Black Market

The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865

Aaron Carico

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655598
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Esclavitud

On the eve of the Civil War, the estimated value of the U.S. enslaved population exceeded $3 billion--triple that of investments nationwide in factories, railroads, and banks combined, and worth more even than the South's lucrative farmland. Not only an object to be traded and used, the slave was also a kind of currency, a form of value that anchored the market itself. And this value was not destroyed in the war. Slavery still structured social relations and cultural production in the United States more than a century after it was formally abolished. As Aaron Carico reveals in Black Market, slavery's engine of capital accumulation was preserved and transformed, and the slave commodity survived emancipation. Through both archival research and lucid readings of literature, art, and law, from the plight of the Fourteenth Amendment to the myth of the cowboy, Carico breaks open the icons of liberalism to expose the shaping influence of slavery's political economy in America after 1865. Ultimately, Black Market shows how a radically incomplete and fundamentally failed abolition enabled the emergence of a modern nation-state, in which slavery still determined--and now goes on to determine--economic, political, and cultural life.

CHAPTER ONE

Freedom as Accumulation

How, after the war, triumphant industry in the North coupled with privilege and monopoly led an orgy of theft that engulfed the nation and was the natural child of war … and delivered the land into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

For years longer than we can remember, cotton has been our companion; we travel down the plantation road with debt holding our left hand, with credit holding our right, and ahead of us looms the grave, the final and simple end.

—Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices

Let’s begin with the debts, which already couldn’t be repaid. Near Helena, Arkansas, someone told Ann Ulrich Evans that a man in that state, or Alabama, or Missouri, wanted “a gang of niggers to do some work and he pay you like money growing on trees.” But then after bringing in the “fine big crops” on those “great big farms,” she was told she owed more than when she arrived.¹ In the Brazos Bottom of Texas, a storekeeper promised Laura Smalley anything she’d like, any kind of money, any dress her daughter desired, if she’d just open an account before Christmas and stick around another year.² Henry Blake got such offers in Arkansas, too—twenty dollars in food, a gallon of whiskey, whatever clothes he wanted.³ “They’d let you go jus’ as far in debt as you wan’ to go.” “Anything that kept you a slave.” “We never did git out of debt.”⁴

These were the voices of former slaves and their descendants as they recalled standing before the counter of the country store, facing the white merchant on the other side. That scene, fraught and repeated, was a cornerstone of the South in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

While one of the merchant’s hands might relax its hold on necessities, proffer some small comforts, and thus extend a brief reprieve in a world of forced privation, all for a price, everybody knew his other hand gripped a pistol. Such was the consumer’s choice, the contract’s consent. “He cussed me, hit me with the pistol and broke two teeth. He told me he had learned I was planning to move on Mr. R. C. Nichols place … and that he would kill me before he let me work for anybody else. He made me get in his automobile and”—let this sink in—“go to his store and get a month’s supply of groceries.”⁵ And after that white merchant put down the gun and handed over the seeds, the shoes, the bacon, the bolted meal, the bolt of cloth, the suit, the dress, the overalls, he grabbed a leather daybook and a pen to note those debits and mark them against an individual’s account. Pistol and pen, both weapons in the so-called New South: the first threatened a quick death, reinforcing the slow one promised by the second.⁶ In our mind’s eye, the red we imagine is probably the blood fresh on Jake Dunwoodie’s bashed mouth, shy two teeth, rather than the red ink that fills those store ledgers. But after 1865 in the South, it’s hard to tell the hues apart.

