Johnson - River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in The Cotton Kingdom (2013) PDF

Walter Johnson
RIVER of
DARK
DREAMS
Slavery and Empire in the
Cotton Kingdom
ri ver of da r k dr ea ms
RIVER of
DARK
DREAMS
Slavery and Empire
in the Cotton Kingdom
Walter Johnson
t h e b e l kn a p p re ss of
h a r v a r d uni ve r si t y p re ss
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2013
Copyright 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Walter, 1967
River of dark dreams:slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom/Walter Johnson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-04555-2 (alkaline paper)
1.SlaveryMississippi River ValleyHistory19th century. 2.Cotton growingMississippi River
ValleyHistory19th century. 3.SlaveryEconomic aspectsMississippi River ValleyHistory
19th century. 4.CapitalismMississippi River ValleyHistory19th century. 5.Social change
Mississippi River ValleyHistory19th century. 6.Mississippi River ValleyRace relations
History19th century. 7.Mississippi River ValleyCommerceHistory19th century. 8.United
StatesTerritorial expansionHistory19th century. 9.ImperialismHistory19th
century. 10.Slave tradeHistory19th century. I.Title.
E449.J695 2013
305.800977dc23 2012030065
For Alison,
my morning star
Contents
Introduction: Boom
1 Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana
18
2 The Panic of 1835
46
3 The Steamboat Sublime
73
4 Limits to Capital
97
5 The Runaways River
126
6 Dominion
151
7 The Empire of the White Mans Will
176
8 The Carceral Landscape
209
9 The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton
244
10 Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade
280
11 Tales of Mississippian Empire
303
12 The Material Limits of Manifest Destiny
330
13 The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny
366
14 The Ignominious Effort to Reopen the Slave Trade
395
Notes
423
Acknowledgments
509
Index
515
He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities;
the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5
introduction
Boom
The slave barons looked behind them and saw to their dismay that there could be
no backward step. The slavery of the new Cotton Kingdom in the nineteenth century must either die or conquer a nationit could not hesitate or pause.
W. E. B. Du Bois, John Brown
on december 14, 1850, the Anglo-Norman backed from the levee at New
Orleans and headed up the Mississippi River on what was supposed to be a
short, celebratory maiden voyage. Having satisfied all on board that she was a
first rate sailor, and giving the promise of a brilliant career in the future, the
steamboat started back down the river. Among those aboard was H.A. Kidd,
the editor of the New Orleans Crescent, who described what happened next in
an essay entitled The Experience of a Blown-Up Man: Ajet of hot water,
accompanied with steam was forced out of the main pipe, just aft of the chimney. He had just enough time to wonder aloud what was happening when, he
reported, Iwas suddenly lifted high in the air how high it is impossible for me
to say ... passing rather irregularly through the air, enveloped as it seemed to
me in a dense cloud. He remembered thinking that he would inevitably be
lost, but had no recollection of falling back into the river. When I arose to
the surface, he continued, I wiped the water from my face, and attempted to
obtain a view of things around me, but this I was prevented from doing by the
vapor of steam, which enveloped everything as a cloud. As the steam cleared,
Kidd wrote, Ifound myself in possession of my senses, and my limbs in good
working order. He became aware that he was surrounded by twenty or thirty
of his fellow passengers. He noticed that many of those in the water were des-
r i ver o f d a r k d r ea ms
lllllllllllllllllllllll
perately trying to find pieces of the shattered Anglo-Norman to help them stay
afloat, and he, too, looked around for something to which he could cling. He
was freezing cold, and could feel the energy draining from his body as he tried
to swim. Low in the water, preparing to die, the editor saw another steamboat
bearing down upon him. Stop the boat! Stop the boat! he heard the others
crying out.1
Later, after he had been dragged, nearly lifeless, from the river by a sailor
aboard that boat, the editor was able to reconstruct some of the details of the
disaster. As the Anglo-Norman rounded for home, the steam pressure used to
drive the paddle wheel had overwhelmed the engine s safety valve, causing the
boats massive iron boilers to explode. Not a scrap as large as a mans hand
remained, Kidd recounted.2 Given that he had been seated on a veranda directly above the boats engine, Kidd was lucky to have survived. It was later
estimated that more than half of those aboard had been killed: scalded by the
escaping steam, struck by the projectile fragments of the splintered boat, or
drowned in the frigid river. But there was no way to know for sure how many
had died. Very few of the names of those who were killed could be ascertained, wrote another, but the general opinion was that the number of victims could not be less than one hundred.3
If he had dared open his eyes at the top of his arc, Kidd would have seen the
Mississippi Valley laid out before him. Downriver was thegreat city of New
Orleans: the commercial emporium of the Midwest, the principal channel
through which Southern cotton flowed to the global economy and foreign cap
ital came into the United States, the largest slave market in North America,
and the central artery of the continents white overseers flirtation with the
perverse attractions of global racial domination. Upriver lay hundreds of millions of acres of land. Land that had been forcibly incorporated into the United
States through diplomacy (with the great powers of Europe) and violence
(against Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, and Creole whites);
land that had been promised to white yeoman farmers but was being worked
by black slaves; land that had been stripped bare and turned to the cultivation
of cotton; land in the United States of America that was materially subservient
to the caprice of speculators in distant markets; land (and cotton and slaves)
for which, in a few short years, young men would fight and die. He might have
seen a flash-pan image of the catastropheat once imperial, ecological, eco-
Introduction
nomic, moralthat haunted the visions of progress and plenty by which the
Valleys masters had charted the course of its history.4
that history the history of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the

nineteenth-century Mississippi Valleybegan with a dream. Specifically, a
dream in the mind of Thomas Jeffersonthe philosopher, visionary, slaveholder president of the United States in 1803. Jeffersons hope for the Mississippi Valley was that the abundance of land would produce a harvest of self-
sufficient, noncommercial white households headed by the yeomen patriarchs
whom he associated with republican virtue, a flowering of white equality and
political independence: an empire for liberty.5 The notion of an empire for
liberty had embedded within it a theory of space. Given enough land, migrants from the East would naturally be transformed into a freeholding, republican yeomanry. Spread out across the landscape, white farmers would
have to provide for themselves: they would be too removed from cities to be
reliant upon them for their basic needs (or to develop other needs they could
not meet themselves); too distant from credit networks to find themselves ensnared in the sort of debtor-creditor relationships that could compromise their
political independence; and too far from factoriesto become dependent upon
wages paid by others for their daily sustenance.These yeoman farmers would
be self-sufficient, equal, and independentmasters of their own destiny. Necessity would be more than the mother of invention: it would give birth to in
dependence, maturity, freedom.
Jeffersons vision of social order through expansion had at its heart a
household-based notion of political economy. Rather than cities sprawling
across the American landscape, bound together by invisible financial networks
and all-too-visible factories, white households were to be the serially reproduced units by which progress was measured. Go to the West, and visit one
of our log cabins, and number its inmates, enthused one latter-day Jeffersonian. There you will find a strong, stout youth of eighteen, with his betterhalf, just commencing the first struggles of independent life. Thirty years
from that time, visit them again; and instead of two, you will find in the same
family twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table.6
The spatial aspect of the empire for liberty was defined more by reproduction than production: the vast lands of the Louisiana Purchase would allow the
United States to freeze economic history at a given moment, and develop

through expansion rather than diversificationthrough the proliferation of
the gendered hierarchies of household social order rather than through the intensification of class hierarchies of Eastern, urban, industrial development.
The liberties promised by Jeffersons vision depended upon racial conquest.
Through a series of military and diplomatic actionsmost notably the Louisiana Purchase, the defeat of the Creek nation at Horseshoe Bend in 1814 and
of the British at New Orleans in 1815, the Spanish cession of the Florida Parishes, and the Choctaw land cessions at Doaks Stand in 1820 and Dancing
Rabbit Creek in 1830the United States government had by the 1830s established a distinction between lands that were inside and those that were outside the Southwest. This was a distinction that they admittedly were prepared
to abandon quickly in the event of an opportunity to expand into Texas, Mexico, Cuba, or even Nicaragua, but it was simultaneously one used to fortify an
emerging continentalist understanding of what constituted the United States.7
For the politicians and military men who brought the vast spaces of the Territories of Louisiana and Mississippi under the dominion of the United States,
a set of problems persisted after the battles had been won, the treaties signed,
and the territories transferred. The United States of America entered the second quarter of the nineteenth century with a vast public domain in the Mississippi Valley; the question was finding the best mechanism to turn that land into
a reservoir for the cultivation of whiteness of the proper kind. While Jefferson
was initially motivated by his fear of an overly concentrated population in the
East, he also worried that a too sparsely settled population, concentrated along
the Mississippi River and separated from the East, might form a breakaway
republic. The General Land Office, chartered during the War of 1812 to distribute Mississippi Valley lands conquered from the Creek, was the settled-
upon solution to this dilemma of racial-imperial governance. Through the
Land Office, the public domain of the United States could be divided into
small, private parcels and distributed to its citizens. The formal sovereignty of
the United States over the Mississippi Valley would be fulfilled in the shape of
a republic of independent, smallholding farmers.
In the event, the course so carefully plotted was not the one followed. The
General Land Office settled on a market mechanism for distributing the public
domain of the United States to its citizens. In spite of various efforts to stem
Introduction
the tide of speculative investment that flowed into the land market, the Mississippi Valley was soon awash in the very capital Jefferson had so feared. The
mechanisms put in place by the government to protect the abilities of first-time
purchasers to secure land that was also desired by big-time speculators (an inherently difficult task when the land auction was already the agreed-upon solution to the problem of allocation) were often undermined by moneyed in
terests. Wealthy individuals could hire or purchase other people to stake their
claims and improve their land for them. The flow of capital into the Mississippi
Valley transferred title of the empire for liberty to the emergent overlords
of the Cotton Kingdom, and the yeomans republic soon came under the
dominion of what came to be called the slaveocracy.
The flush timesthe concomitant booms in the land market, the cotton
market, and the slave marketreshaped the Mississippi Valley in the 1830s.
African-American slaves were brought in to cultivate the land expropriated
from Native Americans. Between 1820 and 1860 as many as a million people
were sold down the river through an internal slave trade, which, in addition
to the downriver trade, involved a coastal trade (Norfolk to New Orleans, for
instance) and an overland trade (Fayetteville, North Carolina, to Florence,
Alabama, for instance). Their relocation and reassignment to the cultivation
of cottonthe leading sector of the emergent global economy of the first half
of the nineteenth centurygave new life to slavery in the United States. An
institution that had been in decline throughout the eighteenth century in the
Upper South was revivified in the Lower South at terrible cost; by 1860, there
were more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi Valley than anywhere else
in the United States. White privilege on an unprecedented scale was wrung
from the lands of the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Chickasaw and from the
bodies of the enslaved people brought in to replace them. The bright-white
tide of slavery-as-progress, however, was shadowed by a host of boomtime
terrors. Slaveholders feared that the slaves upon whom the Cotton Kingdom
depended, as well as the nonslaveholding whites whom it shunted to the margins of a history they had thought to be their own, might rise up and even
unite in support of its overthrow.
As the Mississippi Valley expanded, thousands of investors rushed to launch
their boats on the river. No property pays so great an interest as that of steamboats upon these rivers. A trip of a few weeks yields one-hundred per-cent
upon the capital employed, wrote one early observer.8 Apart from land and
slaves, steamboats were the leading investment sector in the Mississippi Valley
economy after the 1820s. Seventeen steamboats plied the waters of the Western rivers in 1817, the year of the first significant upriver steamboat journey.Three decades later there were well over 700, each of these representing
something close to a 200 percent increase in carrying capacity over the earlier
boats. In 1820 it was still possible to publish a detailed list of the nearly 200
steamboats arriving at the levee in New Orleans in the space of three pages,
whereas in 1860 there were more than 3,500 such arrivals. Taken together,
those boats represented some 160,000 tons of shipping and $17million of cap
ital investment, annually carrying something like $220million worth of goods
(mostly cotton) to market.9
The standard-issue milestones of nineteenth-century U.S. economic history
locate the story of leading-sector development in the mills of Massachusetts
rather than along the Mississippi. But if one sets aside the threadbare story of
industrialization for a moment, and thinks instead in the technological terms
more familiar to the time, the radical break represented by the steamboats
comes into clearer focus. The mills in Lowell used energy according to a formula that was thousands of years old: they used the force of gravity to channel
water through the downward flow of miles of canals to power their works.
Steamboats turned wood and water against gravity: they took the materials
from which the mills were built, remixed and combusted them, and produced
enough added force to drive a 500-ton steamboat upriver. A mere handful of
the steamboats docked along the levee in New Orleans on any given day could
have run the entire factory complex at Lowell, which was spread over forty
square miles and employed 10,000 people.10 Of course, steamboats also exploded with a frequency and ferocity unprecedented in human history. That,
too, was characteristic of the era. Like the fears of slave revolt or class conflict
among whites, however, the knowledge that the technologies of dominion and
extraction concealed within them mechanisms that could produce disorder and
destruction was often pushed to the margins of the account of the Mississippi
Valley given by its boosters.
The Great West, wrote one of the latter, has now a commerce within its
limits as valuable as that which floats on the ocean between the United States
and Europe.11 And the effect on upriver commerce was an order of magni-
Introduction
tude greater than even the exponential growth of the downriver trade: Previous to the year 1817, the whole commerce from New Orleans to the upper
country was carried in about twenty barges, averaging one-hundred tons each,
and making but one trip a year, so that the importations from New Orleans in
one year could not have much exceeded the freight brought up by one of our
largest steamboats in the course of a season.12
In 1810, the population of New Orleans was around 17,000; by 1860, it was
close to ten times that number. Writing in 1842, the Northern traveler Joseph
Buckingham estimated the population of the city at upwards of 100,000; of
which it is considered that there are about 50,000 whites, 40,000 Negro slaves,
and 10,000 free blacks and people of color.13 Irish, Germans, upriver immigrants, and black slaves, men and women, dug the muddy canals (one of them
to this day known as the Irish Canal), shored up the eroding levees, built the
banks, painted the parlors, hauled the cotton, drove the carriages, delivered the
messages, swept the verandas, baked the bread, emptied the chamber pots, and
raised the children. Buyers and sellers packed the citys hotels and rooming
houses from October to March, creating the market which turned cotton into
slaves and slaves into cotton.
The touch points of the river worldthe levees where bags and bales were
loaded onto the boats; the kitchens and dining rooms where stewards supervised cooks, waiters, and chambermaids; the wood yards and engine rooms
where slaves cut wood and stoked the enginesmapped a set of shadow connections between enslaved people and free people of color that we might term
the counterculture of the Cotton Kingdom.14 As they did the work on which
the steamboat economy so obviouslyso visiblydepended, enslaved people
and free people of color daily reproduced the networks of affiliation and solidarity that made it possible for them to escape slavery in numbers that dismayed their masters. The owner of one escaped slave declared that slaves in
the Mississippi Valley were held by the most uncertain tenure by reason of
the facilities held out for escape by steamboats.15
In the mid-1840s, the steamboat economy discovered its outer limit: every
inland backwater that had just enough water in the spring to carry a steamboat
was being serviced.16 There were no more new routes to establish, no more
hinterlands to draw into trade; the geographic limit of the frontier of accu
mulation had been reached. This did not mean that entrepreneurs stopped in-
vesting in steamboats; it meant only that their investments were less likely to
be successful. By 1848, steamboat owners were trying to protect their own
market share by advising others to get out of the business: Let those who can
with convenience withdraw from this fascinating business of steamboating.
Let all who are not involved in it stand aloof until the tonnage on the rivers
bereduced to the wants of the country; until remunerating prices can be obtained.17 As capital continued to flow into the river trade and as more and
more boats competed for a given number of routes, steamboat owners faced a
falling rate of profit. Because they could not expand their routes, they turned
their attention to deepening their share of those they already serviced. Henceforth, steamboats competed by trying to offer better, faster, more responsive,
or more predictable service than their competitors. As the steamboat economy
reached its spatial limit, new entrants tried to make their money back by controlling time.18 Increasingly, they tried to wring profits from the river trade by
running their boats in a way that put both their passengers and cargo in mortal
danger. When time is of the essence, safety, almost inevitably, is not.
As well as an economic transformation, the rise of the Cotton Kingdom
represented a substantial ecological transformation of the Mississippi Valley.
Cotton plantations were tools for controlling labor and organizing production,
but, although this has seldom been noted, they were also ways of attempting
to control and organize nature. Most of the cotton picked by Valley slaves was
Petit Gulf (Gossypium barbadense), a hybrid strain developed in Rodney, Mississippi, patented in 1820, and prized for its pickability. The hegemony of
this single plant over the landscape of the Cotton Kingdom produced both a
radical simplification of nature and a radical simplification of human being:
the reduction of landscape to cotton plantation and of human being to hand.
Cotton mono-cropping stripped the land of vegetation, leached out its fertility, and rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth depen
denton upriver trade for food. It was within these material parameters that
enslaved people in the Mississippi Valley lived, labored, resisted, and reproduced. And it was in response to these material limitationsand in response
to enslaved peoples response to these limitationsthat Valley slaveholders
sought to project their power outward in the shape of pro-slavery imperialism
in the 1850s.
The history of the enslaved people who toiled in those fields has gener-
Introduction
allybeen approached through durable abstractions: the master-slave relationship, white supremacy, resistance, accommodation, agency. Each
category has been indispensable to understanding slavery; together they have
made it possible to see things that otherwise would have been missed. Increasingly, however, these categories have become unmoored from the historical
experience they were intended to represent. The question of agency has often been framed quite abstractlycounterpoised against power as if both
terms were arrayed at the ends of some sort of sliding scale, an increase in one
meaning a corresponding decrease in the other.19 But agency, like power,
is historically conditioned: it takes specific forms at specific times and places;
itis thick with the material givenness of a moment in time. Agency is less
a simple opposite of power than its unfinished reliefa dynamic three-
dimensional reflection. The history of Gossypium barbadense suggests that beneath the abstractions lies a history of bare-life processes and material exchanges so basic that they have escaped the attention of countless historians of
slavery.20 The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal
energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger,
and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit.21
While it is easy to lose sight of the elementally human character of labor
even that of forced laborin light of the salutary political effect of labeling
slavery inhuman, it is important to recognize that slaves humanity was not
restricted to a zone of agency or culture outside their work. When slaves
went into the field, they took with them social connections and affective ties.
The labor process flowed through them, encompassed them, was interrupted
and redefined by them. Slaves worked alongside people they knew, people
they had raised, and people they would bury. They talked, they sang, they
laughed, they suffered, they remembered their ancestors and their God, the
rhythms of their lives working through and over those of their work. We cannot any more separate slaves labor from their humanity than we can separate
the ability of a human hand to pick cotton from its ability to caress the cheek
of a crying child, the aching of a stooped back in the field from the arc of
abody bent in supplication, the voice that called time for the hoes from that
which told a story that was centuries old.
A similar focus on the interlinking of material process and cognitive experience can help us to understand the character of slaveholding agency, particu-
10
larly the long-standing question of the relationship of slavery and capitalism.

Cotton planters work in the worldtheir agencywas shaped at the juncture of ecology, agriculture, mastery, and economy: weather patterns, crop
cycles, work routines, market cycles, financial obligations. The cotton market about which they so frequently spoke, and to which they attributed an almost determinative power over their own lives and fortunes, was in actual fact
a network of material connections that stretched from Mississippi and Louisiana to Manhattan and Lowell to Manchester and Liverpool. The economic
space of the cotton market was defined by a set of standard measureshands,
pounds, lashes, bales, gradesthat translated aspects of the process of production and sale into one another. Those tools for measuring and enforcing
quantity, quality, and value produced commercial fluidity over space, across
time, and between modes of production. Yet they also indexed the frictions
resulting from the movement of cotton from field to factory: shifts between
quantitative and qualitative valuation of the crop, between the physical pro
cesses of producing the cotton and those of grading it, between the labor of
slaves and the demands of purchasers. These measures served both as the imperatives by which the commercial standards of the wider economy might be
translated into the disciplinary standards that prevailed on its bloody margin,
and as markers of the nonstandard, human, resistant character of the labor
that produced the value that was ultimately being measured and extracted.
They marked both the extent to which the metrics of the exchange in Liverpool penetrated the labor practices of Louisiana and the extent to which the
labor practices of Louisiana pushed outward to shape the practice of the global
market. Rather than a pure formcapitalism or slaverythey united,
formatted, and measured the actually existing capitalism and slavery of the
nineteenth century.
Along the levee in New Orleans, the Mississippi Valley met the Atlantic.
Between 85 and 90 percent of the American crop was annually sent to Liverpool for sale. For most of the period before the Civil War, the United States
was the source of close to 80 percent of the cotton imported by British manufacturers. The fortunes of cotton planters in Louisiana and cotton brokers in
Liverpool, of the plantations of the Mississippi Valley and the textile mills of
Manchester, were tied together through the cotton tradethe largest single
sector of the global economy in the first half of the nineteenth century. As one
Introduction
11
English observer put it, describing the commercial symbiosis of slavery and
industry, Manchester is no less needful to New Orleans than New Orleans is
to Manchester.22
Much of the history of the political economy of slavery in the Mississippi
Valley was framed by the tension between the South as a region of the global
economy and the South as a region of the United States of Americaby the
tension between the promiscuity of capital and the limits prescribed by the territorial sovereignty of the United States. As Adam Smith wrote, merchant
capital was by nature mobile: it seems to have no fixed residence anywhere,
but may wander from place to place, according as it may either buy cheap or
sell dear.23 Rather than inhabiting space, merchant capital made it, fabricatingconnections and annihilating distances according to rates of interest and
freight, the laws of supply and demand. The laws of the United States, however, sought to channel and limit the accumulation of capital in ways that many
in the Mississippi Valley increasingly came to believe divested them of their
birthrightas slaveholders, as Americans, as whites, as men.
To imagine and represent the global span of this economy, pro-slavery po
litical economists (especially after the Depression of 1837) seized upon another
metric: the fact that the South provided two-thirds of the nations exports,
but consumed only one-tenth of its imports. Rather than as a measure of the
degraded condition of Southern slavesSouthern demand for goods was low,
it could be argued, because slaveholders continually pushed downward upon
the subsistence levels of their slaves (which is to say one-half of the population of the states of Mississippi and Louisiana)or even of the comparative
underdevelopment of Southern manufacturing, the defenders of slavery interpreted this imbalance as evidence of the degraded condition of slaveholders. Two issues were of particular (not to say obsessive) concern. The first
was slaveholders vulnerability to tariffs, which, defenders of slavery argued, transformed Southern agricultural wealth into a subsidy to Northern
manufacturers. Second were unscrupulous financiers and merchants, who sold
slaveholders cotton short and siphoned their profits. Increasingly, pro-slavery
political economists looked to free tradeto a relation with the global economy unmediated by the territorial sovereignty of the United Statesas the
solution to Southern economic disadvantage.
All of this leaves us with two sets of questions. First, how did the global
12
reach of the cotton economyin which millions of pounds of cotton and billions of dollars were annually traded, in which credit chased cotton from the
metropolitan banks of Europe to every plantation outpost of the Mississippi
Valley and then back again, in which the rate of exploitation of slaves in a field
in Mississippi, measured in pounds per day, was keyed to the standards of the
Exchange in Liverpool and the labor of the mill-hands in Manchesterhow
did this global economic formation result in one of the most powerfully sectionalist accounts of political economy in the nineteenth century: the Confederate States of America? And second, perhaps even more perplexing, how did
this regionalist account of political economy come to seek its resolution in globalism? How did those who saw merchants as bloodsuckers and interlopers
come to see more trade rather than less as the solution to their problems? How
did Valley cotton planters who were daily exposed to the risks of transactions
that occurred thousands of miles away, whose years work would be consumed in a matter of minutes due to a decision made in an unknown warehouse by an unknown merchant (covering his own unknown obligations),
come to seek an even more direct exposure to the global economy? How did
the defenders of the Mississippi Valleys Cotton Kingdom become free traders
and then imperialists?
It is easy to see in retrospect that overinvestment in slaves, overproductionof cotton, and overreliance on credit made Valley planters vulnerable to
precisely the sort of crisis they experienced during the Depression of 1837.
Cotton planting was extraordinarily capital intensive, and most of planters
money was tied up in land and slaves. For the money they needed to get
through the yearfor liquiditythey relied on credit. And to get credit, they
had to plant cotton. Their situationthe fact that they were overaccumulated in a single sector of the economywas expressed in the antebellum
commonplace repeated to the Northern traveler Edward Russell as he made
his way up the Red River in 1854. Planters, a man told Russell, care for nothing but to buy Negroes to plant cotton & raise cotton to buy Negroes.24
The commonplace made no mention of the fact that because the planters
capital was human, their economy was particularly vulnerable to the sort of
structural shock represented by the Panic of 1837. In most capitalist economies, capital chases the leading sector. Over time, as more and more is invested
in a single sector, returns diminish. Often there is a crisis, a crash. Value in one
Introduction
13
sector is destroyedacres go untilled, factories are left to rot, workers are laid
offand investment moves on. Thus, in our own time, overinvestment in information technology, software development, and web-based marketing gave
way to overinvestment in real estate, mortgage-backed securities, security
technology, and defense contracting. Much of that capital has now been destroyed, leaving the world strewn with the husks of prior cycles of boom-andbust, of speculation, overinvestment, and crisis. But in the nineteenth-century
South, capital could not so easily shift its shape, at least not when it came to
slavery. While individual slaveholders might liquidate their holdings in response to bad times, slaveholders as a class could not simply transfer their investment from one form of capital to another, cutting their losses and channeling their money into the Next Big Thing. Their capital would not simply rust
or lie fallow. It would starve. It would steal. It would revolt. Beneath the commitment of the exegetes of slavery to their cause lay fearful visions of any future without it. In 1852 in Jackson, Mississippi, at the Southern Commercial
Convention, J.D.B. DeBow warned of disastrous consequences from the declining productivity of human capital: Does it not encourage dark forebodings of the future that slaves are becoming consumers in a larger degree than
they are producers? And in cases where population growth outstripped productivity, warned the American Cotton Planter, the race which is stronger will
eat out the weaker. The South cannot recede, wrote another commentator,
arguing that the preservation of slavery was fundamental to the economic future of the South. She must fight for her slaves or against them. Even cowardice would not save her.25
Even as cotton prices fell and returns on human capital declined, the production of cotton continued to be determined by the size of the slave population in rough arithmetical proportion: bales per hand per acre. Planters whose
capital was tied up in land and slaves depended upon advances against cotton
for liquidityand only cotton would do for factors and bankers who had to be
certain of the salability of the staple promised in consideration of the capital
they had advanced. Planters in need of credit could not afford to assign their
slaves to other labor. And planters who feared their starving slaves could not
lay them off, at least not in aggregate. What they so often framed as a moral
obligation to provide a bare minimum subsistence for their people was shadowed by their fear of what would happen if they could no longer do even that.
14
They were caught between unsustainable expansion and unspeakable fear: the
fear of the fire next timeof Toussaint LOuverture, of Charles Deslondes,
of Denmark Vesey, of Nat Turner, of Madison Washington. Thus were the
science of political economy, the practicalities of the cotton market, and the
exigencies of racial domination entangled with one anotheraspects of a
single problem, call it slave racial capitalismas planters and merchants
set about trying, first, to reform themselves and, failing that, to remap the
course of world history. In order to survive, slaveholders had to expand. Like
DeBow, they displaced their fear of their slaves into aggression on a global
scale.26
In the 1850s, pro-slavery globalism increasingly took the form of imperialist military action. Our histories of the coming of the Civil War have generally been framed around the question of sectionalism, of the line that divided
the South from the North. Taking the global and imperial aspirations of
the defenders of slavery seriously, however, transforms the question of sectionalism. The economic boom of the 1850s brought several underlying tensions in the political economy of slavery to the point of crisis. High prices for
cotton translated into high prices for slaves, and a dramatic increase in the
number of slaves traded from Upper-South slave states like Virginia and
Maryland to Deep-South cotton-producing states like Mississippi and Loui
siana. High prices, however, made it more difficult for the Souths non
slaveholding whites (about 40 percent of the regions total population) to buy
slaves and thus become members in full standing of the master class. Concomitantly, the geographic redistribution of the enslaved populationwhich
caused unfathomable suffering among the enslaved (50percent of slave sales
during the antebellum period involved the breakup of a family)spurred
fears among defenders of slavery that the Upper South was being drained
of slaves and would be abandoned to free labor through the workings of the
slave trade.
Increasingly, Mississippi Valley slaveholders (and others) sought fixes for
these contradictions outside the confines of the United States. Cuba was the
first target. In the 1850s several attempts were made to overthrow the islands
Spanish colonial government by force of arms; the most spectacularly unsuccessful of these efforts was launched from New Orleans in the summer of
1851.27 For many Valley slaveholders, Cuba represented the mouth of the Mis-
Introduction
15
sissippi River, the place where the political economy of slavery joined the
global economy, and thus it was a natural, indeed essential, addition to the
South. Nicaragua played a similar role in the global aspirations of Mississippi
Valley slaveholders. The filibuster government of William Walker (who invaded Nicaragua with an army of fifty-seven mercenaries in 1855 and became
its more or less self-appointed president in 1856) drew much of its monetaryand military support from Valley slaveholders. For these supporters, control of Nicaragua represented a way to connect the Mississippi Valley economy with the emerging economies of the Pacifica truly global vision of
pro-slavery empire. Nicaragua, moreover, represented a convenient receptaclefor nonslaveholding whites, whose loyalty to the institution of slavery was
thought to be increasingly suspect. Finally, in the late 1850s, Valley slaveholders turned their eyes to Africa and the effort to reopen the Atlantic slave trade,
which had been outlawed in 1808 by an act of Congress. A solution for both
the problem of nonslaveholding whites and that of the slave drain, the effort
to reopen the trade found its most consistent support in the Mississippi Valley,
where the New Orleansbased DeBows Review supported the project with
malign intensity. The state legislatures of Mississippi and Louisiana each considered reopening the trade in 1858.
It takes no great insight (only a taste for heresy) to say that the story of the
coming of the Civil War has been framed according to a set of anachronistic
spatial frames and teleological narratives. It is resolutely nationalist in its spatial framing, foregrounding conflict over slavery within the boundaries of todays United States to the exclusion of almost every other definition of the
conflict over slavery. Because of the territorial condition of the regions under
debate and the character of federal recordkeeping, the Missouri Compromise,
the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act produced tremendous
archives that American historians have used to terrific effect. Yet for many in
the Mississippi Valley (and for the president of the United States, who in 1852
devoted the first third of his State of the Union
address to the topic), the most

