The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (73 page)

IN 1852, A YEAR
after Rice Ballard’s business partner
Samuel Boyd helped to buy arms for Narciso Lopez’s invasion of Spanish territory, other things that Boyd had been doing caught up to him. Boyd, a Natchez lawyer and judge, and former slave trader Ballard had been buying distressed properties through the trough of the 1840s. As the new decade opened, they began to buy dozens of new “hands” through a New Orleans slave-consignment agent named C. M. Rutherford.
Pre-1850s financial innovations had worked in tandem with new slave trades, from coffle-chain and Georgia-men to
the supertraders and the securitization of hands. Now the factors’ capillary credit created demand, to which the domestic slave trade responded with a new business model. Unlike 1830s’ supertraders who owned enslaved hands from one end of the pipeline to the other, new players, such
as Richmond’s Richard Dickinson, behaved more like consignment agents or commodities traders. Using the tools of faster communication—instant telegraph, or mail carried by rail—to gauge demand and supply, they held slaves in their jails for owners who wanted to sell, graded captives, provided clothes and insurance, found remote buyers, and put captives like Ben Slaughter on trains headed southwest.
Sellers often waited until final sale to get their money, but they benefited from more predictable prices. Dickinson sent employees around the selling states to gather market data—“No. 1 women $1300 to 1350 and girls size of Margaret and Edmony $1025 to 1100. . . . [S]ome think No. 1 men will go as high as $1600 to 1700.” He repackaged this data into regular price circulars, which he mailed to
potential sellers and brokers across Virginia. The new pattern of trade reduced opportunities for arbitrage but didn’t require a single middle party to bear all the risk. Capital requirements for entry declined, and there was demand to fill. The price of an adult man in New Orleans climbed from $697 in 1850 to $1,451 in 1860. The reorganized slave trade moved about 70 percent of the decade’s 250,000
forced migrants.
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Rising prices, returning credit, and the efficiencies of the newest iteration of the domestic slave trade enabled wealthy cotton enslavers to expand their operations dramatically. US cotton production reached 4 million bales by 1859, an incredible testimony to the seemingly unlimited capacity of both the southern economy to increase its production, and the world economy to
absorb it. Boyd and Ballard, who owned almost a dozen labor camps, did their share. On one of them near Natchez, Ballard owned a woman named Virginia. She wasn’t a girl, for she had a teenage daughter, and she began to call herself Boyd because Samuel carried on a relationship with her. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why she carried on with “the Old Man,” as she later called him. In
the early 1850s, Boyd and Ballard were sending enslaved people to carve new labor camps out of the land they now owned on the heavily forested western shore of the Mississippi River: Elcho, Brushy Bayou, Pecan Grove, and Outpost in northeastern Louisiana, and Wagram in Arkansas. In 1852, the partners sold 2,000 bales to their factors. By 1855, a memo showing returns from only six of the partners’
ten camps recorded 3,319 bales made—1.34 million pounds of clean ginned cotton.
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The partners were not alone. In contrast to the 1810s or 1830s, in the 1850s the borders of slavery’s empire were not expanding, even though southern
whites hoped for Cuba. In the Mississippi Valley, much of the expansion of cotton production was driven by high capitalization to fill in the vast stretches of untapped
rich soil.

