46. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball . . . (New York, 1837), 263–265, 275; cf. Dickson D. Bruce, The Origins of African-American Literature (Charlottesville, VA, 2001).
47. Nettie Henry, AS, S.1, 8.3 (MS), 975–976; Jack Hannibal to Dear Mistress, August 9, 1878, Jack Hannibal Letter, Duke.
48. Eliz. Koonce to Eliz. Franck, December 18, 1849, Cox and Koonce Papers, SHC.
49. E.g., Notice to Sampson Lanier, JD, and Wildredge Thompson, January 11, 1838, JSD; Memo of Debts, JSD; John Devereux to JD, January 26, 1839, JSD; Bank of Milledgeville to JD, February 14, 1840, JSD; Notice of Protest, April 24, 1840, JSD; S. Grantland to JD, September 14, 1840, JSD; Executions v. JD, Macon County, Alabama, October 24, 1840, JSD.
50. Petition of JD, February 10, 1843, and Deposition JD, JSD.
51. J. S. Short to T. P. Westray, August 1, 1838, Battle Papers, SHC; John Roberts to John Bacon et al., December 13, 1841, and John Roberts to H. D. Mandeville, January 3, 1842, both in Bank U.S. of Penna. Papers, LLMVC. I thank Richard Kilbourne for generously sharing his transcription of this difficult collection.
52. Fol.: Papers: 1839, JSD (passim); Rich. Faulkner to Wm. Powell, May 8, 1839, William Powell Papers, Duke; John Roberts to Bacon et al., April 12, 1842, and John Roberts to Geo. Connelly, February 26, 1843, both in Bank of U.S. of Penna. Papers, LLMVC; Joseph Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (New York, 1854).
53. R. W. Cook to J. S. Copes, July 5, 1840, Joseph Copes Papers, Tulane; Wm. Thompson to John Bassett, July 19, 1839, Fol. 3, Indiana Thompson, 1842, Fol. 4, John Bassett Papers, SHC.
54. Jacob Bieller Will, December 1835, Fol. 1/15, BIELLER.
55. Louisiana Supreme Court, Bieller v. Bieller, 1845; Jacob Bieller Will, December 1835, Fol. 1/15, BIELLER. However, Nancy Bieller, at least, did not get to divide and monetize people whom she had claimed. When the divorce case finally made it to the state supreme court, Jacob was dead, as was his son, whose heirs successfully argued that Jacob’s earlier divorce from his son’s South Carolina mother in 1808 was never legally completed. Hence Nancy was never really married and her daughter was illegitimate, so Jacob’s white son’s heirs were his legitimate legatees.
56. “N.B.N.” [?] to JD, July 14, 1841, JSD; Andrew Scott to JD, June 22, 1841, JSD; Wm. Bond to JD, October 22, 1841, JSD; “Memo” [210], Diary 1833–1846, JSD.
57. Irish v. Wright, 8. Rob. La. 428, July 1844 [431], 3:561; Pleasants v. Glasscock, Ch. 17, December 1843 [21], 3:297; Cawthorn v. McDonald, 1 Rob. La. 55, October 1841 [56], 3:541; Tuggle v. Barclay, 6 Ala. 407, January 1844 [408], 3:561, 297, 541, 153, all CATTERALL; Campbell, Empire for Slavery, 55.
58. Groves v. Slaughter, 40 U.S. Pet. 449 (1841), CATTERALL, 3:533–535, January 1841; Green v. Robinson, ibid., 3:289, December 1840; David Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2006), 72–84.
59. Brien v. Williamson (MS), 3:294; Green v. Robinson (MS), 3:289; cf. Carson v. Dwight (LA), 3:554, all CATTERALL; Bacon Tait to RB, January 1, 3, 1840, Fol. 31, RCB; H. Donaldson Jordan, “A Politician of Expansion: Robert J. Walker,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 19, no. 3 (1932): 362–381; Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003), 193–200.
60. Edwin Miles, Jacksonian Democracy in Mississippi (Chapel Hill, NC, 1960), 150–151; Rich. Faulkner to Wm. Powell, June 16, 1839, Wm. Powell Papers, Duke; John J. Wallis, Richard Sylla, and Arthur Grinath, “Sovereign Debt and Repudiation: The Emerging-Market Debt Crisis in the U.S. States, 1839–1843,” NBER Working Paper no. 10753, 2004, National Bureau of Economic Research, www.nber.org/papers/w10753; Baptist, Creating an Old South, 154–190; Columbus Democrat, February 20, 1841; McGrane, Foreign Bondholders, 201.
