Like Hawkins Wilson, who wrote from Texas to the sister from whom he’d been separated as a little boy to tell her that he’d survived to become a “grown man,” and that, “like Joseph,” he would be overjoyed to see her again, Hannibal was patriarch and mother hen both. He measured himself by what he had lost, what he had endured, and what he had found again—and not by what he had been unable to resist from enslavers who had called him a “boy.” What such men got by surviving and caretaking was not always enough to replace the other hopes that they held in their hearts. They paid a psychological cost no one can measure. Nor were all enslaved men exemplars of ordinary virtue. But Joe Kilpatrick, Jack Hannibal, and uncounted others chose to shelter under their wings far-off futures that might only arrive long after their own deaths. They hoped that in that future, children or children’s children—their own blood—would be free. For this future to arrive, however, someone had to survive. In a billion acts of quiet love that kept children and others alive, such men had been challenging southern white and Western definitions of manhood, even as the boom in planter power swelled to 1837’s peak.
ONCE A YOUNG ALABAMA man, told to carry a letter, instead took it halfway down the path to town and then stopped. He made sure no one could see him. Then he buried the envelope in the sand next to the road. The information in the letter stayed in the ground for a month. But somehow his enslaver “found it out.” The news was coming. Letters and notes from creditors, courts, banks, and sheriffs were all on their way. And there was almost nothing that enslaved men, or the other people in the families they had helped to build, could do to stop the letters from destroying what they had built.48
There was also nothing John Devereux could do to stop the letters that were coming for his son, Julien. John, who lived in Alabama, was still an eighteenth-century Virginia gentleman at heart. In good Jeffersonian style, he rose on January 1, wrote the number of the new year in both the Christian and the Muslim reckoning, and added a lyrical description of the day’s weather. He fed every white man who called at his door. He spent evenings reading works of natural history. At his advanced age, Devereux preferred for “Scot Negro” to wield the whip.
By 1839, however, a maelstrom of failed schemes was sucking Julien under. There was his botched speculation in land claims swindled from Creek Indians. Political enemies discovered the scam and denounced it in the state legislature. Julien’s friends shouted down the whistle-blowers with threats, but the documents revealed that he owed vast sums of money to multiple banks. His business partnership with brother-in-law Henry Holcombe—a slave labor camp and a Mobile cotton brokerage—collapsed. Despite “our long indulgence,” growled a merchant firm’s letter, Julien’s account remained in the red. A few weeks later, a sheriff’s employee brought a document certifying that Julien was being sued for $10,000 by another creditor. More demands rolled in by mail: “Will you make some arrangement for payment”; “I take the liberty of reminding you of the promises made to me”; and, “This bill of exchange on Julien S. Devereux, in the amount of $3500.00 is PROTESTED.” Even his marriage was collapsing.49
Julien sold his land to raise cash and then moved himself and his children—and his remaining slaves—in with John. Julien’s divorce from Adaline was a rare event in antebellum Alabama. The legal system believed that only extreme humiliation was sufficient to justify white divorce. John had to claim, in a deposition supporting his son’s divorce petition, that Adaline’s propensity to argue, beat house servants, and wail on the couch when her will was checked had become the “notorious . . . subject of general remark and gossip,” to the “mortification of all her friends.” The façade of John’s family broke open. Everyone could see the failure inside.50
Panic strained and ruptured the bonds that had held schemes together, creating a crisis of planter society—and manhood—that imperiled white social and familial ties in ways that the geographical separations of physical migration had never done. As dawn rose on a ruined financial landscape scattered with useless paper—“Business very dull here, but few speculations going on. Little or no money in circulation”—the light revealed once-dominating men being pursued like fugitives. They could no longer, for instance, use their pet banks to stand between themselves as borrowers on the one hand and world credit markets on the other. Insolvent slave-frontier banks owed massive heaps of debt to northeastern institutions, such as the B.U.S. of Pennsylvania. The B.U.S.P., itself bankrupt, was in the hands of trustees who sent John Roberts down to Mississippi to make collections from the state’s banks. But he soon discovered that he had no choice but to try to collect himself the immense quantities of debt that individual Mississippians owed to their Planters’ Bank, which in turn it owed to the B.U.S.P.51
