“Here you shall be paid,” Steed said, producing a hand-full of bills. “I find talking with you most refreshing. I can’t understand how you can preach the way you do.”
“I’m an old man in an old tradition.”
“You’re barely sixty!”
“I go back to a different century. And I dread the one that’s coming.”
His sermon on Devon Island was by far the best of his tour, but it differed from the others because Paul and Susan Steed consented to sit in the shade only if he promised not to refer to them in any way. He therefore had to renounce his heroics and attend to his logic, and he made a stirring case for slavery as an orderly method of fulfilling God’s intentions. At Steed’s request he also stressed the duties of the master to the servant, quoting biblical verses he usually overlooked, but his peroration had the same fire as before, and when he ended, his listeners were in tears and some were shouting, and as he left the podium many blacks clustered around to tell him that he certainly knew how to preach. But as he moved toward the wharf, where a boat waited to deliver him to Virginia, he was accosted by two white people whom he had not noticed during his sermon. Somehow they had slipped into the edges of the crowd.
“I’m Bartley Paxmore,” the man said, extending his hand. “This is my wife Rachel.”
“I’ve heard of you two,” Buford said guardedly.
“How could thee distort the word of God so callously?” Bartley asked.
“Good friends,” Buford said without losing his temper, “we all need time, you as well as I. Are you prepared to bring down the holocaust?”
“I would be ashamed to delay it on thy terms,” Rachel said.
“Then it will not be delayed,” Buford said. “You’ll see to that.” And he was so eager to escape the tangled passions of the Eastern Shore that, he actually ran to his boat and jumped in.
When Elizabeth Paxmore, in her sickbed, heard Bartley’s report of Reverend Buford’s Theft of Self, she asked for her Bible and spent a long time leafing through it, sidetracked constantly by coming upon some passage she had memorized in her youth.
At last she cried, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “I’ve found it!” And when her family gathered, even the grandchildren, who would remember this event well into the next century, she asked, “Why do they persist in censoring the one verse in the Bible that seems most relevant?” And she read from Deuteronomy 23:15:
“Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: ... thou shalt not oppress him.”
She said that she wished her family to continue abetting the runaways, even if it took them away from Peace Cliff during what all knew was her last illness. “I will be able to fend,” she assured them.
In 1859 two contradictory events provoked Paul Steed into sitting down and evaluating the economic base on which the Devon plantations rested. The first was the excitement aroused throughout America by the forceful book of a North Carolinian, Hinten Helper, who had the temerity to title it The Impending Crisis, as if slavery were in desperate trouble. In this uncompromising work Helper, a southerner with sound credentials, argued that the South must always suffer in competition with the North if it persisted in using slave rather than free labor. He marshaled statistics tending to prove that plantation owners would gain if they freed all their slaves, then hired the men back.
In Maryland the book caused a mighty stir, for these were the years men were choosing sides, and northern propagandists cited Helper to prove their claim that border states would be wise to stay with the Union. Legislation was passed making it a crime to circulate either Helper or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and when the freed black who lived next to Cudjo Cater was caught reading a copy of the latter, he was sentenced to ten years in jail.
Many southerners wrote to Steed, reminding him that since his Letters had made him a champion of the slaveowners, he was obligated to rebut Helper; the petitioners argued: “We know that Helper has used erroneous facts to bolster his fallacious conclusions, and it’s your job to set the record straight.”
He would have preferred to avoid the fight, but a second event intervened, and this forced him to do precisely what his correspondents wanted: undertake to weigh dispassionately the pros and cons of the slave system. What happened was: Southern agriculture had suffered badly in the prolonged depression of the 1840s, and many plantations had neared collapse; it was this period that provided Helper with his statistics, and they certainly did prove that slavery was a burden; but starting in 1851 a veritable boom had developed, and in years like 1854 and 1856, southern producers of tobacco, cotton, sugar, rice and indigo reaped fortunes.
Now the value of slaves increased; when Paul found it advisable to rent a few from neighbors, he discovered to his amazement that he must pay up to one dollar a day for their services, and provide food, clothing and medical supplies as well. During harvest the price jumped to a dollar-fifty, and he began to wonder whether returns from his crop warranted such outgo:
So I retired to my study and with all available figures before me tried soberly to calculate what the experience of the Steed plantations had been in bad years as well as good. I owned, at the beginning of 1857, a total of 914 slaves, distributed by age, sex and worth as follows:
THE STEED SLAVES
Classification
Male
Female
Number
Value
Number
Value
Total
Each
Each
Value
Infants, 0-5
44
0
47
0
0
Children, 6-13
135
300
138
250
75,000
Prime, 14-52
215
2,000
161
1,800
719,800
Older, 53-66
72
1,200
35
300
105,900
Ancients, 67-
16
0
21
0
0
482
432
900,700
Any slaveowner will quickly see that my figures are conservative, and I have kept them so on purpose. In this analysis I wish to offer the lowest possible value for my slaves and highest possible maintenance costs, for if under such circumstances they still produce a profit for the plantations, then slavery will have been demonstrated to be economically feasible. Therefore I should like to append a few notes to the above table:
Infants. Obviously they are of considerable value, and to quote them as zero is ridiculous, but infants die, they become crippled, they prove themselves useless in other ways, so it is prudent to carry them on the plantation books at no proven value.