61. US Congress, “Condition of Banks”; Mississippi Free-Trader, October 28, 1843, November 1, 1843.
62. Albany Argus, November 26, 1841. In 1852, Mississippi’s legislature also defaulted on the $2 million principal of the Planters’ Bank bonds of 1831. Florida and Arkansas repudiated in 1843. Only Alabama levied taxes and continued payments in the antebellum era, though after the Civil War both Alabama and Tennessee repudiated their prewar debts. McGrane, Foreign Bondholders, 178–192, 241–257, 282–291, 357–364.
63. John Knight to Wife, July 14, 1839, John Knight Papers, Duke; Circular to Bankers, December 10, 1841, McGrane, Foreign Bondholders, 203, 265–281, 382–391.
64. McGrane, Foreign Bondholders, 201–205.
65. J. B. Hawkins to W. J. Hawkins, June 5, 1847, Fol. 76, Hawkins Papers, SHC.
66. Miles, Jacksonian Democracy, 139; G. Rust and A. McNutt, [1835], E. Mason to Wm. Rust, June 2, 1845, E. Mason to G. Rust, April 5, 1844, June 2, 1845, McNutt Papers, MDAH; Malone, Sweet Chariot.
67. Jim Allen, AS, 7.2 (MS), 1; Tempie Lummins, AS, 4.1 (TX), 264; Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, VA, 1976), 211, 318; Anonymous, AS, 18 (TN), 298–299; Mollie Barber, AS, S1, 12 (OK), 29–30; C. G. Lynch to JD, August 16, 1840, JSD; Felix Street, AS, 10.5, (AR), 250; Carrie Pollard, AS, 6.1 (AL), 318–319; Clayton Holbert, AS, 16.1 (KS), 1. Gutman, Black Family, represents the classic “strong patriarchal family” position, while Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (Cambridge, UK, 2003), argues that kinship ties were tenuous. Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996), and White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, describe women-centered networks.
68. Erwin v. Lowry, Louisiana cases 1849; Comstock v. Rayford, 1 S. and M. 423, 1843, [424]; Hardeman v. Sims, 3 Ala. [747], 1840; Blanchard v. Castille, 19 La. 362, September 1841 [363], 595, 297, 147, 539, all CATTERALL 3; Milly Forward, AS, 4.2 (TX), 45; Mary Anderson, AS, 4.1 (TX), 26–27; Tom Harris, AS, 9.4 (MS), 1579; Annie Penland, AS, S1, 12 (OK), 257; William Holland, AS, 4.2 (TX), 145; AS, 18 (TN), 98–99.
69. Betty Simmons, AS, 5.4 (TX), 20; Henri Necaise, AS (MS); Ellaine Wright, AS, 11.2 (MO), 378; cf. AS, 10.5 (AR), 203; Iran Nelson, AS, 7.2 (MS), 199.
70. Robert Laird, AS, 8.3 (MS), 1292; Wash Hayes, AS, 8.3 (MS), 963–964; John McCoy, AS, 5.3 (TX), 32; Pierre Aucuin, MW, 21–23.
71. Gutman, Black Family, 88–93, mentions incest tales but does not discuss their symbolic aspects. See also Perdue et al., Weevils in the Wheat, 89, 105; Henry Brown, AS, 2.1 (SC), 124–125; Cora Horton, AS, 9.3 (AR), 321–324; Lizzie Johnson, AS, 9.3 (AR), 102–103; Liza Suggs, Shadow and Sunshine (Omaha, 1906), 75, retells the same story, though born in 1875.
72. Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD, 2004); Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Feitores do Corpo, Missionários da Mente: Senhores, Letrados e o Controle dos Escravos nas Américas, 1660–1860 (São Paulo, 2004).
73. Steven Heath Mitton, “The Free World Confronted: Slavery and Progress in American Foreign Relations, 1833–1844” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2005); Maxwell, Wright, & Co., Commercial Formalities of Rio De Janeiro (Baltimore, 1841).
74. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 236–237; Walter R. Cassels, Cotton: An Account of Its Culture in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1862); K. L. Tuteja, “American Planters and the Cotton Improvement Programme in Bombay Presidency During the Nineteenth Century,” Indian Journal of American Studies (1998); Lelia M. Roeckell, “Bonds over Bondage: British Opposition to the Annexation of Texas,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999): 269n29; Madeline Stern, The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (Austin, TX, 1968); Benjamin Lundy, Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia, 1847).
75. Mitton, “Free World Confronted”; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion (New York, 1990), 1:390–391.
76. Virgil Maxcy to Calhoun, December 3, 10, 1844, in JCC, 17:586, 599–603; Wilentz, Rise of America
n Democracy, 565.
77. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London, 1838), 1:147–148; Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York, 1994), 379; William W. Freehling, “Spoilsmen and Interests in the Thought and Career of John C. Calhoun,” Journal of American History 52 (1965): 25–42; Richard R. John, “Like Father, Like Son: The Not-So-Strange Career of John C. Calhoun,” Reviews in American History 23, no. 3 (1995): 438–443.
78. Edward Crapol, “John Tyler and the Pursuit of National Destiny,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 467–491.
79. Calhoun to Richard Pakenham, April 18, 1844; Documents relative to Texas, Serial Set vol. 435, session vol. 5, 28th Cong., 1st sess., S.Doc. 341; Charles Wiltse, John C. Calhoun: Sectionalist (Indianapolis, 1951), 168.
80. Silbey, Storm over Texas, 62–68. Van Buren’s letter responded to William Hammet, former University of Virginia chaplain, now Mississippi congressman and unpledged Democratic convention delegate.
81. Joel Silbey, “‘There Are Other Questions Besides That of Slavery Merely’: The Democratic Party and Anti-Slavery Politics,” in Alan Kraut, ed., Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays of the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System (Westport, CT, 1983), 143–175.
82. Robert J. Walker, Letter of Mr. Walker, of Mississippi: Relative to the Reannexation of Texas. In Reply to the Call of the People of Carroll County, Kentucky, to Communicate His Views on that Subject (Washington, DC, 1844); Robert J. Walker, The South in Danger: Being a Document Published by the Democratic Association of Washington, D.C., for Circulation at the South, and Showing the Design of the Annexation of Texas to Be the Security and Perpetuation of Slavery (Washington, DC, 1844); Frederick Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (Cambridge, MA, 1971).
83. Silbey, Storm over Texas, 77; Holt, Whig Party, 196–206.
84. Nell Mick Pugh, “Contemporary Comments on Texas, 1844–1847,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 62 (1959): 267–270; Frederick Merk, Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (New York, 1972), 152–166; Holman Hamilton, “Texas Bonds and Northern Profits: A Study in Compromise, Investment, and Lobby Influence,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (1957): 579–594. When the bonds were paid off (1856–1857, at 0.75 on the dollar), 60 percent went to northern holders.
85. Silbey, Storm over Texas, 111–112.
86. Following paragraphs: John Devereux Diary, 1833–1846, January 1 to March 23, 1846, JSD. The 1845 Texas state constitution enabled homestead exemptions that protected slaves from debt seizure. Mark Nackman, “Anglo-American Migrants to the West: Men of Broken Fortunes? The Case of Texas, 1821–1846,” Western Historical Quarterly 5 (1974): 441–455. Attempts to pursue debtors into Texas postannexation apparently failed. Endicott v. Penney, 1850, 325; McIntyre v. Whitfield, 1849, 322, all CATTERALL, vol. 3.
87. Harriet Jones, AS, S2, 6.5 (TX), 2095; Frank Adams, AS, S2, 2.1 (TX), 2–10; Sean Kelley, Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society on the Texas Borderlands (Baton Rouge, LA, 2010), 99–102.
CHAPTER 9. BACKS: 1839–1850
1. Hannah Palfrey Ayer, A Legacy of New England: Letters of the Palfrey Family (Milton, MA, 1950), 1:145.
2. Frank Otto Gatell, John Gorham Palfrey and the New England Conscience (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 76–87; Frank Otto Gatell, “Doctor Palfrey Frees His Slaves,” New England Quarterly 34 (1961): 74–86.
3. Baltimore Patriot, November 8, 1824; Rev. Wm. Trotter, “Observations on State Debts,” North American Review 51 (1840): 316–337; J. G. Palfrey (JGP) to Wm. Palfrey, March 11, 1836, PALF.
4. Henry Palfrey to JGP, January 8, 1838, September 3, 1838, January 9, 1839, December 4, 1838, all in PALF; Gatell, “Doctor Palfrey,” 75–76.
5. Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton Versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843–1848 (Lexington, KY, 1967); Thomas O’Connor, Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1968).
6. Gatell, “Doctor Palfrey,” 80; Washington Daily Intelligencer, March 3, 1842; Melvin Urofsky and Paul Finkelman, March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States (New York, 2002), 1:352–353; Brauer, Cotton Versus Conscience; Gatell, John Gorham Palfrey, 111–114; H. W. Palfrey to JGP, March 12, 1844, PALF.
