TONGUES 15 страница

On March 12, John also had a guest: “An old man on foot”—a white man—“called this morning and got breakfast,” John wrote. The man “had laid out all night in the rain—says he is a millwright and was born in Augusta,” in the Shenandoah Valley into which southwest-bound coffles descended after crossing the Rockfish Gap through the Blue Ridge. He knew “the Springers and the Landrums,” old Augusta families from John’s childhood. But from there the barriers of fortune and class lowered on the conversation. The sun rose higher. The poor man stood up and said his goodbye. He walked silently down the road, in his own way representing another life ground under by the rolling frontier of the modern slave economy.

Image 8.4. After the wreck of so many entrepreneurial plans in the wake of the bursting of the slave credit bubble, enslavers increasingly portrayed their own operations as being driven by paternalist, familial impulses—rather than pecuniary ones. And, as the title of this illustration suggests, enslavers rejected abolitionists’ claims that their society was somehow an un-American tumor that should be excised from the national body. Edward William Clay, “America, 1841.” Library of Congress.

John knew that he, too, would die a thousand miles from home. He had more to hope for than an old age of sleeping rough and begging for manuallabor jobs. But the conversation with the wanderer led him to assess his life. John had lost four of his six children, and he was a widower twice over. Yet he admitted that he was much better off than, for instance, Job. Each of his own wives had been “worth a cowpen full such as” the complaining spouse who had burdened the Old Testament figure. And perhaps Julien’s second bride would be better than the first. John hadn’t heard from Julien in months, but he was on his way. After the worst of the legal storm blew over, the younger Devereux had returned to Alabama to pick up several dozen slaves who had been stashed on an ally’s place since 1841. Now, on March 20, “about 12 o’clock,” a white employee arrived with “three wagons and the negroes from Montgomery,” and John relished both their “excitement at meeting with the Negroes here and Julien’s letter giving information that he had sold out and all was coming.” Even better, the letter told “of the birth of a son.” The news “operated powerfully on my sympathies,” John wrote. Tears choked the old man. Julien, remarried, now had an heir of his blood, and thus John did as well. A new generation of enslavers was emerging.

Just a few days more, and Julien arrived. Overseer, three other employees, Julien, and John: six white men were now at the new house, where only a few months ago there had been none but the old man. All day and into the evening, the slaves worked the raw East Texas soil around the new cotton shoots. The United States had stretched its borders to incorporate these acres, these white men, and their property. Slave prices were climbing. With the promise that the US government would fund Texas bonds, surely credit would pump again through the veins that oxygenated the endeavors of southwestern entrepreneurs. Further southwest, cannon boomed and men marched, pushing the border onward. Here, a woman set supper out. All six men sat down to eat, “which,” John noted, “filled all our chairs and table.” The world had come right side up again.

BACKS

1839-1850

THE GIRL GIGGLED IN her pew, looking back at seventeen newly emancipated Louisianans, frozen in the church entrance. Mid-step between the doorway and a sea of staring faces stood Anna and her four children; Sarah and Frankey, both eleven, no parents; Betsy and her son; Maria, Margery, and their daughters; Little Sam; Jose; Rose; nine-year-old Amos. The big red turbans the women wore had been stylish decades ago in New Orleans, when they’d been sold. Now they screamed country and slave to the Boston streets.¹

A hand tightened on the knowing girl’s arm, jerked down, pulled her around to face the pulpit. She needed to remember. Here at Unitarian King’s Chapel, on Beacon Street, she was also a visitor— black Bostonians usually spent their Sundays elsewhere, such as the new A.M.E. church. The day’s assigned lesson was solidarity. Like many of the other visitors in the pews, her mother was what we’d today call an activist. She might have been at 1843’s huge Faneuil Hall protest meeting, two years earlier. Slave-catchers had come up to Boston in disguise. They had found George Latimer, an escapee from Virginia slavery. He and his wife, Rebecca, were living like free people. The kidnappers had seized the Latimers and thrown them into the Boston jail. But word had gotten out, and soon three hundred free black men were surrounding the Boston courthouse. Their aim was to keep George and Rebecca there until the meeting at Faneuil could raise $600. Eventually, George’s Virginia owner decided that taking the money and making out George’s manumission papers might be his best option.