important issue in the early 1850s was Cuba, an issue that was related to but
certainly not reducible to the question of territory gained through the Mexican
War and the Compromise of 1850. Similarly, for many pro-slavery Southerners, especially in the Mississippi Valley, the issues of Nicaragua and the Atlantic slave trade were more important than the question of Kansas (dismissed by
16
many as a fight over a place where no real slaveholder would ever want to live
anyway) and more important than what was happening in Congress, from
which they, in any case, expected very little. The standard narrative, that is to
say, projects a definition of spaces which resulted from the Civil Warno
Cuba, no Nicaragua, no Atlantic slave tradebackward onto its narrative of
the description of the conflict over slavery before the war.
Much of this work has been done through the category of the South,
which serves in its dominant usage as a spatial euphemism for what is in fact a
conceptual anachronism: those states which eventually became part of the Confederacy.28 But what the Southern position was on any given issuethe role
of nonslaveholders in a slaveholders society; Nicaragua; the slave trade;
whether Virginia should be considered a slaveholding, a slave-breeding, or
(even) a free-labor state; the importance of building a railroad connection to
the Pacific (not to mention what that route would be); the expediency of establishing direct trade with Belgium; the best recipe for chicken and biscuits; and
so onwas subject to fierce debate at pro-slavery commercial conventions of
the late 1850s, which are generally seen as hotbeds of secessionism. About the
only things upon which those conventions could agree was that there was
something called the South that was worth fighting for and that the election
of a Republican president in 1860 would be grounds for secession.29 The ultimate grounds for secession represented a sort of lowest common denominator, a platform defined by what everyone involved agreed the South could
not be.30
It was a politics of negationof seceding fromwhich initially held the
Confederacy together in 1860.31 And its story has been told by projecting the
histories of the territorial units secession createdthe Union in the North
andthe Confederacy in the Southbackward in time as the history of sectionalism: as the history of the emergence of the differences between the two.32
What has been of much less concern has been the history of alternative visions of what the South might look like if instead of focusing on the sectional divide, one were to turn around and look in the other direction: if instead of looking at what the South was leaving and thereby defining the
South wholly in reference to the politics of secession, one asked where Southerners (and slaveholders in particular) thought they were going and how they
thought they could pull it off in the first place. In the invasion of Nicaragua
Introduction
17
and the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade, Valley extremists (read: a very
large proportion of Valley slaveholders) were pursuing goals that had some
thing to do with but were not reducible to secession. Indeed, at the time, many
made the argument that pressing Congress to reopen the Atlantic slave trade
was the best way to ensure that the South would remain in the Union. In the
Mississippi Valley in the 1850s, many of those who would later become Confederates were busily imagining and promoting a vision of a pro-slavery futureof pro-slavery time and spacewhich is nonetheless revealing for the
merciful fact that it never came to pass.33
1
Jeffersonian Visions and
Nightmares in Louisiana
Waist-deep they fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and
the Indians glided back into the west. Small wonder the wood is red. Then came
the black slaves. Day after day of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina ... was heard in these rich swamp lands. Day after day the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muted curses of the wretched.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Of the Black Belt
the insurgents rose on the night of January8, 1811. They marched in the
rain along the muddy river roadhundreds of them, armed with shovels and
axes, their leaders on horseback. At their head was later said to be a mulatto
named Charles Deslondes, a Creole slave from Louisiana.1 Among their number were men named Charles, Cupidon, Telemacque, Janvier, Harry, Joseph,
Kooche, Quamana, Mingo, Diaca, Omar, Al-Hassan. They were African-and
American-born, French-and English-speaking, Christian and Muslim, Creole,
Akan, and Congo, organized in companies that reflected their various origins.
They represented all of the diversity of New World slavery dedicated to the
single purpose of its overthrow.
For months before the uprising, there had been rumors of runaways in the
swamps behind the plantations that lined the river along the German Coast (so
called because of the origins of its eighteenth-century white settlers). Like
plantations elsewhere along the Mississippi, those on the German Coast were
rectangular in shape, their narrow sides parallel to the river in order to ensure
Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares
19
that as many planters as possible could own a piece of the riverbank, their
longer edges stretching away from the river in order to maximize their area.
Along the back edge of these plantations, the slaves of various owners worked
near one another, but far away from the concentrated supervision of the riverbank. There, where their owners property abutted, they had planned their revolt in the interstices of their labor.
The conversationsthe debates, the inducements, the promises, the threats
that occurred at the back of those plantations are lost to history, but we must
imagine them as extraordinary conversations. People who had little in common but their slaverypeople of varied origins, different faiths, several languagestrusted one another enough to say words that could cost them their
lives. Words such as We are thinking of revolting. If we do, will you join
us? Or, finally, We are going to New Orleans to kill all whites. Tonight is the
night. We will meet on the river road.
The revolt had begun on the plantation of Manuel Andry, which served the
territorial militia as an arms depot. For an insurgent army that was armed only
with the tools of their labormachetes, axes, hoes, pitchforkstaking the armory was critical. The insurgents quickly overwhelmed Andrys plantation,
supplied themselves, and left it in flames. As they marched down the river road,
they left Manuel Andry and his son for dead in the ruins of their plantation.
The rebels numbers grew as they pressed downriver. Slaves from neighboring
plantations joined (or were conscripted), and maroons (escaped slaves) who
had been hiding out and living in the swamps that backed the fields came out to
fight. They marched with drums beating and banners flying.2 As word of their
march spread down the river, another group took to the roada caravan of
whites and their loyalist slaves, a column of frightened refugees later estimated
to have been nine miles long, fleeing the advancing insurgents: carriages and
carts full of people making their escape from the ravages of the banditti
Negroes, half naked, up to their knees in mud with large packages on their
head driving along towards the city.3 Behind them, the rebel army burned the
abandoned plantations and outbuildings along the river road as it marched,
killing the lone slaveholder foolish enough to remain behind in his house. The
insurgents marched through the night and the following day, stopping finally
to rest on the plantation of Cadet Fortier; they had traveled roughly fifteen
20
miles, about half of the distance between Andrys plantation and the city of
New Orleans.4 But if the insurgents had the element of surprise when they
first marched, that advantage was lost by the time the sun rose the next day.
Word of the rebellion reached New Orleans on the morning of January9.
There was no regular militia in the city, and the governor put the defense
of the city in the hands of General Wade Hampton, who had arrived in New
Orleans two days earlier with a small detachment of regular army soldiers.5
Hamptons purpose in Louisiana had been to defend the territory from pro-
Spanish rebels who resented the closing of the slave trade and feared that their
colonial land titles would be invalidated under U.S. rule. But on the morningof January9, he found himself at the head of a small army of regular soldiers and volunteer militia mustering to march up the river road against an in
surgent army they had heard was 500 strong, and from which they no doubt
feared the remorselessness they had come to associate with the Haitian Revolution. As he left the city, Hampton sent word to Major Homer Milton, who
was in command of a company of United States dragoons (light cavalry)
marching westward from Baton Rouge to aid in the pacification of Spanish-
aligned insurgents in West Florida. With Hampton marching upriver along
the muddy river road and Milton turning his force southward toward the German Coast, for the first time in its history the U.S. Army was deployed against
a slave revolt.
By early morning on January10, Hamptons army had reached the Fortier
plantation. They found that Deslondess insurgents had established a perime
ter and taken up defensive positions in a couple of brick buildings attached to
Fortiers sugar works. Although the sources make it hard to determine if the
rebels knew about the movements of their enemy at any given time (this is
much easier to establish for Hampton and Milton), Deslondes and his soldiers
seem to have known that a force was coming up from New Orleans to confront
them. And by the time Hamptons soldiers were ready to deploy for attack,
their opponents had unaccountably disappeared. The soldiers from New Orleans stormed Fortiers plantation, to find only the refuse of an army (their
word) that had slipped away in the night, tracking its way northwestward
across the fields behind the plantation houses, outflanking Hamptons army
before turning eastward again and going on to New Orleans!6
Meanwhile, the grievously wounded Manuel Andry, left for dead by the in-
21
surgents, had not died, but managed to cross the Mississippi to the west bank
and raise the alarm there. Andry had taken refuge in the household of a planter
named Charles Perret, who began on the night of January8 to warn the slaveholders on the rivers west bank about the rebellion that was occurring on its
eastern shores. By the morning of the tenth, he had raised an army of his own,
eighty or so menplanters, whites, free people of colorand crossed the
river above Fortiers plantation, surprising Deslondess army. We saw the enemy at a very short distance, number about 200 men, as many mounted as on
foot, Perret later wrote. Deslondess force was caught in the cleared fields of
the sugar plantation belonging to Bernard Bernoudi. It was surrounded by
three small armies: Hamptons regular army troops and volunteers behind,
Perrets volunteers to the left, and Miltons dragoons from the north.7
Andry referred to what followed as une grande carnagea great slaughter. Deslondess army splintered.8 Those who survived the initial encounter
fled into the swamp at the back of Bernoudis fields. The wounded were murdered where they fell; their bodies, mutilated. The survivors were hunted
down over the next few days. Charles Deslondes was executed on the battlefield: first his arms were amputated; then his thighs were shattered one after
the other with a musket; finally he was burned alive.9 Twenty-one were conveyed to the Destrehan plantation, where they were tried on the lawn by a jury
composed of leading planters, and sentenced to death. Twenty-nine more were
taken to New Orleans, where they were tried before a judge.10 Two of those
tried in New Orleans were acquitted; two others were ordered beaten and returned to their owners; the remaining twenty-five were condemned to death.11
In death, the German Coast rebels were converted into insignia of the regime.12 The heads of those executed at Destrehan were put up on pikes along
the levee between New Orleans and the German Coast. The judge in New
Orleans (himself a refugee from the revolution in Haiti) appended specific instructions to his execution orders: Caesar was to be hung at the usual place of
execution; Jessamin was to be hung at the plantation of Barthelem McCarty,
where his body was to remain on the gallows; Hector would be hung between
the plantations of Mr. Villerai and Robert Bourdique, and likewise left to
slowly and publicly rot; Lindor was to be hung at the plantation of his master
in the presence of the whole gang where his body shall remain exposed;
Louis was to be hung and left on the levee in front of the Powder Magazine;
22
Daniel Garret was to be hung in the usual place in the city of New Orleans
... his head severed from his body and exposed at one of the lower gates of
the city; Gilberts body was to be delivered to his family after he was shot by
a firing squad.13 And so on. The rotten heads of the dead served to remind
those who passed beneath them of the inexorability of the emergent order. If
the revolt was, according to one of the citys white residents, a miniature representation of the horrors of Santo Domingo, the mutilated bodies of the insurgents were meant to mark the boundary between the islands revolutionary
history and that of the Mississippi Valley.14
The history of the Mississippi Valleys Cotton Kingdom that has come to
emblematize the word slavery was, from the beginning, twinned with the
history of the most successful slave revolt in the modern era: the Haitian Revolution. In 1793, Haiti (then known by its French imperial designation, Saint-
Domingue, or St.Domingue) was the richest colony in the world. As the historian C.L.R. James put it, On no portion of the surface of the globe did its
surface in proportion to dimension yield so much wealth as the colony of
St.Domingue.15 And nowhere, according to James, were the inequalities and
barbarities of New World slavery more pronounced. Half a million people
lived in St.Domingue: 450,000 slaves, 40,000 whites, and 28,000 free people
of color. Year after year, St.Domingue produced more sugar than all of the
islands of the British West Indies combined. Upon the labor of those half-
million slaves depended the livelihoods of more than six million Frenchmen.
And the future of the Mississippi Valley as well.
In the settlement following the Seven Years War (17561763), France had
been forced to cede to Spain the territory of Louisiana828,000 square miles
stretching from the west bank of the Mississippi River to the Continental Divide and including the city of New Orleans. By the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish control of the Mississippi Valley, and particularly of New Orleans, posed a problem for the emerging economy of the United States. There
is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy, Jefferson wrote: New Orleans, through which three-eighths
of our territory must pass to market.16 In the Treaty of San Lorenzo, finalized
in 1795, the United States secured right of passage through the Port of New
Orleans, thus assuring for the moment that American produce from the interior of the continent could be shipped down the Mississippi to East-Coast and
23
Atlantic markets without being taxed by Spanish customs officials in New Orleans. It was not long, however, before rumors reached Washington that Spain
had signed a secret treaty that returned Louisiana to France.
In Napoleons global vision of the French Empire, the Mississippi Valleywould be a service colony for St. Domingue. Because every arable acre
on the island was given over to commercial cultivation, the population of
St. Domingue depended on imported food for its survival. The vast valley
atthe center of the North American continent would provide the food that
would support Haitian slaves as they cultivated sugar for European markets.
St.Domingue lay in the middle of a nutrient chain that would convert North
American grainvia sugar and slaveryinto European wealth. Napoleons
global vision, however, was spoiled by the unexpected staying power of the
revolution in Haiti. In 1791, tensions between free people of color and whites
over political rights provided an opening in the structure of rule that was soon
breached by the colonys slaves, who took up arms under the leadership of
Toussaint LOuverture. In 1794, LOuverture proclaimed the abolition of
slavery, and in 1804 Haiti achieved independence.17
The most successful slave revolt in the history of the world and the most
democratic of the Atlantic worlds anti-colonial uprisings, the Haitian Revolution drastically diminished the value of the Mississippi Valley to Napoleon.
Following W.E.B. DuBois, the historian Henry Adams, in 1899, noted the
decisive importance of that revolution to the subsequent history of the United
States: The colonial system of France centered on St.Domingo. Without that
island the system had hands, feet, and even a head, but no body. Of what use
was Louisiana, when France had lost the main colony which Louisiana was
meant to feed and fortify?18 In 1803, a delegation sent by Thomas Jefferson to
France in order to negotiate a purchase of the city of New Orleans, and thus a
safe passage to market for American agricultural goods produced east of the
Mississippi, was dumbfounded to be presented instead with an offer of the entire territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi, an area equal in size to the
existing United States. The eventual purchase price was $15million.
The Louisiana Purchase has gone down in U.S. history as the bargain of the
centurybut twenty years earlier, the purchase of the vast Territory of Louisiana might not have made sense to Jefferson at any price. The appeal of the
Louisiana Purchase to both sides depended not only on a political revolution
24
within the French Empire, but also on a revolution in the history of political
thought. In Federalist10 (1787), James Madison had departed from the conventional view that Greece and Rome had become corrupt and authoritarian
because they had overexpanded, and instead had argued that spatial expansion
was the guarantor rather than the antagonist of political liberty. In a large polity, Madison suggested, only men of qualitypublic-spirited men capable of
governing in the general interestwould be well-known enough to be elected
to office.19 In an 1814 letter to Madison, Thomas Jefferson expressed the connection between United States imperialism and American liberty: We should
have such an Empire for Liberty as [none] has ever surveyed since the creation.... No Constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.20 When he spoke of liberty, Jefferson had
in mind a liberty of a very particular sort; when he spoke of empire, he had in
mind the Mississippi Valley.
In keeping with their origins in the American Revolution rather than the
Haitian, Madisons intellectual evolution and Jeffersons embrace of empire
evolved around notions about the liberties of white men, rather than of humanbeings in general.21 Historians have termed the sort of liberty that Jefferson imagined yeomens republicanism, referring to a polity of independent
householders who owned the land they lived on, commanded the labor of their
wives and children, and produced the necessities of their own subsistence.
They were patriarchal, noncommercial, self-sufficient white men. Jefferson, in
a passage characteristically eliding the labor of women, children, and slaves
(many of whom were also women and children), put it this way: Those who
labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, in whose breasts he has made
his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.22 In Jeffersons view,
because these yeomen owned their own land and provided their own subsistence, they could not be bought or bossed: they did not need to work for a
wage or enter into entangling relationships of debt that would make them economically vulnerable to those who might seek to control their votes. Empire
the expansion of the United States and the distribution of its population
over spacewas, thought Jefferson, essential to producing the specific form
of agricultural economic development that he associated so strongly with liberty. By spreading westward, the United States could leave what Jefferson
termed the depravity of moral dependence and corruption incident to the
25
emergent manufacturing economies of Europe.23 Jefferson imagined a global

division of labor, with manufacturing (and its ills) confined to Europe and
separated from the agricultural heartland of the United States by a narrow
band of mercantile institutions along the East Coast.
Even as Jeffersons vision of liberty, like Madisons, came to depend on the
prospect of territorial expansion, both men continued to harbor some anxiety
about the dangers of overextension. Most notably, Jefferson feared that some
inhabitants of the empire for liberty might be so distant from the government in Washington, D.C., that they would fall out of its orbit entirely, separating from our confederacy and becoming its enemies, as he put it. Future
societies on the waters of the Mississippi, Madison wrote in 1785, might be
viewed in the same relation to the Atlantic States as exists between the hostile
and heterogeneous societies of Europe.24 Even after the Louisiana Purchase
formally incorporated the territory west of the Mississippi into the United
States, the problem of establishing real American sovereigntythe problem
signaled by Jeffersons fear of breakaway Western republicsremained a
pressing one. At the moment of the Louisiana Purchase, the Mississippi Valley
was anything but a natural extension of Jeffersons empire for liberty. It was
inhabited by a population of Indians thought to be sympathetic to Great Britain and hostile to the United States, Creole whites identified with French and
Spanish rule, and potentially insurgent African and African-American slaves.
It was historically French, bounded on both sides by SpainFlorida to the
east and Texas to the westand coveted by Great Britain, the greatest military
and commercial power in the world. It could have been French; it could have
been Spanish; it could have been British. It could have been Creek or Choctaw
or Chickasaw. It could have been Bambara or Congolese or Coramantee. It
could have been Haitian. Jeffersons empire for liberty would have to be
sealed to the United States with blood.
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the United States pacified the
Mississippi Valley through a multiform war against disloyal whites, Native
Americans, Africans, and African Americans. The strategic goal was to prevent alliances linking invading armies from Europe (particularly the British,
but also the Spanish) with the indigenous and enslaved populations of the Mississippi Valley. As Andrew Jackson put it, the best British strategy in the event
of an invasion would be to excite the Indians to War, the Negroes to insurrec-
26
tion, and then proceed to the Mississippi.25 For Jackson, the problem of asserting United States sovereignty in the Mississippi Valley and that of subjugating the population contained within the nations supposed borders were
indissoluble aspects of each other. Not for the last time in the history of the
United States, national security and white supremacy were synthesized into
state policy and military violence.
In the event, however, the first real threat to United States sovereignty in
the Mississippi Valley came from the white populationindeed, from the military and political leadership of the United States itself. In 1806, two years after
he had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Aaron Burr set out for the Mississippi Valley in search of an empire of his own. Though the details remain
sketchy, Burr apparently hoped to divide the territory west of the riverthe
Louisiana Purchase territory, the territory that Jefferson and Madison had
feared might become the ground of a breakaway republicfrom the United
States. Behind him was a small private army, heavily dependent on the service
of men who held land titles from the period of Spanish rule in the Valley; men,
that is, who had fortunes to gain by ensuring that their speculative titles would
be recognized above all others. And in the shadows of the story lurked General James Wilkinson, the U.S. Army general in command of the Mississippi
Valley, who, as it turned out, was also a paid agent of the government of Spain
(Special Agent No.13). The Burr conspiracy represented a threat that was both
inside and outside the formal territorial boundaries of the United States. Indeed, the possible alliance of the Mississippi Valleys restive white population
with Spains imperial interests rendered incoherent the distinction between
inside and outside the United States. In the end, the conspiracy was uncovered; Burr was tried for treason and Wilkinson court-martialed (both men
were acquitted). Even in exposure, however, the Burr conspiracy signaled the
vulnerabilitythe hollowness, reallyof the U.S. claim to dominion in the
Louisiana Territory.26
The next step in the Americanization of the Mississippi Valley took place in
West Florida. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Spanish Florida included a narrow strip of territory that stretched along the Gulf and into the
interior of Louisiana all the way to the Mississippi, creating an elongated panhandle stretching from Pensacola to Baton Rouge. In 1810, the U.S. Congress passed a secret law providing for the annexation of any territory in
27
NorthAmerica, and began the covert funding of an American-aligned uprising against Spanish rule in Florida (covert because an overt American military
action against the Spanish presence in North America would likely have drawn
the British into the conflict). The so-called Patriot War of 1810 brought the
area around Baton Rouge (as well as the area around St.Augustine) under the
control of the U.S.-aligned rebels, although the territory they inhabited was
still officially claimed by Spain. Among the white inhabitants of the Florida
Parishes of Louisiana, many of those who remained loyal to Spain viewed
themselves as a conquered people.27
The federal regulation of foreign trade was a primary source of Creole dissatisfaction. The Embargo Act of 1807, the Non-Intercourse Act of 1808, and
various customs duties all defined a legal line between the internal economy
of the United States and the global economy of the late nineteenth century,
dividing the Valley from the global economy by inscribing across the mouth
of the Mississippi a line between the inside and the outside. They were ways of
making the U.S. national sovereignty represented by the Louisiana Purchase
material, in the form of economic practice. These laws were bitterly resented
by a population whose livelihood depended upon exports and exchange, none
more so than the 1808 law closing the Atlantic slave trade to the United States.
By seeking to draw a line between the henceforth domestic economy of
American slavery and the global economy in human beings, the act attempted
to balance the emerging concern that the importation of African slaves was
rendering the United States insecure in the event of invasion with the imperatives of the ongoing dependence of a large section of the new nation on human property. By instituting an always-already-broken-down distinction between slaveholding and slave trading, the act (along with the Embargo
Act of 1807) represented the efforts of a new nation to align the limits of its
economy with its polity. It forwarded an emergent idea of the nation as the
container of its own economy, over and against the insatiable logic of an economy that could commodify anythingeven a tiny child.
The legal separation of slavery in the United States from slavery in the rest
of the world aimed to provide a new sort of solidity to American rule in the
Mississippi Valley. Thenceforth, the political economy of slavery and the territorial limit of the United States ran along the same lineat least in theory.
Driving slaves across that line provided a terrific opportunity for pirates like
28
Jean Lafitte. Lafitte maintained a base in the tangle of inlets at Barataria Bay on
the Gulf Coast, from which he attacked Spanish ships on their way to Cuba,
where the slave trade was still legal. He seized their cargo, including slaves,
and smuggled it into New Orleans, where illegal sale brought even higher
profits. Lafittes trick was to make money by pursuing old patterns of trade
across the legal boundaries that now sought to outlaw them. In 1813, the governor of Louisiana, William C. C. Claiborne, offered a reward for Lafitte;
shortly afterward, posters appeared throughout the city of New Orleans, offering a reward for the capture of the governor and signed by Jean Lafitte.
Whether or not Lafitte was actually responsible for the handbills, the point was
clear: the United States claim to sovereignty over the Louisiana Purchase territory was disputed in practice long after it was codified in law. The Mississippi
Valley remained connected to the Atlantic world by the currents of global
commerce that could be channeled, but never fully contained by the boundaries of the United States.
Meanwhile, the global racial apocalypse feared by Andrew Jackson never
materialized. The closest it came was perhaps the Battle of New Orleans in
1815, when the British, drawing on the support of allies among the Gulf Coast
Indians, were bolstered by the flight of hundreds, perhaps thousands of Louisiana and Mississippi slaves during their invasion of the Mississippi Valley.
Both the British and the Americans sent diplomatic missions to the pirate
princeling Jean Lafitte, trying to persuade him to join his band of extranational
freebooters to their respective military forces. Lafitte cast his lot with the
Americans; even more important, the British naval captain responsible for
landing the imperial artillery on the battlefield disembarked on the wrong side
of the river. Although the Battle of New Orleans came after the Treaty of
Ghent had officially closed hostilities (but before news of that treaty had
crossed the Atlantic), it represented a landmark victory in the Americanization
of the Mississippi Valley.28
Jackson spent the next fifteen yearsfirst as a general in the U.S. Army,
then as the military governor of Florida, and finally as the president of the
United Statessupervising the ethnic cleansing and racial pacification of the
southeastern United States. His first target was the Seminole nation in Florida,
a hybrid group composed of various Native, African, African American, and
European refugees, whom Jackson began to root out in 1817. The generals
29
orders from the War Department signaled the strategic intertwining of defending the borders, pacifying the Native population, and shoring up the foundation of racial slavery. He sought to make Florida safe for white settlers, for
slavery, and for the United States of America. He was to move the Seminole
away from the Gulf Coast, where they might provide a beachhead for an invading army, and, through the cantonment of the Seminole, reduce the lure
that their nation provided to escaping slaves. But Jackson quickly exceeded his
mandate. He hired a private army of Tennesseans and used them to fight an
illegal war against the Spanish in Florida (a low point of which was the capture
of two British subjects in Spanish Territory and their execution by a firing
squad composed of U.S. soldiers operating outside the legal authority of the
United States). Violations of federal, international, and natural law notwithstanding, the results that Jackson achieved on the ground were formalized in
the Adams-Ons Treaty of 1819, in which Spain ceded Florida to the United
States.29
After the Seminole, Jackson turned his attention to the Chickasaw. In 1818,
Jackson presented the Chickasaw with a treaty promising them equal land
for their territory (mostly in present-day Tennessee and Alabama).30 When the
Chickasaw responded that they would lose every drop of blood in their veins
before they would yield to the United States another acre of land, Jackson
employed a strategy he would use again and again in the Southeast. First, he
threatened that the Chickasaw would simply be deprived of their land by force
and offered nothing in return; then, he bribed a portion of the tribal leadership
with secret payments and land grants; finally, having bought off a portion of
the Chickasaw, he signed a treaty that he claimed represented the wishes of the
people as a whole.31 All the while, he portrayed himself as the defender of the
tribe. Without a treaty, he told the Chickasaw, the white people would certainly move on their lands by the thousands, and all the evils which their father
the president was trying to avert would ensue. Jackson represented the expansion of the white population and the dispossession of the Chickasaw as a
sort of racial inevitability, a foregone conclusion predicated upon their relocation west of the Mississippi to a portion of land that was insistently represented
as equal, although it was not at all equivalent apart from the bare mea
surement of square acreagenot historically, not economically, not ecologically, not spiritually. In 1830, by-then President Jackson warned the Chickasaw
30
that they must disappear and be forgotten.32 The final removal of the Chickasaw to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma occurred in the fall of 1837;
of the 5,600 who started west (including a thousand or so slaves), 500 died
along the way.33
It was the same story with the Choctaw. At Doaks Stand in 1820, General
Jackson hectored the tribal leaders with the threat that without a change in
your situation, you must dwindle to nothing, before bribing them into signing away their peoples lands in exchange for land grants that allowed the signatories to stay behind in Mississippi.34 Jacksons metaphysics of expansion
and removal were echoed by his frequent political antagonist Henry Clay in an
1825 exchange with John Quincy Adams: They [are] destined to extinction.
... Their disappearance from the human family would be no great loss to the
world.35 Of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, which presaged the final
removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi, General Edmund Gaines wrote:
[It] acted as a bomb thrown among them. It filled them with surprise, astonishment, excitement, grief, and resentment. Not a single Choctaw favored the
sale and cession of the lands of the tribe. It had not a solitary advocate among
them.36 Of the 8,000 or so Choctaw who left Mississippi bound for Oklahoma
in the 1830s, more than a quarter died along the way. Yet it is said, wrote the
Choctaw chief, George Harkins, that our present movements are our own
voluntary actssuch is not the case. We found ourselves like a benighted
stranger, following false guides, until he was surrounded on every side, with
fire and water. The fire was certain destruction, and a feeble hope was left him
of escaping by water. A distant view of the opposite shore encourages the
hope; to remain would be inevitable annihilation. Who would hesitate, or who
would say that his plunging into the water was his own voluntary act?37
And so it went: final removal treaties were signed with the Choctaw in 1831,
and with the Creek, the Seminole, and the Chickasaw in 1837. The Cherokee
were forcibly removed along the Trail of Tears in 1838. By the time he was
done, Andrew Jackson had added over 100 million acres to the public domain
of the United States. The Native civilizations of the Southeast had been destroyed, resettled in Indian Territory, the very name of which bespoke the
forcible transformation of sovereign nations into racial subjects. All but a
handful of tribal leaders who cooperated with the government (or, to put it
more charitably, saw the writing on the wall and cut the best deal they could)
31
experienced the cognitive dislocation and physical suffering generally associated with the term ethnic cleansing; tens of thousands died in the process.
By 1840, the homelands of the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Seminole, and the Cherokee had, through the military power and legal authority of
the United States of America, been converted into a vast reserve for the cultivation of whiteness.
as it turned out, however, white social reproduction in the Mississippi Valley

