The Half Has Never Been Told

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The Half Has Never Been Told Page 64

by Edward E. Baptist


  10. Easton Star, September 27, 1831; cf. Easton Star, April 12, 1825, May 8, 1827, November 27, 1827, April 7, 1829, May 28, 1829, September 7, 1830; Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington, KY, 2004); BD. Not all slaves sold in Kent County were from Kent County: many were like the fourteen-year-old girl named Anne, whom Caleb Dorsey brought across the Chesapeake from Anne Arundel County to sell to John Maydwell in the fall of 1830.

  11. Richard Watson, John Wesley, and John Dixon Long, Pictures of Slavery in Church and State (Philadelphia, 1857).

  12. William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: The Second Party System in Virginia, 1824–1861 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996), 22.

  13. Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (Oxford, 1976), 109–112; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison, WI, 1989), 301; Moses Grandy, Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America (Boston, 1844), 46.

  14. S. C. Archer to R. T. Archer, July 28, 1833, Box 2E652, Fol. 6, Richard T. Archer Papers, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

  15. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Boston, 1861); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore, 2011).

  16. Sarah Byrd, AS, 12.1 (GA), 168; John Majewski, A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War (Cambridge, UK, 2000); John Bezis Selfa, Forging America: Ironworkers, Adventurers, and the Industrious Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 2004); Ledger, 1829–1855, Alfred Rives Papers, Duke.

  17. US Census Bureau, 1830, R54/p429; Robert Falls, AS, 16.6 (TN), 13; Viney Baker, AS, 14.1 (NC), 71; Charley Barbour, AS, 14.1 (NC), 76.

  18. Grandy, Life, 44; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), 98–99; Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003), 25–30; Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro,” Selected Addresses of Frederick Douglass (Lanham, MD, 2013); Rezin Williams, AS, 16.3 (MD), 76–77; Ethan A. Andrews, Slavery and the Domestic Slave-Trade in the United States (Boston, 1836), 80–81.

  19. Allen Parker, Recollections of Slavery Times (Worcester, MA, 1895), 9; BD.

  20. Robert Falls, AS, 16.6 (TN), 13; B. S. King to Joel King, February 23, 1824, Joel King Papers, Duke.

  21. Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 165–206.

  22. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1820 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); John C. Hammond and Matthew Mason, eds., Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (Charlottesville, VA, 2011).

  23. JQA, 9:35; Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009), 149; cf. Kari J. Winter, The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader (Athens, GA, 2011).

  24. Margaret Nickerson, AS, 17 (FL), 251; Jane Sutton, AS, 7.2 (MS), 152; Cora Gillam, AS, S2, 1.3 (AR), 68; Adaline Montgomery, AS, S1, 9.4 (MS), 1514; Lewis Brown, AS, 8.1 (AR), 292; Grandy, Life, 10–11.

  25. Jane Sutton, AS, 7.2 (MS), 152; George Ward, AS, S1, 10.5 (MS), 100; Harry Johnson, AS, 4.2 (TX), 212–213; George Fleming, AS, S1, 11 (SC), 127–133; William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston, 1849), 13; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens, GA, 2006), 243–274; Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, VA, 1976), 115; Greta Elena Couper, An American Sculptor on the Grand Tour: The Life and Works of William Couper (1853–1942) (Los Angeles, 1988). Weevils in the Wheat refers to a 1907 statue of a Confederate soldier near the Norfolk docks.

  26. Helen Odom, AS, 10.5 (AR), 227; Lettie Nelson, AS, 10.5 (AR), 209; William Grose, NSV, 83. On slaves’ vernacular storytelling as the root of literary production, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana, IL, 1985); Marion W. Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Boston, 1981, repr. of 1946 diss.); Henry Louis Gates, Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988).