Children. Healthy children are bringing much higher prices these past few years than shown, especially those in the later ages. Were I so inclined, I could sell the Steed children south at prices considerably in advance of these, but at Steed’s we do not sell off our children.
Prime. Figures at Patamoke sales have been consistently higher than these, as proved by the rental prices in the past few years. If an owner in Alabama can rent out a prime hand for up to $400 a year, and if the slave has forty good years, his actual value could be astronomical.
Older. These figures may be high. I could not sell our older slaves south for such prices, because they would not last long in the rice and sugar fields, but for what one might call domesticated service in a city like Baltimore, they could fetch even higher prices than I show.
Ancients. Every slaveowner will remember older Negroes who served handsomely into their eighties. Our plantation has a doorman who answers to the name of Tiberius who is one of the adornments of the island. Departing guests invariably praise him for his courtly style, and when visitors return t
o their homes their letters usually include some reference to Tiberius. If slaves have been well treated in their prime, they provide years of appreciated service in their seventies, but on the auction block they would bring nothing, so I list them at that.
Artisans. I do not include in my analysis any classification for the highly skilled mechanics who can contribute so much to the successful operation of a plantation. At Steeds we have perhaps two dozen men who would bring more than $3,500 each if offered for sale, and three or four who would fetch twice that. The plantation manager is slothful if he does not ensure the constant development of such hands within his slave force, for to purchase them on the open market is expensive when not impossible.
So the value of the Steed slaves is over nine hundred thousand dollars, using the most conservative figures, and something like one and a quarter million with top evaluations. But what does this figure really mean? Could I go out tomorrow and realize nine hundred thousand dollars from the sale of my slaves? Certainly not. To place so many on the auction block at Patamoke would destroy all values; what I really have in my slaves is not a million dollars, but the opportunity to earn from their labor a return of about thirteen percent per year.
Warfare uses a concept of value which covers this situation, the fleet in being. Such a fleet is not actually at sea, and it is not fully armed or manned, and no one knows its exact condition, but in all his planning the enemy must take it into account, because the ships do exist and they might at any time coalesce into a real fleet. As they stand scattered and wounded they are not a fleet, but they are a fleet in being. My 914 slaves are wealth in being, and it often occurs to me that they own me rather than that I own them, for as I have shown, I cannot sell them. Indeed, it is possible that the Steed family will never realize the nine hundred thousand dollars existing in these slaves; all we can do is work them well and earn a good yearly profit from that work. Thirteen percent of nine hundred thousand dollars is a yearly income of $117,000. Now I confess that rarely do we accomplish that goal, but we do well.
He then went on to cite his expenses—about $122 a year per slave, for he fed and clothed better than average—the loss through accidents and many other factors. In the end he proved that by the most careful husbandry, which included giving his slaves at least as much attention as he gave his hogs, it was possible to utilize them more profitably than hired labor. He refuted each of Hinton Helper’s main arguments, and added a clincher:
I would concede to Mr. Helper that if a plantation owner were going to be lazy, or indifferent, or cruel to his slaves, or inattentive to every small and irritating item of management, he might do better hiring his help rather than owning it. But the true southern gentleman accepts not only the possibility of making a just profit but also the obligation to create on his plantation a harmonious style of life, in which each man and woman has duties to perform and rewards to enjoy. He likes to have his slaves living near him, to observe their families growing and to share in their recreations. He takes pride in the fact that they take pride in whom they work for; often he hears his slaves boast to Negroes from other plantations, “This is the best place to work.” I direct my plantation to seek that approval, and I produce a good profit for everyone while doing so.
Without reservation, I would throw open the Steed plantations for comparison with the labor-mills at the north. My slaves live freely in the open air, eat good food, are warm in winter, and are cared for by my doctors. In every respect their lot is superior to that of the so-called free labor at the north, which rises before daylight, works in horrible conditions, and goes home after sunset to a foul bed. When unprejudiced men compare the two systems, they must conclude that ours is better.
By May of 1860 the United States was in such confusion that European nations began to speculate on when a war would start and which side they ought to back. Both London and Paris received ominous reports from their envoys, the French ambassador having written:
The presidential election this autumn cannot escape chaos. There may be as many as five contending parties, for the Democrats are in pitiful disarray and will not be able to agree on any one man. Expect them to present two candidates, one North, one South and to lose the election thereby. The Whigs have become the Constitutional Unionists and have no possibility of winning. But the Republicans are also split and may also have to offer two candidates, so that 1860 may well go down in history as the year in which nobody won.