“The condition of the people in their pecuniary concerns,” Roberts soon learned, was impossibly tangled: “Even mortgage[-secured] debts are quite uncertain, the slaves which make mortgaged debts most safe, are frequently removed and disposed of beyond our reach.” The mortgage for a piece of land was recorded at the Woodville courthouse, he was told. Or maybe it was recorded in Natchez. Or was it Yazoo City? “‘Tis all design!” Roberts exploded, exasperated at run-arounds that circled other run-arounds. Everyone, it seemed, was lying and cheating each other in the scrabble to escape the traps they’d built for themselves: “I would not believe the first man” in Mississippi, he wrote: “Saint or sinner there is no difference, they all lie and cheat.” Alabama was no better: “The people are getting all most desperate—More shooting and killing each other here than you have any idea of.” Soon Roberts was writing, “I would not ask anyone in Mississippi to become security on a bond.” He now regarded Mississippi whites as people without ethics, lacking honor, deserving of their suddenly subordinate status in national credit networks.52
Roberts spent the next ten years sifting through bad paper and lies, suing hundreds of enslavers and forcing thousands of slave sales. Under that kind of pressure, white proprieties and interpersonal bonds dissolved. Governor Hiram Runnels owes us money, wrote one of his Mississippi allies, and he won’t pay. He’s about to fight a duel, and “is likely to be slain.” Bad news. But wait: “Would Mrs. Runnels facilitate you in paying it if he is killed?” Maybe a bullet in a friend’s chest was good news after all. As entrepreneurs scrabbled to preserve as much of their stake in the game as they could, even family ties snapped. In 1838, William Thompson and his sister, Indiana, had bought slaves from their brother, Darwin, a gambler in both private and entrepreneurial life, to save him from bankruptcy. Now, in 1842, Darwin wanted to regain possession of them, probably by repaying only part of what they would cost on the open market. But William and Indiana suspected that Darwin would turn around and mortgage the slaves again, as if he held full and clear title to them: “He would not keep them two years before he or the sheriff would sell them,” his sister predicted. In a moment of candor, he had admitted to William that he planned to sell one boy right away. “Well what will you do with the money?” William reported asking. Darwin admitted he planned to go to Texas, another country, where he would be sheltered from collection of his Mississippi debts. “Of course I retained the boy,” William said. That time he managed to protect his own and his sister’s financial interests. But when William traveled away for business a few months later, and his wife fell deathly ill, Darwin swooped down to pester her on her deathbed. His sister heard the conversation: “I’ll tell what I’ll do sister,” Darwin told the dying woman. “All I want is my nigers give me them.” He promised to use their labor to pay his debts. “Ha ha ha ha,” interjected Indiana in her sarcastic account. Everyone knew Brother Darwin was headed far away, leaving creditors to harass his brother and sister. Thus, enslaved people, once the magic seeds of white dreams, became the currency of contention within white families.53
White southern women had occasionally raised doubts about slavery. But when pressures caused women to fear not only for family enterprises but for their own individual financial futures, th
ey felt the usefulness of slave property with new intensity. Take northern Louisiana enslaver Nancy Bieller, entangled with husband Jacob Bieller in the tendrils of their own messy divorce case. Long-standing problems between them had intensified back in 1833, she claimed, when he hit her in the head with a stick. He denied that charge, counterclaiming that she had engineered the elopement of their daughter. Nancy then charged that he had “kept a concubine in their common dwelling.” Jacob denied all. Nancy vanished and reappeared in her daughter’s household, demanding the division of the scores of slaves he owned, regardless of family ties. Jacob could game a public auction, colluding with his friends to keep bids low so he could buy back the undervalued slaves. Instead, she said, appraise the first-rate hands, the women, and the children; balance them all by their book value so that each spouse would get exactly the same; and split them up, for “they are susceptible to a division in kind without injury to us.” As the divorce wound on and panics erupted, she stuck to her guns, demanding her share and threatening to get her son-in-law to assault the nearly seventy-year-old Jacob. She offered but one concession: she’d let Jacob buy Mary and Coulson from her if they fell to her in the division by lot. (In an 1835 will, Jacob had given de facto freedom to “my slaves Mary Clarkson and her son Coulson, a boy something more than five years old, both bright mulattoes.”)54