  27. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia (London, 1855), 18–19. For claims that ancestors were kidnapped free people, see Spence Johnson, AS, 4.2 (TX), 228–229; Clayton Holbrooke, AS, S2, 1 (KS), 286; Carey Davenport, AS, 4.1 (TX), 284; Ann Clark, AS, 4.1 (TX), 223; Ambrose Douglass, AS, 17 (FL), 101; Samuel Smalls, AS, 17 (FL), 300–301; Douglas Dorsey, AS, 17 (FL), 93; Florida Clayton, AS, S1, 6.1 (MS), 143; Mary Reynolds, S2, 8.7 (TX), 3284, and 5.3 (TX), 236; Julia Blanks, 4.1 (TX), 93. Philadelphia cases: Joseph Watson Papers, Louisiana State University; cf. Freedom’s Journal, June 22, 1827, September 14, 1827, January 18, 1828; Jonathan Evans et al. May 30, 1825, and Th. Kennedy to Geo. Swain, September 11, 1826, Manumission Society Papers, Duke; John (a negro) vs. George Williams, 1821, Box 6/101, Adams Co. [MS] Court Files, one of eighteen cases from the 1820s in the Natchez Historical Collection. Cf. Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington, KY, 1995); James Gigantino II, “Trading in New Jersey Souls: New Jersey and the Interstate Slave Trade,” Pennsylvania History 77, no. 3 (2010): 281–302.

  28. Evie Herrin, AS, 8.3 (MS), 988; Sim Greeley, AS, 2.2 (SC), 190; J. Green, AS, 4.2 (TX), 87, and S2, 5.4 (TX), 1577–1583.

  29. Shang Harris, AS, 12.2 (GA), 119; Josephine Hubbard, AS, 4.2 (TX), 163; Henry Benjamin Whipple, Bishop Whipple’s Southern Diary, 1843–1844, ed. Lester B. Shippee (Minneapolis, 1937), 17. Uses of “stole” to describe the Middle Passage: John Jea, The Life and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher (Portsea, UK, 1811), 3; Martin Diagney, MW, 62; Carlyle Stewart, MW, 206; Victor Duhon, AS, 4.1 (TX), 307, and 18 (TN), 152, 198; Charley Barbour, AS, 2.1 (SC), 30–31; Susan Snow, AS, 7.2 (MS), 136; Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 1, 64; John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London, 1862), 7; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston, 1845), 40; Henry C. Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-Nine Years the Slave, Twenty-Nine Years the Free Man (York, PA, 1895), 129–131; Francis Fedric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, Or, Fifty Years of Slavery . . . (London, 1853), 4.

  30. Charley Barbour, AS, 2.1 (SC), 30–31; Venus in Emma Hurley, AS, 12.2 (GA), 274; Mariah Snyder, AS, 5.4 (TX), 53. A few of the endless references to stealing and sale in Works Progress Administration interviews include: Jake Terriel, AS, 5.4 (TX), 79; Mary Thompson, AS, 5.4 (TX), 101; William Rooks, AS, 10.6 (AR), 76–77; J. T. Travis, AS, 10.6 (AR), 336; Mollie Barber, AS, S1, 12 (OK), 29–30; Amy Chapman, AS, 6.1 (AL), 58; Nelson Cameron, AS, 2.1 (SC), 173; “Mrs. Sutton,” AS, 18 (TN), 31, 81, 105, 204–205, 216, 298–299; Jim Allen, AS, 7.2 (MS), 1; Maria Clemmons, AS, 8.2 (AR), 15; Wash Allen, AS, 12.1 (GA), 10; Lucretia Hayward, AS, 2.2 (SC), 280; Amanda Jackson, AS, 12.2 (GA), 292. See also Perdue et al., Weevils in the Wheat, 161 (Katie Johnson), 185 (Louise Jones), 211, 250 (Sis Shackelford), 318 (Nancy Williams). Cf. Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (New York, 2000), 117–149.

  31. Natchez Gazette, March 11, 1826; John Hope Franklin and Loren F. Schweniger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999).