Like these seventeen, many of the other African Americans in the church had also been adjusting to Boston. Some were runaways. Others had been forced to leave the South by laws that were designed to make life unbearable for free people of color. They were all in their way forced migrants, driven by slavery’s expansion, driven to a place that they had built. If these newest Bostonians looked up in wonder at King’s Chapel’s austerely magnificent vaults, which soared like white wedding cake from pillars to roof, and if they felt intimidated by the rich variety of clothes on the congregants— clothes unavailable on the backwaters of the Attakapas—the migrants had nevertheless spent their lives constructing exactly this world.

They had certainly built the Palfrey family. John Palfrey the elder had owned them. He was the Massachusetts merchant whose slaves had joined the 1811 rebellion when he lived in St. John the Baptist Parish along the Mississippi River. Palfrey had moved to St. Martin Parish, pursued by debts. The sheriff repossessed some of his slaves. He sold his silver candlesticks and hand-tooled pistols. But after 1815, he could borrow again, so he bought more enslaved people.

The separations that the seventeen, or their parents, had endured as they had traveled from the Chesapeake Bay area to Maspero’s place in New Orleans, and then the work they had endured in the crop fields of the Attakapas, had rebuilt John Palfrey’s twice-destroyed financial self. His own family was also divided, though not exactly like the families of the people he bought. His oldest son, John Gorham Palfrey, lived in Louisiana briefly with his father, but then returned to Massachusetts. Talents and birth destined John the son to be a Harvard prodigy. At nineteen, he was ordained a Unitarian minister. Then, in 1830, he became a Harvard professor. Later in the decade he took over the North American Review. Economic growth was producing a well-educated bourgeois that wanted to participate in a national high culture distinct from that of old Europe. Under Palfrey, the Review published the authors of America’s emerging literature, from James Fenimore Cooper to William Cullen Bryant.²

Young John’s four brothers stayed in Louisiana. Henry became a cotton broker; William, a Bayou Teche planter. In 1816, however, Edward died of yellow fever in the New Orleans counting-house where he worked. George caught a pistol ball in an 1824 duel. Death by hot-blooded dueling did not happen in the orderly, morally improving Boston of the North American Review. But the brothers stayed in contact. John G. Palfrey visited at the height of the 1830s boom, traveling on the steamboat Southerner. The letters he sent to Louisiana afterward asked ironically after enslaved people in the terms of racist parody: How are “my sooty friends?” When William contemplated visiting Boston, John the younger warned him to bring his own slave: “The black servants you can hire here are good for nothing.” The Palfreys agreed on national politics. All were sensible Whigs, supporters of the party’s project of national social and moral uplift. Henry sold copies of John’s Review to his planter clients, who perhaps squirmed to read an English author’s claim that “the continuance of slavery” in the United States was a disaster. But the author’s claim that American problems were caused by too much democracy surely found secret assent.³

Of course, the Review didn’t pay the bills any better than serious magazines ever have. When the Panic of 1837 hit, subscriptions dropped and bills multiplied. Henry helped the Review stay afloat, sending young John $1,000 from Louisiana and convincing their father to lend $5,000 to the magazine. Slavery financed John Palfrey’s Massachusetts literary project. However, the question of whether slavery should grow or shrink was about to strain the brothers’ bonds. As John the elder aged, the Louisiana Palfreys took care to advise their brother that he would, by the terms of their state’s Napoleonic civil code, inherit one-third of his father’s property. Most of the value of that property was in slaves. The best way to turn this share into money usable in Massachusetts would be to sell the people he inherited. But “you might incur the risk,” wrote William, “of some busy abolitionist... report[ing] that the Revd. Dr. P. had been selling human flesh etc etc or living on the income of slave labor.”⁴

