The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  So southwestern anti-bank politicians now launched a crusade for G.T.T. by entire states. Mississippi governor Alexander McNutt, the same governor who in 1838 had supported the Union Bank, by 1841 advocated for repudiating the $5 million in state bonds he had helped to sell in the great 1838–1839 cotton speculation. In that fall’s elections, Mississippi elected a repudiationist majority to the state legislature, which immediately decided that it would not pay the bonds. The Mississippi legislators who voted against paying the bondholders collectively owed between $500,000 and $1 million to the Union Bank. Those who voted against repudiation owed about half that amount. Both Florida and Arkansas also repudiated their bonds. Louisiana technically did not repudiate its bonds, but Democratic legislatures refused for years to make interest payments on C.A.P.L., Union, and Citizens’ Bank bonds. The state had committed to back $21 million in bonds. Banks sold the securities and lent out the proceeds to their friends, yet as of the Civil War, $6 million remained unredeemed, the interest still unpaid.62

  Bond repudiation outraged investors. Outrage fermented quickly to contempt. When he traveled to New York in 1839, John Knight discovered that “Mississippi and Mississippi men, bank, &c” already stood “in horrible odour.” Wall Street’s banks had survived the Panic of 1839, effectively winning the battle with Nicholas Biddle and the southern entrepreneurs for control of America’s financial future. But Wall Street men and City of London types alike were shocked that the southwestern frontier, in which they had invested so much money, would so shamelessly steal. European bondholders fired off endless pamphlets criticizing the repudiating governments. The London Standard called Mississippi citizens “a set of atrocious scoundrels.” The London Times claimed in 1847 that it would be fifty years until another European would be fool enough to lend money to the United States.63

  The bondholders launched endless lawsuits. Despite a withering storm of criticism and lawsuits, however, the bankrupt states continued to refuse to pay. The US Supreme Court dodged involvement. As late as the 1930s, the Principality of Monaco, which had inherited some Mississippi Union Bank bonds, was still trying to sue Mississippi in the Supreme Court. And Congress also declined to act. Neither party wanted to demolish its own electoral chances in the half dozen repudiating states. The states’ citizens, meanwhile, solaced themselves against the slings and arrows of an angry financial world in a number of ways. Less wealthy whites took satisfaction in the discomfort of bank cliques. The governor of Mississippi and some of its leading newspapers turned to an ancient Western excuse. A Mississippi newspaper dismissed the London Times as “the organ of Jew brokers,” while Alexander McNutt sneered that the Rothschilds, who held both Alabama and Mississippi bonds, should be denied payment because they were of “the blood of Shylock and Judas.”64

  So southern popular culture, once as open to Jewish participation as anyplace in Christendom, had now been cynically injected with an anti-Semitic virus that would last for many decades. But that was only the start of repudiation’s poisoned gift-giving. True, reaction to the bank bonds had produced the most significant political uprising of class-based resentment to elite domination that would ever emerge from the poor and small-farming white men of the plantation frontier. No politician associated with the property banks had a viable political future. Yet G.T.T. on the grand scale was a self-inflicted choking-off of ties to worldwide credit markets. After this, southwestern entrepreneurs would never again participate as equal partners in the worldwide expansion of capitalism. These elites had used popular anger to turn the power of the state into a shield against foreclosures—but at the cost of losing future control over their own credit. Common white southerners, who had not experienced the boom of the 1830s in the same way as their self-appointed “betters,” cared little about all that, but credit would shape their futures, too.

  REPUDIATION OF ONE FORM or another had called a white man named Paskall to a slave labor camp on the far side of the Brazos. The camp’s owner, Richard Blunt, lived twenty miles away in the coastal town of Matagorda. Blunt, in debt in Mississippi, had run his slaves west across the line into Texas, where his creditors’ arms were too short to reach. Paskall had come west to find a job. Overseeing paid cash. Now he had to control the people whom Blunt’s decisions had separated from anything they’d built, and everyone they’d built it with, back in Mississippi.

