The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  26. William Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Account of His Travels for Many Years Whilst a Slave (Cincinnati, 1846), 20–26; Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 209–210.

  27. Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 212; Monica Najar, “‘Meddling with Emancipation’: Baptists, Authority, and the Rift over Slavery in the Upper South,” JER 25, no. 2 (2005): 157–186.

  28. Barbara Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT, 1985); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, 2009); Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor Along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana, IL, 2011); Jennifer Hull Dorsey, Hirelings: African American Workers and Free Labor in Early Maryland (Ithaca, NY, 2011); US Bureau of the Census, Negro Population, 1790–1815 (Washington, DC, 1918), 57.

  29. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 36.

  30. Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery (New Bedford, CT, 1847), 24–26; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 15–18; Thomas Culbreth to Gov. Maryland, February 21, 1824, 818–819, in “Estimates of the Value of Slaves, 1815,” AHR 19 (1914): 813–838.

  31. David Smith, Biography of the Rev. David E. Smith of the A.M.E. Church (Xenia, OH, 1881), 11–14; William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, Written by Himself (New York, 1825), 22; cf. Abraham Johnstone, The Address of Abraham Johnstone, a Black Man Who Was Hanged at Woodbury, N.J. (Philadelphia, 1797); Michael Tadman, “The Hidden History of Slave-Trading in Antebellum South Carolina: John Springs III and Other ‘Gentlemen Dealing in Slaves,’” South Carolina Historical Magazine 97 (1996): 6–29, esp. 22. For the complex origins of the cotton gin, see Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2003).

  32. Cf. New York Advertiser, September 24, 1790.

  33. “Charleston” from Pennsylvania Packet, February 25, 1790; C. Peter Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic: The Case of Fletcher v. Peck (Providence, RI, 1966), 2–5.

  34. Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York, 2008); “Charleston” from Pennsylvania Packet, February 25, 1790.

  35. Shaw Livermore, “Early American Land Companies: Their Influence on Corporate Development” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1939).

  36. Magrath, Yazoo, 6–19; Kamensky, Exchange Artist, 35–36.

  37. John Losson to John Smith, 1786, Pocket Plantation Papers, RASP. Series E.

  38. G. Melvin Herndon, “Samuel Edward Butler of Virginia Goes to Georgia, 1784,” GHQ 52 (1968): 115–131, esp. 123; “The Diary of Samuel E. Butler, 1784–1786, and the Inventory and Appraisement of his Estate,” ed. G. Melvin Herndon, GHQ 52 (1968): 208–209, 214–215; Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790 (Washington, DC, 1908), 32; Grimes, Life, 25; cf. Thomas Johnson, Africa for Christ: Twenty-Eight Years a Slave (London, 1892), 10–11; Moses Grandy, Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America (Boston, 1844), 55–56; Hayden, Narrative, 57–59; Julius Melbourn, Life and Opinions of Julius Melbourn (Syracuse, NY, 1847), 9–10; James Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith (London, 1849), vi, 24, 82; James Watkins, Narrative of the Life of James Watkins, Formerly a “Chattel” in Maryland (Bolton, UK, 1852), 26; Lewis Charlton, Sketches of the Life of Mr. Lewis Charlton (Portland, ME, n.d.), 1; James Williams, Life and Adventures of James Williams, a Fugitive Slave (San Francisco, 1873), 11.

  39. For definition of “coffle,” see Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com.

  40. James Kirke Paulding, Letters from the South, Written During an Excursion in the Summer of 1816 (New York, 1817), 126–127.

  41. Grimes, Life, 22; Alexandria Gazette, June 22, 1827; Damian Alan Pargas, “The Gathering Storm: Slave Responses to the Threat of Interregional Migration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 3 (2012): 286–315; Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931), 23–24. Some of the chains were literally repurposed from Atlantic slave-trading vessels. See Gardner, Dean, to Phillips, Gardner, April 10, 1807, Slavery Collection, NYHS.