Because of a constellation of contradictory reasons, most European nations sided with the South and actively hoped it would win. England perceived the northern states as being the real inheritors of the original colonies, and any animosities held over from 1776 and 1812 were vented on them. Also, British industrialists relied heavily on southern cotton, and goaded their government into openly supporting these states. Austria backed the South because it was viewed as being the home of gentlemen and fine horses. And France was strongly pro-southern because this region was civilized, whereas the North was not. Russia and Germany vaguely wanted to teach the upstart nation a lesson.
When Europe decided that war was inevitable, it became necessary to form some estimate of the South’s chances of winning, and in late May the French government dispatched one of its lesser naval vessels on a casual tour of seven southern ports, chosen rather skillfully to reveal a wide scattering of opinion. Remembering the amiable relations France had once enjoyed with the Steed family, whose sons had attended St. Omer’s, officers directed the little ship to end its voyage at the port of Patamoke, where the local gentry were to be entertained and queried.
The ship was the Ariel, captured from the slaving fleet in 1832 and refashioned into a corvette of eight guns. She was an old ship now, but her timbers were so solid and her keel so unblemished that ambitious men liked to serve aboard her, and her captains, usually younger men, often found quick promotion. Her present commander, Captain de Villiers, did not know the Chesapeake, but his great-uncle had served under De Grasse; the name kept recurring in family records.
His arrival at Patamoke was not announced. Paul Steed was pushing his wife’s chair on a promenade through the north garden when the Ariel passed up Devon channel, and although both the Steeds had once been involved with this ship, they did not recognize her as she passed. The French Ministry of Marine had raised her bulwarks to accommodate the guns and had replaced the old hermaphrodite rigging with full brig dress.
But when the vessel approached Peace Cliff, old George Paxmore, who had built her, studied her with his glass, as he did all ships of size coming upriver, and cried to his son, “Bartley, I do believe it’s the Ariel. Look what they’ve done to her!” Bartley joined his father on the porch as the elegant ship sailed past; he had not been born when she was launched in 1814, but family conversation had acquainted him with her history, and he could now appreciate the compact design and the flow of wood and sail which had made the ship memorable.
It was not until the Ariel had berthed that she created her real impact, for her name proclaimed her saga, and citizens from all parts of town streamed down to see this legendary vessel. A score of Turlocks came; their family had once owned the Ariel. And young men whose fathers had worked upon her came down to study her lines. As they watched, a very old man, crotchety and pushing people aside, moved to the edge of the wharf.
It was Lafe Turlock, seventy-seven years old and long retired from chasing runaways. He had sold his dogs and given his tracking boots to his grandson, but when he saw the Ariel his eyes beamed. “She was my cousin’s ship. Finest sea captain this river ever produced. Killed by niggers I won’t name.”
Through the long afternoon and into the evening the townspeople gaped at the beautiful little ship, recalling her escapades. They watched admiringly as young Captain de Villiers came ashore to pay his respects and dispatch a boat to convey his greetings to the Steeds. He sought the Paxmores, too, but the young men who ran the boatyard warned him, “Steeds and Paxmores do not meet at social affairs,” and si
nce this was precisely the kind of subtlety that Captain de Villiers wanted to investigate, he said graciously, “Oh, I intended inviting your distinguished uncle to the ship, not to Devon.”
“He would be delighted to come,” the young man said.
“And you. And your wives.”
So it was agreed. On the first evening the ship’s officers would be taken to Devon for a gala party with the leading planters. On the second evening the Paxmores and their friends would be entertained aboard the ship that old George had built. And on the final evening the Steeds and a few choice friends of similar persuasion would attend a farewell party aboard ship. By that time Captain de Villiers would have a sense of loyalties along the Choptank.
During each afternoon the ship was opened to the general public, and a host of Turlocks trooped over the deck that their cousin Matt had once ruled. They relived his exploits and listened, jaws agape, as Lafe pointed out where the gallant redhead had fallen—“The niggers was so dumb they didn’t even cut off his silver fist.”
There was one family that did not board the ship. Cudjo Cater and his children stayed onshore, for as Eden explained, “They sure ain’t gonna want to see us on that ship.” Cudjo took his sons to a point along the shore from which they could see the spars, and as they stood there he told them of his adventures.
“You was tied down?” they asked.
“Chained an’ bolted,” Cudjo said.
“You mean the roof only this high?”
“Lower. Put your hand lower.”
“Nobody cain’t live that low.”
“We did,” Cudjo said.
“An’ then you come up stairs.”
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