American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

U >> Ulrich Bonnell Phillips >> American Negro Slavery

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46

Many slaves carried by sea were covered by marine insurance. Among a number
of policies issued by the Louisiana Insurance Company to William Kenner and
Company was one dated February 18, 1822, on slaves in transit in the brig
_Fame_. It was made out on a printed form of the standard type for the
marine insurance of goods, with the words "on goods" stricken out and "on
slaves" inserted. The risks, specified as assumed in the printed form were
those "of the sea, men of war, fire, enemies, pirates, rovers, thieves,
jettison, letters of mart and counter-mart, surprisals, taking at sea,
arrests, restraints and detainments of all kings, princes or people of what
nation, condition or quality soever, barratry of the master and mariners,
and all other perils, losses and misfortunes that have or shall come to the
hurt, detriment or damage of the said goods or merchandize, or any part
thereof." In manuscript was added: "This insurance is declared to be made
on one hundred slaves, valued at $40,000 and warranted by the insured to be
free from insurrection, elopement, suicide and natural death." The premium
was one and a quarter per cent, of the forty thousand dollars.[31] That
the insurers were not always free from serious risk is indicated by a New
Orleans news item in 1818 relating that two local insurance companies
had recently lost more than forty thousand dollars in consequence of the
robbery of seventy-two slaves out of a vessel from the Chesapeake by a
piratical boat off the Berry Islands.[32]

[Footnote 31: Original in private possession.]

[Footnote 32: Augusta, Ga., _Chronicle_, Sept. 23, 1818, quoting the
_Orleans Gazette_.]

Overland coffles were occasionally encountered and described by travelers.
Featherstonhaugh overtook one at daybreak one morning in southwestern
Virginia bound through the Tennessee Valley and wrote of it as follows: "It
was a camp of negro slave drivers, just packing up to start. They had about
three hundred slaves with them, who had bivouacked the preceding night
in chains in the woods. These they were conducting to Natchez on the
Mississippi River to work upon the sugar plantations in Louisiana. It
resembled one of the coffles spoken of by Mungo Park, except that they had
a caravan of nine wagons and single-horse carriages for the purpose of
conducting the white people and any of the blacks that should fall lame....
The female slaves, some of them sitting on logs of wood, while others were
standing, and a great many little black children, were warming themselves
at the fire of the bivouac. In front of them all, and prepared for the
march, stood in double files about two hundred men slaves, manacled and
chained to each other." The writer went on to ejaculate upon the horror of
"white men with liberty and equality in their mouths," driving black men
"to perish in the sugar mills of Louisiana, where the duration of life for
a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven years."[33] Sir Charles Lyell,
who was less disposed to moralize or to repeat slanders of the Louisiana
regime, wrote upon reaching the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia, in January,
1846: "The first sight we saw there was a long line of negroes, men, women
and boys, well dressed and very merry, talking and laughing, who stopped to
look at our coach. On inquiry we were told that it was a gang of slaves,
probably from Virginia, going to the market to be sold."[34] Whether this
laughing company wore shackles the writer failed to say.

[Footnote 33: G.W. Featherstonhaugh, _Excursion through the Slave States_
(London, 1844), I, 120.]

[Footnote 34: Sir Charles Lyell, _A Second Visit to the United States_ (New
York, 1849), II, 35.]

Some of the slaves in the coffles were peddled to planters and townsmen
along the route; the rest were carried to the main distributing centers and
there either kept in stock for sale at fixed prices to such customers as
might apply, or sold at auction. Oftentimes a family group divided for sale
was reunited by purchase. Johann Schoepf observed a prompt consummation of
the sort when a cooper being auctioned continually called to the bidders
that whoever should buy him must buy his son also, an injunction to which
his purchaser duly conformed.[35] Both hardness of heart and shortness
of sight would have been involved in the neglect of so ready a means of
promoting the workman's equanimity; and the good nature of the competing
bidders doubtless made the second purchase easy. More commonly the sellers
offered the slaves in family groups outright. By whatever method the sales
were made, the slaves of both sexes were subjected to such examination of
teeth and limbs as might be desired.[36] Those on the block oftentimes
praised their own strength and talents, for it was a matter of pride to
fetch high prices. On the other hand if a slave should bear a grudge
against his seller, or should hope to be bought only by someone who would
expect but light service, he might pretend a disability though he had it
not. The purchasers were commonly too shrewd to be deceived in either way;
yet they necessarily took risks in every purchase they made. If horse
trading is notoriously fertile in deception, slave trading gave opportunity
for it in as much greater degree as human nature is more complex and
uncertain than equine and harder to fathom from surface indications.