  42. New Hampshire Gazette, October 13, 1801; Alexandria Times, January 10, 1800.

  43. ASAI, 69–70; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia (London, 1855), 17–18.

  44. Parker Autobiography, Rankin-Parker Papers, Duke; “Aaron,” The Light and Truth of Slavery (Springfield, MA, 1845).

  45. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); John C. Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville, VA, 2011).

  46. Jesse Torrey, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia, 1817), 39–40, 33–34.

  47. Jesse Torrey, American Slave-Trade (London, 1822), 66–71.

  48. Robert Goodloe Harper, The Case of the Georgia Sales Reconsidered (Philadelphia, 1797); Abraham Bishop, The Georgia Speculation Unveiled (Hartford, CT, 1797).

  49. “Charleston” from Pennsylvania Packet, February 25, 1790.

  50. Thomas Hart Benton, Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, from 1798 to 1856, 223 (March 1798).

  51. Magrath, Yazoo, 34–35.

  52. Klein, Unification, 252–254; John Cummings and Joseph A Hill, Negro Population 1790–1915 (Washington, 1918), 45, available at http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00480330_TOC.pdf; Watson Jennison, Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860 (Lexington, KY, 2012).

  53. NR, September 29, 1821; Gerald T. Dunne, “Bushrod Washington and the Mount Vernon Slaves,” Supreme Court Historical Society Yearbook (1980); Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003), 6–8.

  54. Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820; Founders’ Constitution, 1:156; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 264.

  55. NR, September 1, 1821.

  56. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 86–91.

  CHAPTER 2. HEADS: 1791–1815

  1. Benjamin Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans: Diary and Sketches, 1818–1820, ed. Samuel Wilson Jr. (New York, 1951), 13–14; Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Pamela Neville-Sington (repr. London, 1997), 9–11; John Pintard to Sec. Treasury, September 14, 1803, TP, 9:52–53. Cf. Amos Stoddard, Historical Sketches of Louisiana (Philadelphia, 1812), 159–160; James Pearse, Narrative of the Life of James Pearse (Rutland, VT, c. 1826), 16; H. Bellenden Ker, Travels Through the Western Interior of the United States (Elizabethtown, NJ, 1816), 36; Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, trans. John Davis, Travels in Louisiana and Florida in the Year 1802 (New York, 1806), 8.

  2. TASTD; James McMillin, The Final Victims: Foreign Slave Trade to North America, 1783–1810 (Columbia, SC, 2004), 23; Stephen Behrendt, David Eltis, and David Richardson, “The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World,” Economic History Review (n.s.) 54, no. 3 (2001): 454–476.

  3. Approval Alex. Clark, Bill of Lading, March 9, 1807, Reel 1, Inward Manifests, New Orleans, RG 36, NA; John Lambert, Travels Through Canada and the United States of America, In the Years 1806, 1807, and 1808 (London, 1816), 2:166.

  4. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000); Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1988); Robin C. Blackburn, Origins of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997).

  5. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York, 1985).

  6. M.L.E. Moreau de St. Méry, Description topo
graphique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie francaise de l’isle Saint-Domingue . . . , 2 vols. (Paris, 1797); Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC, 1992).

  7. Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY, 2000); Kenneth C. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Berkeley, CA, 2000), 31–68; David Eltis, “Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819–1839,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1982): 453–475.

  8. Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana, 35–37.

  9. Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York, 1976), 61–62, 107–126; William Plumer, William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the U.S. Senate, 1803–1807, ed. Edward Sommerville Brown (Ann Arbor, MI, 1923).

  10. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The St. Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, TN, 1990).

  11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995); Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 821–865; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, LA, 1988).

  12. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1963).

  13. Stephen Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life (New York, 2004); Laurent DuBois, Avengers of the New World (New York, 2004); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988).

  14. Roger Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York, 2003).

  15. Jefferson to Robert Livingston, April 18, 1802; Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York, 2003), 235–259.

