New Directions in Slavery Studies

Commodification, Community, and Comparison

Jeff Forret, Christine E. Sears, Jeff Forret, Christine E. Sears

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780807161173
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

In this landmark essay collection, twelve contributors chart the contours of current scholarship in the field of slavery studies, highlighting three of the discipline's major themes—commodification, community, and comparison—and indicating paths for future inquiry.New Directions in Slavery Studies addresses the various ways in which the institution of slavery reduced human beings to a form of property. From the coastwise domestic slave trade in international context to the practice of slave mortgaging to the issuing of insurance policies on slaves, several essays reveal how southern whites treated slaves as a form of capital to be transferred or protected. An additional piece in this section contemplates the historian's role in translating the fraught history of slavery into film.Other essays examine the idea of the "slave community, " an increasingly embattled concept born of revisionist scholarship in the 1970s. This section's contributors examine the process of community formation for black foreigners, the crucial role of violence in the negotiation of slaves' sense of community, and the effect of the Civil War on slave society. A final essay asks readers to reassess the long-standing revisionist emphasis on slave agency and the ideological burdens it carries with it.Essays in the final section discuss scholarship on comparative slavery, contrasting American slavery with similar, less restrictive practices in Brazil and North Africa. One essay negotiates a complicated tripartite comparison of secession in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, while another uncovers subtle differences in slavery in separate regions of the American South, demonstrating that comparative slavery studies need not be transnational.New Directions in Slavery Studies provides new examinations of the lives and histories of enslaved people in the United States.

I

COMMODIFICATION

1

COMMODITY CHAINS AND CHAINED COMMODITIES

The U.S. Coastwise Slave Trade and an Atlantic Business Network

CALVIN SCHERMERHORN

In the decade after the War of 1812, commerce in cotton linked the American South to northwest England. The American republic’s fortunes rose on a tide of cotton lint, while agents of the British Industrial Revolution sped cloth and debt instruments through global arteries of commerce. The resulting cotton chain included cotton fibers, textiles, and conveyances such as ships, along with manufacturers, mariners, merchants, planters, and workers. Credit, knowledge, and trust formed the links. They were capitalist constructions, magnificently creative yet monumentally destructive. Enslaved people were a hidden but central component, and their commercial transport from the eastern seaboard of North America to the Lower South was vital to the process.

Scholars investigating slavery and capitalism have disagreed sharply over capitalism’s historical characteristics and how directly slavery was involved in modern commercial development. This chapter takes a microhistorical approach to a world system, investigating concrete connections within the broad processes of Atlantic world commerce and the expansion of slavery in the early United States. An analysis of merchant voyages connects the bondpersons who shouldered the burdens of unpaid labor to the businessmen who orchestrated and financed the larger system. Systems of money and credit that made possible the rise of the transatlantic cotton economy of the 1820s were also part of the infrastructure of the interstate slave trade.¹

The cotton economy took shape rapidly after the War of 1812. In 1815 food was the primary U.S. export, mainly flour shipped to the British West Indies. Ten years later, cotton was the largest by a factor of two or more. Most American cotton went to England. England imported cotton from all over the globe, and American cotton competed with West Indian and Brazilian lint. By the last half of the 1820s, three-quarters of Britain’s imported cotton came from the United States.²

Financial mechanisms, maritime technologies, and manufacturing processes all underwent significant changes that shaped the process. The Second Bank of the United States and later state banks expanded credit, though that expansion was cyclical. Shipping firms rationalized markets over time, and vessels became more capacious. English manufacturers improved technology using power looms, which turned out abundant varieties and prodigious quantities of cloth. American agriculturalists experimented with higher-yielding strains of cotton. At either end of the transatlantic cotton chain were workers whose productivity rose substantially. Spinners and weavers in England increasingly worked in factories for wages that fluctuated with markets, while enslaved field hands in the United States were forced to produce ever more cotton per person.³

Like the Internet of a later age, the resulting cotton chain was an abstraction, the sum of a multitude of market actors, relationships, and materials. Anyone in the second or third decade of the 1800s seeking concrete evidence of it could find it in a wooden sailing ship docked at Baltimore, Maryland’s premier city. Merchant ships carried the commercial world in miniature. The Hyperion of Baltimore was one such vessel. Built in 1820, it was described as an “elegant and swift sailing brig” with two tall masts and a capacious 413-ton cargo space. Perhaps the ship’s name was inspired by John Keats’s epic poems featuring the Titan god of the sun. Owner Thomas Tenant was one of Baltimore’s leading merchants, a participant in the Baltimore Exchange and the city board of trade. He was a councilman and captain of the Seaman’s Union Bethel Church in Fell’s Point. Tenant initially sent his new ship to Rotterdam, Holland, but the Hyperion returned without cargo.⁴ That was a losing venture emblematic of the tough economic times following the panic of 1819, which capped half a decade of natural and unnatural disasters.