  32. Elisha Winfield Green, Life of Elisha Winfield Green . . . (Maysville, KY, 1888), 3.

  33. Emancipator, 1820; Hiram Hilty, North Carolina Qua
kers and Slavery (Richmond, IL, 1984), 93; Stephen Weeks, Southern Quakers and Slavery: A Study in Institutional History (New York, 1968); Ryan P. Jordan, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma (Bloomington, IN, 2007), 7.

  34. Benjamin Lundy, Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia, 1847), 15–24.

  35. Phineas Norton, Haiti trip notebook, 1826, Th. Kennedy to Meeting for Sufferings, 1826, and “Account of Negroes,” Manumission Society Papers, SHC.

  36. Emancipator, September 1820, 86; Merton Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana, IL, 1966), 117–120; Genius of Universal Emancipation, September 12, 1825.

  37. Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 20, 1827, February 24, 1827, March 31, 1827; Gudmestad, Troublesome Commerce, 155–156.

  38. Henry Mayer, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); C. Peter Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers: The United States, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 7–10; Lundy, Life; John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963), 106–113.

  39. Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827. The asterisk indicates that this was an abbreviation, but it was understood that the name was “Woolfolk.”

  40. Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York, 2013), 13–40; Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, PA, 1997).

  41. David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Boston, 1829), 12–26, 43, 62–75.

  42. David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice (Baton Rouge, LA, 1989), 23–41; Walker, Appeal, 65, 71–72.

  43. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 332–338.

  44. Hinks, Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 269–270; Liberator, January 22, 1831.

  45. The literature on the abolitionist movement is vast. Within it, a few good starting points that do not silence the voices of the formerly enslaved include: Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969); R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Abolitionists in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, CA, 1998); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1997); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Abolitionist Movement (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, MA, 2008); J. Brent Morris, “‘All The Wise and Truly Pious Have One and the Same End in View’: Oberlin, the West, and Abolitionist Schism,” Civil War History 57 (2011): 234–267; Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Urbana, IL, 2009); Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010); Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom.

  46. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 13, 51; cf. Thomas Smallwood, A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Toronto, 1851), 19; Isaac Williams, Aunt Sally, Or, the Cross the Way of Freedom (Cincinnati, 1858), 89; Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball . . . (New York, 1837), 36; Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper (Philadelphia, 1838), 62; J. W. Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen as a Slave and a Freeman (Syracuse, NY, 1859), 14–15; Charles Wheeler, Chains and Freedom, Or, the Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, a Colored Man (New York, 1839), 36–45; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (London, 1860), 3–7; Henry Brown, Narrative of Henry Box Brown (Boston, 1849), 15; Kate E. R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife “Vina” (Syracuse, NY, 1856), passim; Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane (Boston, 1842), 20. Cf. Elizabeth Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” JAH 82 (1995): 463–493; Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” AHR 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–334.

  47. Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827.

  48. GSMD, 99–100.

  49. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989).

  50. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978), 129–132, 223–225; Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 217–225.

  51. NSV, 137; Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008); Jeffrey Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); David Barrow, Involuntary Slavery Examined (Lexington, KY, 1808), 22; Betsey Madison, ST, 185–186; Betty Crissman, ST, 468–469; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 164–165.

  52. On Cane Creek: John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington, KY, 1972); Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville, TN, 1999); Paul Conkin, Cane Ridge, America’s Pentecost (Madison, WI, 1990).

  53. John F. Watson, Methodist Error, Or Friendly Christian Advice to Those Methodists Who Indulge in Extravagant Religious Emotions and Bodily Exercises (Trenton, NJ, 1819); Jane Alexander to Mary Springs, July 24, 1801, Springs Papers, SHC; R. C. Puryear to Isaac Jarratt, November 16, 1832, Jarratt-Puryear Papers, Duke.

  54. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

  55. Adam Hodgson, Remarks During a Journey Through North America in the Years 1819, 1820, 1821 (New York, 1823), 200; Randy J. Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773–1876 (Athens, GA, 1994), 61–66; Ellen Eslinger, “The Beginnings of Afro-American Christianity,” in Craig Thompson Friend, ed., The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington, KY, 1998), 206–207; Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007).