came very quickly to depend on the expansion of black slavery: the racial privilege of the empire for liberty contained within it the seeds of the Cotton
Kingdom. Whether slavery would be allowed in the Louisiana Territory was
in one way a foregone conclusion: there were already thousands of slaves in
the Mississippi Valley by the time it became a part of the United States, and
there were very few advocates for their emancipation. But the extent to which
the material incorporation of the region into the economy of the United States
and the world would be accomplished through slave labor was a subject of
great debate in the early years of the nineteenth century.38 Opponents of slavery argued that the institution should not be allowed to establish deeper roots
in a new region of the United States. With slavery, they argued, spread the
threat of a rebellion that could destabilize not only the region, but the whole
nation. Tis our duty, declared one opponent of the legalization of further
slavery in the Louisiana Territory, to prevent ... the horrible evil of slaveryand thereby avoid the fate of St.Domingo.39 Supporters of the spread
of slavery argued that only Africans and African Americans could withstand
the withering conditions of agricultural labor in the lower Mississippi Valley;
without them, the Louisiana Territory would be of little more value ... than
an equal quantity of waste land.40 This pro-slavery, pro-expansion position
began from the axiom that African-descended people were uniquely and biologically suited to do just the sort of work that slaveholders needed them to do,
and it proceeded to the postulate that, in the absence of slave labor, the economic development of the Mississippi Valley would cease: time would begin to
run in the opposite direction.
The debate was eventually settled near Jeffersons own position, which tried
to balance a fear of the volatility of slavery in the era of the Haitian Revolution and recognition of the dependence of American economic development
32
upon the labor of the enslaved. Not for the last time in the nineteenth-century
history of the United States, fear of revolt among the enslaved was used to
justify a spatial expansion of the institution of slavery. Jeffersonians, such as
John Breckinridge of Kentucky, argued that allowing slavery to spread into the
Mississippi Valley would not only aid in the incorporation of that region into
the United States, but also disperse and weaken that [African] race&free
the Southern states from part of its black population, &of its danger.41 The
black population would, in the term of the day, be diffused across the continent, spread so widely that slavery might eventually be abolished without
thefear of revolt associated with a concentrated population of blacks. Allowing slavery to spread into the Mississippi Valleyan entirely new region of
the continentwas (paradoxically, mistakenly, disingenuously) represented
by Jefferson and his supporters as a prelude to the abolition of the institution
as a whole. Congress ultimately accepted this position, passing a law that allowed bona fide owners to transport their slaves to the Mississippi Valley.
Diffusion turned out to be a chimera. The extension of slavery into the Mississippi Valley gave an institution that was in decline at the end of the eigh
teenth century new life in the nineteenth.42 In 1800, there were around 100,000
slaves living within the boundaries of the present-day states of Mississippi
and Louisiana; in 1840, there were more than 250,000; in 1860, more than
750,000.43
The role of the U.S. government in relation to slavery in the Mississippi
Valley turned out to be not presiding over its gradual disappearance, but forcibly ensuring its furtherance. If the Haitian Revolution provided the condition
of possibility for the expansion of the United States of America into the Mississippi Valley, it also provided a sort of counterhistory to the Jeffersonian vision. The first chapter of this history, which has begun in St.Domingo ...
will recount how all the whites were driven from all the other islands, wrote
Thomas Jefferson. If something is not done and not done soon, we will be
the murderers of our own children. ... The revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe will be upon us.44 The specter of Haiti haunted the Mississippi
Valley throughout the antebellum period.45 As John Breckinridge bluntly put
it, I hope the time is not far distant when not a slave will exist in this Union. I
fear our slaves in the south will produce another St.Domingo.46
Indeed, in the years immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, the
33
Haitian Revolution was anything but distant from daily life in Louisiana. In
1809, 10,000 Haitians arrived in New Orleans, roughly a third of them white,
a third of them free people of color, and a third of them claimed as slaves
by someone in one of the former groups.47 Whether whites, free people of
color, or reenslaved slaves, the Haitians made Louisianas American governor
nervous. The whites, though pro-slavery, pro-order, and anti-revolution, still
represented a potentially insurgent foreign presence at a time when the sovereignty of the United States over the Creole inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley was anything but certain. The free people of color represented an embodied contradiction of the identification of race and slaveryan equivalence on
which the institution of slavery in the United States was coming increasingly
to depend. And the slaves represented a history in which Haiti had become a
byword for race war. At some future point, this quarter of the union must
(I fear) experience in some degree the misfortunes of St.Domingo, William
Claiborne had written of the Mississippi Valley in 1804. In January 1811, along
the river road to New Orleans, his fears were realized in the shape of the army
led by Charles Deslondes.48
In the aftermath of the revolt, those who supported federal governance in
the Mississippi Valley emphasized the incompetence of the territorial militia
and the indispensable role of the federal forces in their accounts of the way the
rebellion had been suppressed. Those less supportive of the United States emphasized the heroism of the territorys Creole elite who mustered on the west
bank and flanked the slaves on Bernoudis plantation. Most important, the
once-restive citizens of the city of New Orleans requested that the U.S. Army
establish a permanent garrison at New Orleans.49 Thenceforth the privilege of
slaveholders (and other whites) in the Mississippi Valley was backed by the
power of the U.S. Army. The role of federal troops in putting down the 1811
revolt represented the extension of the emerging national order to the Mississippi Valley, and the emergence of white-supremacist and pro-slavery solidarity out of the residual divisions of the imperial world.
The wars fought by the U.S. Army in the Mississippi Valleyagainst Creole elites aligned with European powers, against Native Americans fighting
for their land, against Africans and African Americans resisting slavery
forcibly established U.S. sovereignty in the region. Andrew Jacksons one-time
fear that an invading European army might excite the Indians to War, the
34
Negroes to insurrection, and then proceed to the Mississippi was expunged

with the bloody federal conquest of all of the above.50 Imperial governments
were rooted out and the interests of Creole elites brought into alignment with
those of the U.S. government through the dispossession and redistribution of
Indian lands and the federal protection of the property (and lives) of the slaveholding elite.
The Americanization and commercialization of the Mississippi Valley were
concomitant with its racial pacification. In the years that followed, the military
conquest of the Mississippi Valley was fulfilled in the shape of the Cotton
Kingdom. Jeffersons empire for liberty was transformed into the credit-
importing, cotton-exporting leading edge of the global economy of the nineteenth century.51 When the surveyors hired by the General Land Office began
their work in Mississippi in 1831, they used the Old Choctaw Line as the
base meridian of their efforts to transform the landscape from a landscape
of imperial violence to a field of national development.52 The achievements
of the surveys and surveyors ... varied with the strength of American arms,
wrote the historian Malcolm Rohrbough, noting the direct relationship between the primary technologies of imperial expansion and commercial rationalization in Jacksonian America. It was through the Land Office that expropriated Indian land would be sown with white settlers; that conquest would
yield citizenship. As Andrew Jackson put it in the aftermath of his conquest of
the Creek: The wealth and strength of a country are its population, and the
best part of the population are cultivators of the soil. Independent farmers are
everywhere the basis of society, and the true friends of liberty. The true
policy of the United States, he continued, was to sell the lands of the Creek
(and of other conquered peoples) in limited packages at a price barely suffi
cient to reimburse to the United States the expense of the present system.53
The market would turn Indian lands into white farms and conquest into cultivation: empire into equality.
So wise, so beautiful, so perfect a system was never adopted by any government or nation on earth, wrote one of the overseers of the Land Office of
the process by which the landscape of the Mississippi Valley was surveyed,
mapped, and offered for sale.54 Administering this vast domain for the cultivation of independent and equal white men was the central business of federal
governance in the 1830s. From the vantage point of Washington, D.C., the
35
problem of the administration of federal lands was a problem of legibility

of creating a system that made it possible to read the landscape and make decisions about it at a distance of hundreds, even thousands, of miles. The tools
used to accomplish this task were those of the surveyor: the theodolites they
used to project perpendicular corners and straight lines onto the uneven surface of the earth; the chains they used to measure the land into sections; the
scaled rulers and protractors they used to draw their maps; the perforated templates they used to draw the outlines of imaginary towns onto maps of land
that had not yet been sold.55 The surveyors tracked their way across all of the
hundreds of millions of acres in the lower Mississippi in the first half of the
nineteenth century, laying them out in rectangular grids (still visible from the
sky today) of 640-acre sections and then subdividing them into the 160-acre
quarter-sections which were the standard unit of sale in Land Office auctions.
Surveyors were paid by the mile, and their task was difficult. They worked
their way across the landscape, marking boundary lines and making detailed
notes about the land those boundaries contained: Each surveyor shall note in
his field book the true situation of all mines, salt licks, salt springs, and mill
seats which shall come to his knowledge; all water courses over which the line
he runs shall pass, and also the quality of the lands, read the legal guidelines
defining their work.56 The surveyors hired small parties of men to help them
blaze trails through the woods, cut pathways to project their lines and run their
measuring chains, and to forage and hunt for food. Sometimes they faced attack from banditti, or squatters fearful that the Land Office would turn them
off their holdings.57 None but men as hard as a Savage who is always at home
in Woods and Swamps can live upon what they afford ... can travel for Days
up to the knees in mud & mire, can drink any fluids he finds while he is
drenched with water also . . . can make anything by surveying the type of
Country we have to Survey, wrote one Land Office supervisor in a sentence
which both suggested the proximity of surveying to racial conquest and emphasized the labor involved in turning the landscape into a mapthe materiality of the process of abstraction.58
The surveyors field notes were transcribed at the district office, where they
also served as the basis for maps that were sent on to the General Land Office
in Washington, D.C. There, the maps were coordinated into huge offerings of
landtens, even hundreds of millions of acres at a time authorized for sale
36
through auctions held at the district office. The work of the Land Office was to
make the concrete landscape abstract: to turn this salt lick into a salt lick; to
turn a trail blazed through the woods into field notes in a field book; to turn the
surveyors recorded experience into maps to be sent to Washington; to turn
those maps into an offering, which could be represented in the space of several printed pages, and then circulated to potential buyers, wherever they were.
The business of the land office was to translate the practical knowledge of the
surveyor into the abstract knowledge of the investor, to refashion the particularity of the landscape into terms susceptible of generalization and comparison, to make the land legibleand salableat a distance.
The process generated an enormous amount of clerical labor. If surveyors
represented the advance guard of capitalist transformation, they preceded an
army of clerks producing maps, registering claims, overseeing the payments,
and engaging in countless other tasks while struggling to keep pace with
mounting responsibilities. Despite their labors, the boom years of 18311835
brought a sort of bureaucratic apocalypse to the district land offices of the
Mississippi Valley. In Mississippi, a few beleaguered clerks were dwarfed by
towering stacks of field notes, and planned sales were repeatedly postponed; in
Arkansas, an overwhelmed and dismissed Surveyor General left behind him
more than 5,000 miles worth of unprocessed reports, more than twice the
length of the Mississippi River itself. Despite spending much of December
1832 personally signing land patents, President Andrew Jackson soon fell so
far behind that he convinced Congress to appropriate money to pay a full-
timeclerk with the sole responsibility of signing the presidents name to land
patents.59
The rectangular grid expressed the sovereignty of the United States of
America over the landscape of the Mississippi Valley.60 It made the Mississippi
Valley measurable, governable, and salable. It transformed territory into property. And it touched off the greatest economic boom in the history of the
United States to that point. In the aftermath of the Indian Removal Act of
1830 and the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, capital flowed into the Lower
Mississippi Valley. Global capital investment translated into easy money in the
Mississippi Valley. Mushroom banksquickly chartered, lightly capitalized,
virtually unregulatedflourished in the state of Mississippi during what came
to be known as the flush times. Because banks in Mississippi were not re-
37
strained by any effectual laws requiring them to maintain a reasonable ratio of

specie (gold and silver coinage) to banknotes, the Valley of the 1830s was
awash in paper money: banks provided credit by printing money. The State
banks were issuing their bills by the sheet, wrote Joseph Baldwin, like a patent steam printing-press; and no other showing was asked of the applicant
forthe loan than an authentication of his great distress for money.61 Where
money was cheap, everything else was expensive. Baldwin continued: Under
this stimulating process prices rose like smoke. Lots in obscure villages were
held at city prices; lands, bought at the minimum cost of government, were
sold at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, and considered dirt cheap at that.62
Carried along by a floodtide of money, the empire for liberty was transformed into a frontier of accumulation.
Despite the tidy order of the gridded maps on display at the General Land
Office in Washington, D.C., the lived landscape of the Mississippi Valley was
a palimpsest of prior, conflicting claims. Spanish, French, and British land
titles were interspersed and overlaid amid military land bounties of as-yet-
unsurveyed land provided by various states to their soldiers. Exclusive title
rights, traded to those among the Choctaw who were willing to sign away the
common claims of their people in the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek,
gave these unscrupulous few the right to allotment claims, which were to be
located before the land was put on sale. Lively markets soon developed in both
sorts of prior claims. The history of the military conquest of the Mississippi
Valley was thus converted into speculative property.
The laws governing the Land Office had built into them a set of mechanisms that were supposed to insulate the sort of smallholding yeomen farmers
at the heart of the Jeffersonian vision from the upward pressure on the price of
land caused by the flow of capital into the Mississippi Valley. Termed preemption laws, and passed by the United States Congress in 1828, 1830, and
1832, these laws allowed people who were living on land they had improved
to buy land at the prescribed minimum prices ($1.25 an acre) in advance of the
public sale. Settlers making preemption claims were given one year to pay off
their purchase; otherwise the government foreclosed on their land, benefiting
from their improvements in the process. Squatting, improving, and preempting was undoubtedly the best way for poor white men to fulfill their own Jeffersonian aspirations. But it also provided several loopholes, which allowed
38
the value of land to skyrocket yet did not provide any corresponding increase
in the value of white labor. Capital, it turned out, could increase the value of
land more quickly than that of labor.
The existing unevenness of the land confounded the orderly logic of the
rectilinear survey. To begin with, the material improvement made by the first
generation of white squatters almost necessarily overlapped the rectangular
grid laid down by the surveyors. Further, the administrative lag between the
time at which the land was surveyed and the time it was offered for sale provided settlers with a chance to establish themselves on land, begin improving
it, and file adventitious claims for preemptive registration. In order to adjust
the pattern of settling to the pattern of surveying, the Land Office bought
squatters out of their improvements by providing them with floating land
grants, which could be used to claim any surveyed quarter-section in the district before it went on sale. A brisk market sprang up in preempted quarter-
sections. Depending on how many claimants had made prior improvements to
a given piece of land, one surveyed quarter-section might produce up to four
compensatory quarter-section grants. Termed floats, these grants could be
located anywhere in the district before the land was put up for auction. For
poor farmers who faced the prospect of losing everything if they could not
pay off their claim at the end of the year, selling out their claim made sense,
and a lively market in preemption claims immediately developed in Mississippi. Speculators bought up floats and located them according to the contours of predicted developmentalong rivers and existing roads, on the outskirts of growing towns, in a checkerboard pattern that hedged in other
development on rich land. Though the law was intended to favor the poor
people, surveyor Gideon Fitz wrote, it is a fact that the rich are the persons
benefited in the end, because the poor cannot pay for their land, and all they
can do is sell their claims and remove to some other place.63 Preemption law,
intended to establish an equilibrium between the purposes of the empire for
liberty and the processes of the land market, instead became a frontier of accumulationall before the land was actually put up for sale. As the British
traveler Arthur Cunynghame put it, The laws perhaps ensue, rather than operate against, the very system they are meant to check.64
The simplest way to game the preemption process was to use capital to command labor. With just a little bit of collusion in the Land Office, a given specu-
39
lator could use any number of names to register any number of preemption
claims. It is represented, wrote the secretary of the treasury to the commissioner of the General Land Office about rumors originating in the Mississippi
Valley, that associations of men are engaged in speculating in the purchase of
floating rights under the late pre-emption law and ... much valuable land in
Louisiana is thus engrossed & that these rights are multiplied by the recog
nition of separate pre-emption rights in the parents children & hired men of
each family & fictitious persons.65 In order to be patented, the land represented in these fraudulent claims had to be improved within a years time of
registration, materially transformed before its ownership could be finally recorded on the map in the District Office. Here, again, privilege presided over
preemption. It is a fact, wrote the chief surveyor in the Mississippi District,
that many of the very wealthy inhabitants send overseers & slaves or hire
men to make improvements on the most choice places for the purpose of getting pre-emption.66 The standard measures that were built into the lawone
years labor, 160 acres of land, $1.25 an acrewere deranged by the ability of
capital to command labor. Preemption law assumed that labor could be used as
the limiting condition of the land market: no (white) man would be allowed to
purchase more land than he could improve. But the ability of some (white)
men to purchase the labor of others, and, still more, to purchase black slaves to
improve the land for them, made a mockery of the equivalence of land and labor upon which the law was based.
Preemption law was intended to rationalize the privatization of public lands,
temporally, spatially, and racially; it was intended to bring past settlement up
to date with present sale, to provide a new Year Zero for property holding in
the Mississippi Valley and beyond by allowing squatters to buy their own land;
it was intended to mesh the existing condition of the unevenly settled land
with the rectilinear survey by providing floating grants that could be located
only within the emergent grid of settlement; it was intended to protect the
value of white labor by providing a mechanism by which it could be converted
into land ownership at fixed rate of exchange. In the end, it did none of these
things. Preemption, intended as the mechanism that would finalize the conversion of conquered lands into a yeomans republic, was diluted into meaninglessness by the flood of capital into the Mississippi Valley.
If preemption was intended to smooth the historical and sociological un-
40
evenness of the landscape into the emergent zero point of the land market, the
land auction was supposed to do the same for geographic and ecological unevenness. The 160-acre sections of the Land Office were the containers by
which the landscape was transformed into a commoditycontainers that
could be used to make a comparison between the loamy fertile soil of the
Mississippi Delta and the barren sandy soil of the piney woods, or between
open prairie land and uninhabitable swamp; between land with ready access to
roads, rivers, and markets and land likely to remain isolated even amid the
flood tide of economic development; between a sure thing, a calculated risk,
and a shot in the dark. The land auction was a mechanism by which aspiration,
information, and speculation were given a value (the per-acre price a bidder
was willing to pay for a given quarter-section) that could be used to distribute
slices of the public domain of the United States to its most deserving, or at
least most desirous, citizens. Well, at least in theory thats what it was.
In the early years of the boom, auctions generated a great deal of fanfare.
Advertised months in advance, they drew huge crowds to the administrative
outposts of the Land Office. Even so, they proved insufficient to meet the apparently insatiable appetite for land. In the event, most of the business in the
land market ended up being conducted outside its premises. Speculators orga
nized syndicates and sent advance men known as land hunters to follow the
surveyors through the woods and gather inside information about the land. In
the early years, squatters and smallholders stood some chance against speculators. It is very evident to me that no gentleman would be safe in that District
who would bid for, or purchase, any of those squatters settlements, wrote
the commissioner of the Land Office about Mississippis Pearl River District in
1815.67 But by the boomtime, speculators had begun to organize themselves
into companies, hire their own thugs to suppress competing claims, and agree
in advance upon limits to the prices to be offered at the government sales. Often land was purchased at the legal minimum from the government and then
immediately resold within sight of the district Land Office at a substantial
markup.68 The flow of capital into the Mississippi Valley transferred title of the
empire for liberty to the speculators.
But it was the labor of black slaves that made the dream of the speculators
into the material reality of the Cotton Kingdom. By and large, the slaves who
remade the Valley were brought there from the East, perhaps as many as a mil-
41
lion of them in the years 18201860, about a third of whom were brought west
with their masters as parts of intact plantation relocations, the other two-thirds
of whom were traded through a set of speculations that was quickly formalized into the domestic slave trade. The slave trade had its roots in the ventures of dozens of independent speculators who bought lots of ten or so slaves,
generally on credit, in Upper-South states like Virginia and Maryland. They
then walked them southward, after binding them wrist to wrist in a coffle, to
the emerging regions of the Lower Southfirst Georgia and later Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabamaselling slaves as they went. As it became clear that
there was a great deal of money to be made in buying, transporting, and reselling slaves, a set of highly organized firms emerged to compete with the footloose speculators. These firms maintained offices, complete with high-walled
jails that could house as many as a hundred slaves at a time, large yards where
the human property could be exercised, and showrooms where interested buyers could question and examine the people they hoped to purchase, at both
ends of the trade. The large firms employed salaried agents who haunted estate sales and county jails at the north end of the trade, hoping to pick up slaves
on the cheap who could later be sold for premium prices in the urban markets
of the Lower South.69
In order to make sure that they could count on a price differential sufficient
to justify the effort and expense of dragging as many as a hundred unwilling
and potentially rebellious slaves on a weeks-long journey across the backcountry or on a lonely sea journey around the Atlantic coast, the larger firms and
even simpler two-person partnerships mailed one another frequent reports on
the condition of the slave market at either end of the trade. These reports formalized a system of grading slavesExtra Men, No.1 Men, Second Rate or
Ordinary Men, Extra Girls, No.1 Girls, Second Rate or Ordinary Girls, and
so onwhich allowed them to abstract the physical differences between all
kinds of human bodies into a single scale of comparison based on the price
they thought a given person would bring in a given market. By 1820, the daily
practice of slave tradersgathering information about the economy by inquiring into the price of cotton in New Orleans, New York, and Liverpool and
the price of slaves in the Upper and Lower South, comparing them, and making a bet about whether the market would rise or fallwas sufficiently developed to ensure that slave prices in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans
42
would track both one another and the price of cotton (and to a lesser degree
that of sugar) with a remarkable degree of precision. The daily practice of the
slave trade, shipping slaves from one region of the South to another and sending information back and forth about how much they cost, knit a territory that
stretched from Louisiana to Maryland into a single slave economy. It was held
together not by its devotion to a certain crop (for the crop culture of Virginia
was, as slaves traded southward were the first to note, radically different from
that of Louisiana), or by a shared mode of production (for slave prices in
Richmond tracked only those in New Orleans, ignoring those in Havana or
Rio), but by the territorially bounded slave market that Congress had established in 1808.70
The domestic slave trade, however, was never just that, for the price of
Southern cotton that the price of slaves so surely tracked was, as every planter
was repeatedly told by every factor, set by the prices that cotton buyers in markets as distant as New York and Liverpool were willing to pay. The value of
the ground beneath the feet of the new white inhabitants of the Mississippi
Valley, as well as that of the slaves whom they drove westward and then out
into the fields every morning, pitched and rolled in response to the rhythm of
distant exchanges.
what held these regional, national, and international economies together

over space and across time was money. The abstract scale of dollar values allowed business to take place in a space not strictly delimited by the physical
properties of the thing being traded. The value of a barrel of salt pork, which
would go bad if it sat on the levee waiting for the crop to come in, could be
noted and paid off in sugar when it finally did; the value of a young woman in
Virginia in May might be compared to that of an old man in Louisiana in September, although their bodies were distant in time and space, and distinct in
physical proportion and capacity; the value of either might be compared to a
bale of cotton in Liverpool in January, a barrel of sugar in New York in June,
or a plot of land that was for sale down the road two days hence. Yet money
sometimes moved while things stood still: the ownership of a bale of cotton in
a warehouse in New Orleans or a descendants claim to a particular slave in a
share of an estate on the Red River, for example, might be transferred several
43
times, although the actual bale of cotton or the actual slave was never carried
away. Nothing in this economy moved without money.71 The real problem, it
sometimes turned out, was moving the money.
Because the dimensions of their economy outstripped the available technologies for gathering and sharing information, those who bought or sold cotton or sugar or slaves could not simply have funds transferred by depositing
them in one bank and having them readily available for withdrawal at another
bank miles away.72 They had to find ways to move money in its physical form
metal or paperfrom where it was to where it needed to be. In terms of
commercial complexity, the easiest form in which to move money was specie,
which ensured negotiability at par in every corner of the transoceanic economy. Specie, of course, presented its own problems. It was everywhere scarce,
nowhere more so than in the Mississippi Valley. And even when specie could
be had, the very physical properties which made it so attractive to antebellum
political economistsits luster, its density, and its malleabilitymade it a liability to those who would carry much of it very far.73 The physical substance
that most often linked Valley slaveholders to regional, national, and international networks of trade, profit, and purchasing was paper.
No one in the antebellum economy, of course, thought that pieces of paper
were inherently valuablethey were representations of value, or, more spe
cifically, of debt. Most simply, there were banknotes: printed markers of an
amount of money that was notionally deposited in the bank whose name was
on their facethe Merchants Bank of Philadelphia, the Farmers Bank of
Tennessee, the Citizens Bank of Louisiana. These banknotes circulated far
and wide in the antebellum economy, usually trading at a discount of between
1 and 10 percent, based on how much information about their bank of origin
existed at the point where they were being exchanged. These discounts were
ashorthand way of answering a set of questions about the representational
value of a piece of paper with a printed picture on the front: Did the Farmers
Bank of Tennessee really exist? Could its unknown managers be counted on
to maintain a sufficient reserve of deposits in order to redeem the notes they
had issued? How much trouble would it be to get someone to accept a note that
carried with it these uncertainties, or, alternatively, to turn up on the banks
doorstep and demand the value in specie represented on the face of its notes?
44
In the settled commercial cultures of the Northeast, many of these were questions that had long been settled; but in the land of the wildcat bankers of the
Southwest, they pressed in upon every transaction.74
Even more difficult to exchange were promissory notes. These were simple
promises to pay scripted out by the parties to a transaction on a scrap of paper
what you or I would call anIOU. In a specie-scarce economy, these promises to pay frequently circulated as a form of money, passed from buyer to
seller in a series of transactions that can be followed by the successive signatures scrawled on the back of the original note. Unlike banknotes, these notes
were termed obligations, due at a point in the future stipulated on the front
of the note (usually three to twelve months), and generally carried interest
based on the term of the note (a note payable at 6percent in twelve months
time would pay $1.06 on the loaned dollar when it came due). In many cases,
sympathetic creditors would renew the notes they were holding at the end of
the term for another three to twelve months, allowing debtors another chance
to raise the money to pay the note.
As they migrated further and further from the original exchange of goods
or services represented on the front of the sheet, these notes, too, traded at a
discount. In the case of promissory notes, that discount reflected questions
about both the parties to the note and its ultimate legal standing as a negotiable
instrument. Could the third party (or fourth or fifth) to a distant transaction be
sure that the original debtor was still alive, still at the same address, and still
good for the debt? Indeed, could parties along the line even be sure that the
people whose names headed the succession of debts really existed in the first
place? And even assuming all of those things were true, could the person who
ended up with the note be sure that the parties to the original transaction had
understood that the note was negotiable and would honor it when it made its
way backward along the chain of debt that linked them to one another? What
if, for example, Poor FarmerA had assumed that the note he was signing in
exchange for the cotton seeds he got from Rich PlanterB was, like all the notes
he had received from his good friend down the road in the past, going to be
rolled over to the following year if the crop failed and he had no money to pay
the note when, legally speaking, it came due? And what if, when Big-City
Note BrokerC (or his local agent,D) turned up on his doorstep, claiming that
Rich PlanterB had sold the note to him and demanding Poor FarmerAs mule
45
and his plow in lieu of the cash he knew that the farmer did not have, Poor
FarmerA was instead able to present him with a decision from a sympathetic
judge who had ruled in an earlier case that notes like the one he had given to
Rich PlanterB were not negotiable in the first place?75
These recombinant spirals of exchange, credit, and speculation had their
material correlate in the physical transformation of the Mississippi Valley.
What had been, at the end of the eighteenth century, a woodland characterized
by a decentralized frontier exchange economyIndian venison and deerskins
for European metal goods, alcohol, and firearmswas, by the second quarter
of the nineteenth century, emerging as one of the greatest staple-crop exporting regions in the world.76
From the perspective of Thomas Jefferson, life along the cotton frontier
must have seemed to possess a certain clarity. There was first the idea of national sovereigntythe idea that this was an American space and would thus
be governed by the culturally dominant norms of the American nation-space,
most notably by the laws and practices governing slavery, the land market, and
the money market. Those laws and practices were reflected in another set of
abstractions: the division of the land into forty-acre plots, which abstracted it
from its own physical properties by turning it into a set of fungible commodities. Then there was the compression of the infinite variety of human types
into a handy set of categories by which the slave traders did their business.
Lastly, there was the imaginative transformation of metal and paper into the
physical vehicles of a scale of values which could be used to compare the plats
of land and the bodies of slaves to all manner of other goods. If you took them
at face value, this nested set of abstractions provided a pretty good guide to
getting along in the Mississippi Valley. But if you looked more closely, you
would see that each abstraction stood at odds with the physical properties of
the object it sought to represent. Fissioning the fictions that held them together
could be explosive.
2
The Panic of 1835
It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance reigned
among the masters. ... And yet with all this there was something sordid, some
thing forceda certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show
and tinsel built upon a groan?
Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and
heard their horses thundering towards him, until at last they came sweeping like a
storm, and he saw in front that haggard white haired man, whose eyes flashed red
with fury. Oh how he pitied himpitied himand wondered if he had coiled the
twisting rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and
turned his closed eyes toward the Sea. And the world whistled in his ears.
W. E. B. Du Bois, Of the Coming of John
the little town in central Mississippi where the killing started no longer
exists. Its been overrun by the strip malls and suburban developments that
make todays Mississippi, in spite of its dark history, look like so much of the
rest of the United States. Yet there are reminders of the timethe first time,
though not the lastwhen the lawless brutality of Mississippis ruling class
transfixed the nation: the moss-shrouded trees lining the sluggish, muddy
streams; the vast shimmering fields that in 1835 were the most valuable land on
earth; the antebellum houses that were lighted all night that summer, fortified
against the very slaves who had built and maintained them; and the hard white
heat of the Gulf South sun. By the time it finally happened, there had been
weeks of rumors about a planned slave revoltfear hanging in the fish-bellied
The Panic of 1835
47
sky that finally burst with the cathartic violence of a summer storm. But what
happened in the end was less a revolt than a pogrom, a preemptive strike
against a conspiracy that may never have existed and that left at least sixteen
slaves and seven whites dead, their backs scored by torture before their necks
were snapped and their legs left quivering at the end of the gallows arc.
What happened in Mississippi that summer was not the sort of history that
Thomas Jefferson had imagined when he had secured the nations Western
frontier with the purchase of the vast Territory of Louisiana in 1803. In his
moments of brightest optimism, Jefferson had hoped to turn the Mississippi
River Valley into a republican Arcadia populated by self-sufficient yeomena
vast domain of patriarchal household order and noncommercial white-male
equality. And in his moments of darkest pragmatism, Jefferson had imagined
the Valley as a destination for the surplus population of black slaves whom
hehad increasingly come to see as an insurrectionary threat to American libertya vast dumping ground over which a dangerous slave population might
be spread so thinly that it would eventually disappear into the fruitful harvest
of republican liberty. But a future such as thiswith slaveholders patrolling
the night against an army of slaves they thought outnumbered them fifty to
one, lynch mobs closing the courts and arrogating their authority, broken bodies, black and white, swinging side by side from the gallows in the summer
sunwas not what Jefferson had imagined.
the compressed energy of the contradictions between the vision of social order promised by Jeffersons empire for liberty and that represented by
the emergent shape of the Cotton Kingdom exploded into large-scale violence
in Madison County, Mississippi, in the summer of 1835. Madison County had
been carved out of the Choctaw land cessions of 1820 and 1830, sitting on the
eastern side of the Big Black River, a tributary connecting the county to the
Mississippi system. By 1835, the county was in the midst of a furious transformation from a frontier exchange economy to a boomtime cotton economy. In
the five years leading up to the violence in the summer of 1835, the number of
slaves in the county had more than doubled, vastly outstripping the growth
of the white population.1 It is perhaps not too much to say that when things
started to go wrong that summer, the county was sitting on the leading edge of
the international cotton market.
48
By the time anyone in Madison County wrote anything down, at least