On this set of internal frontiers, some of the entrepreneurs who had survived the last crash in good shape achieved a kind of superplanter status. Ballard wasn’t the only one who realized old slave-trading profits in the form of massive new projects. For instance, take Tennessee lawyer Joseph Acklen, who married the widow of Ballard’s former business partner Isaac Franklin in 1849.
Franklin had built up “Angola” and several other labor camps in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. By 1860, Acklen had added one hundred newly purchased people to the labor force acquired by marriage, and his Angola complex made over 3,100 bales a year. Across the river, where armies of enslaved people were being deployed to turn Carroll, Concordia, and Tensas Parishes into a new lobe of the world
economy’s cotton-breathing lung, four camps owned by the Routh family generated 5,000 bales a year by 1859. Back on the Mississippi side, another new frontier opened in the vast stretch from Vicksburg north to Memphis, which had been mostly unexploited before the late 1840s. Issaquena County, for instance, did not exist before 1849. By 1860 its median slaveholding had reached an astonishing 118.
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Issaquena County is today one of the poorest counties in the United States, but in those days that whole region was being turned with industrial rapidity into a wealth-generating landscape of endless cotton fields. The Chickasaws had been driven out during the 1830s, leaving a citadel of 7,000 wild square miles, “a chaos of vines and cane and brush” untouched by axe or plow and patrolled by wildlife
that included bears, wolves, cougars, and even a few jaguars. But the roots of trees (their trunks up to six feet in diameter) twined through some of the richest dirt for cotton on the surface of the planet—“pure soil endlessly deep, dark, and sweet,” as the journalist David Cohn put it a century later. Unlike all preceding North American slavery frontiers, most of the delta’s entrepreneurs
came from a small group of the most heavily capitalized men in the country. Few settled in the region. Instead they operated massively productive slave labor camps as if by remote control. You can see that in the new delta’s demographics. From 1850 to 1860, the enslaved population in its six core counties almost doubled, from 17,000 to 30,000. The white population, which had not yet reached 7,000,
stood at roughly 20 percent of the slave population—a fact revelatory of a commitment to large-scale specialized cotton production as complete as the Saint-Domingue enslavers’ commitment to sugar.
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As the number of enslaved people on this internal frontier grew, so, too, did the demands on them. In 1849, the Issaquena slaveholdings of Robert Turnbull, a Westchester, New York, resident, amounted
to 200 slaves who made 300 bales of cotton. By 1859, Turnbull’s estate in Issaquena exploited 400 captives who made 2,000 bales of cotton—an increase from 1.5 to 5 bales per enslaved person, which is evidence of how hard they were driven in the new fields. George Young was born on a similar labor camp in that same decade. If he’d had a birth certificate, it would have given a date within a year
or two on either side of the Ostend Manifesto. But Young’s elders always told him he was born in “The Lawler Year,” because enslaved people sometimes remembered years by the names of the annually changing overseers, and Lawler was memorably violent. Indeed, across the South, the 1850s were a Lawler Decade. As slavery’s center of gravity lurched south and west, the number of enslaved African Americans
who lived in cotton districts grew from 1.6 million to 2.2 million. The re-acceleration of forced migration, the shift of the population into disease-friendly ecologies, and the increasing pace of labor brought hunger, alienation, and death. Life expectancy for African Americans, which had climbed in the less market-frenzied 1840s, now dropped again, as it had in the 1810s and 1830s.
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Virginia
Boyd was able to avoid the most Lawler-like places as long as Samuel Boyd wanted to keep her handy. They were certainly together in the summer of 1852 outside of Natchez. Just a few months later, she knew she was definitely pregnant. But then someone else—maybe Samuel’s wife in Natchez—found out what they had been doing. Ballard also found out. That old and “smooth hand at Cuff” went into action.
He wrote a letter ordering Virginia’s overseer to send her up to Karnac, a labor camp he and Boyd owned near Port Gibson on the Mississippi River. And, Ballard warned Boyd, Virginia had to be sent farther still. Samuel didn’t put up an argument, even replying that he didn’t want “to be bothered with her, & if she will not behave, put her in the stocks until you start her off.”
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Somehow, however,
the information in one of Ballard’s letters had gone astray, because Virginia, who was literate, had clearly learned many details about his plans. Then, she tried to send a note to Boyd.

In response Ballard’s letters began to fly around her, weaving a web that wrapped her tight. His agents moved her, first up the river to Karnac, leaving her daughter near Natchez; then down to New Orleans in
February, where Ballard’s agent, C. M. Rutherford, was waiting for her. She’d be sent too far away to ever trouble Boyd again—to Mobile, or to the slave market in
Houston. Virginia told Rutherford that the child was due soon, trying to delay the inevitable sending-away, and she snuck out of his store whenever she could to try to find her own buyer in New Orleans. Samuel Boyd, meanwhile, may have
had second thoughts, for (as Ballard discovered) he traveled down to New Orleans. But by April, Virginia was consigned on board a Texas-bound ship, guarded by a white man, like a fugitive being escorted by a marshal.

