Indeed, for a few years after , many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. And after , northern allies abandoned southern black voters. Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance.
White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.
Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre—Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers.
For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time.
Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy—let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion—and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.
After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt—or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains.
Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion.
Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters.
Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.
But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation.
This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post— Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it.
Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor.
The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense.
Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire—this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power.
And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them. All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth.
Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen—even elect one of them president—to make amends.
Then the issue will be put to rest forever. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions.
But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. Ivy listened politely. He sat still. He was a mean man. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell.
So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives.
One woman had twelve children. Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. So Anderson moved to the next question.
Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Still others imagined that allowing slaves the ability to spend money as they chose might make up for restrictions in other parts of their lives. These slaveholders hoped to co-opt the consumer process and turn it into a management tool. But how could slaveholders take advantage of the consumer process while maintaining some semblance of control? Agricultural journals and plantation records burst with strategies and advice.
But from the s onward, we see planters strategizing further, introducing choice—or the illusion of choice—as a way to tamp down long-term discontent. Goodloe, for example, advised slaveholders to allow supervised shopping trips. Perhaps the easiest way to monitor slave spending was through the operation of a plantation store.
The system had a good many benefits, as Georgia slaveholder Thomas Clay explained. Slaveholders imagined themselves as models of economic propriety and their memoirs reveal much moralizing over choices made by their slaves.
Blacks wasted their money, masters opined, or bought goods impractical for their lowly lives. Purchased clothes were garish and gaudy, they scoffed. Worse, they did not know the value of a dollar, allowing vendors to take advantage of their lack of consumer savvy.
Over and over again, we see slaveholders attempt to justify their rule by pointing out the inadequacies of enslaved consumers. Shopping, then, entailed more than the acquisition of desired goods. Internal economy focused political struggle, and consumption was deeply woven into the tragic and tangled fabric of the master-slave relation. These purchases took careful planning. How much was their labor-power worth in a market that was weighted against free people of color?
Should they free themselves individually or wait until they had saved enough to buy kin as well? Would masters renege on sales or manipulate prices beyond reach? Given the difficulty of saving such an enormous sum, why not spend cash more immediately on food and clothing to make daily life less miserable? For most, these questions were no more than abstractions, as few enslaved people managed to purchase themselves.
Yet even the most thriftless and impoverished must have cherished the thought of that most conspicuous and politically subversive form of consumption. For masters and bondpeople alike, the internal economy both challenged the institution of slavery and shored it up.
Secession in sharpened this double-edged sword and threw all aspects of southern economic life into crisis. As crops failed and the Union blockade tightened, goods became scarce. The master class scraped to make ends meet. Seemingly unimportant trades ruined old relations and wove together new webs of economic, social, political, and cultural life in a thousand stressed communities.
Morgan, eds. Thus the balance of power between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states turned, in part, on the three-fifths presence of enslaved Africans in the census. Slaveholders were taxed on the same three-fifths principle, and no taxes paid on slaves supported the national treasury. In sum, the slavery system in the United States was a national system that touched the very core of its economic and political life. All rights reserved. Rice and indigo plantations in South Carolina also employed enslaved African labor.
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