twenty-three people were already dead. And because they had been executed
not by the State of Mississippi, but by a committee of citizens unclothed with
the forms of law, those who had taken the law into their own hands felt compelled to justify themselves in a pamphlet addressed to their fellow citizens.
We must, then, read carefully, for the only account of the event we have was
an effort to reweave dozens of interrogations and executions unrestrained by
law into a story of the orderly unfolding of justiceor, as the pamphlet itself
put it, due deliberation and an earnest desire to find out the truth.2 Given
that their actions had been described and questioned in newspaper dispatches
that were read and recirculated nationwide and because they were themselves
conceivably facing murder charges in the cases of at least the seven whites they
had put to death, we can only assume that they tried to tell a good storyone
that would make the rest of the world see things the way they saw them.
What they said they saw and heard was this. From the middle of June,
people in Madison had been hearing rumors that an insurrection was being
planned among their slaves. After about two weeks, it seemed clear to a group
of gentlemen in the town of Livingston that the rumor had begun with a
white lady who lived at Beaties Bluff, a small settlement about nine miles
up the Big Black. A group of men from Livingston went up to hear her story,
and she told them that at some point that summer the behavior of her house
servants had begun to change. They had become insolent and disobedient;
they talked about her within her hearing; and she saw them engaged in secret
conversation when they ought to have been engaged at their business. So she
decided to spy on themscrutinize their conduct more closely was the way
the pamphlet put itand her fears were confirmed. She heard one of them say
that she wished to God it was all over and done with; that she was tired of
waiting on the white folks, and wanted to be her own mistress the balance of
her days, and clean up her own house. Soon afterward, the lady heard another
secret conversation, this time carried on between one of her female slaves and
a man who belonged to one of her neighbors. They spoke in a tone so hushed
that the words barely registered in her straining ear. Is it not a pity to kill
such..., the slave began, and after that the lady could hear no more. The
mans reply was clear enough. He said, It was, but it must be done. That
night, the lady told her son about what she had overheard. He went and told
The Panic of 1835
49
the enslaved woman that he knew something about what she had been saying
and that she must tell it. Without hesitation or punishment, she told him
that what she had said was, Is it not a pity to kill such a pretty little creature as
this? having reference to a child she then held in her arms. She went on to
say that the man with whom she had been caught in conversation had been telling her that there was going to be a rising of the black people soon and they
intended killing all the whites.3 That was enough information for the group
of white men who had traveled up from Livingston. On June27, at a large
and respectable meeting of citizens held in Livingston, the assembled white
men agreed to set up a system of patrols and committees of investigation that
would reconvene in three days time to report if anything new had been
discovered.
Once the committees of investigation took to the roads, evidence of a conspiracy among the slaves in Madison quickly began to mount. A slaveholder
named William Johnson enlisted his driver to investigate the slaves on his
plantation and soon returned to the citizens meeting with the news that an old
man on his plantation had heard there would be an uprising and knew that a
slave named Peter, who belonged to Ruel Blake, had plans to break into a store
to get gunpowder and shot. It was later determined by the committee that Peter had recently assisted in unloading wagons at the store, and that he had
asked what was in the kegs when he was carrying them in. The old man who
had implicated Peter was then brought into town and interrogated by the assembled committee. After at first denying that he had ever said anything about
Peter or gunpowder or shot, and then receiving a most severe chastisement,
the old man confirmed in every particular the statement and implicated another slave, a man belonging to Thomas Hudnold whose name was never rec
orded by the committee. When they went to fetch Hudnolds slave in the field
where he was working, he ran off, and though he was run by track-dogs some
two hours, he escaped by taking to water. It was agreed by the citizens
that he was a desperate villain who had been a terror to the neighborhood
for some years, and when several weeks later he was decoyed into Living
ston, he was taken directly to the gallows and hanged after confessing his
guilt and saying that it had been Ruel Blake himself who had told him of the
insurrection when Blake and he were in a swamp getting out gin-timber.
Blake, he said, had given him five dollars and told him he would be one of the
50
captains of the Negroes,&c. if he promised he would join.4 But as the unnamed slaves standing on the steps of the gallows surely knew, it was too late
for Blake to be held responsible for whatever he had done in the swamp that
day. By that time, Ruel Blake was already dead.
The bloody strand of confessions, accusations, and executions that began
with a conversation between slaves half-overheard by a worried old woman at
Beaties Bluff, and that brought to light a hidden proposal made by a white
man in the woods, traces out the process by which the presumptions of social
and spatial order upon which the Cotton Kingdom was founded were undermined by the fear of racial insurrection that shadowed its development at ev
ery step. Once it was suspected that slaves might conspire with white men,
scenes that had once seemed to reflect a sense of ordera slave unloading a
wagon at the center of town, a black woman lulling a white baby to sleep
suddenly became images of horrible disorder. Once that happened, all bets
were off. The duration of the violence in Madison County would be determined solely by the length of time that the countys citizens were willing to
keep torturing out confessions and murdering those they implicated.
The line of investigation being pursued by the committee in Livingston was
abruptly cut short by the actions of a mob. On the night of July2, the two
slaves who had thus far been implicated were seized from the jail and lynched.
But by that time, things had begun to heat up at nearby Beatie s Bluff. The
leader of the citizens committee there, Jesse Mabry, heard that James Lee (a
very close observer of men, both black and white) had been spying on an enslaved blacksmith named Joe and a preacher (also a slave) named Weaver,
and had heard them say things which confirmed his suspicions. Mabry
shared with the committee his suspicion that one of his own slavesa great
scoundrelmust have been in on the plot; and knowing that the slave had
been in Joes shop recently, the committee members conceived a plan for making certain of what they thought they already knew. They sought out Joe in
his shop, where Mabry, upon entering, addressed him in the following terms:
Do you know who we are? When the slave responded that he knew the two
other men, but not Mabry, the slaveholder contradicted him. I immediately
insisted that he did know me and continued to look him full in the face for
some minutes, until he began to tremble. When I saw this I asked him if he
knew Sam. Joe admitted that he did know the fellow named Sam and had
The Panic of 1835
51
spoken
with him recently, yet insisted that nothing had passed between them
other than what was usual when fellow-servants meet. We then, Mabry
continuedand remember, this is in a document meant to show that the slaveholders proceeded with care and deliberationcalled for a rope, and tied his
hands and told him we were in possession of some of their conversation and
he should tell the whole of it.5
Joe began to talk. He said that there were several white men actively engaged in the business; he named Ruel Blake, Joshua Cotton, and William
Saunders, which might have seemed like a remarkable revelation to the white
men in Beaties Bluff, but wouldnt have surprised anyone in Livingston,
where Blake had been implicated the day before, Cotton had been arrested that
morning, and William Saunders had disappeared. He alsoin answer to what
type of question, we will never knowsaid that Weaver was involved, as well
as another preacher named Russell, and Sam. And he said that the plan was to
begin with the conspirators massacring their owners with axes and hoes. They
would proceed to Beaties Bluff, break into a storehouse that held arms and
ammunition, then march on Livingston, and then Vernon, and then Clinton,
sacking and recruiting all the way to Natchez, where they would kill every
body and rob the banks, before retiring to a place called The Devils Punch
Bowl. Weaver, brought in as Joe talked, said that Joe was lying. When he refused to say anything more than that, he was beaten and put in confinement,
while Joe was allowed, for the moment, to go free (and presumably to tell ev
eryone he knew what had happened between him and the committee). Russell,
brought before the committee sometime after Joe had been freed, also denied
knowing anything. Mr.Lee at this time struck him twice, and Russell made a
statement that was, in all particulars, precisely like the one made by Joe.
The next morning an enslaved man named Jim was brought before the committee, and, Mabry reported, at length he agreed that if I would not punish
him any more he would make a full confession. Jims story was very much
like the one told the previous day by Joe, although he implicated several more
slaves, as well as a white man named Angus Donovan and another named
Moss, both of whom were standing nearby as he was interrogated. Jim also
added a detail that seemingly expressed the worst fears (and most lurid fantasies) of the men who were standing over him with a lash. He told them that the
slaves had planned to kill all the whites except some of the most beautiful
52
women
whom they had intended to keep as their wives. He went on to say
someone must have pressured him to saythat he had already picked one for
himself.6 Jim, like all of the others who were brought before the committee at
Beaties Bluff (five in all), was hung on the afternoon of July2.
On and on the interrogators went, in an endless feedback loop of their own
suspicions: asking the slaves questions based upon information that everyone
involved knew might just as well have been produced by the investigation as
discovered by it; acting as if the slaves information networkwhich they
claimed had been so effective in spreading the news of a massive plothad
ceased functioning the moment that the people they brought before their committee started making statements; torturing anybody who failed to go along
with the game. Upon finding that (mirabile dictu!) the same questions kept
producing the same answers, the committee in Livingston passed a set of resolutions, appointed a thirteen-man jury, and began hanging people on the morning of July 4. The pamphlet later published by the Livingston slaveholders
contains no record of the trials of the dozen or so slaves they hung during the
next several days, but it contains a detailed account of the evidence against
each of the seven white men they put to death. The trials of the slaves were
noteworthy for these citizens only insofar as they led to the trials of a group
of white mena group of men whom, it appears, they had been watching for
quite some time.
the committee began with Joshua Cotton. A native of New England who
had lived in western Tennessee before settling near the Land Office in neighboring Hinds County, Cotton had recently arrived in Livingston, where he set
up shop as a Thompsonian steam doctor, an entrepreneurial healer using
steam and herb baths to treat everything from gout to consumption (the system had been founded by Samuel Thompson of New Hampshire). There was
a lot of evidence taken against Cotton, all of which circled back to a peculiar
pastime. Cotton, it seemed, was always hunting horses, following them as
they tracked a path across the surveyed property lines, wooden fences, and
plowed fields that marked out the emergent pattern of land tenure in Mississippi. Cotton, that is, moved through the landscape in a way that accorded
more with the customs of the frontier exchange economy than with those of
the cotton boom. There were reports of seeing him skulking around the plan-
The Panic of 1835
53
tations near Livingston, near Vernon, and near Beatie s Bluff. At another
moment he might have just looked like a poor man trying to gain a stake by
raising a set of animals for whom he did not have any land.7
But in the summer of 1835, he looked sinister. His erstwhile partner in steam
doctoring, William Saunders, thought he knew the reason that Cotton would
suddenly materialize in the middle of another mans farm and then melt away
into the forest at its edge. Cotton, Saunders said, had been trying to steal slaves
in partnership with a man named Boyd. To provide himself with a cover, he
had purchased a number of Spanish horses, which he intentionally turned
loose so that he might have a chance to talk to the slaves and instill rebellious
notions among them in a way that he could not do by being a steam-doctor
(like, say, Saunders himself ). A slave seized after the executions at Beatie s
Bluff confirmed Saunderss account, saying he had been hunting horses at the
end of May when he ran into Cotton, who claimed to be doing the same. Cotton had started asking him questions: Was his master a bad man? Were the
slaves whipped too much? Would they like to be free? And then he had done
something no white person in Mississippi would ever do: he had offered the
slave a swig of whisky and made him drink first. Cotton had then told him
his plan for liberating the Negroes &c. Brought into a room where six or
seven white men were chained and surrounded by a crowd, the slave from
Beaties Bluff pointed at Cotton and exclaimed, That is the man who talked
with me in the prairie. Cotton, the committee s pamphlet reported, looked
thunderstruck and came near fainting on hearing the annunciation of the boy.
And then he began to talk.8
The first man he named was William Saunders. Saunders, the committee
recalled, had recently relocated from Madison to neighboring Hinds County,
and in the months since had moved through the landscape in a way that had
caught the attention of his new landlord. He would often be out all night and
never could give satisfactory explanations for so doing, the landlord apparently testified. And not only that: The gentleman afterwards ascertained that
while at his house and without any reasons therefor, he was often seen not only
in remote parts of Hinds, but also in Madison and Yazoo counties. In addition
to having been seen out late and away from homethat is, moving differently
from the way prosperous white people movedSaunders was doubly suspect
because he knew Cotton. He had, the committee cannily noted, apparently
54
known something of the plot, since he had known enough to try to pin it on
Cotton. As they accused each other, Saunders and Cotton were sitting in the
same room, each hearing what the other said and apparently repeating it in a
hopelessly played version of the Prisoners Dilemma.9 Saunders was executed
on the fourth of July.
And so on. Each of the men named by Cotton seemed to have a fragmentary record of mysterious behavior, which folded out into a complete story
once an accusation of conspiracy was placed at its end. For example, Albe
Dean was known to associate with Negroes, and would often come to the
owners of runaways and intercede with their masters to save them from a
whipping; he was seen prowling about the plantations ... ostensibly for the
purpose of inquiring for runaway horses, which he did with great particularitysometimes inquiring for a black, bay, gray, or other color that suggested
itself at the time; he acknowledged that he was in the swamp near Living
ston when the notorious Boyd was started by the dogs. Dean was condemned
to death on the morning of July6, and was executed two days later.10
Also accused was Angus L. Donovan. His deportment, some weeks previous to his arrest, was very suspicious, from his intimacy with the Negroes in
the neighborhood, being suspected of trading with them; his conduct was so
very extraordinary and suspicious ... as to induce the citizens of the neighborhood to watch his movements; he was repeatedly found in the Negro cabins,
enjoying himself in Negro society; after the whippings at Beatie s Bluff had
begun, he was caught at the house where the discovery of the conspiracy was
made, engaged in earnest conversation with the girls who divulged the plot;
when he found he could not be present at the examination of the Negroes, he
evinced considerable uneasiness, and kept walking to and fro. Donovan
alone among the suspected conspirators in Madisonwas accused of being an
abolitionist. He was condemned to death on the morning of July7 and died
with Albe Dean.11
Ruel Blake was the only slaveholder among those who were put to death.
He was of a cold, phlegmatic temperament, with a forbidding countenance;
kept himself almost aloof from white society, but was often seen among Negroes; as he worked at his trade of gin-wright ... he had opportunities of
becoming acquainted with the Negroes on most of the large plantations in
Madison; when he was asked to whip the implicated Peter, he did so in such
The Panic of 1835
55
a manner as to convince everyone present that he did not wish to hurt him;
when someone else took over the lash, he kept walking to and fro, each turn
getting closer to his boy, until the boy commenced talking, when he could
stand it no longer, and rushed through the crowd to where his Negro was, and
swore if he was touched another lick, they would have to whip him first. He
was chased out of town, then tracked down in Vicksburg. As he walked to the
gallows on the morning of July10, he protested his innocence to the last and
said that his life was sworn away.12
As Blake reminded the immense concourse of people who came to see
him swung off into infinity, there was no way of knowing whether anything at
all had really been happening in Madison County before the committee of
safety started torturing slaves. The confessions were all coerced; the witnesses were all made aware of what had been sworn against them; the fury of
the mob was so out of control that anyone who expressed doubts about the
process might soon find himself its victim; and the pressure on a committee
that had put at least sixteen slaves and seven white men to death without any
pretense of a trial was so great, that the committee members might have said
anything to make it seem as if they had done the right thing. So we will never
know if Joshua Cotton was plotting a full-scale assault on Southern slavery,
just trying to steal a few slaves, or simply tracking a bunch of horses that had a
knack for repeatedly escaping. Nor will we ever know what was behind the
appearances that the committee took as evidence of guilt: why William Saunders stayed out all night and kept popping up all over Mississippi, whether Angus Donovan really enjoyed himself in Negro society, or what Ruel Blake
actually was worried about when he tried to keep his blacksmithelsewhere
described as an old manfrom being beaten to death.
What we can tell from the pamphlet version of the Proceedings at Livingston
is what made these white men seem so suspicious that they had all apparently
been questioned about their activities, warned about their behavior, and subjected to further scrutiny long before the proceedings ever began. They
have been described as marginal men outside of social networks, poor
men who were not well known by their slaveholding neighbors.13 But the marginality and poverty of these men had a spatial correlate, one that both their
slaveholding neighbors and the surrounding slaves seem to have noticed.14
Their class position was literally thata positionand these men were al-
56
ways out of place. They were far from home in the dead of night; they were
on other mens property without being in their company; they were out on the
prairie chasing horses, in the swamp being flushed by dogs, or in the woods
doing something they could quite never explain to the satisfaction of their
slaveholding neighbors; they were in the slave quarters before the proceedings started, and in the way once they began. They were men who violated
the emergent code of behavior that was written in straight-line fences, plowed
fields, and open roads all across the Mississippi Valleylandless white men
in a landscape being remade by black slavery and private property. As the
empire for liberty became the Cotton Kingdom, they were woefully out of
place.
This is not to say that they were primitive rebels fighting for safety-first agriculture, yeoman-style republicanism, and a way back to a time before cap
italism, if such a time could even be imagined by a white man in the Mississippi
Valley. Just as the residual landscape theyso obviously, so balefully, and so
fatallyinhabited was itself a product of the uneven pattern of speculation
and settlement on the cotton frontier, their own presence in that landscape was
a reflection of the transformation under way in the Mississippi Valley. Their
aspirationswhether they were ultimately about steam doctoring, horse trading, slave stealing, arming the slaves, or robbing bankswere a mirror image
of the bubbles of hope that floated the cotton boom.
The stories told about the mens territorial trespasses were also stories
aboutracial transgression. They were accused of being men who talked with
and traded with slaves; just as they repeatedly violated the cotton-boom landscapes spatial etiquette, these men violated its code of proper racial behavior.
But talking and trading were really the least of it. Just as arresting as the image
of Joshua Cotton out on the prairie when he should have been minding the
store was the image of Cotton offering his bottle to a black man and then
drinking from it himself. And the picture of Angus Donovan trying to insert
himself into the interrogations of the slaves at Beatie s Bluff was clearly linked
in the minds of his accusers to the sight of him mooning around the slave
quarters, enjoying himself and talking with the girls. A white man who
would speak of liberating the Negroes with a slave s saliva still wet on his
lips, another who preferred the company of black women to that of the wife he
had left behind in Kentuckythe actions of these men called into question
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their racial integrity.15 As Henry Foote, a future governor of Mississippi, reported saying to Donovan at the time: Were you to witness a bloody conflict
between the slaves of this country and the white people, on which side would
you be?16
the execution of a number of white men in the first several days of July
concluded what had begun at the end of June as a fear of a slave revolt. The
Proceedings, which spent pages detailing the evidence against the white conspirators, did not bother to tally the deaths of the numerous slaves who were
murdered in the same days. In that way, what happened in Madison County
was not so different from what happened countless other times in the history
of American slavery. Slaveholders almost always framed their inquiries as investigations of the immediate circumstances of a revolt, rather than as con
siderations of the system of slavery itself. Instead of thinking that as long
as there was slavery there would probably be slave revolts, or trying to
fathomtheaspirations and political imaginations of their slaves, they reframed
revoltsand revolt scaresas evidence of a set of problems that could be
solved within existing parameters. And they set about making a series of reforms, most of which focused on their own behavior and that of their fellow
whites: they could control how much preaching or trading or hiring or traveling or steam doctoring their slaves were exposed to and thus make sure that
this never happened again.17 But the path by which understanding of what had
happened in Madison migrated away from any consideration of black self-
activity and toward a panic about white men who acted black was a particularlyoverdetermined one. For, as he went to his death, Joshua Cotton had provided Madison slaveholders with a way to link their own anxieties about space,
race, and slavery in Madison County to a wider network of boomtime terrors.
In the confession he signed just before the noose snapped his neck, Cotton
claimed he had been a member of a far-flung clan that was trying to carry
into effect the plan of Murrell as laid down in Stewarts pamphlet. Those
bookish last words sent a tremor of fear up and down the Mississippi Valley.
If there was a white man who embodied the uncertainties and fears that
lurked behind the bright-white tide of cotton and profit that flowed down the
Mississippi River in the boom years of the 1830s, his name was John Murrell.
Murrell was the leader of a clan of frontier bandits who swarmed over the
58
Mississippi Valley in the early 1830s, stealing horses and slaves, passing counterfeit bills, robbing travelers, and organizing a massive slave revolt that would
stretch all the way to Maryland. Or at least thats what Virgil Stewart said.
What we know about Murrell comes mostly from a pamphlet published by
Stewart in 1835 under the pseudonym Augustus Q. Walton.18 By that time
Murrell was in jail, hauled in by Virgil Stewart, and convicted wholly on the
basis of Stewarts testimony. But Murrell did not simply sit slack-jawed as
Stewart called him out; he was, he admitted, guilty of some of the crimes
of which he was accused, but said that Stewart had been his partner. This accusation was hard for Stewart to shake, because he was the only witness to the
crimes of which he was accusing Murrell: the slaves he had accused Murrell of
stealing, he said, had been transferred through a secret network and sold off
somewhere near Yazoo, Mississippi. In order to cleanse his good name of the
bad odor of its association with Murrells crimes, Stewart published a pamphlet
explaining how he had captured Murrell, lost sight of the stolen slaves,
and, above all, saved the nation from the horror that had engulfed Santo
Domingo.19
That was the pamphlet that was apparently on Joshua Cottons mind as he
prepared to die. There is no way to tell whether anyone else in Madison County
had read Stewarts pamphlet (still less whether anyone else had taken it seriously, for many of its initial readers thought it was a joke) before Cottons
confession.20 No way to tell, that is, whether the pamphlet provided the Madison County Committee of Safety with a road map at the beginning of their
investigation or simply a way to rationalize their actions after the fact. What is
clear is that the citizens of Madison County and Virgil Stewart came to need
one another. Today, the easiest way to obtain a copy of either the committee s
report or Stewarts history of his own good deeds (both of which were published in relatively small runs as unbound pamphlets) is in a bound compilation of documents relating to the events in Madison County that was issued in
a large run by a New York publisher in 1836.21 There, Stewarts otherwise unproven assertion that Murrell was planning a huge slave uprising as he traveled
the Mississippi Valley, and the committees otherwise implausible suggestion
that Madison County had been the site where that rebellion was set to begin,
are matched like a set of bogus confessions to a crime that never occurred or
like a pair of wise-guy endorsements kiting value out of an unbacked bill. And
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59
so, in the end, it does not really matter when the citizens of Madison County
first heard of Murrell or first came to believe that it was his dark purpose that
was behind the suspicious movement of their neighbors and the sinister murmuring of their slaves. The history that was made after Cottons confession
was a history in which the meaning many attributed to the murders in Madison
County was shaped out of the purposes they attributed to John Murrell, purposes that retraced the pattern of the cotton economy in shadowy negative
outline.
When Virgil Stewart started to play John Murrell for information, Murrell
was a social oddity, if not a theoretical impossibilitya white man who was
being legally treated as a slave. In 1833 Murrell had been convicted in MadisonCounty, Tennessee, for harboring three slaves who belonged to a man
named William Long. The slaves had disappeared and had been found in Murrells possession, but he claimed to have captured them and not yet (in spite
of his best efforts) been able to return them to their owner. That much made
Murrell a rogue and an outlaw, but the sentence in the case made him some
thing more. Because Murrell had neither the money nor the property to cover
his fine, the judge sentenced him to serve Long for a term of five years.
Murrell appealed the sentence, but while he waited for a decision he was again
accused of stealing slaves, this time by a man named John Henning, and he
apparently decided to leave Tennessee. Henning, by all accounts, hired Virgil
Stewart to track Murrell and find the slaves that he was sure the latter man had
stolen and had stashed somewhere along the road he would soon be traveling.
After that, everything we know comes from Stewart. When Murrell headed
out of town, Stewart followed him for several hours and then decided to make
his acquaintance. He drew up beside him and introduced himself as a fellow
traveler. He was, he claimed, a visitor from the Choctaw nation and he was on
that road hunting a horse.22 He used, that is, the guise generally favored by
those who stole slaves in order to track a slave stealer who was in actuality a
runaway slave.
On down the road went this oddly inverted couple; and as they traveled, the
con man got conned. Stewart later explained that he had been able to stay by
Murrells side all the way across Tennessee and into Arkansas by claiming that,
in addition to looking for a horse, he was looking for land. The land east of
the Mississippi River, he confided to his companion, is all entered and it is
60
very dear. Their journey quickly veered off the turnpike and into the woods,
heading toward Randolph, Tennessee, where Murrell planned to cross the
river.23 After several days of thrashing around in the woods at the rivers edge,
looking for a crossing and waiting for the water to subside, the pair made it
across the river into the morass, a swampy canebrake uninhabited except for
a few huts occupied by men and sometimes by Negroes. Farther and farther
off the grid of orderly settlement they traveled, deep into an almost impenetrable wilderness, searching for the meeting place of Murrells clan. Murrell,
Stewart recorded, referred to himself and his men as speculators, and when
he traveled he identified himself as an agent in the transformation of the
Southwest, sometimes posing as a slave dealer out collecting debts, other times
as an itinerant minister of the Methodist Church. He had traveled, he claimed,
from Virginia to Louisiana, conning, robbing, kidnapping, and murdering
along the way, and to Stewart, at least, he seemed eager to talk about it. According to Stewarts account of his experience of riding into the woods with
Murrell, his mind was filled with strange phantoms and he began to feel as
though he were on enchanted ground.24
Stewart later said that he had used a needle and a secret system of stenography to scratch notes into his boot legs, fingernails, saddle skirts, and portmanteau as they rode and talked. These he transcribed on tiny pieces of paper
stashed in the lining of his hat.25 MurrellStewarts Murrellspoke of his
past crimes at great length, and by the end of their journey he had provided
Stewart with something like a highwaymans map to the vulnerabilities of the
antebellum economy. Start with hijacking. Stewarts Murrell had spent time on
the Natchez Trace, the pathway through the woods and swamps north of New
Orleans that river traders used to walk home after they had sold their goods.
According to Stewart, Murrell bragged that in the early days of his career he
would select his marks along the road by the way they looked, make their acquaintance, and then rob and murder them. A tall and good looking young
man, for instance, riding an elegant horse which was splendidly rigged off,
caught his eye. When the man said he had been to the lower country with a
drove of Negroes and was on his way back to Kentucky with cash in his
pocket, Murrell offered to ride with him along the dangerous road through
the Choctaw Nation. For the trader, that road ended when Murrell pulled
him off the road and pointed a gun at his head. When he pleaded to be allowed
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61
to pray before he died, Murrell told him, I had no time to hear him pray, and
shot him dead. The man, it turned out, had been a bit of a puff, a phony
the wallet he had told Murrell was full of cash turned out to be stuffed with
love letters.26
Then there was counterfeiting. As he traveled south, at least by Stewarts
telling, Murrell would always pick up the tab, paying with a counterfeit note,
often while passing himself off as a preacher. The members of the devout
Nobs family, who ran an inn along the banks of the Mississippi, Stewart remembered, were so besotted by the presence of a minister at their dinner table
that they tried to refuse payment for the meal. Murrell insisted, apologizing
that he had only a large-denomination bill for which they would have to make
changein coin. On the way out the door, he mentioned in passing that he
was hoping to start up a small business breeding mules to pay for his ministry.
The Nobs were only too happy to accept Murrells note as payment for a mule
(although their money was at that moment heavy in his pocket).27 The object
for Murrell was less to get things for freethe only load that Murrell planned
to make his new mule carry was the weight of a tag noting its price (in cash)
than it was to use the cash nexus to turn worthless paper into good money.
Indeed, Murrells method made the economy of capitalist accumulation run
backward: the transfer of a thing served as the mechanism by which the sellers
money ended up in the buyers pocket.28 Virgil Stewart was so impressed with
the trick that he gushingly termed Murrell a great man, possessed of unrivalled mental powers, as he recalled the dumb grins that had graced the Nob
family faces when Murrell had bestowed upon them a final, bogus bene
diction.
But Murrells real game was stealing slaves. Like Murrell himself, slave
stealing haunted the margins of the cotton economy. For a white man like
Murrellslaveless, ambitious, unscrupulous even by the standard of Mississippi Valley slaveholdersan escaped slave could look like a walking income
stream. One white man accused of helping to steal a twelve-year-old slave girl
named Rachel recalled encountering her along the banks of the Mississippi,
explaining that he had only reluctantly acceded to her request for a ride and
brought her to his house after observing that she had one of her feet cut.
There she remained for two days, whereupon he took her to the defendant
and left her with him. Where she stayed for a year, until her owner heard
62
where she was and drove out from New Orleans to repossess her.29 Although
she was treated as a slave in the household of the man with whom she was left
(he had her work in his kitchen and tracked her down on the two or three occasions on which she disappeared), she continued to claim that she was free right
up until her legal owner came to get her. Faced with returning to his service,
she suddenly admitted she was a slave and begged the family of the man with
whom she had been living to buy her.
While she was not the free person she claimed to be, Rachel was quite
clearly something other than a victim of circumstance. Traveling a landscape
populated by white men apparently eager to take advantage of her vulnerability, she searched for the best situation she could find. And what of the man in
whose house she was discovered? Had he knowingly harbored a fugitive, trading her board for her labor and the hope of her eventual reproduction, as her
legal owner came to suspect? Had he bought her from the man who found her
on the road? Or had he simply taken her in because both men agreed that he
stood a better chance of finding her rightful owner and returning her than the
first man? Had he really tried to spread the news to neighbors that she was
working in his kitchen, even as he somehow missed the published notices in the
Louisiana Advertiser that was delivered monthly to his home?30 Although the
precise details of the story are unknownthey remained contested during
thecourt case that followed, which concluded with the ambiguous finding that
the man in whose house Rachel had been found had behaved in a way that
wasnegligent and remiss, but not criminalthe moral of the story remained clear enough. At least on the margins, the social privileges of whitenessof being able to command the labor of an out-of-place black child
foundalong a country roadcould compromise the property rights of slaveholders, as well as the aspirations of their escaping slaves.31
Similar stories are threaded through the court records of the antebellum
Mississippi Valley. Three slaves named Tom, Brunswick, and John disappeared
from the plantation of Shupley Owen in Carroll Parish, Louisiana, on the
night of January18, 1854, taking with them a boat and a coat, rain pantallon,
rain boots, and a vest belonging to their overseer. The coat, the overseer
added, was a black frock or sack coat bound around with some kind of tape,
there was cord on it in the shape of a barrel for fancy buttons. About five days
later, it was later alleged, the escaped slaves were drifting down the Mississippi
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63
opposite Island No.95 when a nonslaveholding white man named Gersham