This chapter is about that red ink, and what it symbolizes—about national and international flows of racial capital, and the ongoing circulation of slavery’s economic value in modes of finance after 1865. One can begin to follow the arithmetic in the receipt for those groceries. The ex-slave Bayley Wyat does the math in a speech he gave in 1866: “And den didn’t we clear the land and raise de crops ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob ebery ting? And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? … I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.”⁷ A similar calculation was made a century later by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power, in their polemic against an institutional racism that enmeshes black Americans in an unending colonial exploitation by whites. In the unfinished ledgers of our unfinished Atlantic world, the conventions of slavery’s double-entry bookkeeping remain in force: white life is written in black.⁸

This chapter puts forward a few distinct but related propositions: first, that the slave remained a form of value after the developments of 1865; second, that freedom names a metamorphosis of the slave in terms of political economy; and third, that the political economy of slavery continued to implicate the entire United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of unresolved questions, which are often repressed in historical accounts of the long Reconstruction era, stand behind these propositions: What attributes of slavery did abolition disestablish? Does slavery designate a status that can be summarily reversed by law? And is it then the law’s failed execution that must be blamed for the persistence of slavery’s attributes? Or should we also understand slavery as an entrenched institution in American political economy and culture, one so entrenched that its supposed legal meliorations—a rights-bearing personhood, for example—only further secure its bonds? As an institution central to “the making of American capitalism” as a recent book has it, does slavery transcend the immediate circumstances of captivity, of physical domination and confinement? And if so, did the implementation of abolition dismantle slavery’s vast fortune-making machinery, or did it instead preserve and refurbish it? To put the matter plainly: What exactly was accomplished by the developments begun in 1865 that we deem “abolition”? Which features of slavery were eradicated and which were left intact?⁹

To describe freedom as accumulation disputes emancipation as a simple admission into a postwar rights-bearing subjecthood. The personhood that was constitutionally secured by the Union’s victory also enabled new modes of accumulation, on both an individual and global scale. Achieving salience through the functions of commercial exchange, personhood was a conceit of law fashioned into a means of acquisition—and of dispossession.¹⁰ Late in the century, the Supreme Court would fix this conception of personhood through a bold-faced interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, conferring personhood’s rights and liberties on corporations. The court supplied that new gloss, as we will shortly see, in a case directly tied to the American plantation economy, one that centered on bales of cotton. All this jurisprudence turned on interpretations of that amendment, which defined birthright citizenship and affirmed the rights of due process. Often overlooked in accounts of slavery’s afterlives, which tend to focus on the Thirteenth Amendment and its infamous loophole that legalized enslavement “as a punishment for crime,” the Fourteenth Amendment instituted a notion of freedom rooted in an ideology of contract. It also tethers the definition of citizenship, and the rights of personhood, outlined in Section One, to the “validity of the public debt of the United States,” in Section Four, which “shall not be questioned.” Freedom names here the status and process incumbent to the mendacious work of formal abolition, rather than total abolition. Freedom indicates a transformational process within slave racial capitalism—not the antithesis to the political economy of slavery but rather its modification. It comprises here a metamorphosis in the value-form of the slave. “In a money culture … value survives its objects,” the theorist and historian Ian Baucom writes, and that fact, one affirmed by the object’s loss, “confirms the system-wide conviction that that value was always autonomous from its object.”¹¹ And liberated capital needs someplace to go.¹²

---

FORMAL ABOLITION DIDN’T so much dissolve the fact of bondage as it amended the terms of the bond. There were no revolutions in 1865, no permanent razing of factories in the field, no backbreaking coup de main against the profit regimes of black captivity, no seizure and return of the coin minted from the sweat and blood of those captives. And while the general strike by the slaves won major legal concessions—their bodies safe against being bought and sold, their families safe against being sundered by such sales, their departures safe against charges of self-theft—these bulwarks of freedom could and would be overtopped.¹³

The substance of these amended bonds was financial. A black North Carolina congressman in 1880 encapsulated the new arrangements this way: “A [landlord] has land which he rents to a tenant; the tenant desires to run his crop; he comes to town and must make a mortgage, either directly with the merchant or indirectly through his landlord, to have his supplies furnished.… [T]hat gives him credit, and that is all there is in that matter.”¹⁴ Abolition amounted, in other words, to a financial arrangement. And that financial arrangement amounted to the bailout of an institution that was too big to fail: the plantation, the site of slavery’s production. In the decades after 1865, the plantation was reconstituted and revitalized.