  Paskall complained to the other white men in the neighborhood that “the Negroes were very unruly.” Perhaps the disruption of their lives had shifted the terms of the daily calculus of obeying or fighting back. Go along to get along, get yanked out of one’s cabin in the middle of the night, and be herded west all over again. One’s husband was back on the next plantation along the Yazoo; or one’s wife and child; so were the Bible and the bag of hoarded coins, both hidden under the roots of that old cottonwood.

  Or maybe this: there had been that day in Mississippi when Blunt called everyone in from the field and lined them up for the man from the bank, who counted them off and wrote down dollar values and fake ages for his mortgage ledger. A mortgage is technically a sale, so by running to Texas Blunt had stolen each mortgaged slave from his or her legal owner. One day Blunt was the representative of the Law, the hard edge of a giant monolith bearing down. Then, that night, he was slipping away with stolen property. He and his agents now seemed less imposing and united.

  So there was Paskall, pushing a man to keep up with the cotton-chopping line. And this spring day, that man had enough. He “knocked [Paskall] in the head with a grubbing hoe and buried him in the field, and ploughed over him.” The man took Paskall’s gun, and, gritting his teeth, shot himself in the hand. He staggered from the field and walked twenty miles to Matagorda, where he gave Blunt his story. Paskall had shot him in a rage, “thought he killed [the slave], and [Paskall] rode one of his horses off.”

  Blunt was too busy with drinking and cards to worry about the details. But the story sounded fishy to his neighbor James Hawkins. A few days later the horse came wandering back, saddle still on. Hawkins convinced other local whites to have the slaves interrogated. “It was some time,” he reported, “before we could make the Negroes tell anything about [Paskall].” But they did. Hawkins took the men out to the field and made them dig Paskall’s body out from under the cotton furrows. “The negroe” with the hand wound, Hawkins reported, “was in jail” and “will surely be hung.” Hawkins’s overseer, terrified by the neighborhood murder, was barricading himself in his cabin every night.65

  Perhaps the terrified man couldn’t erase the image: blood pooling in dirt; Paskall’s shattered head half-covered by the plow’s first run; black man frantically whipping balking mule around for one more pass, scanning the horizon. Borrowing and slave purchases in Mississippi, a son leaving Paskall’s father’s home back East: these ordinary decisions had led to the death of two men on the next and maybe last frontier for cotton slavery. Murder wasn’t what these men had imagined as the outcome of their long ride and march west. On slavery’s bleeding edge, overly ambitious plans made years earlier led to blowback. But no one bled as much as enslaved people. And no one’s life was as disrupted by the principles of G.T.T.

  From 1837 to the mid-1840s, desperately indebted enslavers looted the riches stored and nurtured by enslaved people’s blood relationships. Alexander McNutt, Mississippi’s repudiationist governor, had—back in 1835—purchased $20,000 worth of enslaved people from fellow Virginia native George Rust. McNutt promised to pay Rust principal plus 10 percent annual interest over the next several years. Ten years later, McNutt had entered and left office, and some of the twenty-odd men and women who had survived the adjustment to life in his Mississippi slave labor camp had married and had children. For instance, Lewis and Mary, preteens in 1835, were now married and raising four-year-old Anderson and toddler Louisa. Between the endless hours they spent toiling in McNutt’s cotton field, Lewis and Mary had also spent years working to make sure their blood survived. But the governor had not paid Rust back.
Fearing that McNutt would slip away to Texas with the slaves, the Virginia creditor demanded that the now ex-governor cash out his debt. So in May 1845, early enough that potential buyers could use them to pick that year’s cotton crop, twenty-two survivors of the group that had come out from Virginia a decade before were auctioned. Families, new and old, were broken on the block, like the one whose seven-year-old Nathan was sold off on his own to a bidder named A. J. Paxton for $300. Another couple—Nelson and Prissy—were sold together, but their son, Jefferson, a boy of less than ten, was sold to a different buyer.66

  Enslaved people in the southwestern states talked about the ways in which whites’ decisions and failures inflicted consequences on the enslaved themselves, as if they were commodities. “He drank us up.” “He said: ‘I’ll put you in my pocket.’” If one enslaved person heard a white man and a woman in the house “talking about money,” everybody in the quarters understood that “money” meant “slaves,” and that “slaves” were about to be turned into “money” (“Massa say: ‘they’s money to me’”). “They [black folks] knew that mean they [white folks] gonna sell some slaves to the next nigger trader that come round.”