[Footnote 35: Johann David Schoepf, _Travels in the Confederation,
1783-1784_, A.J. Morrison tr. (Philadelphia, 1911), I, 148.]

[Footnote 36: The proceedings at typical slave auctions are narrated by
Basil Hall, _Travels in North America_ (Edinburgh, 1829), III, 143-145; and
by William Chambers, _Things as they are in America_ (2d edition, London,
1857), pp. 273-284.]

There was also some risk of loss from defects of title. The negroes offered
might prove to be kidnapped freemen, or stolen slaves, or to have been
illegally sold by their former owners in defraud of mortgagees. The last
of these considerations was particularly disquieting in times of financial
stress, for suspicion of wholesale frauds then became rife. At the
beginning of 1840, for example, the offerings of slaves from Mississippi in
large numbers and at bargain prices in the New Orleans market prompted a
local editor to warn the citizens against buying cheap slaves who might
shortly be seized by the federal marshal at the suit of citizens in other
states. A few days afterward the same journal printed in its local news the
following: "Many slaves were put up this day at the St. Louis exchange. Few
if any were sold. It is very difficult now to find persons willing to buy
slaves from Mississippi or Alabama on account of the fears entertained that
such property may be already mortgaged to the banks of the above named
states. Our moneyed men and speculators are now wide awake. It will take a
pretty cunning child to cheat them."[37]

[Footnote 37: _Louisiana Courier_, Feb. 12 and 15, 1840.]

The disesteem in which the slavetraders were held was so great and general
in the Southern community as to produce a social ostracism. The prevailing
sentiment was expressed, with perhaps a little exaggeration, by D.R.
Hundley of Alabama in his analysis of Southern social types: "Preeminent in
villainy and a greedy love of filthy lucre stands the hard-hearted negro
trader.... Some of them, we do not doubt, are conscientious men, but the
number is few. Although honest and honorable when they first go into the
business, the natural result of their calling seems to corrupt them; for
they usually have to deal with the most refractory and brutal of the slave
population, since good and honest slaves are rarely permitted to fall into
the unscrupulous clutches of the speculator.... [He] is outwardly a coarse,
ill-bred person, provincial in speech and manners, with a cross-looking
phiz, a whiskey-tinctured nose, cold hard-looking eyes, a dirty
tobacco-stained mouth, and shabby dress.... He is not troubled evidently
with a conscience, for although he habitually separates parent from child,
brother from sister, and husband from wife, he is yet one of the jolliest
dogs alive, and never evinces the least sign of remorse.... Almost every
sentence he utters is accompanied by an oath.... Nearly nine tenths of the
slaves he buys and sells are vicious ones sold for crimes and misdemeanors,
or otherwise diseased ones sold because of their worthlessness as property.
These he purchases for about one half what healthy and honest slaves would
cost him; but he sells them as both honest and healthy, mark you! So soon
as he has completed his 'gang' he dresses them up in good clothes, makes
them comb their kinky heads into some appearance of neatness, rubs oil on
their dusky faces to give them a sleek healthy color, gives them a dram
occasionally to make them sprightly, and teaches each one the part he or
she has to play; and then he sets out for the extreme South.... At every
village of importance he sojourns for a day or two, each day ranging his
'gang' in a line on the most busy street, and whenever a customer makes his
appearance the oily speculator button-holes him immediately and begins to
descant in the most highfalutin fashion upon the virtuous lot of darkeys he
has for sale. Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom was not a circumstance to any one of
the dozens he points out. So honest! so truthful! so dear to the hearts
of their former masters and mistresses! Ah! Messrs. stock-brokers of Wall
Street--you who are wont to cry up your rotten railroad, mining, steamboat
and other worthless stocks[38]--for ingenious lying you should take lessons
from the Southern negro trader!" Some of the itinerant traders were said,
however, and probably with truth, to have had silent partners among the
most substantial capitalists in the Southern cities.[39]

[Footnote 38: D.R. Hundley, _Social Relations in our Southern States_ (New
York, 1860), pp. 139-142.]