Brown, who lives on said island[,] caught them and took them by force to said
Island and there kept them secretly and fraudulently and put them to work cutting cord wood, which he sold to passing steamboats. Several months later,
having somehow heard that his slaves were on Island No.95, Owen went down
to fetch them. Rowing out to the island, Owen later testified, he spotted Gersham Brown on shore about two miles above the usual landing, whereupon
Brown and his sons jumped into their own boat and rowing at the utmost
speed, passed petitioner and his friends underway and got to the said landingfirst. When Owen finally caught up, there were no slaves in evidence at
Browns wood yard and an awkward conversation ensued in which Owen and
his friends gave Brown false names, and pretended they had rowed out to the
island to go hunting, thus gaining a pretext to keep looking around. Brown insisted (when finally asked) that there had not been any Negroes ... runaways
or others on the island for several months. Brunswick and John were forced
ashore in Vicksburg two days later, where they apparently told the whole story
(although their testimony is lost to history because it could not legally be used
in a case against a white man like Gersham Brown). Tom, wearing a cloth
overcoat with loops and buttons ... fine pants, casimere, a pair of boots, a
black silk hat ... a white linen bosom shirt and a cravat, the overcoat trimmed
with braid, rowed out to a passing steamboat. He claimed that he was a free
man from Pittsburgh named Bill Steele who had been employed as a cook
aboard the steamboat Sultana, but had been put off on the island after having
some difficulty with the boats steward. Some of the hands on board, including one to whom he had apparently given his memorable coat as he came
on board, vouched for him, and he was enlisted as a fireman for the rest of the
boats journey upriver. In November 1854, one of Shupley Owens sons saw
the overcoat on the back of a white man in Louisville, Kentucky; he bought it
from the manwho turned out to be the very man to whom Tom had traded it
(for his safe passage?)and had it sent home to his father. It was later exhibited in court and identified by Owens overseer as the very same coat that had
disappeared on the night Tom had absconded. Tom himself was last seen in
Cairo, Illinois, in the summer of 1854, and was never heard from again, at least
not by Shupley Owen.32 Tom had apparently made his way out of slavery
along a fault line in the structure of Southern rule: the discrepant interests of
64
men like Gersham Brown (and perhaps the man who vouched for Tom in return for a fancy coat), who could attain some of the privileges promised them
by virtue of their race by betraying the loyalty to the slaveholding social order
that their whiteness supposedly demanded of them.
There were others like Gersham Brownnonslaveholding white men eager to command, for a time, the services of a slave not legally their own. They
included Amos Hall, who enjoyed Granville s service aboard the steamboat
Chieftan all the way from New Orleans to Louisville, where they parted ways;
the mysterious particular friend, who sent word to Walker Reynolds that he
knew where Reynoldss slaves George, Ned, and Dick were hiding and would
return them for $1,000; the elusive Doctor Clark who paid his way from
Mississippi to Louisville aboard the Hercules by hiring out Peter and Samuel
(who, it was discovered, belonged to someone else) to the unwitting ships captain; Manuel St.Germain, who hired out Jacko to the captain of the steamer
A.M. Wright, who when confronted by Jackos legal owner said that Jacko
was not Jacko but William Henry and that William had been hired to him by a
Dr. Merceror was it Mercier?33 There is no way to know exactly how many
slaves were stolen, the practice being an inherently shadowy and indeterminate one (at what point did passively failing to find a runaway slave s erstwhile
master become actively stealing a slave?), but it was frequent enough to be a
matter of grave public concern. The penalties prescribed by law were severe:
up to twenty years at hard labor for those convicted of stealing a slave. We
believe there are worthless scamps prowling about in this community who
make a business of stealing Negroes and who exist on the fruits of their infamous labor, wrote an editor of the New Orleans Daily Picayune in 1839.34
And among the slave stealers, there was none more notorious than John
Murrell.
Murrell needed, he bragged to Stewart, only fifteen minutes to decoy the
best of Negroes from the best of masters. The conversations between stealer
and slave generally went something like this. Coming upon a slave walking on
the road on a cold winters day, Murrell would begin by taking the slave s side:
Well, old man, you must have a dd hard master, or he would not send you
to mill this cold day. The slave, perhaps sensing a chance for some illicit interplay (why else would a white man start a conversation like that?), would
reply, Yes, maser, all on um hard in dis country. Murrell: Would you like to
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65
be free and have plenty of money to buy land and houses, and everything you
want? Well, who wouldnt? And then Murrell would make his proposal: if
the slave would come away with him and consent to be sold several times, escaping each time only to be sold again, then Murrell would eventually set him
up for freedom in Texas (outside the jurisdiction of the United States). In
Stewarts telling, the game always had a trick ending. In order to protect himself, after a few sales Murrell would murder his silent partners. One man, he
told Stewart, he had cut open, filled with rocks, and sunk in a creek.35
John Brown almost ended up that waybut, as he told it, Murrells 1834 arrest (by Virgil Stewart) saved his life. Brown claimed that when he had belonged to a cruel-hearted man in Georgia, he was decoyed away by a member of Murrells gang named Buck Hurd. Brown described the operation this
way: They had stations in various parts of the country, at convenient distances, and when a member of the club succeeded in stealing away a Negro or
a pony, he would pass him on as quickly as he could to the nearest station from
which point he would be forwarded to another and so on. Brown estimated
that it was no problem for Murrells gang to move a slave 300 miles without
stopping. He had heard stories that Murrell had murdered one of the slaves he
had stolen, ambushing him in the woods after telling him to go to fetch some
water; but Brown was desperate enough that he took up Hurds proposal.
They spent their nights on the road, hiding in the woods and swamps by
day, until Hurd got word that Murrell was in prison in Tennessee. Hurd got
frightened and told Brown that he wanted to take him back, which he planned
to do by pretending that he was a slave catcher who ran across Brown in the
woods. Brown agreed to the plan, as long as Hurd promised that he would get
my master to promise not to flog me.36 We cannot, of course, rule out that
Brown had read Stewarts pamphlet and constructed his own tale around the
coordinates of a well-known frontier legend. Yet neither can we forget what
Browns account represents: a trace of the complicated give-and-take between
stealer and slave that was suppressed in Stewarts rendering with the same
typographic ease with which he dashed out the middle letters of the word
damned.
About the stakes in these traveling skin games, Murrell was quite clear when
he told the story of a slave called Sam, whom his brother had stolen from a
Tennessee man named William Eason. Sam had been sold out of his neigh-
66
borhood to Eason, and so he was easily persuaded to go away with the slave
stealer. He was quickly moved toget thisMadison County, Mississippi,
where he was sold for fourteen hundred dollars in cash, seven hundred dollars in ready-made clothing, and a draft on Thomas Hudnold ... for seven
hundred dollars, which is as good as gold dust. Though he has to sue for the
draft [i.e., go to court to get the portion of the price that was unpaid at the time
of sale], the recovery is sure-fire. They can never get the Negro and without
him they can never prove he was Easons Negro. In other words, after Sam
escaped from Hudnold, there was no way anyone could prove that the man
identified on the bill of sale as, say, a prime Negro man named Jack, medium
height, dark complexion, was the same Sam who had recently disappeared
from Easons farm in Tennessee. His brother, Murrell confided to Stewart, had
made only two mistakes: he had not cashed Hudnolds note quickly enough,
thus giving the planter time to cancel it when the slave ran off; and he had not
killed Sam.37
Slave stealing twisted the contradiction of human propertythe governing
fiction of the slaveholding Southinto subversion. It was the human capacities of enslaved people that made them valuable: the fact that they could think
and act and create. Indeedand this was the heart of the contradictionthe
human capacities of enslaved people made them uniquely valuable repositories of capital. Unlike real estate, they could be moved from place to place as
the economy demanded; unlike other forms of personal property, they could
be repurposed to meet novel challenges. But along with the labor and the cap
ital that made them so valuable to their owners, enslaved people were inhabited by their own slippery, sometimes subversive will. They possessed the ability to conspire with a man like Murrell, to play the part of property, cloaking
their own aspirations in a series of sham sales, until, like Sam, they had a
chance to slip out from under it entirely.
John Murrell haunted the uneasy frontier between value and its physical
form. In order to be moved over time and space, capital had to be made material in one form or another. And whether it was by overtaking travelers along
the Natchez Trace and stealing the metal and paper in which they were carrying home the value they had extracted from their sold slaves, by passing fake
paper for good metal at a roadside inn, or by selling a slave who could never be
proven not to be the man he was represented to be on the bill of sale, Murrell
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67
hijacked the capitals material hosts. He pried his way into the mechanics of
aneconomy that had (long since) grown beyond its ability to accomplish the
lightning-quick transfer of value that characterized the on-the-books economy
of the country store, where a slab of bacon might be reduced to a twenty-fivecent credit with the flick of a wrist. As value migrated from the real physical
things that Murrells victims bought and sold every day into the pure ether of
unencumbered dollar values that they dreamed about every night, it had to
pass through his territory: a territory in which things could be measured and
compared by a price, but in which that price always had to be paid in a physicalmovable, fakeable, and boostableform.
But Murrell was more than a trickster freelancing along the frontier of exchange value. He had a network.38 Every fellow that would speculate that
lived on the Mississippi River and many of its tributary streams, from New
Orleans up to all the large western cities, was a part of his clan, reported
Stewart. Barely visiblein a midnight encounter along a country road, at the
wooded edge of a planters field, in the fantastic tale with which Virgil Stewart
returned from the morass on the unsettled side of the Mississippiwas the
ghostly underside of the cotton economy, stretching throughout its length and
breadth, reversing its flows, switching its codes. Indeed, in Stewarts telling, it
was Murrell and his men, not the slave traders, cotton planters, and commission merchants they preyed upon, who were the masters of this economy. It
was they who understood the physics of the uneven movement of money and
information through that network of streams, rivers, and roads, and could
move fast enough and think fast enough to remain the master of each.
Murrells ultimate speculation was to use his shadowy network to excite a
rebellion among the Negroes, throughout the slaveholding states, and to
manage it so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour on Christmas Day, 1835the terrifying simultaneity of the event making it seem to the
slaveholders as if they were facing an all-seeing invisible enemy. In the midst
of the confusion and disarray all over the South, Murrell and his men would
slip into the cities and rob the banksthe nodal concentrations of the wealth
produced in the region. As Murrell and Stewart rode through the morass,
the plan was already under way, unfolding in a series of secret conversations
between the agents of Murrells clan and their contacts among the most vicious and wicked among the slaves. We poison their minds, Murrell con-
68
fided, by telling them how they are mistreated, and they are entitled to their
freedom as much as their masters, and that all the wealth of the country is the
proceeds of the black peoples labor. ... We tell them that all Europe has abandoned slavery, and that the West Indies are all free, and that they got their
freedom by rebelling a few times and slaughtering the whites ... and that they
can marry white women when they are all put on the level. But, Stewart
asked,what if their courage falters? They will be forced to engage, Murrell
replied, under the belief that the Negroes have rebelled everywhere else,
and would be encouraged by the promise to conduct them to Texas should we
be defeated. Indeed, he had plans to disguise himself as a quack doctor and
travel to South America, to get some friends in that country to aid me in my
designs relative to a Negro rebellion.39 From the underworld of the cotton
economy, Virgil Stewart claimed, he had, like his namesake, returned to warn
the world of the vision of the future he had seen from the other side: whole
cities wrapped in smoke and flames, and houses and human beings together
swallowed up by sheets of fire.40
stewart s prophecy of the apocalypse of John Murrell remapped the

territory of the Mississippi Valley (and the rest of the South) and rewrote the
history that had begun with the Louisiana Purchase. The sovereign boundary
drawn around the slave South at the beginning of the nineteenth century was
exposed in Murrells plan as a comforting illusion of territorial and historical
isolation. The history being made in the South was not the history that the
slaveholders and cotton factors told themselves they were making, but another
sort of history entirely. It was a history being made by their black slaves. And
though that real history was evident every day in the physical labor with which
those slaves created the country, it was yet hidden from view by the forced
conversion of their labor into wealth credited to the substance of their masters
and by a stage-prop sovereignty designed to convince them they were alone in
the world. Murrells plan was to rupture the illusion. He would tell the slaves
that the boundaries of their world were not defined by farm fences or state
lines or international borders, or even by the global reach of the cotton economy. He would pry the history of the South away from that of the United
States and reattach it to the history being made in what we would today call the
Black Atlantic: in Haiti, where blacks had been ruling themselves for forty
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69
years; in the West Indies, where the slaves had gained their full freedom in
1834 (an event widely reported in Southern newspapers); and in South America, where, he would assure them, there were many thousands ready to join
them in arms.41 In the end, Murrells apocalypse was to be a speculation structured much as were those on the topside of the cotton boom. Those who were
reluctant to go along with his plan would be told that slaves everywhere else
were already engaged, until each individual decision to join was prefigured by
an image of a realized collective that was actually yet in the makinguntil all
of the marginal players in the business imagined themselves to be riding a
surge of events greater than themselves. Murrell, Stewart said, planned to rupture the history of American slavery with a speculative bubble of belief in the
possibility of black revolt. When Stewart finally brought him in, Murrell was
walked through the streets of Nashville chained to a slave.
It is hard to say what Virgil Stewart thought people would see in this apocalyptic fantasywhy he thought they would buy his pamphlet. Perhaps he
thought that a vision of the end of their world would allow slaveholders to
imagine themselves in extremis, to measure their mastery against a fantasy of
its greatest test. Perhaps he thought he could draw back the curtain which
shielded slaveholders from so many of their sins, to provide them with a negative image of the sum total of their own work in the world: their achievements
credited to their slaves, their homes destroyed and their wives traded away,
their nation under attack by an outside that was suddenly everywhere, their
history suddenly made by someone else. Or perhaps he thought he had really
uncovered a conspiracy that stretched the length and breadth of the South and
that threatened to explode at any moment.
Whatever the ultimate source of its attraction to its adherents, in the aftermath of the hangings in Madison, County, Stewarts vision burst over the Mississippi Valley like a primordial thunderclap. On July6, 1835, a fight that had
begun between two men at an Independence Day celebration in Vicksburg
turned into a riot when the citizens of Vicksburg gathered to drive the
gamblers and sowers of sedition among Negroes from their midst. The
panic soon spread to Natchez and Little Rock and New Orleans and Norfolk
and Cincinnati, all of which experienced mob action against gamblers in the
month of July. Those who were gamblers, or who looked that way, were forced
to the river and packed onto steamboats or flatboats, which traveled from town
70
to town looking for one that would allow their haggard passengers to come
ashore. In the end, it was reported, many of them made their way to Texas.
The mobbings were accompanied by a series of insurrection scares all over the
South. In Maryland, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky, insurrection plots were uncovered and slaves were tortured and hung. In Mississippi, there were three separate scares in the months
leading up to Christmas Day, 1835; in Louisiana, four more.42 For months, it
was said to be dangerous for anyoneany white personto travel the roads
in Mississippi. In succession, steam doctors, gamblers, slave dealers, clock peddlers, and finally missionaries were warned off the roads and driven out of
communities up and down the Mississippi River Valley, as slaveholders tried to
choke out the enemy within themselves.43
And then, as suddenly as it had gathered, the panic dispersed. Newspapers
that had carried seemingly daily reports from Mississippi began instead to fill
their pages with extended discussions of the origins of the phrase Lynchs
Law and its first usage in North America. Doubts about the full truth of Stewarts pamphlet were spun off into a detailed controversycomplete with a
court case, the published testimonials of many worthy men on either side, and
several more pamphletsbetween its author and his former business partner
about whether or not Stewart had been acting as his agent or merely his
employee when he made several off-the-books sales, after which the other
man seemed to have many fewer goods but little more money. The image of a
commercial economy that was extended beyond its physical capacity to send
information and safely move moneydependent for its daily bread upon a
potentially insurgent labor force that had already penetrated its most intimate
hideaways, pasted together by a racial ideology that was only skin deep, and
protected from an outside world in which history seemed to be moving in another direction by only a few fictional lines drawn on a mapsubsided into
nostalgia. By 1836, Virgil Stewart was touring Mississippi not as a prophet of
the disaster that was to come, but as the hero of an event that everyone seemed
to believe had happened long ago and far away, fted on the Fourth of July
along with the republics dead founders.44
Like the terrors of the summer of 1835, John Murrell was consigned to the
past. Gradually, Murrells story became legend, part of the river lore of the
flatboat era, the bygone times before the steamboat. Murrell died a savage
The Panic of 1835
71
jungle cat, crushed by the dawning age of steam, to which he could not reconcile himself. ... Alive, he had passed at various times as a lawyer, doctor, and
a preacher. Dead, he marked the end of an epoch.45 The race, in short,
of these singular beings, is becoming extinct, wrote the traveler who called
herself Matilda Houstoun, commenting on white men such as Murrell. Like
the Indians whom they resembled, these white men were being pushed by
progress into banditry, drunkenness, and racial degeneracy.46 According to any
number of travelers, the racial backwash of the steamboat era was apparent at
every landing where the boats stopped to take on fuel. There, one could see
men like Gersham Brown, the slave-stealing woodsman who lived on Island
No.95: outcasts, squatters, men of broken character; worn and sallow, with miserable pallid children, Thomas Hamilton called them; tall,
lanky, unwashed men, with clay-colored faces, looking for all the world as
though they had been made of the same mud that dyes the Mississippi waters,
wrote Mrs. Houstoun; the squalid look of the miserable wives and children
of these men was dreadful ... their complexion is of a bluish white that suggests the idea of dropsy, wrote Frances Trollope.47 Whatever they were
sallow, pallid, clay-colored, bluishthe woodsmen, their wives, and their
children in these tellings were not quite white; they represented a sort of racial
residuum, white men left behind by the progress of their race.
The legend of John Murrell became part of the process by which class differences among whites were translated into other sorts of difference: historical
differences, which made poor whites seem like men from another time; racial
differences, which made them seem not quite white. Far from being extinguished by the capitalist transformation of the Mississippi Valley, however,
these men, like John Murrell, Joshua Cotton, and Gersham Brown, were created by it. They were the aspirant cotton farmers whose crops had not yet
come in, the immigrant laborers trying to work their way up, the second-order
white working class who stitched together the political economy of slavery.
They were clerks, coopers, and carpenters; shopkeepers, barkeepers, and
housekeepers; actors, dancers, and prostitutes; slave traders, slave overseers,
and slave catchers; steamboatmen, railroadmen, and night watchmen; typesetters, tailors, and tinsmiths; upriver truck farmers, Eastern fortune seekers, and
European immigrants; riverboat gamblers, roadside bandits, and horse thieves.
They may have been the relative losers in the process by which the empire for
72
liberty became the Cotton Kingdomthe process by which the racial promises of white supremacy were foreshortened into the class privileges of slaveholdingbut they were not going anywhere. Usually, when they looked at
their white faces in the mirror, they saw not-yet winners, rather than losers,
and stayed loyal to the program. Sometimes, however, they saw themselves
for what they were: incomplete members of a society in which privilege
wasdefined by slaveholding even more than by race. At those moments, they
would once again seem as dangerous to slaveholders as they had in the summer of 1835.
3
The Steamboat Sublime
A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine
and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdomthe shadow of a
marvellous dream.
according to legend , Robert Fultons New Orleans was the first steamboat launched on the Mississippi River, in 1811. According to historians, Fulton may not have been the first to get his boat onto the water, but he was certainly the first to make money doing it. Fulton would surely have appreciated
the difference. For the New Orleans was not simply an inventionit was a visionary speculation.1 In Fultons creative mind, the introduction of steamboats
to the Mississippi Valley would be the first phase in a process that meditated
nothing less than the introduction of steam navigation throughout the civilized world. The object, he wrote, is immense. Fultons own object was
to obtain the exclusive privilege to run steamboats on the Mississippi for a period of at least twenty years, in exchange for the time and money he had invested in the boat. When Fulton was granted such a monopoly by the Orleans
Territory, in the sort of his-business-partners-brothers-best-friend sweetheart deal characteristic of nineteenth-century capitalism and statecraft, he
was rebuffed by a flood tide of resistance: Our road to market, must and will
be free. ... The citizens of the West insist on ... the privilege of passing and
re-passing, unmolested, on the common highway of the West. Fultons great
antagonist in the Western steamboat wars was Henry Shreve, who launched
several boats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in the 1810s, most notably the
74
Enterprise, which was seized on two separate occasions for violating Fultons
state-protected monopoly. The question of exclusive franchises on the nations internal waterways was finally decided in the U.S. Supreme Court in
Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), although by the time Fulton and his business partnerwere dead, the free navigation of the Mississippi was a well-established
fact, and Henry Shreve, along with many others, was making money hand
over fist.2
Origin stories invisibly shape the history they seem to narrate. They reframe economic history as a story of self-made men, of inventors and entrepreneurs. In the nineteenth century, they were a regular feature of the didactic
literature of commercial self-improvement; comparisons of Fulton and Shreve
to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, were a hallmark
of the genre. That importance notwithstanding, the stories that boosters told
themselves about the steamboat elided deeper structures of history. They
overwrote the history of conquest with the history of technology. They transformed the history of capitalism into the history of technology, the results of
incentives and investment into inventions. They were bright, didactic bubbles
floating on top of the muddy tide of the history of the Mississippi Valley.
So spectacular was the confrontation of the emergent rhythms of steam
power with the patterned ecology of the Western waters that travelers on Mississippi River steamboats often used the word sublime to describe it.3 Their
usage was an artful one, in keeping with the idea (current in nineteenth-century
philosophy and aesthetics) that there were places or experiences that could
carry human beings to the edge of language and reasonspectacles, in the
words of the historian Simon Schama, of holy terror.4 Sights and sounds
that could overawe the senses: immense, ineluctable, terrifying, marvelous.
There are few objects more truly grandI almost said sublime, wrote Edmund Flagg in an 1838 passage emblematic of the convention, than a powerful steamer struggling with the rapids of the western waters. And a few pages
later, again: The mighty stream rolling its volumed floods through half a
continent is sublime. And again (and again and again): Its resistless power is
sublime. ... The memory of its bygone scenes, and the venerable moss grown
forests on its banks are sublime; and lastly, the noble fabric of mans workmanship, struggling and groaning in convulsed, triumphant effort to overcome the
resistance offered... Flaggs downriver passage to New Orleans carried him
75
to the edge of the known world, to a place where human beings tore history
from the relentless current of time: the terrible Mississippi . .. fearful and
sublime.5 In trying to imagine the Mississippi, Flagg was overcome by his
sense of the spatial and temporal scale of the river world.
The dimensions of the Mississippi Valley served those who wrote about it
as an index of the importance of their subject. The most famous of these was
Mark Twain, who began Life on the Mississippi with a geography lesson framed
in terms of commercial transportation, carefully noting the rivers unprecedented watershed, including fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable
by steamboats, and ... hundreds that are navigable by flatboats and keels.6
Twain wrote this in 1883, after the river had been replaced by the railroad as
the commercial artery of the West; his book was an elegy, his account of the
vastness of the Mississippi Valley almost an apology, put forth as a justification
of why his subject was still well worth reading about. Fifty years earlier, the
heyday of the steamboat had been in the future rather than the past, and accounts of the rivers range had been correspondingly optimistic. The Mississippi Valley, wrote Robert Baird in 1832, comprised more than 1,300,000
square miles of the most fertile country, taken as a whole, that the earth affords
... country which will one day, and that not very distant, contain a population
of 100,000,000 immortal beings.7 For Baird, who turned out to be closer to
right about the exponential increase of the population than he was about its
immortality, the future could be seen on the plain face of a map.
Translated into the conventions of the steamboat sublime, the commercial
geography of the Valley was rescaled in the key of awe. No river in the world
drains so large a portion of the earths surface, wrote Thomas Hamilton.
The imagination asks, whence come its waters, and w[h]ither tend they?
They come from the distant regions of a vast confinement, where the foot of
civilized man has never been planted. ... On what lonely and sublime magnificence have they gazed? The effect of traveling on a Mississippi steamer dulled
his senses into dreamy contemplation, the lonely melancholy of a traveler
lost in time: Day after day, and night after night, we continued driving to the
South; our vessel, like some huge demon of the wilderness, bearing fire in her
bosom, and canopying the eternal forest with the smoke of her nostrils. How
looked the hoary river god, I know not; nor what thought the alligators, when
awakened from their slumbers by a vision so astounding. In his descriptions,
76
Hamilton presented the voyage down the Mississippi as a sort of time travel: a
journey backward in history to a point at which the voyage itself was unimag
inable, a time of gods and monsters, not modern machinery. Less dreamily
than Hamilton, but to the same effect, J.S. Buckingham wrote that traveling
the Mississippi aboard a steamboat carries one s admiration to the verge of
the sublime, an effect he likewise represented as a sort of break in time.
Inthe valley of the Mississippi, the chief interest lies in the signs of promise
for the future, as contrasted with the wild and savage nature from which it has
just emerged into a giant infancy, advancing on to manhood with colossal
strides.8 In these accounts, past, present, and future were cut, remixed, and
placed edge to edge by the worldmaking power of steam.
The words used to represent nature in such accountswild, savage,
uncivilizedsuggested the history of conquest that was embedded in the
steamboat sublime. As one celebrant of commerce and conquest wrote of the
Mississippi Valley: In that wide land, where so lately the beaver and the honey
bee were the only representatives of labor, and a painted savage the type of
manhood, are maintained all the necessaries of life, letters and the fine arts are
cultivated, and beauty and fashion bloom around us. As the painted savage
fell before the ineluctable power of superior technology, human beings were
only as relevant as their transportation technology. It is needless to do more
than mention the Indian canoe, the smallest and rudest of boats, in order to
suggest that the introduction of the steamboats upon the western waters ...
contributed more than any other single cause, perhaps more than all other
causes which have grown out of human skill, to the civilization of the West.9
In the nineteenth-century science fiction of the steamboat, the history of conquest and capitalist transformation overrode the Native history of the West as
inexorably as one of its floating palaces might have run down a rude pirogue
crossing its path.
Steam power became, in these accounts, a sort of alibi for imperialism and
dispossession: a deus ex machina that shifted the terrain of conquest to a scale
of action beyond politics and wara literary conceit that acquired a terrible
historical correlative when the steamboat Monmouth, packed with Creek Indians being forced out of their homeland, exploded about twenty miles north of
Baton Rouge, killing hundreds of those aboard.10 The steamboat sublime took
expropriation and extermination and renamed them time and technology.
77
From the vista of the steamboat deck, Indians were consigned to prehistory,
the dead-end time before history really began, represented by the monuments
of remote antiquity that lined the rivers banks.11
The confrontation of steamboat and wilderness, of civilization and savagery, of relentless direction with boundless desolation, was called Progress.
And progress was measured in what Twain referred to as the steamboats
time-devouring capacitywhich others, using a more conventional formulation, termed the annihilation of time and space.12 The steam-engine, second only to the press in power, wrote Edmund Flagg, has in a few years
anticipated results through the New World which centuries, in the ordinary
course and consequence of cause and event would have failed to produce.13
And the acceleration of time could be measured in the compression of space.
Steam navigation colonized the West! wrote James Lanman. It brought the
western territory nearer the eastern by nine-tenths of the distance. ... It has
advanced the career of national colonization and national production at least
acentury!14 In the Mississippi steamboat, a visionary future had come true:
What has heretofore been merely the speculation of enthusiasts has been realized, wrote one such enthusiast.15
Behind all of this expressive urgency was a single epoch-making fact:
steamboats made it possible to ship goods up the river on a previously unimag
inable scale. Whereas the economy of the Mississippi Valley had previously
been subject to the downward flow of its drainage, steam made it profitable to
ship goods against the current. The Valleys agricultural goods had once been
shipped to market on flatboats, which were broken up and sold for salvage at
the rivers end by men whose most direct pathway home was on foot. And the
goods imported to the Valley had once been dragged over rutted muddy roads
by teams of oxen, or had been poled or pulled up the river by the muscular
exertions of Western keelboatmen. The power of steam, however, had made
possible the independence (a favorite word among the steam boosters) of
the Mississippi Valley from the Mississippi River.16 Instead of spending many
months in warping a barge or cordelling and pulling and bush-whacking a
keelboat from New Orleans to Pittsburg against the impetuous current of the
Mississippi and Ohio, wrote Robert Baird, a steam-boat now makes the journey in fifteen or twenty days, stopping also at all the immediate places of importance. ... Distance is no longer thought of in this regionit is almost an-
78
nihilated by steam!17 Steam power had emancipated the Mississippi Valley

from its reliance on animal energy, allowing a concomitant increase in the ratio
of cargo to dead weight, and enabling an exponential increase in the volume
and velocity of upriver trade.
It was not simply that, in practical terms, steamboats moved goods to market; in economic terms, they moved the markets closer to the goods. New
Orleans, announced the St. Louis Republican on May 9, 1844, has been
brought within four days travel of St.Louis, in immediate propinquity.18 The
measurement and comparison of record travel times between cities along the
Mississippi River became a popular pastime among men-in-the-know, a regular feature in newspapers, and a sort of commonsense measure of commercial
and historical progress. Tables such as the one reproduced here (see Table1)
conveyed the eras commonsense belief in progress.19
But the ultimate measure of the steam-driven revolution (another favorite word) in the geography and velocity of commerce was the declining price
of goods. Not only has time been gained, but the expense of traveling, and
of transporting goods has been diminished three or four fifths, wrote Baird.
Merchandize of all kinds is now carried between the extremest points for a
very small amount.20 The universal equivalent of the steamboat sublime
the standard measure of the technological transcendence of nature, the compression of time, and the shrinkage of spaceturned out to be the dollar.
The economic and culturalor, to be truer to the terms of the day, civilizationaleffects of steam power were reckoned together in direct variation:
the one followed from the other. A simple mechanical device ha[s] made life
both possible and comfortable in regions which heretofore have been a wilderness, wrote one traveler. The moral changes alone which are felt throughout
the west on price are almost incalculable, added another.21 Teasing out the
common sense encoded by the notion that lowering the price of goods had a
moral aspect (and setting aside for the moment the idea that steamboats were
mercantile as well as mechanical vessels, that they were made of capital as well
as of wood and iron), we can follow the account of technology, economy, and
human development provided by many nineteenth-century observers: steam
power spawned commercial development, which provided the goods necessary to civilize the Valleys population. Steamboats, wrote the French traveler Baptiste Dureau in 1850, are the salvation of the valley of the Mississippi.
79
Table 1.From New Orleans to Natchez268 miles.
1814, Orleans made the run