  16. DeConde, Affair of Louisiana, 161–166.

  17. P. L. Roederer, Oeuvres du Comte P. L. Roederer (Paris, 1854), 3:461; Comté Barbé-Marbois, The History of Louisiana: Particularly of the Cession of That Colony to the United States of America, trans. “By an American Citizen (William B. Lawrence)” (Philadelphia, 1830), 174–175, 263–264.

  18. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 297–301.

  19. Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006).

  20. Annals of Congress, 1806, 238; Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1970), 331; David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 162–163.

  21. DeConde, Affair of Louisiana, 205–206; Jared Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment: William C. C. Claiborne Letter Book, 1804–1805 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003), 13; Alexander Hamilton, in New-York Evening Post, July 5, 1803, Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 26:129–136. An exception to historians’ cover-up: Henry Adams, History of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison (New York, 1986 [Library of America]), 1:2, 20–22. Cf. Edward E. Baptist, “Hidden in Plain View: Haiti and the Louisiana Purchase,” in Elizabeth Hackshaw and Martin Munro, eds., Echoes of the Haitian Revolution in the Modern World (Kingston, Jamaica, 2008).

  22. Peter J. Kastor, Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT, 2004); Lawrence Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Plumer, Proceedings, 223–224, notes three Louisiana French planters’ visits to Congress complaining about Claiborne.

  23. Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana, 28–29, 80; Vincent Nolte, Memoirs of Vincent Nolte (New York, 1934); Sarah P. Russell, “Cultural Conflicts and Common Interests: The Making of the Sugar Planter Class in Louisiana, 1795–1853” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2000); Kenneth Aslakson, “The ‘Quadroon-Placage’ Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon,” Journal of Social History 45 (2012): 709–734; Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, 2009).

  24. Peter C. Hoffer, The Treason Trials of Aaron Burr (Lawrence, KS, 2008); James Madison to Gov. Claiborne, January 12, 1807, TP, 9:702.

  25. J. P. to J. Johnston, February 1, 1810, Folder 1, PALF; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

  26. J. Carlyle Sitterston, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1763–1950 (Lexington, KY, 1953), 3–11; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 325–357; Stoddard, Sketches, 332–333; C. C. Robin, Voyages dans L’Intérieur de la Louisiane, (Paris, 1807), 109–110; Russell, “Cultural Conflicts,” 55.

  27. James Pitot, Observations of the Colony of Louisiana, from 1796 to 1802 (repr. Baton Rouge, LA, 1979), 9; Claiborne to President Jefferson, November 25, 1804, TP, 9:340; Gilbert Leonard to Claiborne, January 25, 1804, TP, 9:172. On Louisiana importing only a few thousand slaves before 1801 to 1804: TASTD; Rothman, Slave Country, 89–91.

  28. John Watkins to Claiborne, February 2, 1804, WCCC, 2:10–11; Claiborne to Madison, July 5, 1804, March 10, 1804, ibid.; cf. Claiborne to Albert Gallatin, May 8, 1804, ibid., 2:235–237, 25–26, 134; Annals of Congress, vol. 14, 1595–1608; W. E. B. DuBois, Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States (New York, 1896), 89–90; James E. Scanlon, “A Sudden Conceit: Jefferson and the Louisiana Government Bill,” Louisiana History 9 (1968): 139–162; Sarah P. Russell, “Ethnicity, Commerce, and Community on Lower Louisiana’s Plantation Frontier,” Louisiana History 40 (1999): 396–399; Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, 398; Claiborne to President Jefferson, November 25, 1804, TP, 9:340; “Act for Organization of Orleans Territory,” March 26, 1804, TP, 9:202–213. Southerners and their congressional allies, including John Quincy Adams, defeated an effort to free all slaves imported into the territory.

  29. McMillin, Final Victims, Appendix B; Claiborne to Madison, May 8, 1804, WCCC, 2:134, 358–361; Claiborne to President Jefferson, November 25, 1804, TP, 9:340; Rothman, Slave Country, 92–95; Brown to Gallatin, December 11, 1805, TP, 9:545–547.

  30. Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931), 300n19; Claiborne to A. Jackson, December 23, 1801; John Hutchings to Jackson, December 25, 1801, CAJ, 1:265, 266.