[Footnote 39: _Ibid_., p.145.]

The social stigma upon slave dealing doubtless enhanced the profits of the
traders by diminishing the competition. The difference in the scales of
prices prevailing at any time in the cheapest and the dearest local markets
was hardly ever less than thirty per cent. From such a margin, however,
there had to be deducted not only the cost of feeding, clothing,
sheltering, guarding and transporting the slaves for the several months
commonly elapsing between purchase and sale in the trade, but also
allowances for such loss as might occur in transit by death, illness,
accident or escape. At some periods, furthermore, slave prices fell so
rapidly that the prospect of profit for the speculator vanished. At
Columbus, Georgia, in December, 1844, for example, it was reported that a
coffle from North Carolina had been marched back for want of buyers.[40]
But losses of this sort were more than offset in the long run by the upward
trend of prices which was in effect throughout the most of the ante-bellum
period. The Southern planters sometimes cut into the business of the
traders by going to the border states to buy and bring home in person the
slaves they needed.[41] The building of railways speeded the journeys and
correspondingly reduced the costs. The Central of Georgia Railroad
improved its service in 1858 by instituting a negro sleeping car [42]--an
accommodation which apparently no railroad has furnished in the post-bellum
decades.

[Footnote 40: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 31, 1844.]

[Footnote 41: Andrews, _Slavery and the Domestic Slave Trade_, p.171.]

While the traders were held in common contempt, the incidents and effects
of their traffic were viewed with mixed emotions. Its employment of
shackles was excused only on the ground of necessary precaution. Its
breaking up of families was generally deplored, although it was apologized
for by thick-and-thin champions of everything Southern with arguments that
negro domestic ties were weak at best and that the separations were no more
frequent than those suffered by free laborers at the North under the stress
of economic necessity. Its drain of money from the districts importing the
slaves was regretted as a financial disadvantage. On the other hand, the
citizens of the exporting states were disposed to rejoice doubly at being
saved from loss by the depreciation of property on their hands [43] and at
seeing the negro element in their population begin to dwindle;[44] but even
these considerations were in some degree offset, in Virginia at least,
by thoughts that the shrinkage of the blacks was not enough to lessen
materially the problem of racial adjustments, that it was prime young
workmen and women rather than culls who were being sold South, that white
immigration was not filling their gaps, and that accordingly land prices
were falling as slave prices rose.[45]

[Footnote 42: Central of Georgia Railroad Company _Report_ for 1859.]

[Footnote 43: _National Intelligencer_ (Washington, D.C.), Jan. 19, 1833.]

[Footnote 44: R.R. Howison, _History of Virginia_ (Richmond, Va.,
1846-1848), II. 519, 520.]

[Footnote 45: Edmund Ruffin, "The Effects of High Prices of Slaves," in
_DeBow's Review_, XXVI, 647-657 (June, 1859).]

Delaware alone among the states below Mason and Dixon's line appears to
have made serious effort to restrict the outgoing trade in slaves; but all
the states from Maryland and Kentucky to Louisiana legislated from time to
time for the prohibition of the inward trade.[46] The enforcement of these
laws was called for by citizen after citizen in the public press, as
demanded by "every principle of justice, humanity, policy and interest,"
and particularly on the ground that if the border states were drained of
slaves they would be transferred from the pro-slavery to the anti-slavery
group in politics.[47] The state laws could not constitutionally debar
traders from the right of transit, and as a rule they did not prohibit
citizens from bringing in slaves for their own use. These two apertures,
together with the passiveness of the public, made the legislative obstacles
of no effect whatever. As to the neighborhood trade within each community,
no prohibition was attempted anywhere in the South.

[Footnote 46: These acts are summarized in W.H. Collins, _Domestic Slave
Trade_, chap. 7.]

[Footnote 47: _Louisiana Gazette_, Feb. 25, 1818 and Jan. 29, 1823;
_Louisiana Courier_, Jan. 13, 1831; _Georgia Journal_ (Milledgeville, Ga.),
Dec. 4, 1821, reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 67-70; _Federal
Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Feb. 6, 1847.]