Ties of blood linked John G. Palfrey to the southern slave-owning elite, and so did ties of economic growth. Northern growth in general and the fortunes of its middle and upper classes in particular were built on the forced labor of people like those whom John would inherit from his father. But moderate northern Whigs had grown increasingly disturbed by southern politicians’ domineering aggression. By late 1843, Louisiana Whigs were salivating over impending Texas annexation, but the constituents of the Massachusetts Whigs were holding a rash of angry meetings. They were spewing anger at New England “Cotton Whigs” whose close ties to the state’s textile manufacturing interests supposedly predisposed them to cave in to enslavers’ endless demands.⁵

In the autumn of 1843, one of the season’s first cotton ships arriving in Boston also brought news from New Orleans. Old John Palfrey had died. John Gorham Palfrey now owned twenty human beings, a mixed crew ranging in age from Margery’s unnamed infant child to Old Sam, sixty-five. At the current price level in New Orleans slave markets, their value approached $7,000—but John the younger had decided that he didn’t want any more money from slavery. This new conviction tells us something about his conscience. But it also tells a story about the outcomes of cotton-driven change in the United States over the first half of the nineteenth century, one in which northern and southern brothers began to argue uncontrollably in the 1840s precisely because they had helped each other to thrive for the preceding half-century.

From the 1790s, the continually increasing productivity of enslaved hands had generated the most important raw material in the world economy at a constantly declining real price. This had made southern enslavers incredibly wealthy, and powerful, too. They were able to attract massive quantities of investment capital in the 1830s. Enslavers also exerted disproportionate influence over the national government, ensuring the creation and implementation of policies that benefited them. Yet the same work of hands that built a wealthy South enabled the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution. This one began in the cotton mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. From the mills, the development of the northern economy spiraled outward to transform wider sectors. After the South’s economy grew into a bubble, and then exploded, the North recovered while the South floundered. And the main reason for the North’s quicker recovery was that northerners had reinvested profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy.

Now, having built a brave new world on the product of the cotton fields, northerners such as John G. Palfrey were convincing themselves that slavery was a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy. This was an inaccurate generalization from an accurate observation. Northern observers and antislavery activists saw the slower recovery of the southern economy and thought it proved that slavery was an economic incubus and not an engine of growth. But they also had some powerful emotional reasons to look at slavery in this way. By 1843, enslaver-politicians had begun to lunge at Texas and beyond, hoping to implement once again their classic formula: new land, new credit sources, a new boom. This time around, however, northern brothers decided that there was a “Slave Power” bent on tyrannical domination, and not just of enslaved hands.

So Palfrey consulted with several Boston acquaintances. The first was a political and legal mentor, US Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Just the previous year, Story’s opinion in the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania had strengthened southerners’ claims that the US Constitution protected slavery. Edward Prigg, a Maryland enslaver, had tried to recover an enslaved woman who had run to Pennsylvania with her children to escape sale to slave traders. State authorities blocked him. The case went to the Supreme Court. It put Story under pressure from two sources: slavery expansionists, on the one hand, and African Americans who resisted being stolen, on the other. He did not want to write the ruling, but he had no choice. In Prigg, the Court ruled that the Constitution required northern states to hand over escapees, undermining northern states’ laws that ended slavery within their own borders.

Palfrey also met with the young “Conscience Whig” politician Charles Sumner. If Story warned him of the difficulty of getting the moral responsibility of slavery off one’s back, Sumner helped stiffen John’s spine for heavy lifting. Without notifying his brothers, John petitioned the Louisiana state legislature to let him free the twenty slaves and allow them to stay in the state. The brothers learned of John’s actions from a New Orleans newspaper story reporting the legislature’s rejection of his request. Henry wrote angrily to John: the whole story would “be published in the Attakapas paper on Saturday.” Local planters would read it. William and Henry would hear questions. Their Attakapas neighbors knew that meddlers were choking Congress with petitions accusing slaveholders of being rapists, torturers, and slave traders. If the Palfreys’ brother was an abolitionist, the local Whig Party, in which the brothers were stalwarts, would suffer. Meanwhile, proposing emancipation for twenty people at old John’s camp would render the other forty unmanageable. They’d send the news up and down the Attakapas by the grapevine telegraph, talk back to overseers, or run to New Orleans to find a lawyer for a freedom suit. “Better to let them remain quietly at work and time will gradually settle all difficulties,” Henry insisted.⁶