Planter women’s active support for proslavery positions increased dramatically during the 1840s, in both private letters and public writings. Scholars usually attribute this support to a reaction against outsiders’ criticism of the South. But perhaps this shift actually grew from the recognition, in the midst of post-panic struggles, of how much right-handed power a Nancy Bieller could get from owning commodified human beings.55
In the wake of the collapse of the rag empire of banks and bonds, white people cheated each other left and right with such frequency that southerners came up with the term “G.T.T.,” a special acronym to denote the tactic. With bankruptcy only a fleeting option, with everyone grabbing for assets, this tactic made a mockery of the law. But it kept enslaved people in enslavers’ right hand so they could try again to create empires. And it swept away castles built by the ordinary virtue of enslaved women and men.
The acronym requires some explanation. In 1841, as the threatening letters mounted up on his desk, John Devereux’s son Julien sought advice. One of his business partners was about to go bankrupt. How, he asked a friend, could he save himself from losing all his property to their mutual creditors? First, the friend replied, do not trust the man. He was probably hiding the truth from Julien, and would act to preserve himself without any regard for him. Next, find out how bad the man’s debts are: “Go ahead and see into the very bottom, deep as it may be & write me confidentially after you find all out—but don’t delay.” Finally, get assets from the desperate man: “Take papers; notes; negroes; land, or anything.” Things were bad—“I really am afraid it is a scrape—but don’t be rash about it”—so threaten to move and leave him holding the bag: “Tell him you act upon your own desires to square up the business for emigration [to Texas]—but you need not emigrate after all.” Of course, the advice-giving friend, another of Julien’s creditors, didn’t realize that Julien wouldn’t just bluff. Julien had already bluffed him, by sending a group of slaves across the Texas-US border and beyond the reach of Alabama’s debt-collection laws. Shortly afterward, leaving both Julien’s wife and many debts behind, father and son Devereux headed to Mobile with some of their remaining Alabama slaves. There they boarded a ship for New Orleans and the St. Louis Hotel. After a comfortable and expensive stay in the same building where many New Orleans slave auctions now took place, the white men booked a cabin on a ship headed for Galveston. Any of their slaves that remained unsold went, too, by deck passage. Julien was “G.T.T.”—gone to Texas.56
Slaves “run off” to escape debt were one reason why the enslaved population of the republic across the Sabine River increased from 4,000 in 1837 to more than 27,000 by 1845. Others took their slaves to a metaphorical Texas. Women sneaked slaves out past vigilant lawmen watching their husbands, delivering them to brothers-in-law, who headed to Texas. Slave owners paid overseers to march enslaved people up into the hills overlooking the Black Warrior River until the courts moved on from one Alabama county to the next and left local debt cases alone for a while. In response, creditors struck back—for instance, kidnapping a borrower’s slaves, taking them to New Orleans, and turning them into cash on the auction block under the dome of the St. Louis Hotel before a countersuit could be filed.57
Eventually, Mississippi-based lawyers went to the US Supreme Court to argue in the most tortured and causuistic way that every white man in the state had a right to G.T.T. without even leaving their home county. Written in the wake of Nat Turner, the 1832 Mississippi state constitution had barred the domestic slave trade. But the state legislature never passed an act “enabling” the ban, and thousands of Mississippians bought southeastern slaves in the ensuing boom years. Among them was Moses Groves, who went into debt to New Orleans–based trader Robert Slaughter. When the crash came, Groves refused to pay, claiming that the sale had been illegal because it violated the state constitution.58