  The talk showed how well the enslaved understood the forces that structured their lives. But they experienced financial manipulation and devastation as men and women with blood pulsing in every vein. When historians have written about the role of family in the lives of the enslaved, they have talked about the way blood relationships gave structure to life; ensured care for children, even when parents were lost; and provided knowledge about the world that was a true alternative to the system of lies spun by planters. Indeed, kinship could do some of those things, sometimes. Even when the early-1840s disruptions, coming after a quarter-century of a growing slave trade, created a cumulative set of challenges not seen since the heyday of the Middle Passage, many adults could scramble and gamble in response to disrupted situations. And sometimes by doing so, they could protect their families. Already sold once, from Georgia to Alabama, Josiah Trelick heard that his enslaver, Charles Lynch, was in serious financial trouble and planning to sell him again. Lynch thought Trelick’s “abroad” wife, “a small dark skind woman,” as Lynch described her, “was very homely and ignorant.” But she and her child were everything to Josiah. So Trelick dug up some money he’d buried, bought a small wagon and team, and slipped away along back roads to get his family from the other enslaver who owned them.

  Then there was the clever light-skinned slave about whom Felix Street’s stepmother told stories: this man started an impromptu auction when his owner was in the vicinity but not paying much attention. Before anyone realized it, the “white-looking” slave had sold off the owner. Or there was Cynthy, a midwife in Tennessee—free, but “apprenticed” to white guardians who skimmed off her earnings. While on a job a day’s journey from the cotton labor camp where her enslaved husband lived, she consulted a fortuneteller, whose cards told Cynthy that her husband’s indebted owner had “run” him to Mississippi. The cards spoke true, but luckily there was a happy ending: her husband was stubborn and not worth much in the cotton field, and his owner was glad when Cynthy’s employers made an offer to buy him.67

  But enslavers still held the aces. A story told by one formerly enslaved person showed white folks’ willingness to manipulate the powers of ownership, breaking any and every relationship, starting with bonds they gave to their creditors. “Old Cleveland,” said the former slave, “takes a lot of his slaves what was ‘in custom’ and brings them to Texas to sell. You know, he wasn’t supposed to do that, cause . . . he borrowed money on you, and you’s not supposed to leave the place until he paid up. ‘Course Old Cleveland just tells the one he owed money to, you had run off, or expired out there.” Newspapers and court documents recorded the details of how freshly reestablished blood ties in slave communities could be broken as a result of crises in white families created by the financial collapse or other factors. So-and-so’s slaves, valued at $23,845, for example, went for $16,000. And African Americans remembered their own histories of the crash. In the 1930s, a white employee of the Works Progress Administration in Jasper, Texas, typed up a summary of his interview with an elderly woman named Milly Forward. “She has spent her entire life in [this] vicinity,” he began. But the text of her interview reveals something different. “I’s born in Alabama,” she recalled. “Mammy have just got up,” from giving birth, “when the white folks brung us out west. Pappy’s name Jim Forward and Mammy name May. They left Pappy in Alabama, because he belonged to another master.”68