Following the War of 1812, the Chesapeake region was hit hard by a terrible harvest, restricted trade, and constricted credit, all of which gave Maryland slaveholders incentives to sell slaves at the same time as their flour exports flowed to the other end of the national slave market, the lower Mississippi Valley. Thanks to the cataclysmic volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora and a confluence of other natural phenomena, 1816 became known as the year without a summer. Poor wheat harvests in the Northern Hemisphere sent prices rising and farmers into bankruptcy. Farmers sold slaves to make debt payments, but their finances were further damaged after Britain threw up tariff barriers to the American flour trade to the West Indies, which had filled Baltimore’s commercial sails. The Bank of England constricted credit, causing textile exporters to sell consignments in cities such as New York for less than their value to remit debt payments, undercutting American merchants and glutting the market. Then times worsened. In 1819 a loss of confidence in banks on both sides of the Atlantic brought on a financial panic. Many Baltimore merchant houses failed, and others scrambled for new opportunities. It soon became clear that slave-grown cotton rather than foodstuffs would be the nation’s chief export. In search of revenue, Tenant put the Hyperion on a new route that took advantage of the reorientation in Chesapeake trade. His ship would haul flour to New Orleans and cotton to Liverpool, returning with manufactured goods. Part of that voyage involved shipping enslaved Marylanders thousands of miles from home on a voyage of no return.⁵

The economic hard times for the Chesapeake region were flush times for the interstate slave trade. After the Revolution, the population of enslaved African Americans grew as the demand for slave labor slackened. By the early nineteenth century, Chesapeake slaveholders moaned that surplus bondpeople burdened them with upkeep costs like food, clothing, and shelter. Hard times at home and a flourishing cotton economy to the south and west presented golden opportunities to those masters. Upper South slaveholders relieving themselves of excess bondpersons formed a complementary interest to Lower South countrymen taking on mountains of debt to buy slaves and land. The domestic slave trade surged in the 1820s. About 155,000 enslaved Americans crossed state lines by force in that decade, and the maritime slave trade from cities like Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, was expanding rapidly. Professional traders moved in, offering “CASH FOR NEGROES.” They scoured the countryside, assembling enslaved Marylanders in coffles and marching them overland to the Lower South or else consigning them to merchant voyages. Shippers suffering in the hard times took advantage of revenues from human cargoes.⁶

Many Marylanders became alarmed at the new commerce. The proliferation of newspaper advertisements worried some citizens that Marylanders of African descent were being spirited out of Baltimore illegally. Maryland’s laws of slavery permitted slaves for life to be transported but forbade those under bond of manumission to be sold out of state. Slave owners were nevertheless breaking promises and selling bondpersons to slave traders. Kidnappers prowled the northern borderlands in search of victims to enslave. Commerce in people caused a demographic catastrophe as it split apart thousands of families. Cash for slaves amounted to “CASH FOR BLOOD,” screamed Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles, a Quaker, in 1821. Niles was an economic nationalist whose paper celebrated the growth of agriculture and industry, but he detested its side effects. Slave traders “have a number of dens in the suburbs of the city,” he growled, “wherein misery personified is groaning in chains.”⁷ Baltimore’s Quakers worried that too many African-descended Marylanders were disappearing into the holds of ships like the Hyperion never to be seen again.

Some decided to investigate. In 1820 Quaker George Ellicott policed the Baltimore shipping district of Fell’s Point. In early November, Ellicott and a customs inspector arrived at Tenant’s Wharf to inspect the Hyperion, which had been cleared to sail to New Orleans with slaves. As they approached the wharf on a crisp November morning, the inspectors beheld a forest of ships’ masts rising above the warehouses on the waterfront. Peering into the Hyperion’s hold, Ellicott and the inspector saw critical parts of the cotton chain in the form of several enslaved people consigned by a local merchant. The inspector asked whether they were being smuggled out of Baltimore. All “acknowledge[d] themselves to be slaves for life,” he reported, “except James Spencer who says that he had the promise of a former master that he would be free at some future period but what time he cannot say.” Six-foot-one-inch-tall Spencer had seen plenty of promises broken in his forty years in slavery. But this one was shattering. After holding out a promise of freedom as an incentive to work diligently, his owner, a local grain dealer, sold Spencer to a city merchant. Not wanting to risk his running off, the merchant decided to sell him in New Orleans. Misery filled the Hyperion’s hold. Among Spencer’s companions was twenty-five-year-old Bill Short and four-year-old Eliza with her twenty-four-year-old mother Hagar. Their stories were not recorded, but all were being taken from loved ones and their homeland.⁸