1844, Comet made the run
1815, Enterprise made the run
1817, Washington
1817, Shelby
1819, Paragon
1828, Tecumseh
1834, Tuscarora
1838, Natchez
1840, Edward Shippen
1842, Belle of the West
1844, Sultana
1851, Magnolia
1853, A.S. Shotwell
1853, Southern Belle
1853, Princess No. 4
1853, Eclipse
1855, Princess (new)
1855, Natchez (new)
1856, Princess (new)
1870, Natchez
1880, Robt E. Lee
Days
6
5
4
4
3
3
3
1
1
1
1
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
Hours
6
10
11
..
20
8
1
21
17
8
18
19
19
19
20
20
19
18
17
17
17
17
Minutes
40
..
20
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
45
50
49
13
26
47
53
30
30
17
11
Source: E.W. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi; or, Goulds History of River Navigation (St. Louis,
1889), 541.
... They are the most essential agents of social life; if they were wiped out, the
rising civilization of those extensive regions would disappear with them.22
Or, once again, this time in the deluxe version: A steamboat coming from
New Orleans brings to the remotest village of our streams, and the very doors
of the cabins, a little Paris, a section of Broadway, or a slice of Philadelphia.23
By overcoming the commercial friction represented by the rivers downward
current, steamboats had transformed the commercial geography of the Mississippi Valley: they made it possible for capital and labor invested in agricultural
production to be repaid in an equal measure of consumption. Steamboats made
it possible to turn a bale of cotton floated down the river into a piano on the
way up.
Nowhere was this steam-powered metamorphosis more evident than on the
docks that lined the Mississippi River in New Orleans. A great[er] number of
80
large, handsome, and fine vessels seemed to me to line the magnificent curve
of the Mississippi than I had ever seen before in any one port. The reflection
that these are all congregated here to receive and convey away to other lands
the produce of such mighty streams as the Missouri and the Mississippi, the
Ohio, the Tennessee, the Arkansas, and the Red River ... carries one s admiration to the verge of the sublime, wrote J.S. Buckingham. Imagining the
itineraries of the goods reefed out along the levee, Buckingham was struck by
the awesome magnitude of the valley before him.24 The profusion of goods on
the levee in New Orleans served Buckingham (and many others) as a sort of
standard proxy for the outer reaches of imagination.
The latent commercial potential of the Mississippi Valley came to fruition
on the levee in New Orleans. The citys position, according to Robert Baird,
was uncannily, perhaps even providentially, adapted to trade: Where on earth
can another city be found whose situation is so favorable, he asked, in regard
to the extent of the country, whose productions, as it were, naturally tend to
this great centre of trade; almost like material substances on the earths surface
to the center of gravitation.25 Conducting his reader on a tour of the levee,
Baird pointed out marvels in every direction: nothing can be more interesting; this is one of the most wonderful places in the world; I was perfectly
amazed the first time I saw this spectacle; if he turns his back to the river, he
will see wonderful sights.26 From the meanest flatboat, destined in a few days
to be pried apart and sold for the value of its own fiber, to the steamboats that
arrived in scores every hour, to the most magnificent tall ship, towed up the
river and docked a hundred miles inland like some sort of gargantuan traveler
from another world, he was surrounded by boats. The vessels concentrated
along the levee in New Orleans gave material form to the web of trade that
bound the elements of the Mississippi Valley to one another and to the world.
Bairds version of the steamboat sublime must also be understood as a sort of
global-commercial sublime; on the levee in New Orleans, he confronted the
global economy of the nineteenth century from one of its nodal points.
And before him lay the produce of the Mississippi Valley: flour and corn
harvested from the fields of Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois; salted beef, pork,
and lard from animals raised and slaughtered a thousand miles away; hides and
furs from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; cattle, hogs, horses, mules
81
from an animal economy that stretched into the far regions of the West; Old
Monongahela whisky from distilleries along the Ohio; and tobacco from
Kentucky. Almost all of this was destined to be sorted, sold, and sliced into
profit before being reshipped up the river to supply the farms and plantations
of the Cotton Kingdom. And alongside these goods designated for upriver
consumers were the hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton and hogsheads
of sugar that would pay their price, each of these tagged with a bright flag that
denoted the identity of the merchant responsible for their handling and that
forecast their sale in the great metropolitan markets of the Atlantic world:
Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Havana, Marseilles, and, above all the others,
Liverpool.27
Bairds account of the barely imaginable commercial wonders of the levee
in New Orleans was intermixed with what we might call the Mississippi Valleys racial sublime. If he passes through the market, he will see such a scene
as he never before witnessed, he wrote. Babel itself could not have exceeded
it. He will hear French, Spanish, English, and sometimes German languages
spoken by Negroes, mulattoes and quartre unes, and whites. The words picayune (6 cents) and bit (12 cents) fall upon the ear at every step as one
passes through the trafficking crowd.28 The ceaseless, restless, violent energy
of commerce and sexuality on a global scale was momentarily stabilized in
imaginary fractions of blood and valuethe mutually defining measures of
the slave market. And then Baird launched back into the crowd: Such crowds
(especially along that part of the levee which is opposite the market-house) of
Negresses and Quartre-unes (written Quadroons by those who do not understand French) carrying on their bandanaed heads, and with solemn pace, a
whole tableor platform as large as a tablecovered with goodies, such as
cakes, and apples, and oranges, and figs, and bananas or plantains, and pine-
apples, and cocoanuts,&c.29 The progression of Bairds account from race to
money to exotic fruit implied without invokingbespoke without speaking
the wonder, the desire, and the terror that defined the citys sublimated racial-
commercial-sexual sublime.30 The eye-catching quadroons of these accounts
are always already female, the exotic fruit and flora surrounding them suggestive of their worldmaking fertility and their owners sexual license. In these
women, the unspeakable obviousslaveholding sexual conquest, itself half-
82
veiled by the projected concupiscence of white-supremacist fancywas daily

displayed on the levee. The blood-thread history of sexual violence was here
represented as sexual novelty.31
The sound of slaves singing as they worked was a ready-mixed aspect of
descriptions of the levee in New Orleans. Edmund Flagg (who, like Baird,
both described the levee as indescribable and likened it to Babel) wrote of the
way that the rhythmic beat of the steamboats pistons was overlaid by the
shrill hiss of escaping steam, and the fitful port-song of the Negro firemen
rising ever and anon upon the breeze.32 Indeed, the sound of the slaves on the
levee singing at their work, the chant by which the Negro boatmen regulate
and beguile their labor on the river, as Frances Trollope put it, reverberated
through many travelers accounts.33 And beneath the canopy of sound was the
spectacle of slave labor. Mrs. Trollope, who found little that can gratify the
eye in New Orleans, made an exception for the large number of blacks seen
on the streets, all labor being performed by them, and the grace and beauty of
the Quadroons, comparing such people to the unwonted aspect of the vegetation and the huge and turbid river as evoking that species of amusement
which proceeds from looking at what one never saw before.34 The rapid cuts
between race, value, and consumable goods in these sentencesthe fact that
the apparently boundless profusion of goods was also an account of the seemingly boundaryless confusion of peoplessignals the underlying source of
both the wealth and the human complexity that so fascinated the travelers.
Some of the goods on the levee were also people. Or, as Baird put it in his seriatim account of the boats on the levee and the cargo they carried, occasionally, some are to be found which are full of Negroes.35
The comparisons made in these descriptions between Negroes, goods,
money, and steam engines hint at the fascination and apprehension these writers felt on the levee, in the presence of slavery. Following the literary convention that the unimaginable might be approached through its worldly aspect
that the endless Valley of the Mississippi, for instance, might be represented by
the goods that ended up on the levee in New Orleanstheir accounts were
deductive, moving backward from evident effects to unimaginable causes. Analyzed according to this upstreaming logic, the desire and the dread braided
together in travelers accounts stretch toward some sort of finally unfulfilled
aspiration to understand the slavery that surrounded them. What hidden force
83
animated the spectacle of the singing slaves? Was it the drumbeat engines and
steam-whistle harmony of the steamboats by which their songs were framed?
The rhythm of labor orchestrated by some purpose beyond their own? Or was
it the evidence of some unfathomable kindred sorrow?
The heart of the racial-commercial sublime was the spectacle of slaves at
worknever more so than when they worked at night, their actions illuminated by the torchlight play of signs and shadows, of evident effects and obscure causes. When the operation of taking on wood is performed at night, it
is picturesque in the extreme, wrote Charles Mackay. A gang of Negroes,
singing at their work, pass on shore and return laden with a pile of logs of cottonwood and cypress, and pile it upon the deck for the all-devouring furnace.
J.S. Buckingham provided one of the fullest, wildest evocations of slave labor
as a sort of dark rite, in his description of slaves loading cotton onto a steamboat moored at a mid-river landing. His account is so utterly symptomatic of
the genre that it is worth quoting at length:
The Negroes, from the plantation above had come down to assist in loading their masters goods. ... The night was cloudy and dark, [and] strong
torchlight was therefore necessary, to enable the labourers to do their
work. The pitch-pine of the woods, so full of resinous matter, was accordingly used for this purpose; and the glare of several such torches
moving spot to spot without any visible agentthe persons of the Negroes, who carried them as high as they could elevate them in the air, being hidden in the shadethe occasional waving of these torches to and
fro, the bright lights on some parts of the cliff, and the deep shadows on
others, with occasional flashes of forked lightning, rolling of thunder,
and shouting of the men, when they hailed from the summit of the bluff
above, or responded from the beach belowformed altogether a scene
of ... terror and grandeur.36
Human beings animated as if bidden by a hidden hand, dark labor darkly concealed, the songs and shouts of the slaves commingled with the basal rhythms
of the engines and the low roar of the thunder. So powerful was the impression of the labor of the slaves on the landing, that Buckingham chose the scene
as the subject of one of only four engravings in a book of almost 600 pages.
84
The others were a view of the harbor of Charleston, the town square in Augusta, Georgia, and the sale of slaves beneath the rotunda of the St.Louis Hotel in New Orleans.
In these accounts, the proximity of slaves to firethe all-devouring furnace, the torchlight by which they worked, the lightning flash on the horizon
signals and specifies the disquiet lurking within the promethean grandeur of
the river world.37 Buckinghams account, in particular, is full of foreboding,
imbued with dread of the coming storm. In the space that the travelers sometimes described as indescribable, lurked an ever-present but rarely acknowledged fear that the slaves who had built that world might one day rise up and
burn it all down. I can imagine nothing more frightful than a general revolt
of the slave population in this country, wrote Matilda Houstoun in a passage
that summarized impressions gained from conversing with Louisiana planters
during her journey down the Mississippi. They are (especially on plantations)
in such a vast majority in proportion to the numbers of white men, that the effects of insubordination would be most disastrous.38 In Mrs. Houstouns telling, the images of slaves animated in unison by a hidden purpose, of their
songs that mixed in the air with the steam of the pent-up boilers, of the torchlight on the landing held high in the hand of a slave, dissolved into a fantasy of
racial apocalypse. At the heart of the steamboat sublime resided the terror of
Mississippi Valley racial-capitalism: in a word, Haiti.
Whatever currents of historywhatever desires and whatever fears
flowed through the imagery of the steamboat sublime, they culminated in the
port of New Orleans. What had been, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a relatively unimportant outpost of European empiresnothing in comparison to Havana or Kingston or Riowas, by the middle of the century,
routinely described as one of the great cities of the world. It had become a city
to be numbered among the metropolitan centers of Atlantic commerce: the
great port of the South, comparable to New York and Liverpool as a center
of global trade. By 1850, New Orleans was the third-largest city in the country
(the largest in the South); in the 1840s, it was already the fourth-largest port in
the world in terms of the value of its exports.39 Visitors complained of the citys
muddy streets and miasmic atmosphere: The sun, acting upon soil so impregnated with moisture, must naturally cause a great miasma and unhealthy effluvia, wrote Arthur Cunynghame.40
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Growing out of the swampy earth, however, was a city full of mercantile
wonders. J.S. Buckingham called its St.Charles Hotel the largest and handsomest hotel in the world, comparing it favorably to seventeen other hotels in
London, Paris, New York, Boston, and Baltimore, while noting the height
of its dome, the dimensions of its dining rooms, the number of its supportingcolumns, and the magnificence of its portico, graced in the middle by a
sculpture of George Washington presented to the buildings owners by the
slave trader John Hagan,Esq. Visitors to New Orleans rarely failed to note
the citys elegant ballrooms, above-ground cemeteries, and proliferation of
churches (though the prevalence of Catholic churches, and relative paucity of
Protestant ones, disturbed some). No visitor to New Orleans failed to mention
the citys commercial infrastructure: the streets lined with banks and money
traders, commission merchants and cotton presses, the shipping and insurance
companies, the riverside boardinghouses and gin joints, the gambling parlors
and cockfighting pits, the U.S. Mint, and the slave market. The subheads in the
twenty-second chapter of J.S. Buckinghams book The Slave States of America, where he described New Orleans, give some idea of the way the city disclosed itself to a visitor: Hotels: St.Charles, St.Louis, and the Veranda
Merchants ExchangeMunicipality HallBanks, Markets, Public Baths
Cotton Presses, size, extent, and operationsSugar refining, size, costs,
and productionsWater-works, plan and operationsTheaters, the Orleans,
St.Charles, and the CampBalls, Operas, Concerts, and Masquerades. The
slave market had its own chapter.
As well as a city of merchant bankers and planters, of steamboatmen and
slaves, New Orleans was a city of clerks, of vast back rooms where young
men calculated, entered, and transferred the goods (and people) they daily
passed in the street. That the citys hypertrophic mercantile architecture
temples of trade built on muddy foundationsrepresented the material residue of the capital flows that connected the Mississippi Valley to the rest of the
world is suggested by two mutually explanatory facts: (1)the state of Louisiana regulated banking more strictly than almost any other state in the union,
making it almost impossible to charter a bank outside the city limits of New
Orleans; (2)in terms of the proportion of whites living in cities, Louisiana in
1840 was the most urbanized state in the United States.41 Turning one s back on
the goods arrayed on the levee and walking into the city, nineteenth-century
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observers encountered the city as financial center, global market hub, and
export-processing zone, a city where the pathways ultimately followed by
goods and people were presaged in paper: circuits of credit and capital.42
The repatterning of the global economyAmerican cotton, British cap
italwas daily made material in the shape of human beings, lined up along
the walls of the slave pens, available for inspection. At the epicenter of the
Mississippi Valley economy was the citys slave market, the largest in the
South. The emergence of the city of New Orleans and of the river trade that
sustained it depended on the forcible relocation of as many as one million
enslaved people from the declining agricultural regions of slaverys Upper-
South heartland (especially Maryland and Virginia) to the emerging regionsof
the Lower-South cotton boom (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana).43
During the trading season, thousands of people were daily put up for sale in
the slave traders high-walled pensas many as twenty separate establishments during the peak years of the slave trade, in the 1830s and 1850s. Dressed
in blue suits and calico dresses, turned out in front of the pens lining Gravier
and Baronne streets in the citys business district, and Chartres and Esplanade
just downriver from the French Quarter, these slaves embodied the future of
their buyers and the region as a whole: their labor converted the forests of the
Mississippi Valley into the cleared fields of the Cotton Kingdom; their reproduction transfigured their flesh and their families into their owners legacies
white families made, over time, out of the broken pieces of black ones; their
domestic service covered over the barbarism of slavery with the social forms
of civilization. The commercial civilization of the nineteenth century, the
pathways of supposed progress that stretched upriver from New Orleans and
out across the broad alluvial plain of the Mississippi Valley (or, for that matter,
from the cotton fields of Louisiana to the looms in Lancashire), was enunciated in the labor of its slaves.44
In addition to their labor (and that of hundreds of thousands of others who
were sold in the smaller slave markets of the Mississippi Valleyat Donaldsonville, Clinton, and East Baton Rouge in Louisiana; at Natchez, Vicksburg,
and Jackson in Mississippi; at every roadside tavern, county courthouse, and
crossroads across the Lower South), the slaves sold in New Orleans represented a congealed form of the capital upon which the commercial devel
opment of the Valley depended. Because, according to the ethical and legal
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norms of slaveholding civilization, enslaved people were more partible than

land, because there was a ready spot market in human beings in every Southern city on every day of the week, and because they could be moved from
place to place depending on the disposition of a lawsuit or the division of an
estate, enslaved people represented a primary form of collateral in the credit-
based economy of the Mississippi Valley.45 The cords of credit and debtof
advance and obligationthat cinched the Atlantic economy together were anchored with the mutually defining values of land and slaves: without land and
slaves, there was no credit, and without slaves, land itself was valueless. Promises made in the Mississippi Valley were backed by the value of slaves and
fulfilled in their labor. If the dollar was the universal equivalent of the steamboat world, as often as not its value turned out to be backed by flesh rather
thangold.
The commercial geography of capitalism and slavery in the Cotton Kingdom was shaped in dialectical interchange with the ecology of the Mississippi
Valley. All told, there were something like 17,000 miles of steamboat-navigable
river connecting New Orleans to the settlements, village, towns, and cities in
the heartland of North America. As the steamboat economy spread upward
along inland rivers and streams, it pushed the increasingly archaic upriver
economy of the keelboats farther and farther back along the Mississippis tributary streams, until keelboats serviced only the most remote capillaries of Valley commerce. Somewhere around 1840, however, the steamboat economy
reached its physical limit: the point along each of these thousands of waterways beyond which the water was too shallow or the channel too narrow for a
steamboat to pass. No form of inland transportation, the historian Louis
Hunter wrote, has been more bounded by geographic limitations than the
river steamboat.46
The outer limit of the Mississippi steamboat economy annually expanded
and contracted with the climate. In the early months of the spring, the Western rivers swelled with Northern snowmelt, a freshet that traveled southward
at a rate of about fifty miles per day, and that was marked by an advancing fogbank that eventually stretched into the Gulf of Mexico. As the amount of water in the rivers declined through the summer months, the ambit of the economy shrank; by the end of summer, where traffic through the Valley was
possible at all, it was limited to smaller, lighter-drafting boats, the so-called
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Mosquito Fleet. With seasonal rains, the rivers rose again in the fall, although
traffic along the upper reaches of the inland network was intermittently halted
when the rivers froze.47
Below Memphis, the Mississippi generally remained navigable year-round,
but the steamboat trade was nevertheless subject to the water that supported it.
As the Mississippi flowed across its broad alluvial plain, it meandered from
side to side: On the Mississippi, wrote Hunter, the river bed was a thing
literally alive, writhing and twisting in its course, its contours in constant pro
cess of change. The channel followed no regular and fixed course, but swung
from one side of the river bed to the other, shifting its position with every
change of volume and velocity of the water.48 As the river moved horizontally across the face of the Valley, the bed beneath its surface shifted along a
vertical axis. The stronger current on the outside of its bend eroded its banks
and deepened the channel on the outside edge of every curve. What was cut
away upstream was gradually deposited in the form of sandbars that formed
on the inside edges of the downstream riverbends, where the current was
slower and the water shallower. Over time, that is to say, the river became
more difficult to navigate: its bends more extremeits bed more fickleuntil
at some point it jumped its course entirely.
When the outside-edge currents on either side of one of the rivers sinuous
turns finally cut through the land that separated them, a cutoff formed,
transferring huge spits of lands that had once formed the curve s inside bank
to the opposite side of the river, and shortening the rivers downstream course
by twenty or thirty miles at a stroke.49 Mark Twain famously described the way
that the movement of the river reorganized both the legal and commercial ge
ography of its banks: The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg; a recent cut-off has radically changed the position, and Delta is now two
miles above Vicksburg. ... A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the state of Mississippi today, a cut-
off occurs tonight, and tomorrow the man finds himself on the other side of
the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of Louisiana!50 The
Mississippi Valley was less a fixed place than a slow-moving ecological pro
cessone that, as Twain suggested, could undermine the human aspirations
that depended on it.
As the river pursued its sidewise course, cutting away its banks and filling
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in its elbows with silt, it undermined the trees that stood on the shore. Especially during times of high water, the river was full of trees cut away from its
banks. As they floated downstream, these tree trunks became waterlogged, and
when the high water that had loosed them from the shore began to subside,
and the tree trunks became too heavy for the current to carry them any farther,
they lodged in the riverbed like gigantic halberds waiting to puncture the hull
of a passing steamboat. Those trees which lodged pointing upstream were
known as snags; those oriented downstream, as sawyers, for their undulating motion as the river washed over them. Depending on the stage of the
river, these accidents-waiting-to-happen could be identified from the pilot
house of an oncoming steamboat, if one was lucky. They lay concealed just
beneath the surface, making it difficult for all but the most experienced readersof the river to see, or submerged in malign anticipation of the low water
that would render them once again dangerous to passing boats.51 As snags accumulatedas snags snagged other snagsthey began to form barriers that
strained downstream matter from the rivers current: wood, rocks, sand, silt.
Eventually, this mid-river buildup formed logjams in the middle of the river;
sometimes those logjams grew into islands, or even rafts, which stretched
from one bank of the river to the other, effectively damming its flow and rendering shipboard passage impossible. Beneath its smooth surface, the Mississippi River was constantly in the process of becoming something else.
Efforts to limit the ways that the river changedefforts to stem the tide of
time and create a stable space over which to travel and tradewere the internal improvements imagined by the commercial visionaries of the nineteenthcentury Western waters. Most likely to be cited by the folklorists of life on the
nineteenth-century Mississippi were the bullheaded improvers and midnight
ditch-diggers who cut through the narrow necks between riverbends, straightening and shortening the channel of trade, while supposedly vastly increasing
the value of their formerly landlocked plantations by stealing their neighbors
frontage.52 Other visions were more public spirited; the most ambitious perhaps was the never-realized plan to create a colossal system of reservoirs that
could be used to eliminate the seasonality of the river trade by storing water in
the spring and releasing it into the system during times of low water.53 Engineers and laborers were more successful in the case of the Red River Raft,
which blocked the Red between Natchitoches and Shreveport. The raft was a
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snag that had been accumulating for 600 years: dead branches and trees were
pulled from the wandering rivers alluvial banks and implanted themselves in
the bed; later trees piled up until a sort of skeletal island formed in the rivers
course; silt and more wood filled out the blockage until it reached from shore
to shore; plants and trees began to grow atop it, their roots binding it ever
more tightly together. By the time U.S. government engineers and laborers
under the direction of Henry Shreve began to clear the raft in 1833, 150 miles
of the Red had been transformed into a swampy morass of pools and rivulets,
navigable by only the smallest steamboats during the highest water. The work
was not completed until 1880.54
Like all similar efforts at environmental reengineering, the commercial improvement of the Mississippi River was subject to ecological feedback and
unforeseen consequencesto what the historian Timothy Mitchell has called
overflows.55 The exponential growth in the number of wood-burning steamboats on the river put pressure on riparian forests. By the middle of the century, it was increasingly difficult for boats to find fuel within an economical
distance of the river anywhere along its length from Cairo to New Orleans.
Deforestation along the banks of the river increased soil erosion; the river meandered more frequently and forcefully, undermining its downstream banks
and producing obstructions in its wake. The improvers responded by trying to
control the rivers channel: dredging, straightening, and leveeing.56 Although
it has apparently escaped the notice of generations of river improvers down to
the present day, a flatter, faster, straighter river was more prone to flooding. As
Arthur Cunynghame put it in 1851 when writing about the cutoffs by which
the river was shortened and straightened, The assistance which they have received ... has indirectly proved the cause of great destruction to property; the
same fall in the water in its flow towards the ocean, which by nature made the
distance seventy-five miles, having thus by the art of man been limited to
twenty-five, has caused the stream, during a sudden rise of the river to descend
with an increased and undue velocity [and] caused the destruction of many levees as well as plantations.57 Once overtopped by a flood, levees ceased to be
man-made barriers that protected commercial agriculture from the vagaries of
the river on which it depended, and became man-made obstacles in the pathway of water trying to return to the riverbed. Or, to put this differently: levees
created swamps.
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The dialectic of economy and ecology was nowhere more apparent than in
the technical design of the steamboats that populated the Western waters. The
backwash effects of river improvement never dampened the flow of capital
into the river trade, and each of the thousands of steamboats constructed between 1820 and 1860 represented a sort of commercial-ecological-mechanical
hybrid: a speculation made on the margin between the specific challenges to
navigation posed by the Mississippi Valley environment and the potential rewards of owning a boat designed to overcome them. The brilliant success of
the steamboat, wrote the traveler James Hall, was the dual product of the
wealth of the western merchant and the skill of the western mechanic.58
Mississippi River steamboats were empirical machines. As the historian and
nautical archaeologist Adam Kane has shown, the development of the Western riverboat, which reached its consummate form in the huge steamers that
traveled the lower Mississippi, took place in a theoretical vacuum. There was
no journal of steamboat architecture where engineers circulated scale drawings, shared tables that calibrated cargo weight to displacement ratios, and presented their latest calculations of the per-square-inch thermodynamic pressure
necessary to drive a 300-ton steamboat upward against 650 cubic feet of water
flowing downstream at three miles per hour. Indeed, there were no such drawings, tables, or calculations at all.59 Mississippi River steamboats were designed
according to rules of thumb, rather than the laws of physics. That is, Mississippi River steamboats were designed according to plans and principles that
owed as much to the properties of the commercial world as they did to those
of the physical world.
Steamboats were generally custom built: fabricated in the shipyards of the
Ohio Valley (close to the iron ore on which they depended) according to the
specifications of a particular buyer. As an article in the Wheeling Gazette put it
in 1846, Boats are constructed . . . for particular trades, and are specially
adapted for the purposes for which they are intended.60 The boats, that is to
say, were reverse-engineered to suit the purpose of carrying large loads on
shallow rivers full of underwater obstructions: their design maximized cargo
capacity in relation to draft. Rather than having a deep rigid keel to maintain
the shape of the boat, cut the current, and hold the boat on course against
crosswinds, Western steamboats were built flat and light. Their draft was shallow enough to pass over obstructions, their keel flexible enough to bend over a
92
sandbar without breaking; their hulls were lengthened and their cargo capacity
was increased by internal hog chains that counterpoised the ends of their
elongated hulls, like the cables that hold up a suspension bridge.61 While the
earliest Western boats had snag chambers, which reduced the risk of sinking,
even this small concession to safety was soon given over to cargo. The evolution of the Western steamboatlonger, lighter, more flexiblewas a piecemeal process, occurring in fits and starts, spurred by the ever-more-ambitious
specifications of various buyers and the gradually accreting observations of
various engineers.62 The resulting boats were something new under the sun:
they flagrantly ignored the conventional wisdom of [their] day ... sail[ing]
on the water instead of in it.63 By the 1830s, Mississippi Valley steamboats
could carry more freight on less water than any other boats in the history of
the world. They were like bubbles.
Unlike oceangoing vessels, steamboats were built above the water line; as
much as 80 percent of their total structure was visible to observers on the
shore. Steamboat engineers solved the problem of increasing cargo capacity
while decreasing draftof working within the ecological parameters of the
Mississippi Valley while expanding market shareby building layers of superstructure out of light, flexible boards, primarily pine. The main deck of a
Mississippi steamboat rode just above the water line. The deck was generally
open on the sides; at its center was the engine room; beneath was the shallow
hold. The open space on the deck provided most of the space for cargo on
Western steamboats, as well as space for deck passengers, who passed their
days and nights packed in amid the cargo. The area of the deck was often extended by guards, which were effectively cargo platforms hung from the
edge of the hull, sometimes exceeding its width by as much as 75 percent.
Above, built out over the open deck, was the boiler deck (so called even
though the boilers were actually located on the main deck), which housed the
ships cabinthe long central parlor, surrounded by staterooms, for which
Mississippi River steamboats were justly famous. Still higher, on the roof of
the main cabin, and cut through with skylights that illuminated the parlors below, was the hurricane deck, mostly open to the air, with a central enclosure
containing cabins for the crew. Finally, atop that, as much as fifty feet above
the water line, was the pilothouse, the small glassed-in enclosure from which
the boat was steered.64
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Mississippi River steamboats were gigantic commercial platforms, built

