing comes to the worst.” Certainly no one paid prices that would actually pay debts from the “flush times,” especially when measured in gold and silver dollars, the only currency accepted at face value. “I wonder how Old Virginia stands the hard times,” wrote one southwesterner about slave sellers who had profited from the rise in asset prices. “I expect Negroes can be bought cheap in the old Dominion. They [Virginians] have reaped the benefits of the folly of the Missns [Mississippians] but I think that harvest is over.” Slave trader Tyre Glen came back to collect the $50,000 that Alabamians owed him. In Mississippi, Rice Ballard forced sales and bought the auctioned assets himself. And slave traders were themselves pursued: a letter to Ballard detailed hundreds of thousands of dollars that a dozen slave traders owed to major Virginia banks.40
THE FEDERAL BANKRUPTCY COURT that sold Evelina and James to pay Samuel Thompson’s debts did not sell James’s father. Despite the separations inflicted by forced migration, the slave frontier was actually teeming with fathers. Indeed, it was full of all kinds of relationships—new, rebuilt, flexible, as creative as the left hand. For fathers, brothers, friends, and lovers, the new relationships of flesh, of blood, and of pretend-blood were foundations on which they could stand and feel like men. But relationships were also gateways to more vulnerability. Many enslaved men were more willing to retreat in order to protect their roles as husband and father than they would have been to protect their own bodies alone. One couldn’t live out these ties unless one was still alive. Yet achieving survival by sometimes retreating from self-assertion and self-defense required a psychologically difficult sort of thinking about oneself.41
These conundrums are explicit in what we know of the life of Joe Kilpatrick, a man whose enslaver sold him to a trader passing through North Carolina in the 1830s. Watching him disappear over the southern horizon were his wife and their two daughters, Lettice and Nelly. Bought near Tallahassee, Joe built a cabin on his enslaver’s cotton labor camp. There he took in and raised George Jones, a five-year-old orphaned by the trade. Thirty years passed. George Jones grew up. He got married. He fathered two daughters. He named them Lettice and Nelly. What stories had Kilpatrick told George in their cabin? When did the boy decide that the girls were his sisters? And what does this story of blood that was not blood say about how Joe Kilpatrick decided to live his life? We cannot guess what played in Kilpatrick’s mind as he watched a child turn into a man, or as he watched the little girls who bore his long-lost blood daughters’ names play in the dirt before his cabin. Yet Kilpatrick registered choice in his actions. He sought redemption for his own losses not in domination, nor in acceptance of despair, but in long-term, patient hope. This was how he lived out an idea of manhood incompatible with the readiness-for-vengeance that had long defined manhood, not only for whites in the antebellum South, but throughout much of Western history.42
Writing about twentieth-century concentration camps, the author Tzvetan Todorov identifies those few who fought to the death, such as the Jews and Communists who rose up against the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1943 and 1944, as exemplars of “heroism.” The resistance fighters of the Warsaw ghetto were willing to die for the value of freedom, even if they could not achieve its reality. “To the hero,” argued Todorov, “death has more value than life”—certainly more than life under conditions in which one cannot claim freedom. Without the willingness to seek out death to avoid domination, the heroes of the revolts believed, life was not worth living. From the tale of Gilgamesh and The Iliad to apocalyptic films, Western epics have been stories about such heroes. They are men who resist, who shed the blood of opponents, who accept no limitations or insults, who will never be slaves. Sometimes they are willing to shed blood and die so that people in general can be free, but always they are willing to do this so that they are free themselves—free most of all from the imputation that anyone could dominate them. Free like Robert Potter, free like the twenty thousand men who came to watch Andrew Jackson become the president. Or free as those men imagined themselves to be.
White men, South and North, viewed the alleged nonresistance of enslaved men as evidence that they were not heroes, proof that they were not really men. They mocked black men as cringing Sambos in jokes, literature, and minstrel shows. The need to disprove the symbolic emasculation that slavery represented has impelled some portion of black cultural creativity for all the years since. And historians have repeatedly confused “manhood” and “resistance” when they have written about slavery.43
Joe Kilpatrick was no hero. He could not construct his life as he would have done in freedom. He was not willing to die just to show he had the freedom to die. Yet he did make choices, and the ones he made were important both for the beliefs about manhood they reveal and for what they did for George Jones, for Lettice, and for Nelly. Instead of honor, Kilpatrick chose what Todorov called “ordinary virtues.” Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings—even at the cost of lowering their own chances—they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.44
In the slave labor camps of the Southwest, an adult man’s commitment to ordinary as opposed to heroic virtues could mean the difference between life and death for children like George Jones. Such choices could have the same result for the men themselves. Rebuilt blood ties could provide a reason not to die fighting in one’s chains. Amid the disruptions and dangers of the 1830s, enslaved men frequently became caretakers of others. Caring is not central to most definitions of masculinity. But just as the kindness of enslaved men had breathed life back into Lucy Thurston’s soul when her spirit was as dead as a zombie in that Louisiana cotton field, the kindness of men like Joe Kilpatrick led them to create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them. Because these choices placed them in relationships as husbands or lovers, fathers or brothers, these men often made ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that told them that as men they had failed. And perhaps—perhaps—a man who lived in that way also undermined the white ideal of the man as vengeful hero.
Men’s pursuit of ordinary virtue in the context of the devastations of forced migration was already visible by the Panic of 1837, shaping life in ways that even influenced the planters’ record books. First is simply the rising rate of marriages on southwestern slave labor camps during the 1830s. At Alexander McNeil’s Magnolia, for instance, twenty-one of the thirty-seven women over the age of twenty were married to men who lived there. Such relationships implied a deliberate choice to start again. Many of these frontier husbands had been married to other women back in the old states. In the middle of the 1830s cotton boom, Peter Carter was sold from Maryland to Florida. An older man by the standards of the trade—over forty—he left a whole family behind. But in Flo
rida he remarried, in his fifties, and raised three more children.45
Being a husband or father mattered because enslaved men who wanted to live in a way defined by moral choice rather than fear had to turn to the long view, to thinking of the people who would one day be left behind them. Even those who did not marry could establish new ties of blood, or pseudo-blood. Charles Ball had left his family behind in Maryland. In South Carolina he became a contributing member of Nero’s household and critiqued Lydia’s husband for not being much of a caretaker. Then he adopted a trade-orphaned little boy, “the same age [as] my own little son, whom I had left in Maryland; and there was nothing that I possessed in the world, that I would not have divided with him, even to my last crust.” What mattered was to matter—to count, to be essential in the life of another person. No need was greater than that of an orphan child for an adult—except, perhaps, Charles Ball’s need for a child.46
The full fruition of these efforts appeared decades later in the wake of emancipation. Women did amazing things to keep life going during the Civil War, and they pushed for freedom’s fullest measure afterward. But in those days, men also made their own sacrifices—some of them brutally difficult ones—to make and remake hundreds of thousands of free households. Nettie Henry’s father tramped back from Texas to Mississippi to rejoin her and her mother. Others chose to stay with the people among whom they had rebuilt a life. Jack Hannibal, a man sold decades prior to the 1870s, wrote from Alabama to his North Carolina onetime owner: “Dear Mistress . . . : Please be so kind to write to Florida to my two sisters to let them know where I am, so that they may know where to post their letters.” He believed she knew where they had been sold. Then he told her how many children he had, that he’d buried one wife and married a second, and that he was ready to gather under his wings all those whom she had wounded: “Please write to my two sisters in Florida that if they are not doing well, they must write to me, for I am now doing like Joseph of old, preparing corn now for them if they should come out.”47
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