While the Civil War caused vast damage to real estate and industry, far worse for planters was abolition itself, which vaporized the overwhelming capital accumulated in and circulated by slave bodies. By 1860, slave property’s value amounted, conservatively, to three billion dollars—a figure worth more than investments in manufacturing, railroads, and banks; worth more than gold; worth more even than land. By 1860, slaves were the collateral of credit relations, the antichresis pledged in mortgages. This “new black flesh coin” was the general equivalent, the “real” currency not just of the Southern economy, but of the national economy.¹⁵ And of course slaves were not just objects of accumulation; they were also subjects of accumulation.¹⁶ They were commodities who labored and produced other commodities, ever more capital. When abolition eradicated white wealth by nullifying the slave as a commodity form, numerous white Southern planters and merchants found themselves deeply in debt.

Rich white Southerners looked to two legal maneuvers to help navigate their postwar loss of property and its value. First, the legislatures of the former slave states almost immediately passed crop-lien laws. These laws simultaneously compelled the freedperson to work “willingly” on a planter’s stated terms and under a regime of contract, and allowed the planters to secure credit from merchants based on their workers’ future labor. The cotton crop’s projected profit was promised in advance for liquid credit in the present. Second, the federal government passed a Bankruptcy Act in 1867 intended to restore Southern wealth. This act expunged the debts and obligations of those who were insolvent, and through property exemptions, it allowed them to hold onto much of what they owned. Controlling the land meant the owners also had political and social control of the region, as the historian Elizabeth Lee Thompson has shown.¹⁷

This act preserved the plantation as a geographical entity, an integer under central control, and unbound the plantation from the debts that threatened to sink it. With one hand, the Bankruptcy Act wiped away the planters’ debt, and with another, crop-lien laws dispersed and atomized future risks by subjecting the freed to the enclosures of credit.¹⁸ Because they no longer held collateral in slave bodies, planters now relied on the value of their acreage (secured by the Bankruptcy Act) and their coming crop (secured by state lien laws) to obtain the credit that would refinance the postwar plantation. This meant that the crushing debt that war and abolition had placed on planters’ and merchants’ shoulders no longer rested so squarely on them. Instead, the maneuvers forged from freedpeople themselves new links in that chain of debt.

The law’s full recognition of personhood in the ex-slave was a Trojan horse that trapped such persons with the liability for a financial debt they literally incarnated. The gift of freedom opened to reveal the inheritance of slavery. At once contriving the consent of the freed and encumbering them with debt, the contract system reanchored the value of the slave’s body in the freed’s person. To use a chemical metaphor, it is as if the value-form of the slave underwent a phase change, a kind of sublimation. Although exchange value was technically no longer engraved in black flesh as a commodity form, this value reattached to a number of those bodies in the red ink of merchants’ ledgers—like a kind of ghost conjured by law and capital, constantly haunting the freed and compelling their labor. Ex-slaves were, in a sense, never fully in control of the property in themselves, which was almost immediately held against them as debt. Formally, ex-slaves had been ushered into a regime of contract, which was conceived as the very denouement of freedom, but unlike most waged laborers, contract’s entitlement to selfhood and to any consequent property or wealth had not been granted to them outright but instead was held in perpetual abeyance.

To say that slave capital was vaporized by abolition, then, does not mean that such capital was destroyed, only that it was transmuted and then transmitted elsewhere, into other hands. On those ledger pages, the ex-slave’s debits for purchases at unconscionably high “time prices”—exorbitant amounts charged for items to be purchased later, on “time,” not cash—were the mark of usury’s magical profit for white lenders. What the freed were forced to buy at credit’s discrepant prices was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Unabolished
• Chapter One: Freedom as Accumulation
• Chapter Two: The Spectacle of Free Black Personhood
• Chapter Three: Cowboys and Slaves
• Chapter Four: Southern Enclosure as American Literature
• Conclusion: In the Trap
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index