Henry knew that enslaved people acted as someone else’s hands because they had no other choice. If the grip slackened, African Americans seized opportunities. As the domestic slave trade surged in the 1830s and the flood of new bodies taxed whites’ ability to surveil the captives, the number of southwestern fugitives also spiked. Some made it all the way to the North. These new fugitives, who were also migrants—though against the grain of slave-trade and credit-circle flows— invigorated northern antislavery organizations. William Lloyd Garrison, taught by slavery-survivors, had helped to mobilize politically effective petition campaigns that portrayed enslavers as opponents of whites’ freedom—particularly whites’ freedom to disagree with policies promoting the expansion of slavery. Still, Garrison insisted that abolitionists should reject politics, which required compromises of the sort that in his view rendered the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” But by 1840, a new wave of survivors of slavery’s frontier, including activist fugitives such as William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb, was steadily pushing abolitionism into the current of political fight.

Runaways pressured Judge Story, and runaways pushed enslaver-politicians to demand that other whites never disagree with them about slavery or its expansion. Palfrey’s brothers didn’t think he needed to contribute to the fuss. Especially not when his grandstanding with their father’s inheritance would cause them trouble. They had heard that Massachusetts Whigs were squabbling, but they were shocked by the force of the leverage that John was willing to apply to enforce his changing convictions. In 1843, their world was one of hard times and G.T.T., and Henry’s firm was bankrupt. They could not fathom how John—who only a few years ago had been asking for their help—could leave $7,000 on the table.

John G. Palfrey’s personal route to rejecting slave ownership, direct or indirect, was ironic. But it was only somewhat unique. His willingness to act on his own convictions, even at the cost of a substantial sum of money, was unusual, though his changing convictions were not. Yet he still had to make a literal journey of rejection. Louisiana state legislators had denied his request that they allow the people he inherited to stay among the community they had built in the wake of forced migration. So Palfrey decided to bring them back with him to Massachusetts. In 1844, worried that they would not be able to support themselves, he visited Massachusetts author Lydia Maria Child and asked her to help him find them new homes in Boston. Child, a women’s rights activist, and also one of the first white women publicly identified as an abolitionist, promised to help. Then he traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, and visited Cassius Clay, a relative of Henry Clay and a rare surviving southern proponent of emancipation. Clay had repeatedly fought off attempts at silencing. One of his speeches degenerated into a knife fight, with attackers rushing the stage. To deter mobs, he loaded a cannon and parked it on his front porch.

Emotionally fortified by Clay’s example, Palfrey traveled to the Ohio River and boarded a steamboat headed to Louisiana. After enjoying a pleasant visit in New Orleans, Palfrey traveled out into the hinterland to brother William’s home. He found that Attakapas whites were not very tolerant. They threatened him, and William was less cordial than usual as well. Eager to conclude his business, John met privately with each adult slave. All were willing to go North, but they wanted to wait until the end of the year. Cotton prices were low in the early 1840s, and William—like many other southwestern enslavers—was allowing enslaved people more time to cultivate their own patches of cotton, corn, and garden crops. In turn, they’d eat fewer planter-furnished rations, meaning less ink on the debit side of ledgers. Men and women with small amounts of cash in their hands could also buy their own cloth, clothing, tobacco, and liquor. Like potential runaways waiting until the corn was ripe, Palfrey’s slaves didn’t want to lose their investments of time and labor. And if they were to venture into the unknown in the hands of another John Palfrey, they wanted cash in their pockets.