On the whole, instead of hampering migration, as serfdom would have done,
the institution of slavery made the negro population much more responsive
to new industrial opportunity than if it had been free. The long distance
slave trade found its principal function in augmenting the westward
movement. No persuasion of the ignorant and inert was required; the fiat of
one master set them on the road, and the fiat of another set them to new
tasks. The local branch of the trade had its main use in transferring labor
from impoverished employers to those with better means, from passive owners
to active, and from persons with whom relations might be strained to
others whom the negroes might find more congenial. That this last was not
negligible is suggested by a series of letters in 1860 from William Capers,
overseer on a Savannah River rice plantation, to Charles Manigault his
employer, concerning a slave foreman or "driver" named John. In the first
of these letters, August 5, Capers expressed pleasure at learning that
John, who had in previous years been his lieutenant on another estate, was
for sale. He wrote: "Buy him by all means. There is but few negroes
more competent than he is, and he was not a drunkard when under my
management.... In speaking with John he does not answer like a smart negro,
but he is quite so. You had better say to him who is to manage him on
Savannah." A week later Capers wrote: "John arrived safe and handed me
yours of the 9th inst. I congratulate you on the purchase of said negro.
He says he is quite satisfied to be here and will do as he has always done
'during the time I have managed him.' No drink will be offered him. All
on my part will be done to bring John all right." Finally, on October 15,
Capers reported: "I have found John as good a driver as when I left him on
Santee. Bad management was the cause of his being sold, and [I] am glad you
have been the fortunate man to get him."[48]

[Footnote 48: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 337, 338.]

Leaving aside for the present, as topics falling more fitly under the
economics of slavery, the questions of the market breeding of slaves in the
border states and the working of them to death in the lower South, as well
as the subject of inflations and depressions in slave prices, it remains
to mention the chief defect of the slave trade as an agency for the
distribution of labor. This lay in the fact that it dealt only in lifetime
service. Employers, it is true, might buy slaves for temporary employment
and sell them when the need for their labor was ended; but the fluctuations
of slave prices and of the local opportunity to sell those on hand would
involve such persons in slave trading risks on a scale eclipsing that of
their industrial earnings. The fact that slave hiring prevailed extensively
in all the Southern towns demonstrates the eagerness of short term
employers to avoid the toils of speculation.

CHAPTER XII

THE COTTON REGIME

It would be hard to overestimate the predominance of the special crops in
the industry and interest of the Southern community. For good or ill they
have shaped its development from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Each characteristic area had its own staple, and those districts which had
none were scorned by all typical Southern men. The several areas expanded
and contracted in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of their
products. Thus when cotton was exceptionally high in the early 'twenties
many Virginians discarded tobacco in its favor for a few years,[1] and on
the Louisiana lands from Baton Rouge to Alexandria, the planters from time
to time changed from sugar to cotton and back again.[2] There were local
variations also in scale and intensity; but in general the system in each
area tended to be steady and fairly uniform. The methods in the several
staples, furthermore, while necessarily differing in their details, were so
similar in their emphasis upon routine that each reinforced the influence
of the others in shaping the industrial organization of the South as a
whole.

[Footnote 1: _Richmond Compiler_, Nov. 25, 1825, and _Alexandria Gazette_,
Feb. 11, 1826, quoted in the _Charleston City Gazette_, Dec. 1, 1825 and
Feb. 20, 1826; _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore, Dec. 29, 1825), VII, 299.]

[Footnote 2: _Hunt's Merchant's Magazine_, IX, 149.]

At the height of the plantation system's career, from 1815 to 1860, indigo
production was a thing of the past; hemp was of negligible importance;
tobacco was losing in the east what it gained in the west; rice and
sea-island cotton were stationary; but sugar was growing in local
intensity, and upland cotton was "king" of a rapidly expanding realm.
The culture of sugar, tobacco and rice has been described in preceding
chapters; that of the fleecy staple requires our present attention.

