The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  Runaways pressured Judge Story, and runaways pushed enslaver-politicians to demand that other whites never disagree with them about slavery or its expansion. Palfrey’s brothers didn’t think he needed to contribute to the fuss. Especially not when his grandstanding with their father’s inheritance would cause them trouble. They had heard that Massachusetts Whigs were squabbling, but they were shocked by the force of the leverage that John was willing to apply to enforce his changing convictions. In 1843, their world was one of hard times and G.T.T., and Henry’s firm was bankrupt. They could not fathom how John—who only a few years ago had been asking for their help—could leave $7,000 on the table.

  John G. Palfrey’s personal route to rejecting slave ownership, direct or indirect, was ironic. But it was only somewhat unique. His willingness to act on his own convictions, even at the cost of a substantial sum of money, was unusual, though his changing convictions were not. Yet he still had to make a literal journey of rejection. Louisiana state legislators had denied his request that they allow the people he inherited to stay among the community they had built in the wake of forced migration. So Palfrey decided to bring them back with him to Massachusetts. In 1844, worried that they would not be able to support themselves, he visited Massachusetts author Lydia Maria Child and asked her to help him find them new homes in Boston. Child, a women’s rights activist, and also one of the first white women publicly identified as an abolitionist, promised to help. Then he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, and visited Cassius Clay, a relative of Henry Clay and a rare surviving southern proponent of emancipation. Clay had repeatedly fought off attempts at silencing. One of his speeches degenerated into a knife fight, with attackers rushing the stage. To deter mobs, he loaded a cannon and parked it on his front porch.

  Emotionally fortified by Clay’s example, Palfrey traveled to the Ohio River and boarded a steamboat headed to Louisiana. After enjoying a pleasant visit in New Orleans, Palfrey traveled out into the hinterland to brother William’s home. He found that Attakapas whites were not very tolerant. They threatened him, and William was less cordial than usual as well. Eager to conclude his business, John met privately with each adult slave. All were willing to go North, but they wanted to wait until the end of the year. Cotton prices were low in the early 1840s, and William—like many other southwestern enslavers—was allowing enslaved people more time to cultivate their own patches of cotton, corn, and garden crops. In turn, they’d eat fewer planter-furnished rations, meaning less ink on the debit side of ledgers. Men and women with small amounts of cash in their hands could also buy their own cloth, clothing, tobacco, and liquor. Like potential runaways waiting until the corn was ripe, Palfrey’s slaves didn’t want to lose their investments of time and labor. And if they were to venture into the unknown in the hands of another John Palfrey, they wanted cash in their pockets.

  John left for Boston. His brothers had insisted that it would “demoralize” their own labor forces if John’s slaves mixed with theirs once word of impending freedom got out, but William was happy that the short-timers stayed. They helped gather William’s cotton harvest—for which John promised to pay them back wages for 1844 once they reached Massachusetts. When 1845 arrived, three of the oldest—Amos (age sixty-one), Clara (fifty-five), and Old Sam (sixty-five)—balked at leaving their children and grandchildren, so John had parish officials bribed to permit these three to stay, despite their manumission. The other seventeen said goodbye to everyone and traveled to New Orleans. From the same levee where they and/or their parents had arrived, they boarded the bark Bashaw and set sail for Boston.

  After their ceremonial welcome at King’s Chapel, John began to send the newly emancipated people to various “placements” arranged by his abolitionist friends. With Child’s help, he placed Anna and her four children in Canandaigua, New York, with a nice Quaker lady who needed a maid, and boys to chop her firewood. Amos Marshall was sent to work as a servant in Brooklyn, as was Henry. The others, however, found employment in Boston before Palfrey could disperse them. Local African Americans who remembered their own difficult transitions helped the country migrants to put down roots in Boston’s black neighborhoods.7

  Like most northern whites who adopted antislavery convictions in the 1840s, Palfrey didn’t seem to be antislavery because of a belief in black equality, of either capacity or right-to-choose. Freeing his slaves over his brothers’ objections, however, allowed Palfrey to demonstrate that southern whites could not silence him, as they had tried to silence his fellow Harvard alum John Quincy Adams with the Gag Rule. Southerners’ political bullying had pushed him into a new conviction that replaced his previous implicit belief in an America where slave-owning and slavery-profiting brothers were united across geographic distance. Now, he concluded—as did other northern whites—that slavery was wrong and that its growth must be stopped because it enabled southern brothers to bully northern ones.