  56. Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks, 66–71, 116–117, 125–139; David T. Bailey, “A Divided Prism: Two Sources of Black Testimony on Slavery,” JSH 46 (1980): 392; Randolph Scully, “‘I Come Here Before You Did and I Shall Not Go Away’: Race, Gender, and Evangelical Community on the Eve of the Nat Turner Rebellion,” JER 27, no. 4 (2007): 661–684; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, SC, 1999); Isaac Johnson, Slavery Days in Old Kentucky (Ogdensburg, NY, 1901), 25–26; Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, NY, 1853), 94.

  57. June 26, 1821, Neill Brown Papers, Duke.

  58. GSMD, 36, 71, 98; cf. GSMD, pp. 41, 53–55, 81–83, 146.

  59. GSMD, 215. The screaming mothers and abandoned babies are frequent elements in Works Progress Administration accounts of the domestic slave trade as-told-to-the-interviewee: e.g., Dave Harper, AS, 11.2 (MO), 163; Alice Douglass, AS, 7.1 (OK), 73–74.

  60. GSMD, 99–100.

  61. William Webb, History of William Webb (Detroit, 1873), 5.

  62. Lula Chambers, AS, 11.2, (MO), 79–81; Robert Falls, AS, 16.6 (TN), 16; Henry Bibb to Albert G. Sibley, September 23, 1852, ST, 50–51; Hannah Davidson, AS, 16.4 (OH), 32.

  63. Ball, Slavery in the United States, 221.

  64. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 3.

  65. Scully, “‘I Come Here,’” 675; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 209.

  66. Nat Turner, Confessions of Nat Turner (Baltimore, 1831), 10–11.

  67. Scot P. French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston, 2004), 83; Patrick Breen, “Contested Communion: The Limits of White Solidar
ity in Nat Turner’s Virginia,” JER 27, no. 4 (2007): 685–703; Anthony E. Kaye, “Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion,” JER 27, no. 4 (2007): 705–720; estimate from Patrick Breen, “Nat Turner’s Revolt: Rebellion and Response in Southampton County, Virginia” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2005).

  68. New Orleans Bee, September 15, 1831; Rachel O’Connor to Brother, October 13, 1831: Allie B. W. Webb, ed., Mistress of Evergreen Plantation: Rachel O’Connor’s Legacy of Letters, 1823–1845 (Albany, NY, 1983), 62–63.

  69. New Orleans Bee, November 19, 1831; Office of the Mayor, List of Slaves Arrived, 1831, NOPL; W. M. Drake, “The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1832,” JSH 23 (1957); Stephen Duncan to Thomas Butler, September 4, 1831, Butler Papers, LLMVC.

  70. “Individuals Importing Slaves, 1831–1833,” Orleans Parish Court Records, NOPL; Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831–1832 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1982); Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 373–374.

  71. Marshall’s speech: Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 369.

  72. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 459.

  73. John Floyd, quoted in Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 351; Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 83; Mobile Register, November 7, 1831.

  74. Mobile Register, November 7, 1831; J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi as Territory and State (Jackson, MS, 1880), 1:385; ST, 267, 185–186.

  75. Annie Stanton, AS, 6.1 (AL), 354; Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia, SC, 1991).

  76. Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22; James Smylie, Review of a Letter, from the Presbytery of Chillicothe, to the Presbytery of Mississippi, on the Subject of Slavery (Woodville, MS, 1836), 3.

  77. For the 1835 rebellion scare, see Joshua Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens, GA, 2011); Christopher C. Morris, “An Event in Community Organization: The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 1 (1988): 93–111; David Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson, MS, 2004); James Lal Penick, The Great Western Land Pirate: John A. Murrell in Legend and History (Columbia, MO, 1981); Laurence Shore, “Making Mississippi Safe for Slavery: The Insurrectionary Panic of 1835,” in Orville Vernon Burton and Robert McMath, eds., Class, Conflict, and Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies (Westport, CT, 1982), 96–120.

 

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