John left for Boston. His brothers had insisted that it would “demoralize” their own labor forces if John’s slaves mixed with theirs once word of impending freedom got out, but William was happy that the short-timers stayed. They helped gather William’s cotton harvest—for which John promised to pay them back wages for 1844 once they reached Massachusetts. When 1845 arrived, three of the oldest—Amos (age sixty-one), Clara (fifty-five), and Old Sam (sixty-five)—balked at leaving their children and grandchildren, so John had parish officials bribed to permit these three to stay, despite their manumission. The other seventeen said goodbye to everyone and traveled to New Orleans. From the same levee where they and/or their parents had arrived, they boarded the bark Bashaw and set sail for Boston.

After their ceremonial welcome at King’s Chapel, John began to send the newly emancipated people to various “placements” arranged by his abolitionist friends. With Child’s help, he placed Anna and her four children in Canandaigua, New York, with a nice Quaker lady who needed a maid, and boys to chop her firewood. Amos Marshall was sent to work as a servant in Brooklyn, as was Henry. The others, however, found employment in Boston before Palfrey could disperse them. Local African Americans who remembered their own difficult transitions helped the country migrants to put down roots in Boston’s black neighborhoods.⁷

Like most northern whites who adopted antislavery convictions in the 1840s, Palfrey didn’t seem to be antislavery because of a belief in black equality, of either capacity or right-to-choose. Freeing his slaves over his brothers’ objections, however, allowed Palfrey to demonstrate that southern whites could not silence him, as they had tried to silence his fellow Harvard alum John Quincy Adams with the Gag Rule. Southerners’ political bullying had pushed him into a new conviction that replaced his previous implicit belief in an America where slave-owning and slavery-profiting brothers were united across geographic distance. Now, he concluded—as did other northern whites —that slavery was wrong and that its growth must be stopped because it enabled southern brothers to bully northern ones.

BACK IN 1819, RACHEL had climbed the New Orleans levee and then descended into a floodplain forested by pylons of cotton bales, silos of British metalware, and screes of calico bolts from Manchester. By then, Britain was clearly already becoming a new kind of society and economy, escaping the old Malthusian trap with the help of the New World’s ghost acres. Its transformations began with the creation of a cotton textile industry. On the capital that sector earned, piggybacking technologies and industries emerged. Soon more people worked in commerce and industry than in agriculture, producing a market of millions of consumers. Raw materials imported from overseas — such as cotton—were essential, but by 1834 the empire concluded it no longer needed its own slaves.⁸

Although the United States and Britain spoke (mostly) the same language, the two nations found themselves in different situations. Britain lacked key natural resources, and therefore cotton made by enslaved US hands was essential to industrialization. Now Britain led the development race by a full quarter-century. Indeed, British-made goods still towered on the levee as the Palfrey people embarked for Boston, for in many manufacturing sectors, such as high-quality textiles, Britain’s dominance had starved American competitors of market oxygen. Some northern Whigs, believing the United States should be further on the path that Britain had blazed, blamed enslavers for forcing the young nation to implement policy choices that pushed the republic away from replicating the empire’s success. To them, the national investment in territorial expansion was a proof-text. Endless robbery of Indian lands in the Louisiana Purchase, Florida, and Texas also meant that land would remain cheap. Immigrants might move to the cheap-land frontier instead of working in factories, keeping industrialists’ labor costs high.⁹

Still, a quarter-century after Rachel’s 1819 arrival in New Orleans, some sectors of the US economy were changing dramatically. One way to measure this transformation is to look at historical estimates of how fast the economy was expanding. Between 1774 and 1800, the annual rate of economic growth per capita in the United States was less than 0.4 percent. From 1800 to 1840, the average rate of increase climbed to between 0.66 percent and 1.13 percent per year—spiking in the mid-1830s, of course, but then crashing into the negative range for several years after the Panic of 1837. By the 1850s, it rose to almost 2 percent per year. By comparison, the per capita growth rate of the US economy in the 1990s, its most successful decade since the 1950s, was about 2.5 percent per year.¹⁰ Traditional explanations for this metamorphosis into a post-Malthusian regime assume that the ultimate cause of growth was some characteristic unique to the North’s free-labor economy. Writers have credited an individualistic culture, Puritanism, open land and high wages, amorphous “Yankee ingenuity,” government intervention in the economy, and government nonintervention in the economy. Yet we now also know that even as the entire economy became more productive, from 1800 to 1860 raw cotton production gained in efficiency still more quickly than other sectors of the economy. The increasing speed of cotton-picking yielded a productivity increase of slightly more than 2 percent per year from 1800 to 1860.

