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WSJ, Jan. 23 2016
The Children of Manifest Destiny
Andrew Jackson drove a convoy of chained slaves. It was known as a ‘coffle.’
By FERGUS M. BORDEWICH
THE AMERICAN SLAVE COAST
By Ned and Constance Sublette
Lawrence Hill, 754 pages, $35
In 1834, the slave trader Isaac Franklin wrote to a colleague that “the
old Lady and Susan”—a pair of slaves—“could soon pay for themselves by
keeping a whore house. . . . It might be . . . established at your place
[in] Alexandria or Baltimore for the exclusive use of the [concern] and
[its] agents.” Such a blunt acknowledgment of the sexual exploitation of
enslaved women was unusual but not unique in the antebellum South, as
Ned and Constance Sublette make clear in “The American Slave Coast,” an
often heart-wrenching descent into one of the darkest corners of
slavery’s history.
Slavery’s defenders hypocritically claimed that emancipation would lead
to rampant “miscegenation,” although race mixing was extremely rare in
the free North but ubiquitous in the South, where the rape of enslaved
women was a way of life. Hundreds of thousands of mulattoes were the
physical proof: in 1860, they made up at least 13% of the nation’s black
population. The Sublettes quote the South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin
Chesnut, who dryly observed in 1861: “Like the patriarchs of old our men
live all in one house with their wives & their concubines, & the
Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—&
every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in
every body’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop
from the clouds.”
There was no such crime as rape against a slave: A slave owner had full
right to do whatever he wished with his property, “and sexual use was
part of the portfolio of privileges,” the Sublettes write. The authors
note that, beyond the opportunity for unrestrained sexual activity, “the
existence of a market in young people created a financial incentive for
slaveowners to intrude into the reproductive lives of enslaved women.”
At least some plantations seem to have employed “breeding men” as studs,
or “stock Negroes.” The Sublettes quote a former Louisiana slave,
Lueatha Mansfield, who in old age told an interviewer that if a slave
owner “saw a fine woman or man on another plantation, he would buy him
or her for breeding purposes in order to continue to have good able
workers. If he didn’t bring them on the same farm, he would arrange for
them to breed from each other.”
Evidence of systematic breeding remains anecdotal, however. The
Sublettes found no evidence of plantations devoted explicitly to
breeding. They point out that such a system would make no economic
sense, since “human beings grow too slowly to raise them as a
cash-producing monocrop.” But, they conclude, “that doesn’t mean slave
breeding didn’t take place on a broad scale, only that it wasn’t
practiced as an isolated profession.” They segue to the much more
expansive proposition that, especially after the curtailment of the
overseas slave trade in 1808, “antebellum slavery was in the aggregate a
slave-breeding system.” This may be true in the most general sense, but
it is an oversimplification that does not really illuminate, implicitly
making slaves’ reproduction everywhere seem congruent with a calculated
process of controlled breeding.
To make their case, the authors devote most of their book to a lengthy
and often digressive account of slavery’s entire history in North
America. They begin with 16th-century slave trading and move on to the
arrival of the first African slaves in Jamestown and the development of
slavery in the Chesapeake region and in Barbados. Their broad exposition
includes the creation of a legal regime to define the status of imported
Africans; the slaveholding of some of the Founding Fathers; the slave
trading of Andrew Jackson (he was the only president to have personally
driven a “coffle,” or convoy, of chained slaves); and the ideology of
Manifest Destiny, which inspired Americans with a vision of the nation
as a transcontinental power and in its specifically Southern iteration
included the spread of slavery all the way to the Pacific Ocean. These
subjects may well be familiar to readers versed in the larger history of
slavery.
Fortunately, the Sublettes’ usually crisp prose keeps their narrative
moving at a comfortable pace, while their boundless curiosity sometimes
leads to unexpectedly interesting places. They offer enlightening
discussion of slavery’s intersection with early newspapers, in which ads
for slave sales and runaways were a significant source of revenue. They
show the ways in which transferable credit and experimental paper money
were used to facilitate slave sales at a time when little specie was
available in the colonies. They also provide an excellent account of the
political rivalry between South Carolina, which supported the
importation of cheap slaves from Africa to feed the port of Charleston
and its profitable slave pens, and Virginia, which wanted to end the
foreign slave trade because it increased the value of her own “surplus”
slaves.
The Sublettes make clear that slavery was, in effect, the South’s
version of the American dream: More slaves equaled more wealth and
higher status. The four million enslaved in 1860 were not merely a labor
force, the authors observe; “they were the South’s capital stock,” worth
between $2 billion and $4 billion in mid-19th century terms and perhaps
10 times that amount in today’s dollars. Emancipation thus left the
South economically supine after the Civil War. As the Sublettes
concisely put it: “The security for hundreds of millions of dollars in
debt walked away, leaving the obligations valueless, the credit
structure imploded, . . . and the planters owning worthless land.” As
valuable as it is to be reminded of such facts, more fine-grained
examinations of the business of slavery will be in found in “River of
Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom” (2013) by Walter
Johnson and “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of
American Capitalism” (2014) by Edward E. Baptist.
Unfortunately, the individual experiences of enslaved women and their
families tends too often to get lost in the Sublettes’ larger scheme of
history. What is more, they pay little attention to the effect on men of
the exploitation on the women in their lives. Men were either forced to
acquiesce (or even watch) while their wives and daughters were raped by
whites or savagely punished for daring to try to protect them. When we
hear the voices of enslaved women, or face their plight directly,
however, the Sublettes’ narrative really comes alive.
Most of the victims still remain nameless, such as a mother who was
interviewed by a curious congressman at Isaac Franklin’s slave pen, in
Washington, D.C., in 1829. The woman, the congressman reported, had
given birth to “eight or nine” children by her free husband, but each
one had been sold away by her owner when the children had reached the
age of 10 or 12. The woman having passed the age of fertility, she too
was now being put on the market. Her fate is unknown, but her sale no
doubt contributed its mite to Franklin’s immense fortune as the most
successful slave trader in America in his day. When he died in 1846, he
left his wife an estate valued at more than $700,000 in contemporary
terms, along with a vast plantation, known as “Angola,” in Louisiana.
The plantation site, the Sublettes note, is today occupied by the
Louisiana State Penitentiary, where its inmates, 76% of whom are black,
perform unmechanized field labor not much different from that done by
their ancestors in slavery days.
—Mr. Bordewich’s most recent book is “The First Congress: How James
Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented
the Government.”
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