The outstanding features of the landscape on a short-staple cotton
plantation were the gin house and its attendant baling press. The former
was commonly a weatherboarded structure some forty feet square, raised
about eight feet from the ground by wooden pillars. In the middle of the
space on the ground level, a great upright hub bore an iron-cogged pinion
and was pierced by a long horizontal beam some three feet from the ground.
Draught animals hitched to the ends of this and driven in a circular path
would revolve the hub and furnish power for transmission by cogs and belts
to the gin on the floor above. At the front of the house were a stair and a
platform for unloading seed cotton from the wagons; inside there were bins
for storage, as well as a space for operating the gin; and in the rear a
lean-to room extending to the ground level received the flying lint and let
it settle on the floor. The press, a skeleton structure nearby, had in the
center a stout wooden box whose interior length and width determined the
height and thickness of the bales but whose depth was more than twice as
great as the intended bale's width. The floor, the ends and the upper
halves of the sides of the box were built rigidly, but the lower sides were
hinged at the bottom, and the lid was a block sliding up and down according
as a great screw from above was turned to left or right. The screw,
sometimes of cast iron but preferably of wood as being less liable to break
under strain without warning, worked through a block mortised into a timber
frame above the box, and at its upper end it supported two gaunt beams
which sloped downward and outward to a horse path encircling the whole.
A cupola roof was generally built on the revolving apex to give a slight
shelter to the apparatus; and in some cases a second roof, with the screw
penetrating its peak, was built near enough the ground to escape the whirl
of the arms. When the contents of the lint room were sufficient for a bale,
a strip of bagging was laid upon the floor of the press and another was
attached to the face of the raised lid; the sides of the press were then
made fast, and the box was filled with cotton. The draught animals at the
beam ends were then driven round the path until the descent of the lid
packed the lint firmly; whereupon the sides were lowered, the edges of the
bagging drawn into place, ropes were passed through transverse slots in
the lid and floor and tied round the bale in its bagging, the pressure
was released, and the bale was ready for market. Between 1820 and 1860
improvements in the apparatus promoted an increase in the average weight
of the bales from 250 to 400 pounds; while in still more recent times the
replacement of horse power by steam and the substitution of iron ties for
rope have caused the average bale to be yet another hundredweight heavier.
The only other distinctive equipment for cotton harvesting comprised cloth
bags with shoulder straps, and baskets of three or four bushels capacity
woven of white-oak splits to contain the contents of the pickers' bags
until carried to the gin house to be weighed at the day's end.

Whether on a one-horse farm or a hundred-hand plantation, the essentials in
cotton growing were the same. In an average year a given force of laborers
could plant and cultivate about twice as much cotton as it could pick. The
acreage to be seeded in the staple was accordingly fixed by a calculation
of the harvesting capacity, and enough more land was put into other crops
to fill out the spare time of the hands in spring and summer. To this
effect it was customary to plant in corn, which required less than half as
much work, an acreage at least equal to that in cotton, and to devote the
remaining energy to sweet potatoes, peanuts, cow peas and small grain. In
1820 the usual crop in middle Georgia for each full hand was reported at
six acres of cotton and eight of corn;[3] but in the following decades
during which mules were advantageously substituted for horses and oxen,
and the implements of tillage were improved and the harvesters grew more
expert, the annual stint was increased to ten acres in cotton and ten in
corn.

[Footnote 3: _The American Farmer_ (Baltimore), II, 359.]

At the Christmas holiday when the old year's harvest was nearly or quite
completed, well managed plantations had their preliminaries for the new
crop already in progress. The winter months were devoted to burning
canebrakes, clearing underbrush and rolling logs in the new grounds,
splitting rails and mending fences, cleaning ditches, spreading manure,
knocking down the old cotton and corn stalks, and breaking the soil of the
fields to be planted. Some planters broke the fields completely each year
and then laid off new rows. Others merely "listed" the fields by first
running a furrow with a shovel plow where each cotton or corn row was to be
and filling it with a single furrow of a turn plow from either side; then
when planting time approached they would break out the remaining balks with
plows, turning the soil to the lists and broadening them into rounded plant
beds. This latter plan was advocated as giving a firm seed bed while making
the field clean of all grass at the planting. The spacing of the cotton
rows varied from three to five feet according to the richness of the soil.
The policy was to put them at such distance that the plants when full grown
would lightly interlace their branches across the middles.

In March the corn fields were commonly planted, not so much because this
forehandedness was better for the crop as for the sake of freeing the
choicer month of April for the more important planting of cotton. In this
operation a narrow plow lightly opened the crests of the beds; cotton seed
were drilled somewhat thickly therein; and a shallow covering of earth was
given by means of a concave board on a plow stock, or by a harrow, a roller
or a small shallow plow.