  31. Claiborne to R. Smith, May 15, 1809, WCCC, 4:354–355; Paul Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of the St. Domingue Refugees,” in Carl Brasseaux and Glenn Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809 (Lafayette, LA, 1992), 246–252; Paul Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992), 101–130; Extrait des documents, 1804; Dautouville to Miltenberger, July 1806, both Miltenberger Papers, SHC. Some of the French nationals came to Cuba from Saint-Domingue shortly after 1791, and some as late as 1803. Some of those denominated as “slaves” in the migration to Louisiana had been transported to Cuba from Saint-Domingue, while others had been bought there as slaves in the up to eighteen years that French nationals had spent in Cuba. See Rebecca J. Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-Enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 1061–1087.

  32. Claiborne to R. Smith, July 29, 1809, WCCC, 4:391–393.

  33. James Mather to Claiborne, July 18, 1809, WCCC, 4:387–409; Claiborne to Julien Poydras, May 29, 1809, ibid., 4:371–372; Claiborne to R. Smith, May 20, 1809, ibid., 4:363–367; Claiborne to William Savage, November 10, 1809, ibid., 5:4–6; Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., Pt. 1, 462–465, “House Debate on Emigrants from Cuba.”

  34. “Aux Arrivans de Cuba: On prendrait à loyer . . . une trentaine de nègres de hache & quelques négresses de travail,” Moniteur de la Louisiane, August 5, 1809; “Vente a L’Encan,” ibid., October 7, 1809; HALL, 60131, 54165; F. Carrere à Miltenberger, April 18, 1809, and Miltenberger to N. Fournier, September 27, 1
809, Miltenberger Papers, SHC. Italics added.

  35. Don Dodd and Wynelle Dodd, Historical Statistics of the United States (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1973–1976); R. Claiborne to Madison, December 31, 1806, TP, 9:692–702.

  36. LC, November 19, 1810; LG, December 6, 1810, July 24, 1810.

  37. Quartier Générale, January 13, 1811, “Interrogation du Cupidon,” January 13, 1811, SCPOA; HALL; Thomas Marshall Thompson, “National Newspaper and Legislative Reactions to Louisiana’s Deslondes Slave Revolt of 1811,” Louisiana History 33 (1992): 5–29; James H. Dormon, “The Persistent Specter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 18 (1977): 389–404; Richmond Enquirer, February 22, 1811, reported as leader “Charles, a yellow fellow, the property of Mr. Andre”; LG, January 11, 1811; Albert Thrasher, On to New Orleans! Louisiana’s Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt (New Orleans, 1996), 297; Rothman, Slave Country.

  38. Trial Augustin, February 25, 1811, SCPOA, 1811, no. 20; Glenn Conrad, The German Coast: Abstracts of the Civil Records of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes, 1804–1812 (Lafayette, LA, 1981), 108.

  39. Claiborne to Wade Hampton, January 7 (1 & 2), 1811, WCCC, 5:91–92.

  40. Interrogation “Koock,” January 14, 1811, SCPOA; Mary Ann Sternberg, Along the River Road: Past and Present on Louisiana’s Historic Byway (Baton Rouge, LA, 1996), 130; Moniteur, January 15, 1811; Thrasher, On to New Orleans, 268.

  41. Jupiter interrogation from “Jugement du Nègre de M. Andry,” February 20, 1811, no. 17, SCPOA.

  42. Numbers from HALL; Deposition of Hermogène Trepagnier, SCPOA, no. 20.

  43. Thrasher, On to New Orleans, 119n42, n46, n49, 52–53.

  44. Moniteur, January 17, 1811.

  45. Destrehan’s compensation claim, SCPOA, 160.

  46. Moniteur, January 17, 1811; Manuel Andry to Claiborne, LC, January 15, 1811; Hampton to Sec. of War, January 16, 1811, TP, 9:918–919; Hampton to Claiborne, January 12, 1811, TP, 9:916–917.

  47. Conrad, German Coast.