  BACK IN 1819, RACHEL had climbed the New Orleans levee and then descended into a floodplain forested by pylons of cotton bales, silos of British metalware, and screes of calico bolts from Manchester. By then, Britain was clearly already becoming a new kind of society and economy, escaping the old Malthusian trap with the help of the New World’s ghost acres. Its transformations began with the creation of a cotton textile industry. On the capital that sector earned, piggybacking technologies and industries emerged. Soon more people worked in commerce and industry than in agriculture, producing a market of millions of consumers. Raw materials imported from overseas—such as cotton—were essential, but by 1834 the empire concluded it no longer needed its own slaves.8

  Although the United States and Britain spoke (mostly) the same language, the two nations found themselves in different situations. Britain lacked key natural resources, and therefore cotton made by enslaved US hands was essential to industrialization. Now Britain led the development race by a full quarter-century. Indeed, British-made goods still towered on the levee as the Palfrey people embarked for Boston, for in many manufacturing sectors, such as high-quality textiles, Britain’s dominance had starved American competitors of market oxygen. Some northern Whigs, believing the United States should be further on the path that Britain had blazed, blamed enslavers for forcing the young nation to implement policy choices that pushed the republic away from replicating the empire’s success. To them, the national investment in territorial expansion was a proof-text. Endless robbery of Indian lands in the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and Texas also meant that land would remain cheap. Immigrants might move to the cheap-land frontier instead of working in factories, keeping industrialists’ labor costs high.9

  Still, a quarter-century after Rachel’s 1819 arrival in New Orleans, some sectors of the US economy were changing dramatically. One way to measure this transformation is to look at historical estimates of how fast the economy was expanding. Between 1774 and 1800, the annual rate of economic growth per capita in the United States was less than 0.4 percent. From 1800 to 1840, the average rate of increase climbed to between 0.66 percent and 1.13 percent per year—spiking in the mid-1830s, of course, but then crashing into the negative range for several years after the Panic of 1837. By the 1850s, it rose to almost 2 percent per year. By comparison, the per capita growth rate of the US economy in the 1990s, its most successful decade since the 1950s, was about 2.5 percent per year.10 Traditional explanations for this metamorphosis into a post-Malthusian regime assume that the ultimate cause of growth was some characteristic unique to the North’s free-labor economy. Writers have credited an individualistic culture, Puritanism, open land and high wages, amorphous “Yankee ingenuity,” government intervention in the economy, and government nonintervention in the economy. Yet we now also know that even as the entire economy became more productive, from 1800 to 1860 raw cotton production gained in efficiency still more quickly than other sectors of the economy. The increasing speed of cotton-picking yielded a productivity increase of slightly more than 2 percent per year from 1800 to 1860.

/>   In 1832, the US government compiled a fascinating document that reveals the way that cotton not only dominated US exports and the financial sector but also drove the expansion of northern industry. Jackson’s secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane, hoping to find evidence that the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” was protecting the emergent US manufacturing sector, asked Democratic insiders across the free states to visit manufacturing establishments in their neighborhoods. They interviewed proprietors such as the manager of the Old Sable Iron Works in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who warned that if the tariff was reduced, “our nail establishments could not be sustained.”

  McLane’s data not only showed that foreign iron was too cheap, but also revealed the crucial role of cotton textiles in driving the expansion of manufacturing. Over the preceding four decades, cotton mills yoked to water power had multiplied along the rivers and creeks of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They relied on labor from southern New England’s worn-out agricultural sector, machinery designs stolen from Britain, and ever-cheaper southern cotton. Early factories had mechanized the process of spinning cotton, but still “put-out” thread to families who used home hand looms to weave it into cloth. Mill-based powered looms would enable the next transition to take place.11

  In the 1820s, the “Boston Associates,” a group that included men such as Nathan Appleton and Abbot Lawrence, who would become Cotton Whigs and John G. Palfrey’s political enemies, planted a factory town on the Merrimack River in eastern Massachusetts. They named it Lowell, after an industrial spy who had stolen loom designs from British factories. By 1832 four massive mills were in operation there. Each integrated spinning and weaving under a single roof. Collectively the mills contained $1 million worth of machinery, and these machines were tended by 3,000 workers, of whom three-quarters were women and girls. Each year, the mills used 5.5 million pounds of cleaned cotton: more than 13,000 bales, close to 15 million pounds as weighed on cotton-stand balance beams. Thus Lowell consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people’s labor every year. And as enslaved hands made pounds of cotton more efficiently than free ones, dropping the inflation-adjusted price of cotton delivered to US and British textile mills by 60 percent between 1790 and 1860, the whipping-machine was freeing up millions of dollars for the Boston Associates. They invested it in other machines, higher pay for factory workers, and the finery and architecture that overwhelmed Palfrey’s freedpeople in the church on Beacon Street. They also lowered the price of textiles, expanding both Lowell’s markets and the access of ordinary people all over the world to factory-made cotton textiles. An entire planet’s consumers shared in the welfare of the growing margin between the price of raw cotton and what the price would have been if picked by free labor.12

  In 1820, only 3.2 percent of the US labor force had worked in manufacturing—maybe 75,000 workers in all. By 1832, the date of McLane’s report, factories and workshops across the North employed about 200,000 workers. The biggest share was in cotton mills, which were the most mechanized, capital-heavy, industrial kind of industry in the entire United States. Their 20,000 employees represented something new in US history: an unpropertied, nonagricultural, free working class, the growth of which created demand for goods. In fact, both cotton labor camps and cotton mills generated increased demand for such things as iron goods, ready-made clothes, rope, furniture, and shoes. By the time of the 1832 McLane census, American industry was beginning to produce more of these goods. Non-textile production still usually took place in relatively small-scale workshops. These included the small but flexible workshops of New York’s “sweated trades,” such as clothes-making, furniture, leather goods, and hats. Then as now, the city attracted a stream of hungry immigrants willing to toil long hours in cramped conditions. Small size also reflected limited technology, for most industries had not yet found substitutes for human power and hand production. The tiny workshops scattered through rural areas near Philadelphia and Pittsburgh still dominated the iron industry. A rare exception was the Ousatonic Manufacturing Company of Litchfield County in Connecticut, which in 1831 employed more than one hundred laborers and made 600 tons of iron.13