The Hyperion was freighted with commodities and consumer goods. Tenant owned much of that cargo, including wine, raisins, and six hundred barrels of flour. Wine and raisins would sell well at the holidays. So would hams and the fifty barrels of apples put aboard. Chesapeake flour was reputed to be some of the finest in the world, and instead of shipping it to the British West Indies to be consumed by enslaved people, Tenant shipped it to fellow Americans in the Mississippi River Valley. Hundreds of thousands had moved west from 1810 to 1820, taking a taste for wheat bread with them. Flour and other bulk commodities were difficult to haul over the Appalachian Mountains and along the dirt roads leading west. The Erie Canal would not be finished for five more years, and in the meantime the city of New Orleans was the dominant transshipment point for goods entering the Mississippi Valley. Much of the Hyperion’s cargo would be steamed upriver for sale. Natchez citizens, for instance, could enjoy a Virginia ham, French wine, and loaves of wheat bread at Christmastime. Perhaps to ameliorate the consequences of holiday excess, the Hyperion also carried medicines. The merchant who owned most of the slaves also shipped boxes and barrels of other goods as well.⁹

The Hyperion landed in New Orleans three weeks before Christmas, completing one leg of the so-called cotton triangle linking eastern seaboard cities with southern cotton ports and British or European ones. After Christmas, shipmaster Francis Blackwell oversaw the loading of 890 bales of cotton. Before steam presses were employed to compress bales of cotton into about half the size they generally occupied, a North American bale of cotton took up about thirty cubic feet. The Hyperion was nearly filled to capacity. It took an experienced mariner to load a vessel correctly. Heavy in the bow or stern, the ship could not navigate effectively. Few things sunk merchant ships quicker than improperly packed cargoes. Blackwell sailed for Liverpool in early January 1821.¹⁰

For merchant seafarers, the Atlantic was a series of strategic sea lanes. Blackwell could be thankful that this passage was in winter. Fogs were less dense during winter crossings. Icebergs were scarcer. The eastbound route across the North Atlantic was faster than the return. Ships sailed to the northeast with the winds and ocean currents off of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift could speed a ship sailing from Louisiana to Liverpool along thousands of miles of ocean in less time than it took to sail from Baltimore to New Orleans.¹¹ After clearing the southwestern tip of Ireland and sailing through St. George’s Channel, the Hyperion entered the River Mersey. The passage had taken just thirty-one days.¹²

Liverpool was about three times the size of Baltimore and extended for three miles along the banks of the Mersey estuary. Wide and well-kept streets were home to commodious houses constructed of dark yellow bricks. The skyline was punctuated by church spires. In mid-February, Blackwell’s ship landed at the recently opened Prince’s Dock, built especially for the U.S. cotton trade. There a throng of workers unloaded the cargo. Blackwell delivered 571 bales of cotton to William and James Brown and Company. Smaller consignments went to other merchants, and 200 would be auctioned.¹³ Whether William Brown or his brother James oversaw the Hyperion’s unloading is unclear, but their firm had much to do with the voyage’s success.

Credit was largely responsible for the strength of the cotton chain. A merchant such as Thomas Tenant could not stay in business long if he invested money in one voyage and then waited four or six months to reap a return and reinvest. Small merchants were self-financed, but that was an obstacle to growth. William and James Brown and Company was the Liverpool branch of Alexander Brown and Sons, one of the largest merchant banking houses in the United States. Alexander Brown was Thomas Tenant’s Baltimore neighbor at 128 Baltimore Street, several minutes’ walk from the Basin (now Inner Harbor), in the commercial center of the city. Brown was an Irish immigrant who began in business by buying and selling consignments of finished goods in Baltimore. His firm sold goods on commission, speculated in commodities, and extended short-term credit to merchants in the transatlantic trade between the United States and Ireland or Britain.¹⁴

Brown’s ambitious strategy led him into merchant banking, which supplemented his import-export business. Brown got into the shipping business as well. With his sons, the firm branched out into financing others’ consignments and eventually into the letter-of-credit business. Letters of credit were endorsements guaranteeing payment by Brown’s firm if the creditor did not pay. Such arrangements built merchants’ creditworthiness under Brown’s patronage. Alexander Brown and Sons’s financial services included dealing in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Commodification
• Part II: The Slave Community
• Part III: Comparative Slavery
• Contributors