layer-upon-layer to maximize the horizontal surface area available to carry
cargo. During the cotton season, downriver boats were packed so high and
tight that the only structural elements of the boat visible from the shore were
the pilothouse and the smokestacks. The rest was encased in layers of cotton:
500-pound bales packed five or six deep and a dozen high.65 Although they
were often finely ornamented and richly appointedstyle-setting floating
palaces that defined the Steamboat Gothic style of rivertown architecture
beneath their polished surface, Mississippi River steamboats were really
floating warehouses, vessels designed and built to the specifications of the
goods they were supposed to carry.
The nineteenth-century commonplace that a steamboat was an engine on a
raft with $11,000 of jigsaw work [fretwork] hinted at what the leading historian of Western riverboats has termed their most distinctive technical feature: their high-pressure engines. The low-pressure condensing steam engines used on the earliest Western steamboats represented the most advanced
technology of the day. Low-pressure engines were driven by a relatively
modest flow of steam (around ten to twelve pounds per square inch) that was
released into a piston cylinder and then channeled into a condenser, where it
was rapidly cooled by a jet of cold water, creating a vacuum. The first blast of
steam pushed the piston upward, driving the engine wheel; the vacuum sucked
it back. Indeed, most of the energy used to drive the engine was produced by
the vacuum, rather than by the initial burst of steamthe engine derived its
power by creating a differential in atmospheric pressure when hot steam met
cold water in the condenser. The high-pressure engines, which quickly predominated on Western riverboats, did away with much of the technical com
plexity of the low-pressure condensing-vacuum engines. High-pressure engines worked by using a great deal more steam pressure (around 100 pounds
per square inch by the 1840s) to drive the piston directly; rather than being
channeled into a condenser, excess steam was simply released into the air.66
The high-pressure engine was the defining technical feature of the Western
steamboat. Whereas the low-pressure engines employed on Eastern and European steamboats relied on precise tolerances to ensure the creation of a vacuum, high-pressure engines simply overcame any imprecision in manufacture
(which caused leakage) through a vast overemployment of power. Whereas
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the low-pressure engine used cold water to create a pressure-increasing temperature differential, lowering the overall running heat of the engine, the
high-pressure engine simply pushed power from the top of the scale. Whereas
the low-pressure engine, with its reversed flows, its condenser, and its cold-
water line relied on huge heavy machinery, the high-pressure engine had
smaller, lighter boilers that reduced the ratio of boat to freight. Whereas a
low-pressure engine made an engineer dependent on Eastern manufacturers
for precisely fitting parts, a high-pressure engine could be fixed in mid-river by
a blacksmith. Whereas a low-pressure engine was sufficient to power an aquiline steamboat on the deep waters of the Hudson, a high-pressure engine could
produce enough power to drive a flat-bottomed steamboat over a sandbar going upriver on the Mississippi.67 High-pressure engines were cheaper, lighter,
simpler, and more powerful.
They were also less efficient and more prone to explosion. They were a
dirtier, more dangerous technology, already antiquated at the moment of their
increasing employment on the Mississippi; their usage, according to one critic,
shows how far prejudice, and a spirit of servile imitation, can prevent advances dictated by science or successful experience elsewhere.68 Depending
on their size, their load, the condition of the river, whether they were running
up or down, and so on, Mississippi steamboats used anywhere from twelve to
seventy-five cords of wood a day (one cord is 128 cubic feet of wood). Unlike
oceangoing vessels, which had to trade cargo space for fuel at the beginning of
every journey, steamboats could stop along the way and take on more wood,
which they generally did twice a day. The steamboat economy came to support
hundreds of wood yards along the rivers course, one every several miles
onthe busiest sections of the river. The historian Adam Kane has described
the techno-commercial-ecological history of high-pressure, wood-burning
steamboats like this: Although the fuel consumption for the engine type was
high, this drawback was relatively minor in light of the Wests plentiful and
inexpensive wood supply.69 Another way to say this would be: the deforestation (and consequent increase in soil erosion) of the Mississippi Valley was the
condition that made possible the expansion of the steamboat economy.
The resolution of the demands of that economy with the limitations of the
environment has often been toldmost famously by Mark Twain in Life on
95
the Mississippias a story of the skill of the riverboat pilots, who steered their
commercial cargo safely through the hazards and shoals of the lower Mississippi. Because the river so frequently and persistently changed course, the pilots could not use maps. Instead, they navigated by committing the river to
memory, riding the stronger currents on the outside edge of the river downstream, and holding to the slack water on the inside of the curves when fight
ing the current upstream. Continually jockeying for efficiency, each had to
cross frequently from one side to the other to maintain the most advantageousposition, memorizing 2,000 miles of crossovers, shortcuts, and obstacles. Skilled pilots knew all of the onshore landmarks by which they judged
their course, using them to track changes in the riverthe tree that marked
the truest passage across the English Turn, the eroded bank that signaled the
rivers stage, the density of driftwood that told whether the water was rising or
fallingreading the face of the river to reveal its hidden third dimension,
spotting the faint dimple on the waters surface which meant a wreck or a
rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that
ever floated.70 They had to do all this upriver and downriver, on high water
and low water, in daylight and in darkness.
Steamboat pilots were the eras emblematic empirics; the way they knew the
river was a byword for the precedence of practical over theoretical knowledge.
Where perception met experience, a new world of insight unfolded before the
eyes of the seasoned riverboat pilot. Almost subconsciously, he recognized
that the appearance of the sun denoted the next days wind forecast, the movement of a log signaled a rising river, the roiling surface of the water marked
countless sandbars, shoals, and channels. To his skilled eye, the totality of the
environmentwater, earth, sky, and everything contained thereinserved as
a barely legible narrative of hidden snares and hazards, the ever-changing,
ever-fatal rhythms of the river world. Standing in the pilothouse, fifty feet
above the river, the steamboat pilot was a human being whose abilitieswhose
eyesight, imagination, hand on the wheeldetermined whether a given shipment of goods would make it through the obstacle course of ecological hazards. Or, reversing course for a moment, we might say that the riverboat pilot
was a human being whose abilities were determined at the meeting of commercial imperatives and ecological parameters: a person formed by the river
96
trade. The pilots empirical knowledge was a way of coordinating the senses
and the flow of time, through the use of memory, observation, deduction, prediction, reaction.
In this way, a pilot was not so different from the eras other emblematic fig
ure: the riverboat gambler. Gamblers were speculators on the flow of time, on
the divination of undisclosed parameters. A poker hand, once dealt, presented
a gambler with a pattern of visible clues and unknown possibilities: two cards
showing, say, and three cards lying face down. The trick of poker was to be
able to calculate (or at least estimate) the possible combinations that could be
made between the shown and concealed cards. Betting was framed against the
underlying knowledge that there were only fifty-two cards in the deckthat
there was a limited set of given facts as yet unrevealed. As the players watched
one another playwho bet, who held, who folded, who flinchedthey re
fined their estimates of what might be hiding in the cards. To employ the conventional usage: they navigated the hand. The cards in a given hand had
names. The first card dealt was the hole card; the middle cards were the
flop or turn cards; the final card, dealt face downthe unknown known
that would determine who won the handwas called the river.
4
Limits to Capital
We suffer the mighty despotism of steam to roll over us with the cold and grinding
regularity of fate, and, shutting our ears to the shrieks of its victims, congratulate
ourselves on the fact that on the whole we are more powerful, rich, and civilized
than we could have been without it.
Charleston Mercury, 1838
as the Mississippi Valley expanded, thousands of investors rushed to

launch their boats on the river. No property pays so great an interest as that
of steamboats upon these rivers. A trip of a few weeks yields one-hundred
per-cent upon the capital employed.1 Apart from land and slaves, steamboats
were the leading investment sector in the Mississippi Valley economy after the
1820s. The Great West, wrote one of the steamboats boosters, has now a
commerce within its limits as valuable as that which floats on the ocean between the United States and Europe.2 And the effect on upriver commerce
was an order of magnitude greater than even the exponential growth of the
downriver trade: Previous to the year 1817, the whole commerce from New
Orleans to the upper country was carried in about twenty barges, averaging
one-hundred tons each, and making but one trip a year, so that the importation
from New Orleans to the upper country was carried in about twenty barges,
averaging one-hundred tons each, and making but one trip a year, so that
importations from New Orleans in one year could not have much exceeded
the freight brought up by one of our largest steamboats in the course of a
season.3
By the middle of the 1840s, as we have seen, the steamboat economy had
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discovered its outer limit: every inland backwater that had just enough water
in the spring to carry a steamboat was already being serviced.4 There were no
more new routes to establish, no more hinterlands to draw into trade; the geographic limit of the frontier of accumulation had been reached. But this did
not mean that entrepreneurs stopped investing in steamboats; it meant only
that their investments were less likely to be successful. By 1848, steamboat
owners were trying to protect their own market share by advising others to get
out of the business: Let those who can with convenience withdraw from this
fascinating business of steamboating. Let all who are not involved in it stand
aloof until the tonnage on the rivers be reduced to the wants of the country;
until remunerating prices can be obtained.5 As capital continued to flow into
the river trade and as more and more boats crowded into the competition for a
given number of rates, steamboat owners faced a falling rate of profit.6 They
responded by running their boats harder, faster, and longeran intensification that sometimes bolstered short-term profits, but only by increasing the
risks to crew, cargo, and passengers.
Because the river was their infrastructure, because they ran on the common highway of the west, steamboats required comparatively small initial
startup investments. In contrast to the railways, which required the purchase
of lands for the right-of-way, the laying of tracks, and the building of terminals, as well as the elaboration of a subsidiary coal-mining and coal-delivery
economy, a steamboat had merely to be built and launched to begin business.The commercial organization of steamboat companies generally reflected
these relatively low barriers to entry. Rather than being owned by joint-stock
companies or highly leveraged investment consortia, most steamboats were
owned by individuals (often their captain) or small partnerships of merchants
and rivermen who went in together on a given boat.7
The hostile environment and the fearsome way in which the boats were often runover sandbars and snags, onto the bank at riverside landings, wide-
open, around the clockmeant that steamboats depreciated quickly. As the
boat was not expected to last more than five or six years, at best, wrote the
traveler James Hall, and would probably be burned up or sunk within that
period, it was considered good economy to reduce expenditures, and to make
money by any means during the brief existence of the vessel. Boats were hastily and slightly built, furnished with cheap engines, and placed under the con-
Limits to Capital
99
trol of wholly incompetent persons.8 Steamboats, Hall suggested, were disposable. Capital, of course, was not, at least not to capitalists. To make certain
that they could spirit their money out of its temporary vessel in the event of a
snagging, sinking, burning, exploding, or otherwise decomposing en route,
steamboat owners bought insurance.9 Though they were often limited to threequarters of the supposed value of the boat (to prevent owners from simply
burning their own boats to save themselves the trouble of running them up
and down the river), these insurance policies represented another dimension
of the resolution of the clashing commercial, mechanical, and ecological imperatives of the steamboat economy: insurance insulated capital from the hazards of taking the temporary form of a steamboat.
There were two principal ways to do business in the steamboat economy:
the transient trade and the packet trade. Transients ran routes determined by
the business they could find on the river. For instance, the Empire, according
to one of her crew, was confined to no particular trade, running wherever
most inducements in the way of business offered. Sometimes she ran to
St.Louis; sometimes, to Louisville; sometimes, all the way to Cincinnati. The
question of whether to continue upriver or return to New Orleans was reopened at every stop, and was determined according to the freight available
for shipping on the levee.10 Passengers, or those with freight to ship, often simply waited on the levee for a boat to appear on the river, signaled it, and negotiated a price for their passage.11 Because transients journeys were charted according to their loads and because their loads were never certain until they had
left the shore, their schedules were uncertain and their rates were lowonce
the boat had committed to a given course, it was in the owners interest to add
as much business along the way as possible. The great object of all these boats
is to procure cargo, Matilda Houstoun explained, and with this end in view,
they of course endeavor, as much as possible, to outstrip each other and arrive
first at the town or landing where cotton and molasses or other cargo is likely
to be waiting for them.12 Transients competed fiercely with one another for
market share, especially during the low-water season, when routes shrank and
more boats crowded onto smaller rivers in search of cargo and passengers.
The transient trade was notorious for shady business practices. As James
Hall put it, The most inexcusable devices were used to get freight and passengers.13 Tickets were sold and freight was contracted on the basis of an an-
100
nounced departure time that receded ever further into the future, following a
hope of cargo that never materialized. Emblematic was the story of John Lobdell, who found himself sleeping rough on a night in July 1836, while the captain of the James Madison searched the city of New Orleans for crewmen on a
journey that had been scheduled to begin hours before. Lobdells baggage was
already aboard the boat, and he could not unload it himself, having relied on
the since-departed crew of the boat to haul it all aboard. He was, in effect, being held hostage by his possessions and his aversion to taking on an even
greater riskthat of trying to find another boat, which itself might not depart
on time.14 Passengers like Lobdell hedged their bets in various ways: they
would purchase tickets for only small stages of their journeys so that they
could bail out and switch to another boat (or re-up) as circumstances along the
way dictated.15 For both owners and passengers, the transient trade was characterized by a constantly shifting set of speculative possibilities; it had all of
the predictability of a riverboat card game.
Packets ran fixed routes according to fixed schedules. Bolstered by mail contracts, which guaranteed the packets cargo and guaranteed the post office an
increased degree of regularity, the packet trade grew throughout the 1840s and
1850s.16 In return for higher ticket prices and freight rates, packets absorbed
therisk of uncertain cargoes; whether or not the staterooms were full and the
deck packed, the packet would depart on schedule. For those with freight to
ship, the packet trade offered obvious advantages. In the cotton market, where
prices were volatile, packets offered the best chance of getting cotton to market quickly. For planters with cotton to sell (or, really, for anyone simply hoping to get someplace within some measure of time slightly more predictable
than whenever), a guaranteed departure time was worth the price premium.
Of course there were no absolute guarantees in the steamboat business;
once a packet left the dock, it was subject to all the contingencies and hazards
that characterized life on the Mississippi. Though leaving for a fixed port at a
set time did not clear the river of snags, straighten its channel, or deepen its
waters, the packets did transform the river trade, concentrating it at given
points along the way (rather than at every plantation landing that fired a signal
indicating a load to be carried) and anchoring the inherent unpredictability of
the steamboat business with at least one fixed point in time.17
As more and more boats competed along a given number of routes, the
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101
issue
of boats character and reputation became central features of the
steamboat trade. Arthur Cunynghame portrayed the competition that characterized the river trade in describing a scene on the levee at Cairo, where he
switched downriver boats at the cost of a few extra dollars. I was particularly struck with the neat and clean appearance of the Lexington. ... She was
advertised to sail on the following day for New Orleans, and her draught of
water was considerably less than that of the Atlantic.18 If assurances like the
ones offered by the Lexington proved reliable, and if that reliability was publicly discussed, a steamboat developed a reputationan invaluable asset amid
the word-of-mouth information economy in the era before consumer reports.
The Missouri, remembered one of her crewmen, was a boat with a very good
character, and the captain did not want her detained at the dock for any reason.19 As Cunynghames comparison of the drafts of the boats suggests, even
more important than a reputation for departing on time could be one for arriving intact. The Henry Clay, wrote Harriet Martineau in 1833, had the highest
reputation of any boat on the river, having made ninety-six trips without accident, a rare feat on this dangerous river.20
Reputation in a word-of-mouth economy was ficklea boat that was only
as good as its last journey was excessively vulnerable on the changing currents
of the Mississippiand so steamboat owners competed for customers by ensuring that their vessels would catch the eye. To the entire population spread
over both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces,
wrote one owner. They tallied with the citizens dream of what magnificence
was, and satisfied it.21 Twain described the sensational effect on the average
ticket holder, who was allowed for the first time to enter a space characterized
by the sort of opulence familiar only to world travelers and local elites: When
he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world:
chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumesand maybe
painted red; pilot-house, hurricane-deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished
with white wooden filigree-work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the
derricks; gilt deer horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the
paddle-box, possibly.22 The spatial limitations of riverine trade, the falling
rate of profit, and the overaccumulation of capital in steamboatsmore boats
making less money along a fixed number of routesproduced the greatest
wonders of Western architecture. As Twains insistent contrast of surface and
102
depthcounterfeit, garnish, giltsuggests, there was something ersatz about

steamboat opulence, something unreliable, temporary, disposable.
The greatest of the Mississippi Valleys floating palaces were also built for
speed. River lore focused on steamboat races. Twain remembered the flush
times of steamboating as an era when races were fixed several weeks in advance, and up and down the Valley people talked only of the coming race.
Wood-supply boats were deployed in advance along the river, and the steamboats refueled as they ran.23 No aspect of the steamboat business elicited so
much contemporary discussion as the rate at which various boats made the
trips between cities along the riverthe upriver journey from New Orleans to
St.Louis being the emblematic challenge route. Record times were sought after, recorded, and publicized. They marked the leading edge of steamboat
owners efforts to separate themselves from the ever-increasing fleet of boats
competing for business along the fixed length of the river. On May9, 1844, the
St.Louis Republican reported that the J.M. White had set new records both
downstream and upstream between St.Louis and New Orleans: three days
and sixteen hours on the way down; three days and twenty-three hours on the
way back.24 Mark Twain reproduced a table in Life on the Mississippi that
tracked declining record times between New Orleans and the principal cities
of the Valley over the course of the steamboat era (see Table2). These record
times, printed and circulated in newspapers, recapitulated and recycled in conversation and legend, were a defining element of the commercial culture of the
Mississippi Valley. They set the standard by which steamboats were judged
and to which their owners aspired.
The sense that time was speeding up and space shrinking was daily renewed
along the levee, as the boats loaded and gathered steam for departure. They
made a show of the way they pulled away from the dock, competing with one
another to make the most dramatic start up the river. Again, Mark Twain:
Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and
presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag fly
ing, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy Negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best voice on
the lot towering from the midst (being mounted on the capstan), waving his
hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus.25 The moment when a steamboat gathered its force, engaged its wheel, and pulled away from the levee, its
Limits to Capital
103
straining engines in harmony with the songs of black labor enmasse, is one we
have encountered before: it is the characteristic moment of the steamboat sublime. It turns out to have been a moment shaped by the limits of the steamboat
economy, the increasing competition and falling rate of profit that led owners
and captains to compete for business in showy departures that supposedly presaged rapid journeys and timely arrivals. Of course, this representative moment was also the moment at which a steamboat was most likely to explode.26
better remembered than the record times and more frequent than the
races, steamboat explosions were the landmark events in the history of the era.
The history of steam navigation on the Western rivers is a history of wholesale murder and unintentional suicide, wrote one critic in 1851.27 Arthur
Cunynghame described the Mississippi as a river proverbial for accidents,
such as the snagging and blowing up of steamers, and remembered boarding
a steamboat with a sense that he would be lucky if he survived the trip. If
Cunynghames journal of his time on the Mississippi is any guide, accidents
were a constant topic of conversation among travelers. In the course of a twohour conversation one evening, he and the ships engineer discussed the explosions of the Kate Kearney, the Kate Fleming, and the SantaFe. The next morning they passed the grounded St.Paul. Cunynghame noted that the heads of
snags constantly protruded themselves about the surface, and discussed with
a clerk two prior occasions on which the man had witnessed snaggings: the
time that the clerk had seen a snag run through the forecabins and crush the
passengers in their berths, and the snagging and sinking of the Tennessee,
with six-hundred souls aboard, a hundred and eighty being drowned, the rest
having to remain for thirty-six hours up to their middle in the water. The following morning, they edged through a passage of river so matted with snags
that it was called the grave of steamers. That afternoon, Cunynghame
watched a boat with a diving bell raise a large number of pigs of lead and a
large assortment of English crockery from a boat that had sunk twenty-two
years before. In addition to all this, during the time he was on the river, he
heard news of one steamboat exploding, one burning, and two snagging, one
of which sank.28
Over the course of the steamboat era, there were about 1,100 serious steamboat accidents on the Western rivers; about 5 percent of the tonnage on the
Table 2.The record of some famous trips, from Commodore Rollingpins Almanac (D., H.,
and M. stand for Days, Hours, and Minutes).
FAST TIME ON THE WESTERN WATERS
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NATCHEZ268 MILES
Run made in
D. H. M.
1814. Orleans
6 6 40
1844. Sultana
1814. Comet
5 10
0
1851. Magnolia
1815. Enterprise
4 11 20
1853. A.L. Shotwell
1817. Washington
4 0
0
1853. Southern Belle
1817. Shelby
3 20
0
1853. Princess (No. 4)
1819. Paragon
3 8
0
1853. Eclipse
1828. Tecumseh
3
1 20
1855. Princess (New)
1834. Tuscarora
1 21
0
1855. Natchez (New)
1838. Natchez
1 17
0
1856. Princess (New)
1840. Ed. Shippen
1 8
0
1870. Natchez (New)
1842. Belle of the West
1 18
0
1870. R.E. Lee
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO CAIRO1,024 MILES
Run made in
D. H. M.
1844. J.M. White
3 6 44
1869. Dexter
1852. Reindeer
3 12 25
1870. Natchez
1853. Eclipse
3 4
4
1870. R.E. Lee
1853. A.L. Shotwell
3 3 40
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO LOUISVILLE1,440 MILES
Run made in
D. H. M.
1815. Enterprise
25 2 40
1840. Ed. Shippen
1817. Washington
25 0
0
1842. Belle of the West
1817. Shelby
20 4 20
1843. Duke of Orleans
1819. Paragon
18 10
0
1844. Sultana
1828. Tecumseh
8 4
0
1849. Bostona
1834. Tuscarora
7 16
0
1851. Belle Key
1837. Gen. Brown
6 22
0
1852. Reindeer
1837. Randolph
6 22
0
1852. Eclipse
1837. Empress
6 17
0
1853. A.L. Shotwell
1837. Sultana
6 15
0
1853. Eclipse
Run made in
H. M.
19 45
19 50
19 49
20
3
20 26
19 47
18 53
17 30
17 30
17 17
17 11
Run made in
D. H. M.
3 6 20
3 4 34
3
1
0
Run made in
D. H. M.
5 14
0
6 14
0
5 23
0
5 12
0
5 8
0
4 23
0
4 20 45
4 19
0
4 10 20
4 9 30
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO DONALDSONVILLE78 MILES

Run made in
Run made in
H. M.
H. M.
1852. A.L. Shotwell
5 52
1860. Atlantic
5 11
1855. Eclipse
5 42
1860. Gen. Quitman
5
6
1854. Sultana
5 12
1865. Ruth
4 43
1856. Princess
4 51
1870. R.E. Lee
4 59
FROM NEW ORLEANS TO ST. LOUIS1,218 MILES

Run made in
D. H. M.
1844. J.M. White
3 23
9
1870. Natchez
1849. Missouri
4 19
0
1870. R.E. Lee
1869. Dexter
4 9
0
FROM LOUISVILLE TO CINCINNATI141 MILES
Run made in
D. H. M.
1819. Gen. Pike
1 16
0
1843. Congress
1819. Paragon
1 14 20
1846. Ben Franklin (No. 6)
1822. Wheeling Packet
1 10
0
1852. Alleghaney
1837. Moselle
12
0
1852. Pittsburgh
1843. Duke of Orleans
12
0
1853. Telegraph (No. 3)
1842. Congress
1854. Pike
FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS750 MILES

Run made in
D. H. M.
2
1
0
1854. Northerner
1 23
0
1855. Southerner
FROM CINCINNATI TO PITTSBURG490 MILES

Run made in
D. H.
1850. Telegraph (No. 2)
1 17
1852. Pittsburgh
1851. Buckeye State
1 16
1853. Altona
1876. Golden Eagle
FROM ST. LOUIS TO ALTON30 MILES

Run made in
H. M.
1 35
1876. War Eagle
1 37
Run made in
D. H. M.
3 21 57
3 18 14
Run made in
H. M.
12 20
11 45
10 38
10 23
9 52
Run made in
D. H. M.
1 22 30
1 19
0
Run made in
D. H.
1 15
Run made in
H. M.
1
37
MISCELLANEOUS RUNS
In June 1859, the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet, City of Louisiana, made the run from St.
Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in 16 hours and 20 minutes, the best time on record.
In 1868 the steamer Hawkeye State, of the Northern Line Packet Company, made the run
from St. Louis to St. Paul (800 miles) in a day and 20 hours. Never was beaten.
In 1854, the steamer Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph, on the Missouri
River, in 64 hours. In July 1856, the steamer Jas. H. Lucas, Andy Wineland, Master, made the
same run in 60 hours and 57 minutes. The distance between the ports is 600 miles, and when the
difficulties of navigating the turbulent Missouri are taken into consideration, the performance
of the Lucas deserves especial mention.
(cont.)
Table 2(continued)
THE RUN OF THE ROBERT E. LEE
The time made by the R.E. Lee from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870, in her famous race
with the Natchez, is the best on record, and inasmuch as the race created a national interest, we
give below her time table from port to port.
Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30, 1870, at 4 oclock and 55 minutes, p.m.; reached
D. H. M.
D. H. M.
Carrollton
27
Vicksburg
1 0 38
Harry Hills
1 0
Millikens Bend
1 2 37
Red Church
1 39
Baileys
1 3 48
Bonnet Carre
2 38
Lake Providence
1
5 47
College Point
3 50
Greenville
1 10 55
Donaldsonville
4 59
Napoleon
1 16 22
Plaquemine
7 5
White River
1 16 56
Baton Rouge
8 25
Australia
1 19
0
Bayou Sara
10 26
Helena
1 23 25
Red River
12 56
Half Mile below St. Francis
2 0
0
Stamps
13 56
Memphis
2 6
9
Bryaro
15 51
Foot of Island 37
2 9
0
Hindersons
16 29
Foot of Island 26
2 13 30
Natchez
17 11
Tow-head, Island 14
2 17 23
Cole s Creek
19 21
New Madrid
2 19 50
Waterproof
18 53
Dry Bar No. 10
2 20 37
Rodney
20 45
Foot of Island 8
2 21 25
St. Joseph
21 2
Upper Tow-head
Lucas Bend
3 0
0
Grand Gulf
22 6
Cairo
3
1
0
Hard Times
22 18
St. Louis
3 18 14
Half Mile below
Warrenton
1 0 0
The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11:25 A.M., on July 4, 1870six hours and thirty-six minutes
ahead of the Natchez. The officers of the Natchez claimed seven hours and one minute stoppage
on account of fog and repairing machinery. The R.E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W.
Cannon, and the Natchez was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P.
Leathers.
Source: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1883).
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107
river was destroyed in any given year.29 Mrs. Houstoun described the suspension of disbelief required of steamboat passengers. The very first paragraph
on the very first page of Mrs. Houstouns account of her Western travels
washeaded Steamboat Disastersyet with the possibility of being either
burnt, drowned, snagged, or sawyered, hanging over our heads (of which
we might have been kept in continual remembrance by the ominous life preservers in our state-rooms), I do not think that it ever occurred to any of our
cheerful little party that they ought to be nervous, or that we ever called to
mind the perils by which we were surrounded.30 Cunynghame, with all of his
morbid curiosity and his mental catalogue of recent disasters, was apparently
not part of the blithely oblivious party that traveled with Mrs. Houstoun.
Reading their accounts side by side, however, one realizes the extent to which
steamboat accidents were cultural events as well as material ones, things that
were worried about, ignored, argued about, and interpreted even as they happened.
This is nowhere more evident than in the 1856 bestseller Lloyds Steamboat
Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters. Of the 326 pages of Lloyds
which included biographies of steamboat-era heroes such as John Fitch and
Robert Fulton, tables of record times for various Western routes, twenty-
seven separate plates which together provided a map of the length of the Mississippi between its headwaters and the Gulf of Mexico, a list of steamboat pilots and engineers residing in the cities of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New
Orleans, and a list of all steamboats on the Western waters as of the time of
publicationa full 157 were accounts of steamboat disasters. Some of these
accounts were illustrated with woodcuts (thirty-two illustrations of steamboatdisasters, in all), and many had appendixes listing and categorizing the
victimskilled, badly wounded, slightly wounded. The table of contents
of Lloyds famous directory was a sort of nightmare poem of alphabetized
Americana: America, explosion of; America South, burning of; Anglo Norman,
explosion of; Atlantic and Ogdensburg, collision of; Belle of the West, burning
of; Ben Franklin, explosion of the; Black Hawk, explosion of the; Constitution,
explosion of; Enterprise, explosion of; Financier, explosion of; Martha Washington, burning of; Mayflower, burning of; Minstrel, sinking of; Mohican, explosion of; Nick Biddle, sinking of; Oronoko, explosion of; Oregon, explosion
of; Persian, explosion of; Phoenix, burning of; Phoenix No. 2, explosion of;
108
Pocahontas, explosion of; Rainbow and American Eagle, collision of; Star-
Spangled Banner, sinking of; Washington, explosion of; Washington, burning
of; Washington, George, loss of; Western World, sinking of. There were ninetyseven disasters described in some degree of detail, often over several pages, as
well as a two-page account of the burning of twenty-three steamboats on the
levee in St.Louis, and fifteen pages in which 219 minor disasters were each
treated in the space of several lines (about one-hundred and twenty-five deck
passengers were drowned; twenty of the crew and deck passengers were
killed; scalding about twenty-five Germans, some of whom died in consequence; two Negroes were killed; fifty-four passengers were lost).31
Lists of names were an effort to recordto memorializethe victims of
steamboat disasters. The following is an account of the dead and wounded left
behind by the November15, 1849, explosion of the steamboat Louisiana while
it was lying between the Storm and the Bostona along the New Orleans levee.
This account has been chosen almost at random from the pages of Lloyds, and
is representative of the genre.
KILLEDRobert Devlin, Baton Rouge; Capt. E.T. Dustin of Bostona; Mr. Gilmer, second mate, and Andrew Bell, pilot, La.; wife and
child of Mr.Robert Moody, clerk of the steamer Storm; Capt. Edmonston, St.Louis; Mr.Roach, deck hand of the Storm; Mr.Knox, head steward of do. [ditto]; a cabin boy of do. name unknown; two firemen of do.;
John Sullivan, James Wolf, and a third name unknown, newsboys;
thecoachman of St.Charles Hotel; several Negroes and deck hands of
the Bostona; Dr.Thomas M. Williams, Lafourche; Dr.Blondine, Point
Coupee; Robert Mackin, clerk of the Louisiana; J. J. Gillespie, Vicksburg; J.Merring, Cincinnati; Mr.Wilson, grocer, St.Louis; Mr.Edgar,
WashingtonCo., Miss.; Sylvester Prescott and Aeneas Craft, Memphis;
Mr.King, clerk of the firm of J.J. Grey &Co., St.Louis; Mr.Elliot,
clerk of the firm March & Rowlett, New Orleans; Merrick Morris, clerk
of the firm of Small and McGill, New Orleans.
WOUNDEDIsaac Hart, New Orleans (supposed to be incurable);
Mr.Ray, clerk of Moses Greenwood &Co., New Orleans; S.Davis, Mobile; Augustus Fretz, brother of Capt. Fretz, formerly of steamer Memphis; A.Bird, planter, near Baton Rouge; Capt. Hopkins, of the Storm;
Limits to Capital
109
John Mason, pilot of the Storm; Mr.Horrell, of the firm Horrell & Gale,
New Orleans; Mr. Price, clerk of the Bostona; chambermaid of do.;
Harvey W. Bickham; Daniel Eckerle; Henry Livingston; Isaac Garrison;
Hugh McKee; Henry, a slave; Samuel Fox; William Welch; Clinton
Smith; Miley Mulley; a female slave of Moses Murray, and her two children; John Evans; William Burke; John Laws; Charles, a small Negro
boy; William Tucker; Henry Tucker; James Matthews, Juan Montreal;
William Nee; Sandy, a slave of J.Adams; Sam, a slave of Captain Cannon; James Welch; James Flynn; Patrick McCarthy; twenty or thirty
other emigrants, whose names could not be ascertained; H. Rea, New
Orleans; Thomas Harrison, Missouri; Frederick A. Wood, New Orleans;
Samuel Corley,Ky.; Cricket, Harrison, Missouri; George, a slave; and a
Negro child.32
In the immediate aftermath of a steamboat accident, lists such as this carried
the first reliable news about the dimensions of the tragedy. Published in the
newspapers in New Orleans, this list would have informed the family and
friends of Dr.Thomas Wilson, say, whether they could ever expect to see him
again.
Reprinted in Lloyds at a distance of seven years and eight hundred miles
from the epicenter of the explosion of the Louisiana, such a list served a different purpose. It memorialized the dead, certainly, though this must have had a
secondary function for virtually every reader of Lloyds. It was immaterial to
them whether James Wolf survived and Isaac Garrison died, or vice versa;
whether it was the coachman of the St.Charles or the St.Louis Hotel who was
unlucky enough to carry the riverbound guests that afternoon; whether Captain Robert Devlin lived in Baton Rouge or Donaldsonville; or whether
Mr.Ray was the clerk of the slave dealer Moses Greenwood or of the commission merchants Marsh and Rowlett. These recycled lists of the dead were a
way of measuring the magnitude of the disaster and communicating it to those
upon whom it had no immediate effect. The known names of the unknown
dead (A.Bird, E.T. Dustin, Merrick Morris, James Flynn, Sam, Mrs. Moody)
and the victims social roles (planter, ships captain, clerk, immigrant, slave,
wife) served as placeholders in the mind of an empathetic reader: It could have
been me. Even as those lists specified and substantiated the human cost of the
110
river trade, they allowed a reader to feelfor a moment and at a distance