  That “Mississippi men” were untrustworthy liars may have been news to John Roberts the debt collector, but it was not exactly a revelation to enslaved people, for whom slavery itself was “stealing.” But this historical epoch was devastating all the same. If their first movement to the cotton frontier had brought revelation, this second one went down in enslaved people’s vernacular history as a storm of chaos that swept away much of the work that survivors of the first round of disruptions had accomplished. Men had created new ways of being men, and the consequence of both women’s and men’s efforts coursed through children who lived, relationships that bloomed, blood ties linked in presence and remembered absence. But now stepparents and half-siblings were split in the dark of night. And whites’ mutual deceptions meant that enslaved children weren’t sure about the basic facts of what had occurred. “He stole me,” remembered an aged Betty Simmons, of her indebted Alabama owner who made her hide in the woods. Then “he sell me [in New Orleans] so the creditors couldn’t get me.” In Mississippi, toddler Henri Necaise wandered every day down to the gate where he last saw his mother leaving. But he never found her. Only his sister was there to comfort him, and he was lucky to have her.69

  “They was always fearing something terrible was going to happen, from some sign they had saw, or something they had heard,” Robert Laird remembered of parents and grandparents. As such children looked back from old age, they sometimes felt that these secondary forced migrations during the decade of planter disaster had isolated and atomized them, stealing their optimism and teaching them the devastating lesson that their blood ties could be broken into unknowable pieces. One Louisiana ex-slave told the tale he had “heard” of Pierre Aucuin—who was sold by his mother’s owner at the age of two. Years later, when freedom came, Aucuin married a woman named Tamerant. The couple had three children. One day, his regular barber was unavailable, so he sat down and Tamerant got out the scissors. As she stood behind him, cutting it close to the scalp, she saw something she had never before noticed. “You know, Pierre, this scar on the back of your head sets me a-thinking way back when I was a gal . . . I had a little brother then. . . . [T]he master sold my little brother from us, and five years later they sold me from my ma and pa. Since then I ain’t seen none of my folks.” Tamerant continued, not yet realizing what she was saying: “One day my little brother and me was playing, and he hit me and hurt me. I took an oyster shell and cut him on the back of his head right where you got that scar.”70

  In their quest to make something beautiful, two people who had lost their personal and family histories stumbled, terribly, over the shards of the past. And variations of this brother and sister story appear several times in the Works Progress Administration interviews. In each case, the storyteller is saying: Listen, enslaver-generated chaos could ultimately, if it went on long enough, steal one’s capacity to recognize even one’s closest kin. If you didn’t know your family, you didn’t know yourself. And if you didn’t know yourself, what sort of disasters could you bring down on yourself and others? So history taught orphaned children to hold such fears alongside all their bravery. Adult survivors of whites’ financial disaster saw their own new lives, built through the practice of ordinary virtues to each other and through the rebuilding of ties of blood, ripped apart again. They found themselves alone, bearing another set of survivors’ scars. This does not agree with the picture of southern African Americans as a tradi
tional people comforted by a deep and resilient web of kinship. Yet it is precisely what happened to people whose family trees had been clear-cut.71

  DESPITE THEIR STINGING DEFEATS, southwestern entrepreneurs who had been through previous crises knew how to survive a downturn. Slave property was mobile, self-supporting, more liquid than any store of value short of sterling bills, and perhaps the most attractive kind of collateral in the entire Western world. If they could keep possession of their slaves, they could take advantage of those elements of enslaved property, especially if new geographical expansion convinced investors to lend their credit—as they always had before—to entrepreneurially minded planters. And yet, even with all of those reasons to feel confidence in the future, after 1839, as external pressures from abolitionist critics and northern creditors began to increase, a growing number of southern politicians and voters began to show clear symptoms of a deepening siege mentality. A small group of northern congressmen—most notably John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts and Joshua Giddings of Ohio—repeatedly introduced antislavery petitions to test Congress’s “gag rule.” Although their measures failed, the northern radicals slowly opened cracks in the interregional alliances between southern slavery-expanders and northern expansion-enablers that were the essence of both the Whig and Democratic parties. Meanwhile, the 1840 US Census showed that high population growth in the free states was erasing the slave states’ ability to control the House. Reapportionment would give northern Whigs and Democrats less reason to do what southerners demanded. The only obvious hope for increasing the number of southerners in Congress was to add Texas, but after Jackson maneuvered the government into recognition of the Lone Star Republic’s independence in 1837, the Whig Party had blocked its annexation.