The Invisible Line (6 page)

 

 

 

 

 

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HEN A RIVER FORMS the boundary between two properties, the law draws an invisible line down the middle of the waterway. This line, the river's “thread,” is the true property limit, and it has the same legal effect as a fence. Unlike a fenced boundary, however, river channels continually evolve and change course as they cut their way through soil and rock. Most of the time the changes are barely perceptible. Small amounts of soil wash into the river and settle on banks downstream. As this gradual accretion occurs, the law redraws the river's thread along the channel's new center. Few people ever have occasion to notice or care that the property line—a set of property rights—has shifted. There may be winners and losers, but the law recognizes the new realities.
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Occasionally, though, a river undergoes what is known as an “avulsion.” It rapidly alters course, cuts an entirely new channel, and abandons the old one. The event can alter hundreds of acres of land in the course of mere hours or days. The effect can be profound; in 1775 Thomas Jefferson described America's impending break from England as an “everlasting avulsion.” When such a sudden break occurs, however, the law refuses to disrupt settled expectations. The original boundary line remains in effect despite the river's new course. The resulting border may be awkward, even irrational—someone could wind up with a narrow spit of land on the far side of a river—but the law pretends that nothing has changed.
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In North Carolina, just above its southern border, the Great Pee Dee River separates Richmond County from Anson County. The river is wide, nearly four hundred yards across, flowing through prime cotton growing land where the sand hills and pine barrens of eastern Carolina yield to red clay. For many decades along one stretch, it was not necessary to determine whether and to what extent the river had changed course. Stephen Wall owned both sides.
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To all outward appearances, Wall was a typical gentleman farmer. He was building on traditions set by his father, who had settled in Richmond County before the Revolution, gained a fortune in land and slaves, and served the community as justice of the peace and sheriff, and in other offices held by the best men. Born in 1791, three years before Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin, Stephen Wall came of age as the South embraced large-scale cotton cultivation and built the plantations that came to define the region. Wall became one of the richest growers in the North Carolina interior, with dozens of slaves working fields that stretched for miles. At age thirty, he won an officer's commission in the state cavalry; he would be known as Colonel Wall for the rest of his life. By thirty-five, he had represented Richmond County in the North Carolina Senate for two terms. In his forties, when the county's businessmen periodically attempted to raise money for a railroad and other internal improvements, Wall lent his name to their efforts. When they organized the local Whig Party, Wall helped craft the chorus of indignation at the corruption and tyranny that Jacksonian Democracy represented.
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Wall's friends saw a man who embodied the Southern virtues of leadership and mastery. His piercing pale stare projected what they took to be “remarkable energy of character” and “indomitable perseverance.” Robust mutton chops supported his “commanding and prepossessing” high cheekbones and bracketed a “strong and discriminating” frown. His hastily tied cravat and the ridge of tangled curls down the middle of his head revealed a man who was too important to bother with his appearance—or perhaps a man without a wife. He drew praise for his generosity and hospitality; “to the distressed always a friend,” an admirer wrote, “to the poor ever kind and attentive.” To the men, women, and children that he owned, friends supposed, Wall was a “provident and humane master.”
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Wall's one physical weakness was apparent only to those who watched him closely: he was blind in his right eye, the pupil scarred into a feline crescent. There were some things that he could not see. What he did see he perceived differently from everyone else. His impairment was a mark of the past, perhaps a memento of misfortune or adventure or stoic resolve. It also suggested a tendency to waver from the path in life that had been made for him. According to family rumors passed down for generations, a neighbor had gouged out Wall's eye in a fight—an odd turn for a man reputed to have “a hold upon [his neighbors'] affections that any might envy.” The reason for the fight had to do with his slaves.
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Although Wall never married, he had many children. Their mothers, at least three of the women who lived on his farm, were lines in Wall's household ledger: Priscilla, Rody, and Jane. Their children bore the irony of great names. The oldest boy was called Napoleon. His half brother was Benjamin Franklin. There was a biblical matriarch, Sarah. Another girl, Caroline Matilda, was named for King George III's sister, a queen of Denmark who scandalized her court when she rode a horse dressed as a man.
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Wall's second son shared his father's chin and brow, eyes and cheeks. His mother's influence colored his skin. He had the strangest name of all: Orindatus. Over the course of his life, people were constantly getting it wrong. It was a slave's name through and through. When he was born in 1825, planters like his father had long given their slaves classical names: Caesar. Pompey. Cicero. Datus, which Stephen Wall called his son, was Latin for “given.” While “Orin” is Celtic rather than Latin, it made the boy's name even more ornate and fanciful. Yet as much as “Orindatus” signaled slavery, the boy's middle names suggested the opposite: “Simon Bolivar,” the great liberator of Latin America who had decreed freedom for slaves and led a movement he described as “closer to a blend of Africa and America than an emanation from Europe.” The boy was Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall.
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Perhaps Stephen Wall named his children as a private joke, the ultimate affirmation of his mastery: he owned royalty, and he owned those who would overthrow it. A generation or two earlier such names might have signaled hope for the future. In the Revolution's wake, Northern states had outlawed slavery. Leading Virginians pondered whether to abolish the institution, and their legislature, as in many Southern states, devised procedures in 1782 that allowed owners to free their slaves. Some owners were inspired by the ideals of the new republic to enter deeds of manumission at local courthouses, while others found emancipation to be a rational choice in an era of economic turmoil and exhausted agriculture—it was cheaper to free slaves than to feed them. The wave of emancipations that followed the Revolution exponentially increased the number of free people of color, creating communities that had the potential to embody the promise of a society founded on liberty. In 1808 Congress banned the international slave trade. After the Revolutionary avulsion, freedom was slowly accreting.
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By the time Stephen Wall named his children, however, the promise of liberty was waning. Cotton and sugarcane had become white gold, and the rush to turn swamps and forests into plantations in Alabama, Louisiana, southwestern Georgia, and Mississippi created insatiable new markets for forced labor. Far more slaves were marched inland in the early decades of the nineteenth century than had survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the American South. This second mass migration changed the way slaves and their owners lived, and it altered the place of slavery in Southern life. Wealth in slaves became nearly as valuable as wealth in land. Whether people owned one or ten or, like Wall, more than one hundred slaves, the South's economy depended on the continued strength of the institution of slavery.
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Driven by fears of revolt—stoked by events from the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s to Nat Turner's gory uprising in Virginia in 1831—powerful Southerners reasserted their support for slavery by means of organized violence and repressive laws. But the prospect that slavery would gradually erode was arguably more real than that of its sudden demise. The immediate presence of freedpeople showed slaves the possibility of a different life, making it harder for masters to dominate them and easier for them to find help in running away. Outside the South, organized groups devoted to slavery's abolition were helping slaves escape to the North and threatening to shift public opinion. In the 1830s the American Anti-Slavery Society sent more than 400,000 petitions to Congress urging it to restrict slavery and mailed thousands of tracts directly to the South, demanding immediate emancipation. To preserve the status quo, support for slavery hardened. Southern postmasters refused to deliver abolitionist tracts, in violation of federal law. State legislators contemplated re-enslaving free people of color, ordered their expulsion, and passed measures that limited their ability to make money, own land, and form communities.
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Moreover, slavery's defenders began articulating a series of arguments to justify the institution's continued existence. Some of the defenses were economic, others biblical. Writers from Virginia to Mississippi asserted that slavery was morally superior to the suffering of poor people in the North. Constant was the notion that slaves were unfit for freedom, that blacks were different from whites, an inferior species even. The “amalgamation” of these separate and distinct races would destroy a nation and a civilization: according to reputable men of science, children who blended black with white were sterile, insane, tubercular, enfeebled monstrosities. Slavery would preserve the purity of the white race, while freedom was the road to mixing, madness, and decline.
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Wall was a representative man in a community dependent upon and devoted to slavery. At the same time he never married, never formed blood alliances with other powerful families, and never produced legitimate children to continue his legacy into the future. His only natural heirs were slaves. The irony of their names attained a double edge. Perhaps he wanted greater things for them. Perhaps the river would change its course.