Texas was not a good option for Virginia Boyd, but it was a good one for bootstrapping white men on the make. In the 1850s, they moved 100,000 enslaved people into eastern Texas,
a region as big as Mississippi or Alabama. Many of these migrant white entrepreneurs were small slave owners, such as S. G. Ward. In 1850, Ward left Warren County, North Carolina, and, as he explained in a letter, “carried all my negroes, save 3 or 4 and as many children, to Texas,” to rent them to his brother, “because they were making nothing clear here.” The immediate application of crowd-tested
techniques of production gave life on the East Texas frontier to the familiar tang of a society composed of undercapitalized men committed to creative destruction: “Cotton is the leading idea here and men neglect everything else,” wrote one migrant. They “lay out all their money on negroes and land. You frequently see men worth $100,000 who seem no better off than our own mountain people.”
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Virginia was to be sold to one of those men. She had lost everything except her unborn child and her literacy. Somehow she obtained pen and paper, convinced someone to mail a letter, and on May 6, 1853, wrote a remarkable message to Ballard from “the city of Houston at a Negro traders yard.” She confronted Ballard with what the relationship between her and her child’s father should mean: “Do you think
that after all that has transpired between me and the old man (I don’t call names) that it is treating me well to send me off among strangers to be sold . . . for the father of my children to sell his own offspring, yes his own flesh and blood.” “Is it possible,” she asked, testing every rhetorical switch she knew in an attempt to flip Ballard’s choice, “that any free born American would hand
his character with such stigma as that?” What would slavery’s critics say, and couldn’t he sympathize with her as a caring father? “You have a family of children & no how to empathize with others in distress.” She begged to be reunited with her daughter, for her children to be set free, that she might be permitted to raise the money to buy her own freedom. “If I am a servant”—and slavery’s defenders
were industriously cranking out articles insisting that the South was built upon a paternalistic relationship between kindly masters and loyal “servants,” not
slaves—then “there is something due me better than my present situation.” And don’t worry, she closed, with both promise and threat, she knew how to send letters back to Adams County, but “I shall not seek ever to let anything be exposed,
unless I am forced by bad treatment.”

In August, C. M. Rutherford wrote to Ballard, who was in Louisville, Kentucky, far from the malarial floodplain where the nearly 1,000 people whom he and Boyd owned toiled at another year’s cotton-picking. “I recd a letter” from Houston today, Rutherford told him, “informing me of the sale of Virginia & her child.” This was the newborn child. The teenage
daughter, purposely not sent to Texas with her mother, was to be sold in Mississippi for at least $1,000. Boyd had created a problem. Ballard had solved it. In fact, he gave all the white men involved some money—Rutherford, for instance, got a $200 commission. And if Virginia Boyd sent any more letters, they did not survive. She does not appear in the 1870 US Census, the first one to record the individual
names of most African Americans. Although she may have changed her name, it is also possible that once “the author of my suffering,” her child’s father, had “thrown [her] upon the charity of strangers,” mere charity had been insufficient.

MOST LIKELY, VIRGINIA WILTED
and died in a Texas field. Whether in East Texas or among the Mississippi Delta’s felled forests, people brought to the newest
cotton frontiers were expected to yield massive profits. Sarah Benjamin recalled the games she and all the other children had played in the gin yard during the 1850s: “Some of us were slave owners and some of us were speculators.” All the grownups, meanwhile, were in the field, and the pace was quick as the prices were high, under August’s brutal sun. At night, the parents of another child, Sarah
Wells, reported that the overseer had told them that if they “didn’t pick 250 pounds of cotton in a day,” he would whip them, and then they fell dead asleep. The children had seen more of how this was accomplished than the grownups ever wanted to believe. Many of those whom we would call children were dragging picksacks in the fields, anyway: Sarah Ashley, born in Mississippi in 1844, was in the Texas
fields by the age of twelve and had to make her 300 pounds—and get it to the cotton house, too. All in all, the number of pounds of cotton produced per slave in the cotton region increased by 30 percent between 1850 and 1860.
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