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March 5, 2016 - February 11, 2019
surveil
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.
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,
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.
screes
calico
Raw materials imported from overseas—such as cotton—were essential, but by 1834 the empire concluded it no longer needed its own slaves.
proof-text.
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
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bolls.
millrace
tranches
All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves—6 percent of the total US population—who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery’s frontier.
By 1845, steam-powered factories were becoming the rule. Increasingly, they burned coal. In 1820, Pennsylvania had sent 365 tons of anthracite coal to market; by 1844 that number had climbed to more than 1.6 million tons.
As northern factories grew, employers could not hire enough workers. In response, European immigration to the North soared. One and a half million came to the United States in the 1840s alone. The Irish were the paradigm. By 1845, 220,000 had already come in a decade not half over, and the second half saw 550,000 Irish refugees arrive in the United States, fleeing British oppression and a famine that killed millions.
The immigrants’ choice to move to the North had a significant demographic impact, raising the northern population from 7.1 million in 1830 to 10 million in 1840, and then to over 14 million by 1850. In the same period, the South grew much more slowly, from 5.7 million in 1830 to almost 9 million.
In 1820, 42 percent of the House members came from slave states. Along with southern equality in the Senate, enslavers had thus needed only a handful of free-state allies to block any proposal they did not like. But after the 1840 US Census, the number of slave-state representatives dropped below 40 percent. After 1850, free-state representatives would make up two-thirds of the House.
The newly emerging northern critique of enslavers and their allies was different from that of immediatists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, who demanded that America purge itself of sins. Instead, the new critics argued that southern slavery damaged the national economy.
defalcations
ur-version
slake
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the result of negotiations with the representatives of defeated Mexico. In addition to confirming Texas annexation, the treaty gave the United States 525,000 additional square miles of the conquered nation-state—13 acres for each of the 23 million people in the Union. This was the third-biggest acquisition of territory in US history, after the Louisiana Purchase and Alaska. The Senate eliminated an article that promised recognition of land claims granted by the Spanish or Mexican governments. The treaty opened the new southwest to a massive Anglo real-estate
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Yet Calhoun did not trust either Taylor or the party system. In January 1849, he and four other southerners in Congress issued a printed “Address”: it warned that if the North’s anti-southern attitudes continued to grow, and the South did not respond, slavery’s expansion—and slavery itself—would end. A Congress dominated by the likes of John Palfrey the younger would ban the interstate slave trade. Then there would be no injections of new capital, and no stick to hold over enslaved people’s heads. An expanding black population would demographically drown whites, and forced emancipation would
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Mississippi state politicians organized a “Slaveholders’ Convention” for October 1849. Senator Henry Foote, Calhoun’s Mississippi ally, began to organize an 1850 region-wide convention—an implied threat, a gathering that could be repurposed into a body ready to deliberate on nation-un-making.
it turned to the business of hiring an official “door-keeper”—an employee position similar to sergeant-at-arms. But then northern and southern representatives turned that, too, into a fight: Should they hire a proslavery or antislavery man?
premonitory
what led the three-quarters of the white southern population who didn’t own slaves to fight, and hundreds of thousands to die, for such doomed madness?
First the white folks disappeared Lulu’s father down the river on a steamboat. As cotton prices stayed high down at the bottom of the map, the older siblings trickled down, too. Clever, clever owner. He showed the merchandise, negotiated the deal, shipped the child off with the trader—all in one workday. Every time, Lulu’s mother got home from the field to find it was already over. “Oh Lord,” she screamed, falling on the cabin’s dirt floor, begging on her knees by the empty bed, “let me see the end of it before I die.
many Cuba expansionists supported extralegal tactics called “filibustering,” a term that in the mid-nineteenth century did not mean obstructionist legislative behavior, but still held its seventeenth-century meaning deriving from the activity of Caribbean pirates. Cuban exiles, Wall Street money, New York publicists, and Mississippi power-brokers supported a series of attempted “filibuster” expeditions intended to overthrow the island’s Spanish colonial government.
course of the 1850s, cotton production and slave ownership became increasingly concentrated among those who owned fifteen or more slaves.38 This skewing of white southerners’ benefits from slavery and of their investment in it inspired forebodings in enslavers, practical political economists who depended on white unity. So did the continued southward shift of enslaved human beings. Perhaps the declining percentage of slaves and slave owners in the upper southern states would eventually lead to border-state legislatures filled with non-slaveholders, who might decide to impose emancipation.