In 1832, the US government compiled a fascinating document that reveals the way that cotton not only dominated US exports and the financial sector but also drove the expansion of northern industry. Jackson’s secretary of the treasury, Louis McLane, hoping to find evidence that the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” was protecting the emergent US manufacturing sector, asked Democratic insiders across the free states to visit manufacturing establishments in their neighborhoods. They interviewed proprietors such as the manager of the Old Sable Iron Works in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, who warned that if the tariff was reduced, “our nail establishments could not be sustained.”

McLane’s data not only showed that foreign iron was too cheap, but also revealed the crucial role of cotton textiles in driving the expansion of manufacturing. Over the preceding four decades, cotton mills yoked to water power had multiplied along the rivers and creeks of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. They relied on labor from southern New England’s worn-out agricultural sector, machinery designs stolen from Britain, and ever-cheaper southern cotton. Early factories had mechanized the process of spinning cotton, but still “put-out” thread to families who used home hand looms to weave it into cloth. Mill-based powered looms would enable the next transition to take place.¹¹

In the 1820s, the “Boston Associates,” a group that included men such as Nathan Appleton and Abbot Lawrence, who would become Cotton Whigs and John G. Palfrey’s political enemies, planted a factory town on the Merrimack River in eastern Massachusetts. They named it Lowell, after an industrial spy who had stolen loom designs from British factories. By 1832 four massive mills were in operation there. Each integrated spinning and weaving under a single roof. Collectively the mills contained $1 million worth of machinery, and these machines were tended by 3,000 workers, of whom three-quarters were women and girls. Each year, the mills used 5.5 million pounds of cleaned cotton: more than 13,000 bales, close to 15 million pounds as weighed on cotton-stand balance beams. Thus Lowell consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people’s labor every year. And as enslaved hands made pounds of cotton more efficiently than free ones, dropping the inflation-adjusted price of cotton delivered to US and British textile mills by 60 percent between 1790 and 1860, the whipping-machine was freeing up millions of dollars for the Boston Associates. They invested it in other machines, higher pay for factory workers, and the finery and architecture that overwhelmed Palfrey’s freedpeople in the church on Beacon Street. They also lowered the price of textiles, expanding both Lowell’s markets and the access of ordinary people all over the world to factory-made cotton textiles. An entire planet’s consumers shared in the welfare of the growing margin between the price of raw cotton and what the price would have been if picked by free labor.¹²

In 1820, only 3.2 percent of the US labor force had worked in manufacturing—maybe 75,000 workers in all. By 1832, the date of McLane’s report, factories and workshops across the North employed about 200,000 workers. The biggest share was in cotton mills, which were the most mechanized, capital-heavy, industrial kind of industry in the entire United States. Their 20,000 employees represented something new in US history: an unpropertied, nonagricultural, free working class, the growth of which created demand for goods. In fact, both cotton labor camps and cotton mills generated increased demand for such things as iron goods, ready-made clothes, rope, furniture, and shoes. By the time of the 1832 McLane census, American industry was beginning to produce more of these goods. Non-textile production still usually took place in relatively small-scale workshops. These included the small but flexible workshops of New York’s “sweated trades,” such as clothes-making, furniture, leather goods, and hats. Then as now, the city attracted a stream of hungry immigrants willing to toil long hours in cramped conditions. Small size also reflected limited technology, for most industries had not yet found substitutes for human power and hand production. The tiny workshops scattered through rural areas near Philadelphia and Pittsburgh still dominated the iron industry. A rare exception was the Ousatonic Manufacturing Company of Litchfield County in Connecticut, which in 1831 employed more than one hundred laborers and made 600 tons of iron.¹³

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