 

 

A MAN IN HIS PRIME was worth $900. Men older than twenty-five and fertile women could sell for $650. A forty-year-old woman: $400. Small children were worth half that, although by the time a boy reached his teens, he could command a price of $750.
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A master would know his slaves well. They cared for him, grew up with him, built his home, plowed and picked his crops, and cooked his food. They were his closest neighbors. Some slept in his house, some in his bed. Many owners worked side by side with slaves in the field; a plantation's success depended on them. But masters were also capable of seeing the same slaves in an entirely different light: as malingerers and layabouts who needed constant discipline lest they become runaways and rebels. They were beasts to be tamed and driven. Boys and girls, men and women, were slapped and whipped, kicked and bloodied, raped and terrorized. Above all, masters could see their property as a set of numbers—low at birth, when surviving the harsh life was unclear, then rising steadily with their strength and fertility, only to decline with age back to a baby's value. Slaves were befriended and beaten and bought and sold.

If slaves experienced the doubleness of being people and property, their masters also had to accommodate themselves to lives of contradiction. Enlightenment and benevolence, the qualities that many Southerners presumed made a person fit to own others, did not coexist easily with everyday violence and sexual assault. Slaveowners and their families had to pretend that men, women, and children whom they saw every day were not related to them. And the robust market for slaves—regular auctions, repeated inquiries by traders, gangs of people in chains marching south—was ever present, reminding masters and slaves alike that lives could change with the shake of a hand.
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Year after year Stephen Wall hired out upward of ten slaves when they were not needed on the plantation, supplying them to neighbors and relatives for fifty or one hundred dollars per laborer. While some of the slaves did housework, many people hired slaves to do tasks that they did not want their own servants doing: too dangerous, difficult, or demoralizing. Wall listed his slaves and their renters by name, along with the agreed-upon price. Each year Wall would write in his ledger, “Priscilla & children not hired,” or “Priscilla and her children I was compelled to keep as I could not get Hire for them.” Such words indicated their special place in his household but also suggested that the next year could be different.
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In January 1836 Wall sold twelve people to a Mr. Gunter of Alabama. Perhaps the sale reflected financial distress or worry on Wall's part. As President Jackson was battling banks and soft currency speculators, inflation was spiraling; the following year would see a raft of bank failures and the start of a major economic depression. Maybe Wall needed cash for a large expense. The sale netted him more than six thousand dollars. The strongest worker was a man named Minus, nineteen or twenty years old, followed by a fourteen-year-old named Jim Crow. Bucking the conventional wisdom, Gunter bought older men and women as well as young children. He also kept at least parts of some families intact. Perhaps he had particular tasks for them in mind. An older man might look after the pigs; older women might cook. Maybe he was looking to spend less money and, after examining—inspecting, touching—the slaves' bodies, concluded that he was getting good value. Henry, a thirty-year-old man, was sold with his boys, ages six and three. Milly, also in her thirties, left with her four-year-old son. But Betsy and Comfort, two and five, had no parents to accompany them on the long journey south.
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