  Textiles made from southwestern cotton continued to lead the way: above all, in employing a working class whose wages created a consumer market that encouraged ever more dynamic market production in other areas. In his response to McLane’s questionnaire, David Anthony of Fall River, Massachusetts, wrote that the town’s mills employed 4,000 textile workers—“all depending directly or indirectly on the manufacturing business . . . requiring as much agricultural produce as any other class of people in the country.” Growing markets for food accelerated a commercialization of daily life that reached into the free states’ rural districts. Farmers grew crops for the market, rather than for subsistence. In Ohio and Indiana, farmers reached southwestern markets via the Mississippi River, and once New York completed the Erie Canal in 1824, upstate farmers could ship produce to New York City. Now that efficiency reaped rewards, northern farmers became more efficient: their farms became larger, farmers began to specialize, and they demanded improved seeds and implements.14

  McLane created his document for the political advantage of northern manufacturers, but it shows that as of 1832, cotton made by enslaved people was driving US economic expansion. Almost all commercial production and consumption fed into or spun out from a mighty stream of white bolls. Politicians and entrepreneurs used the force of cotton’s flood like a millrace to turn other wheels. Politicians, for instance, created a tariff system whose core principle was the protection of New England textile manufacturing. After the War of 1812, the British allegedly tried to smother America’s infant industries by dumping goods below cost on US markets. In response, Congress added a surcharge of almost 35 cents per yard to low-quality imported cloth. The tariff redistributed the productivity of enslaved hands to northern manufacturers and merchants (in the form of profits) and millworkers (in the form of wages). And it allowed American mills to specialize. While finely woven British products filled wardrobes like the ones displayed in Boston churches, American mill towns produced cheap, rough cloth protected by the tariffs on lower-grade textiles.15

  In fact, the same cotton that hands picked returned, spun and woven, in the shape of the rough New England cloth that enslavers bought to cover the backs of African Americans. On his “Southdown” and “Waterloo” slave labor camps in Louisiana, for instance, entrepreneur John Minor issued a yearly “ration” of about ten to fifteen yards of cloth. With over a million slaves in the cotton and sugar areas in 1832, entrepreneurs might have bought 15 million yards of cloth, or all of Lowell’s annual output. There was enough market space in the Mississippi Valley. Every year, one of the Hazard brothers, the owners of Rhode Island’s Peace Dale Manufacturing Firm, traveled down to New Orleans and then out to the countryside to sell their cloth, hats, and other goods. Planters measured women’s shoe sizes, decided whether to buy ready-made clothes or bolts of cloth that year, and sent lists of men by rough measures of size, such as “No. 1” and “No. 2.” The cotton-picking sacks the Hazards offered, made of sturdy cloth from Peace Dale’s steam-powered looms, were “by far the very best” he had “ever seen,” said customer John Routh. Even heavier grades of cotton woven with hemp were needed as wrappings for processed cotton, whether in the more backward “round bale districts” or among up-to-date planters whose newer equipment forced ginned cotton into solid cubes.16

  The specialized workforces of the southwestern slavery frontier didn’t just transfer British money paid for raw cotton into infant US textile firms. They also used American-made shovels, plows, ropes, hats, shoes, and hoes. In fact, one estimate suggests that 30 percent of the “transportable” goods made in the Northeast in the 1830s were sold to the West and South. Thousands of northern women braided palm leaves from Cuba into the wide-brimmed disposable hats that enslavers issued, one to each hand, at the start of the picking season. In 1832 in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, alone, 47 dif
ferent palm-hat-making firms reported a total of 863,000 hats made, costing 28 cents each wholesale, employing 2,500 women year round. Although they were paid 30 cents or less a day, these women in all earned over a quarter of a million dollars—which, measured differently, was in turn paid by 50,000 person-days of cotton-picking.17

  Another example of the way that southwestern efficiencies provided markets for the infant industries of the Northeast is the story of the Collins Axe Works along the Farmington River in Connecticut. In around 1827, Samuel Collins’s brilliant craftsman Charles Morgan mapped the axe-making process into specific tasks: forging, tempering, grinding, polishing, each carried out by an individual worker. Classical economist Adam Smith, who illustrated the division of labor by showing how the production of a pin could be broken into dozens of steps to increase efficiency a hundredfold, would have been proud. So the Collins works ramped up production to 1,000 axes a day, albeit at the cost of an epidemic of silicosis, or “grinders’ asthma,” a fatal disease caused by constant exposure to the dust generated by grindstones spinning against metal axe-heads. Collins’s southwestern traveling agents quickly generated huge sales, such as the order for 30,000 axes placed by one merchant firm. By the middle of the decade, the Collins works was turning out a quarter of a million axes every year.18