No one knows what happened to the specific individuals whom Slaughter had sold to Groves. The scholarly attention focused on the case has been more concerned with the personalities who argued Groves v. Slaughter in front of the Supreme Court. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster represented the slave trader, while Groves’s defenders—who were really arguing that all white Mississippians could G.T.T. their debts without having to leave the state—included Mississippi Senator Robert Walker. After taking George Poindexter’s Senate seat from him in 1836, Walker had parlayed political power into privileged access to credit, which now meant that he owed thousands of dollars for his own purchases of slaves. His plea for Groves was for the right of individual debt repudiation. On the other hand, Rice Ballard paid Henry Clay’s bill. For the great slave trader, this class-action case would determine whether he could collect on debts still owed him by Mississippi slave buyers. (Several similar cases made it to the Mississippi and Louisiana state supreme courts during the first half of the 1840s.) And the US Supreme Court delivered for Webster, Clay, and Ballard, rejecting slave-buyers’ claims that failure to enforce the state constitution gave them the right to cancel their debts by unilateral action.59
Image 8.3. The actual experience of the early 1840s on the cotton frontier was that of living through the clearing-out of the “debt overhang” built up during the boom years of the 1830s. Unceasing slave sales and forced movements were typical, like those depicted in this “Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans,” in James Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London, 1842), vol. 1, facing title page.
In the environment of intense popular democracy that had emerged during Jackson’s presidency, the next step may have been inevitable. By 1840, streams of slave-produced income had dried up, borrowers could not pay the banks, and sale of their mortgaged property—when it wasn’t run off to Texas—brought little cash. The bondholders had fronted the banks millions, and the banks were not making their interest payments. In flusher times, state legislatures had pledged their states’ “faith and credit” to redeem the bonds. Bondholders and bank insiders began to demand that the states extract the money from the people via taxes. Contracts had been made, just like the one between Slaughter and Groves. If the states went along, as pro-bank politicians often believed they should in order to maintain the ability to borrow in the future, they would have to commit to taxing their citizens at a very high rate. In Florida, for example, the amount owed to the holders of the state-issued “faith bonds” worked out to approximately $120 per man, woman, and child in the territory, white or black. This meant that the average slaveless farmer would have to pay more in taxes than his farm was worth. In Mississippi, wrote the Columbus Democrat, “the beds on which your wives and children sleep, the tables on wh
ich you eat your daily bread will be taken by the excise men for the benefit of those who sleep in splendid brick palaces, who sleep in mahogany bedsteads, eat with gold knives and forks, and drink champagne as the ordinary beverage of the day.”60
Privatizing the gains of investment, socializing the risk. This is a classic strategy for politically powerful entrepreneurs. After generations of struggle to force politicians to respond to them, southwestern yeomen already suffering from the bad economic times that the entrepreneurial class had created were not about to hand over what remained of their livelihoods in order to bail out rich men. Increasingly they and their most radical politicians agitated for states and territories to refuse to pay the bonds. Anti-bank anger also split the northern wing of the Democratic Party. Opponents described the reaction as backward-looking. But many voters saw it as a matter of white equality. They wanted to tell “cormorants and sharks,” as a Mississippi newspaper called “bonders,” that rich men couldn’t force the public to pay their debts. Wherever the anti-bank Democrats got the upper hand, they launched financial investigations that documented the banks’ rampant insider lending and completely irresponsible behavior. It emerged, for instance, that the directors of Mississippi’s Union Bank had lent themselves $1 million of the first $5 million generated by the sale of the state bonds.61
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