7. Preceding paragraphs: Ayer, Legacy, 1:145–146; Gathell, “Doctor Palfrey”; Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York, 2013); Cf. J. Brent Morris, “‘We Are Verily Guilty Concerning Our Brother’: The Abolitionist Transformation of Planter William Henry Brisbane,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 111 (2010): 118–150; Sydney J. Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
8. Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006); Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2009).
9. John G. Palfrey, Papers on the Slave Power: First Published in the Boston Whig in July, August, and September, 1846 (Boston, 1846), 31–35.
10. Thomas Weiss, “U.S. Labor Force Estimates and Economic Growth, 1800–1860,” in Robert Gallman and John J. Wallis, eds., American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War (Chicago, 1992).
11. MCLANE, 2:225.
12. Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA, 1987); MCLANE 2:342–343; Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (New York, 1971); C. Knick Harley, “Cotton Textile Prices and the Industrial Revolution,” Economic History Review 51 (1998): 49–83. In “The Relative Productivity Hypothesis of Industrialization: The American Case, 1820–1860,” NBER Working Paper no. 722, July 1981, National Bureau of Economic Research, www.nber.org/papers/w0722, Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff find that in industries dependent on southwestern cotton fields, female labor was highly profitable.
13. Mark Bils, “Tariff Protection and Production in the Early U.S. Cotton Textile Industry,” JER 44 (1984): 1033–1045; MCLANE, 1:1015; David R. Meyer, Roots of American Industrialization (Baltimore, 2003), 240.
14. Meyer, Roots of Industrialization, 3; MCLANE, 1:70; cf. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991); John L. Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (Cambridge, UK, 2010); Harry L. Watson, “‘The Common Rights of Mankind’: Subsistence, Shad, and Commerce in the Early Republican South,” JAH 83 (1996): 13–43.
15. Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin, “The Antebellum Tariff on Textiles Revisited,” JER 61 (2001): 777–798; Israel Andrews, Communication from the Secretary of the Treasury . . . Notices of the Internal Improvements in Each State, of the Gulf of Mexico and Straits of Florida, and a Paper on the Cotton Crop of the United States, US Congress, Senate, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., Doc. 112 (Serial 622–623), 818–821. By 1845, Massachusetts mills consumed 7 percent of the US crop.
16. 1847 Diary, vol. 2, William Minor Papers, LLMVC; Thos. Byrne to R. G. Hazard, July 8, 1839; Joel Small to J. P. Hazard, May 17, 1841; J. P. Hazard to Isaac Hazard, November 30, 1841, December 13, 1841, Hazard and Co., all LLMVC.
17. MCLANE, 1:950, 2:470–577.
18. Janet Siskind, Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795–1850 (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 92–117.
19. Araby Jnl., 88, Haller Nutt Papers, Duke; Henry Kauffman, American Axes: A Survey of Their Development and Makers (Brattleboro, VT, 1972), 33–34; Anderson Ralph to J. D. Hawkins, July 18, 1847, Hawkins Papers, SHC; Magnolia Jnl., 1851–1852, Fol. 444, RCB; Laurel Jnl., 1850–1851, Fol. 445, RCB; Plantation Jnl., 1849–1866, McCollam Papers, SHC.
20. Meyer, Roots of Industrialization, 268–270; MCLANE; Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Dec. 3, 1845, 29th Cong., 1st sess.
21. Meyer, Roots of Industrialization, 3; Robert Gallman, “Commodity Output, 1839–1899,” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Ce
ntury (New York, 1960), 24:43, Table A-1/A.
22. J. D. B. DeBow, Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States . . . (New Orleans, 1852), 3:277, 287; David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: High-Technology Industries in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 2006).
23. Palfrey, Papers on the Slave Power, 8–9; Nathan Appleton et al., Correspondence Between Nathan Appleton and John G. Palfrey (Boston, 1846); Leonard Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000).
24. Joshua Leavitt, The Financial Power of Slavery (New York, 1841).
25. Reinhard O. Johnson, The Liberty Party, 1840–1848: Antislavery Third-Party Politics in the United States (Baton Rouge, LA, 2009); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970); Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Ithaca, NY, 1955).
26. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 596.
27. National Era, February 4, 1847, June 24, 1847.
28. Robert Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York, 2009); Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
29. William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress (New York, 1996), 27–42 and passim; Richmond Enquirer, January 23, 1836. The first recorded use of this doctrine with slavery is by James Gholson, who argued to the 1832 Virginia constitutional convention that state legislative emancipation would violate the Fifth Amendment’s restriction of confiscation of private property without just compensation. See Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 4025–4026; Arthur Bestor, “State Sovereignty and Slavery: A Reinterpretation of Proslavery Constitutional Doctrine, 1846–1860,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 54 (1961): 117–180, esp. 172n113.
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