Republicans appealed to a wider audience. They opposed the expansion of slavery both on moral grounds and because they believed the white man’s frontier should be unsullied by black slaves.
proscription
Senator Atchison urged white Missourians to “do their duty” and secure “peace and quiet” at the Kansas ballot box. The 5,000 Missourians who crossed the border to vote illegally accounted for 75 percent of the ballots. All but one of the legislators elected were proslavery.
assaulted Sumner at his Senate desk with a cane, beating the Massachusetts man into bloodied unconsciousness. “We much regret that the insolence of such men as Sumner renders such scenes occasionally necessary” to defend one’s honor, wrote a Georgia editor.
manumitted
chattel
For the Union, Lincoln insisted, cannot “endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing or the other.
An Irishman in Columbia, South Carolina, dared to express the opinion that slavery drove down wage rates for white laborers. A mob stripped him naked. State legislators ordered a slave to beat him, and then they poured boiling tar on his bleeding skin and doused him with feathers. The northern newspaper that interviewed the Irishman when he made it back to New York reported that “he had always voted with the Democratic Party.
hagiographic
Slavery’s productivity was higher than ever—some 700 pounds per enslaved man, woman, and child in the cotton country, twenty-two times the rate in 1790.
Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states’ rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery. Lincoln’s victory led Deep South slaveholders to claim that only secession could save the South from being “stripped,” as one Alabama editor, a former Douglas supporter, said, “of 25 hundred millions of slave
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Not only had the Republican Party declared its goal to be abolition, but it “now demand[s] . . . equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the right of matrimony.
Lincoln’s victory left only one choice. Secede, or your neighbor’s field “hand” will marry your daughter. Secede, or offer up your “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Republican domination, the emissary concluded, meant a “saturnalia of blood,” “a war of extermination” that would lead to the destruction of the white people by “assassinations” and “amalgamation,” or rape.
In the War of 1812, thousands of slaves had fled to the British. An army raised in the free states, on the ground in the slave ones, would by its mere presence disrupt enslavers’ power. It is certainly strange that few enslaver-politicians considered this possibility.
By early 1862, the number of bales received at Liverpool fell to 3 percent of the 1860 level. The sudden dearth of cotton on the world market raised prices, ironically rendering cotton from other production zones price-competitive with the yield of enslaved hands for the first time in the nineteenth century. In West Africa and in Brazil, cotton production expanded dramatically. And in Egypt, farmers turned the rich soil of the Nile delta into a huge cotton plantation.
at the end of 1862, half of the cotton was rotting in the fields—cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed.
they stood with her as the provost marshal, the military commandant who governed civilians living in the camp, married Lucinda to Abram “under the flag,” as the saying went. The certificate that the commandant gave them proved that Abram and Lucinda had been married in a legal ceremony, one sanctioned by the national state itself. Unlike prewar marriages, which enslavers erased at whim, these weddings had the force of law.
In the surviving photo from March 4, 1865, the triumphant and solemn day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, you can see among the massive crowd of people covering the Capitol portico a mustached figure leaning against a pillar. For John Wilkes Booth was present for Lincoln’s astonishing second inaugural address. This was, perhaps, the greatest speech ever given in the English language. It was itself a history of the half untold. It named slavery and the incessant pressure for its expansion as the reason why oceans of blood had drowned the battlefields of the Civil War. When he turned over the
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the president announced his support for extending the vote to African-American men. Their service in battle had saved the nation. Booth was in the crowd at that speech, too. He turned to a friend. Lincoln’s announcement, Booth snarled, “means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” And on Good Friday 1865, April 14, he murdered the president.
He was succeeded by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was unfortunately an alcoholic racist bent on undermining emancipation.