the thrill of being a survivor, of living to risk dying another day. Indeed, taken
as a whole, Lloyds, which juxtaposed the history of steamboat accidents that
had occurred as many as forty years before with ostensibly current information about the Mississippi Valley, at once signaled the underlying dangers of
the steamboat economy, unstably contained them within its history, and
reaffirmed a shared commitment to that economy through a sort of remembering (the dead) that was also forgetting (the danger). It memorialized past
catastrophes but only, always, and already in the service of present commitments. It was a reliquary.
If Lloyds insistently, though only implicitly, linked the daily business of the
steamboat economy to past and potential catastrophe, it did so in terms designed to materialize the unimaginable. Accounts of steamboat disasters often
emphasized the suddenness with which oblivious passengers were confronted
with oblivion. The explosion of the Lioness, for example, took place at an
early hour, on a calm and beautiful Sabbath morning in the spring. Many of
the passengers had not left their berths. As in the case of the Lioness, the
shock of disaster was often represented by referring to victims who went to
sleep in one history and awoke in another. Mrs. Seymour, traveling aboard
the John L. Avery in 1854, had retired to her state room for an afternoon nap,
from which she was aroused by the concussion [of the boats hull being torn
asunder by a snag] when the boat struck; and soon after she found herself in
the water. Likewise, Charles Stone went to sleep in his cabin aboard the Pennsylvania in June 1858, and when he awoke he found himself in the water.33
When they were not sleeping, steamboat victims were often amiably chatting
with one another, only to be cut down as they talked. It was a pleasant afternoon, and all on board probably anticipated a delightful voyage, began an
account of the explosion of the Moselle; none more so than Captain Perrin,
who at the time of the accident was standing on the deck, above the boiler, in
conversation with another person. He was, the story continued, thrown
to a considerable height on the steep embankment of the river and killed, while
his companion was merely prostrated on the deck and escaped without injury.
The canonical account of the explosion of the Louisiana conveyed both the
unexpectedness and arbitrariness of a steamboat disaster through a similar set
of images:
Limits to Capital
111
The fragments of iron, and blocks and splinters of wood, which were
sent with the rapidity of lightning from the ill-fated Louisiana, carried
death and destruction in all directions. ... Dr.Testut, of New Orleans,
was standing on the wharf, having just parted from his friend Dr.Blondine, of Point Coupee, who had embarked in the Louisiana, and was killed
by the explosion. A fragment of iron struck a man down at Dr.Testuts
feet; the poor fellow, while falling, stretched out his hands and convulsively grasped the doctors palletot, tearing a pocket nearly out. His grasp
was soon relaxed by death.34
Steamboat accidents, particularly steamboat explosions, were the nineteenth
centurys first confrontation with industrialized mayhem, and their chroniclers
published accounts thatalong with the narratives of escaped slavesconstituted some of the eras most graphically violent literature.35 Any number of
examples might be cited. The explosion of the Clipper, on September 1843,
near Bayou Sara, Louisiana:
The hapless victims were scalded, crushed, torn, mangled, and scattered
in every direction; some were thrown into the streets of the neighboring
town [Bayou Sara], some on the other side of the bayou, three hundred
yards distant, and some into the river. Several of these unfortunates were
torn into pieces by coming in contact with pickets or posts, and I myself
... saw pieces of human bodies which had been shot like cannon balls
through the solid walls of houses at a considerable distance from the
boat.36
The explosion of the Louisiana on the levee in New Orleans, on November15,
1849:
The body of a man was seen with the head and one leg off, and the entrails torn out. A woman, whose long hair lay wet and matted by her side
had one leg off, and her body was shockingly mangled. A large man,
having his skull mashed in, lay dead on the levee; his face looked as
though it had been painted red, having been completely flayed by the
scalding water. ... Legs, arms, and the dismembered trunks of human
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bodies, were scattered over the levee. One man, it is said, was blown
through the pilot house of the steamer Bostona, making a hole though
the panels, which looked like the work of a cannon ball.37
The shock wave of energy released by the exploding boilers pulverized both
boat and passengers, reducing each to a sort of debased materiality: the elements of the splintered boats were projected through their passengers; the passengers were dismembered, their remains mixed with the wreckage of their
boats.38
Add the sounds. From the explosion of the Constitution on May4, 1816, near
Point Coupee, Louisiana:
The shrieks of the wounded and dying were reverberated from the distant shores, and many a ghastly and heart-sickening spectacle presented
itself on the deck of the ill-fated vessel. One man had been completely
submerged in the boiling liquid which inundated the cabin, and in his removal to the deck, the skin had separated from the entire surface of his
body. The unfortunate wretch was literally boiled alive, yet although his
flesh parted from his bones, and his agonies were most intense, he survived and retained all his consciousness for several hours.39
Or from the explosion of the Ben Franklin, near Mobile, on March13, 1836:
This fine boat, which had on that very morning floated so gallantly on
the bosom of the water, was now a shattered wreck, while numbers of
her passengers and crew were lying on the decks, either motionless and
mutilated corpses, or agonized sufferers panting and struggling in the
grasp of death. Many others had been hurled overboard at the moment
of explosion, and such were the numbers of drowning people who called
for assistance, that the crowd of sympathizing spectators were distracted
and irresolute, not knowing where or how to begin the work of rescue.40
One must imagine the progression: the sounds of a normal day, the pistons,
the churning wheel, the tinkling of silverware and glasses in the cabin, con
versation, laughter; the concussion of the disaster, the deafening disorienta-
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tion; the sudden stillness; the rising murmur of recognition; shrieks of agony;
prayers for deliverance.
in the aftermath of every steamboat explosion came an accounting of the

losses. Boats and the goods they carried were generally insured separately.
Owners carried insurance on their boats, although insurers generally agreed to
cover no more than three-quarters of the boats estimated value, in order to
discourage fraud. The common law, which held that carriers were responsible
for the loss of goods under their care, generally did not apply on the Mississippi.41 After a few early court decisions holding that steamboat accidents were
ipso facto evidence of negligence on the part of the boat companies, steamboat
owners began to use contracts to shift the risk of accidents to the shippers
of goods. On the Mississippi during the steamboat era, responsibility for the
cargo was generally allocated according to specific provisions of the bills of
lading, which excepted the steamboat from liability for losses caused by the
unavoidable dangers of the river and firethat is, anything likely to go
wrong on a steamboat.42 Part of the business of commission merchants in
NewOrleans (and in other cities) was to arrange insurance for the goods they
shipped. The river trade depended on insurance; without it, nothing would
have moved.
After the wreckage had been hauled away, the wounded attended to, and the
dead buried, the attorneys and the accountants took over. According to the alchemical laws by which goods were given valuethe laws of the marketit
was possible to come to a final, if rarely consensual, allocation of costs in the
aftermath of a steamboat accident. It was likewise possible in many cases to
quantify uninsured losses, particularly in the case of the hard money that passengers often carried on the boats: $38,000 lost by a man who had hidden it in
his pillow aboard the Ben Sherrod; $900 lost by Mrs. Seymour on the John L.
Avery, also hidden in her pillow; $500 lost by Mr.Graham; $900 lost by Mr.Jolley and a thousand by a young man in the explosion of the Georgia; $8,000
belonging to General Lafayette and $1,300 held in the captains desk, sunk
along with the Mechanic.43
Because enslaved people had valuebecause they embodied capitalthey
were often among the accidents enumerated losses. When the Ben Sherrod
burned, only two Negroes escaped out of thirty-five. When the DeSoto col-
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lided with the Buckeye, Mr.Haynes lost sixteen slaves who were on the lower
deck. Mr.Alexander McKinzie, formerly of Florida, lost his wife, seven children, and four slaves. Mr.John Blunt, who was also from Florida, lost his wife,
child, and seven Negroes. When the Georgia burned, B.F. Lofton, of Lenoir
County,N.C., lost two slaves. Rev.J.M. Carter, of Clinton,Ga., lost three
Negroes. ... Dr.J.M. Young, of Hancock,Ga., lost a valuable slave, all his
medical books, surgical instruments, and everything, in short, except the
clothing he wore at the time of the disaster.44 Losses were deemed to be $1,500
for the slave Job, killed aboard the James Monroe; $2,000 for Etienne, run down
by the America as he tried to cross the river in a pirogue; $650 for Brick Yard
Jack, killed while cordelling the Maryland through low water at the English
Turn.45 And so on. The value of slaves determined the way they were included
in the archive of steamboat accidentsthe way they were enumerated, remembered, and accounted for in the aftermath of a disaster.
The nameless dead were noted but not counted in the rolls of the disasters.
Unlike cabin passengers, those who traveled on the decks of the steamboats
bought tickets without reservations, their identities going unrecorded. Unlike
enslaved people, those who were free had no monetary value; their deaths
occasioned no legal action and left no courtroom biography of their cut-short
lives. No estimate of the number killed was ever published, went a contemporary account of the explosion of the Black Hawk just out of Natchez, further explaining: A large proportion of the passengers on Western steamboats
are persons from distant parts of the country, or emigrants, perhaps, from the
old world, whose journeyings are unknown to their friends, and whose fate
often excited no inquiry. When such persons are the victims of a steamboat
calamity, their names, and frequently their number are beyond all powers of
research. Hundreds of others had a similar epitaph: The number of lives
lost by this accident could never be ascertained; the number of the victims
cannot be ascertained with any degree of precision. Nearly one hundred
deck passengers are supposed to have been sacrificed, the names of a great
majority of whom were unknown.46 It perhaps goes without saying that no
steamboat owner would ever have been unable to ascertain or even estimate how many bales of cotton, barrels of sugar, or bales of hay were on a
boat at the time it was lost.
The interchange between the valuation of property and the devaluation of
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freedom in the aftermath of steamboat disasters framed several riverworld

commonplaces. The first (an enduring one) was that poor whites lives, Irish
lives, German lives, or simply strangers lives were somehow worth less than
enslaved lives, because no one got paid for them.47 The confusion between
having a capital value and being socially valued underlay this fragment of
white-supremacist irony, which functioned as a sort of vernacular wisdom
along the Mississippi. The traveler Arthur Cunynghame recalled the story of
the Sultana (which later exploded in one of the most horrible and notorious
steamboat accidents of the nineteenth century), which had been badly damaged just out of St.Louis but nevertheless continued on its way to New Orleans, taking on both water and more passengers all the way down the river:
We afterwards found out that the Sultana had taken in (in all of its senses)
sixty more passengers at Cairo, who were, of course, ignorant of the state she
was in; the excuse being that the underwriters had agreed to stand by the insurance, and that, therefore, if she was considered safe for her freight she was
equally so for her passengers.48 The value of human life, according to the
underwriters and the owners, was incidental to an accurate accounting of commercial riskunless that life was given a market value. Cunynghame again:
It is proverbial on the Mississippi that so long as a good per centage or
handsome dividend is the result, loss of life and limb weighs too lightly
in the opposite scale, and that so long as this property on the river can
find underwriters to insure it, it is considered all that is requisite; indeed I
have often received for answer, when alluding to this subject, Why, sir,
there are plenty of life insurance offices; if you are the least alarmed,
why not insure your life? as if the recompense of a few thousand dollars, which a man would leave behind him, were a sufficient expiatory
oblation for the sacrifice of his own life.49
Making sense of the steamboat economy required the recognition that, in order to be valued, life on the Mississippi had to have a price.
When a steamboat crashed, sank, burned, exploded, or otherwise destroyed
the value invested in and packed aboard it, the owners and underwriters looked
for someone (else) to blame. Often they began with proximate causes. Just before the Ben Sherrod exploded, for instance, the firemen were shoving in the
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pine knots, and sprinkling rosin over the coal, and doing their best to raise
more steam. They had a barrel of whisky before them, from which they drank
often and freely until they were beastly drunk. Likewise, on the Brandywine,
for the purpose of producing more intense heat, and thus accelerating the
boats speed, a large quantity of rosin had been thrown into the furnaces.50
Or, as the Scottish traveler Charles Mackay put it, in an omnibus statement
which made plain the connotations of blaming the firemen in the first place:
The crew and stokers were all Negro slaves: and this was a circumstance to be
deplored perhaps, but not remedied; for the recklessness of the Negroes, recklessness caused not by wickedness, but by want of thought, want of moral dignity, consequent upon the state of slavery, is doubtless one cause, among many,
of the frequency of accidents in all the waters where they form the crews of
the navigating vessels.51 From the perspective of steamboat owners, these
racial accounts of responsibility had the virtue of shifting blame downward
along the chain of command and, not incidentally, away from anyone with the
power to do something about it.52 Indeed, given the extraordinary unlikelihood
that any firemen would survive an explosion in the engine room, these narrow
accountings of cause shifted the blame away from those who might have had
some power to remedy the situation by placing it squarely on those who no
longer had the power to do anything at all.
More commonly and more credibly, observers blamed steamboat engineers
for fires and explosions aboard their boats. Charles Cist, who in 1848 testified
before the U.S. Senate about the causes of steamboat explosions, expressed the
riverworlds common sense: The opinion and judgment of every competent
man I am conversant with, to which I add my own deliberate judgment, [are]
that there never was an explosion not chargeable to the incapacity, or oftener,
the negligence of the engineer.53 The unschooled (empirical) character of
Western engineering came up again and again as an explanation.
Another and not unusual cause of accidents, arises from the temerity, or
rather roguery of the (so called) engineer. I have already mentioned the
wonderful cuteness [cleverness] for which these people are remarkable,
and also the rapidity with which they seem to acquire a knowledge of
any business or profession in which they intend to embark; thus it happens that, on these great western waters, many a man who has acquired
no further knowledge of a steam engine than that which can be picked up
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by acting as a stoker for a voyage or two, passes himself off as a first-rate

engineer, and risks the lives of hundreds of human beings by his unprincipled duplicity.54
If accidents were not the fault of the engineers, they were attributable to
the pilotspilots who switched sides of the river either below or above where
other boats commonly did, or who steered too far out into the current or too
close to the shore. The collision of the Monmouth and the Tremont, which
killed 400 Creek Indians being deported to Arkansas, was blamed on the offi
cers of the Monmouth: the boat had been running in a part of the river where,
by the usages of the river and the rules adopted for the better regulation of
steam navigation on the Mississippi, she had no right to go, and where, of
course, the descending vessels did not expect to meet with any boat coming in
an opposite direction.55 There were pilots who held their course in the river
rather than steering out to avoid another boat, or who waited too long to ring
the bell that signaled the engine room when it became clear that a boat could
not get out of the way. Other pilotsat least according to those whom they
ran down and those who had underwritten their actions as long as they were
prudent and predictableacted with a want of care or even malice as
they navigated.56 Still others exaggerated the difficulty of their jobs in order to
cover for their mistakes, and thus provided a bed of misinformation that was
sedimented into what was believed to be known about the river:
The popular belief in New Orleans, that the progress of the banks near
the mouths of the river has been very rapid, arises partly from the nature
of the evidence given by witnesses in the law courts, in cases of insurance. When a ship is lost the usual line of defense on the part of the pilots, whether for themselves or their friends, is to show that new sandbars
are forming, and shoals shifting their places so fast, that no blame attaches to any one for running a vessel aground. To exaggerate, rather
than underrate, the quantity of sediment newly deposited by the river is
the bias of each witness.57
And if the blame did not lie with the pilots, it lay with the captains, who
would gather steam before they pulled away from the dock, or would race up
and down the river. Most of the accidents, which have resulted from the
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bursting of the boilers, wrote Robert Baird, have taken place when the boat
was leaving port.58 Among the famous explosions that occurred as the boats
pulled away from the dock with a full head of steam were those of the Anglo-
Norman, the Helen McGregor, the Ben Franklin, and the Louisiana.59 The most
notorious cause of steamboat accidents was racing. The Ben Sherrod was trying to catch the Prairie when the boilers became so hot that they set fire to
sixty cords of wood on board. The Brandywine was racing the Hudson when
sparks from the engine ignited the straw that had been used to pack several
carriage wheels being shipped on her deck. And the John L. Avery had just left
the Sultana (with which she appears to have been racing) about a mile astern,
when she struck what was supposed to be a tree washed from the bank by a
recent freshet. The boat almost immediately sank.60
At some point, all of these reckonings turned into riddles. Whose fault was
it that the engine exploded if the captain had ordered the engineer to produce
more power faster, the engineer had weighted the death hook that held
theengines safety valve down beyond its designed release, and the firemen
had thrown pine knots into the furnace? Whose fault was it if the passengers
rushed to one side of the boat as it departed, tilting its hull and dangerously
displacing the water in the boilers, or that, primed by newspaper accounts of
steamboat races and the eras obsession with speed, they egged the captain on
when another boat came into view on the river? Whose fault was it that a pilot
had chosen to cross the river at a point where another pilot might not have, on
a day when there might not have been enough water to run any closer to the
shore and there might have been too much fog to see clearly, on a boat that
may not have been able to stop within 200 feet of the point at which its pilot
gave the order to the engineer? Whose fault was it that an engineer could not
see through an inch-thick iron boiler to tell whether there was enough water
inside to keep it from getting so hot that when more water was eventually
added it would explode? As the traveler Edmund Flagg put it, It is a question
daily becoming of more startling import: How may these fatal occurrences be
successfully opposed? Where lies the fault? Is it in public sentiment? Is it in
legal enactment? Is it in individual villainy?61 There were no easy answers to
these questions. The multiplicity of possible causes often summed up to nothing in the way of clear-cut accountability.
Which did not mean that litigants and lawyers stopped trying. The legal
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action
that followed the collision of the steamboat Abeona was instructive in
that regard. Traveling upriver on December20, 1834, with a boat in tow, the
Abeona struck the clipper Cultivator, which was hauling a load of sugar downriver from Donaldsonville. Eighty-six hogsheads of sugar sank with the Cultivator, and their loss occasioned two separate cases before the Louisiana Supreme Court. In one, the court held the steamboat responsible: it had been
impossible for the schooner, traveling with the current and without wind in
its sails, to avoid the steamboat. In the other, the court released the steamboat
from any obligation: given the conditions on the river, the accident had been
unavoidable.62 Or as Mark Twain put it in evaluating a bit of river lore,
which claimed that the combination of a preacher and a gray mare among
those aboard a boat was an augury of disaster: That this combinationof
preacher and gray mareshould breed calamity seems strange and at first
glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that
to doubt it is to dishonor reason. The tessellated agency of those who worked
aboard the boats, as well as the confusion that surrounds any industrial accident, made the assignment of responsibility into an act of faith.
the most notable effort to establish responsibility for (avoiding) steamboat

accidents was An Act to Provide for the Better Security of the Lives of Passengers on Board of Vessels Propelled in Whole or in Part by Steam, passed
by the U.S. Congress in 1852.63 The Steamboat Act, as it was conventionally
known, provided for the inspection of steamboats and the licensing of engineers and pilots. Boats were to be equipped with fire pumps, lifeboats, and life
preservers. Boilers were to be inspected biannually and certified to be able to
withstand pressure in accordance with a prescribed ratio; the legal standard
was set at 110 pounds per square inch for a forty-two-inch-diameter boiler
made of quarter-inch-thick iron.64 Engineers and pilots were to be examined
and licensed. An engineer would be granted a license after demonstrating that
his character, habits of life, knowledge, and experience in the duties of an engineer are all such as to authorize the belief that the applicant is a suitable and
safe person to be entrusted with the powers and duties of such station; a pilot,
after the examiners were satisfied that he possesses the requisite skill, and is
trustworthy and faithful.65 In cases where accidents were found to result from
technical noncompliance, steamboat owners were held liable to the passengers
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for their losses. In cases where accidents resulted from the carelessness, negligence, or willful misconduct of an engineer or pilot, the malfeasant officer
was held liable.66 Of course, there were cases where neither noncompliance
nor malfeasance could be demonstrated. The Steamboat Act addressed disas
ters on the Western waters as a series of technical and managerial problems. It
was structured around a series of fablesthe rattle-trap machinery, the reckless engineer, the inexperienced pilotthat would have been familiar to any
reader of Lloyds Steamboat Register. To say that these were fables of accountability is to say not that they were untrue, but only that they told the story
of the explosion of the Louisiana or the sinking of the John L. Avery or the collision of the Talisman and the Tempest within a given commonsense narrative of cause and consequence. They addressed the behavior of individuals
owners, captains, engineers, and pilotswithout calling into question the
character of the economy that channeled their choices. They addressed the
problems on the boats without addressing the problems on the river. On
theMississippi, there were too many boats making too many runs competing
for too little business on too little water.
Having reached the outer limits of the inland waterways, steamboatmen
could not simply throw out new branches to expand their service area.
Steamboats competed by trying to burrow ever further into time. Whereas
steamboats in the 1820s had generally laid up at night, by the 1830s they were
operating around the clock. A steamboat that ran twice as many hours could
make twice as many journeys over the course of a season; faster turnarounds
led to more rapid returns. By intensifying the rate of trade on the river, steamboat owners tried to increase the circulation of capital. Of course, running at
night was dangerous. At night the river was habited by phantoms and false
hints. The banks and bars got up and moved around; snags hid in the shadows.67 Running at night increased returns, but it also increased risk.
In addition to extending the length of the day, some steamboatmen tried to
stretch the trading season by squeezing in a final run on the diminishing waters
of the Mississippi system. Although snags were more visible when the water
was low, steamboats were often grounded during river passages that one contemporary observer likened to jumping from one puddle to the next. The likelihood of getting grounded during low water increased with the amount of
water the boat displacedwhich is to say that steamboat owners made bets
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about grounding, calculated the risk, as they loaded their boats. In order to
gain a higher profit, Arthur Cunynghame remembered of the owners of the
Atlantic, they had caused her to be laden with freight, deeper, by at least two
feet, than she ought to have been. That evening we found ourselves again
firmly fixed upon what was called Sliding Island Bar.68 Steamboat groundings
were less spectacular than explosions or firesa cargo was delayed rather than
destroyed, and passengers were inconvenienced rather than incineratedbut
there were nevertheless lives at stake in steamboat owners decisions to send
their boats on one more run up a disappearing river. Once a steamboat was
grounded, it had to be forced off a sandbar. Sometimes boats were put in reverse and driven through the bar; sometimes they were pulled off by other
boats; sometimes they were grasshoppered over the bar with long levers attached to the sides of the boatlifted up, pushed forward, and dropped until
they had walked over the bar; sometimes they were cordelled across with
ropes that were stretched to the shore, anchored, and then wound back around
a shipboard capstan. In any case, the force necessary to drive (or pull) the
10,000-square-foot hull of a 900-ton boat (these were the dimensions of the
Magnolia, which ran between New Orleans and Louisville in the 1850s) was
enough to kill anyone unlucky enough to be standing nearby when some
thingwent wrong.69 Because those most likely to be standing nearby were the
working-class or enslaved crewmembers of steamboats, their deaths did not
usually make the papers.
The principal way in which steamboat capitalists tried to make sure they
gottheir money back out of the boats was by running them faster. It was well
known that steamboat owners favored hot engineers, a piece of conventional wisdom that transmitted the imperatives of capital into the engine rooms
and pilothouses. A mans pride and reputation was to be known as a hot and
fast engineer. Men of this kind were sought and always had a position. ... I
dont think they ever took into consideration the tensile strength of the iron to
know the pressure to the square inch or anything of that kind. The only thing
was to make the boat go and avoid breaking up the machinery, very little concerned about blowing up and hurling all to Kingdom come, wrote one memorialist of the steamboat era.70 As long as the vessels arrived intact, faster
boats paid better. The great object of all these boats is to procure cargo, Ma
tilda Houstoun explained, and with this end in view they endeavour, as much
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as possible, to outstrip each other, and arrive first at the town or landing where
cotton, molasses, or other cargo is likely to be ready for them.71 A reputation for speed drew paying passengers, who often added their voices to the
imperatives of accumulation as steamboats raced up and down the river.
Great was the triumphing when one boat managed to pass another, remembered Houstoun.72
It is with this in mind that we should return to the history of the high-
pressure steam engine that was standard on the Mississippi. As early as the
1820s, high-pressure engines were technologically residual; they were dirtier
and more dangerous than the low-pressure engines that were employed on
steamboats elsewhere. They could, however, generate more power than low-
pressure engines; they made it possible to run boats faster and harderover
sandbars, against the current, past the competition, and so on. They were also
cheaper. Indeed, the historian Paul Paskoff has argued that the transition to
high-pressure engines in the Mississippi Valley was driven by increasing interest rates: as money became more expensive to borrow, steamboat capitalists
saved money by switching from heavier, more expensive low-pressure enginesto lighter, cheaper high-pressure engines.73 That high-pressure engines
were more likely to explode and faster boats more likely to sink when snagged
were known risks, deliberately taken. Competition in the steamboat business
spurred technological degradation rather than technological innovation. Danger was built into the boats.
Still, the passengers kept buying tickets. Running high-pressure steamboats
faster along the Mississippi, it might be argued, was an economically optimal
solution, one that balanced the desires of passengers to get where they were
going with those of steamboat owners to cut costs and maximize profits. The
problem was that one group of participants in the market for steamboat tickets
had all the information they needed to make an informed decision; the other
group had their lives on the line. Ticket purchasers like Arthur Cunynghame
or Matilda Houstoun made their choices on the basis of rumor and superstition: the proverbial knowledge that steamboats were dangerous; the blind
faith that the boat they chose to take would not be the next to blow its stack.
Ticket sellers, on the other hand, calculated the risk of disaster into their margins and carried insurance on their boats. What makes our ships last such a
short time, Joel Poinsett explained to Alexis de Tocqueville, is the fact that
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our merchants often have little disposable capital at the beginning. Its a cal
culation on their part. From this perspective, the horizon of responsibility
stretched beyond the engine rooms and pilothouses of the boats, backward toward the countinghouses and clerks of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Louisville.Accidents, James Hall wrote, were set down as among the unavoidable chances of navigation, and instead of adopting measures to prevent them,
they were deliberately subtracted from supposed profits as a matter of course.
As the boat was not expected to last more than four or five years, at best, and
would probably be burnt, blown up, or sunk within that period, it was considered good economy to reduce the expenditures, and to make money by any
means, during the brief existence of the vessel.74 Steamboat accidents, these
critics suggested, were the result of close accounting rather than careless engineering. In such a world, there was an exculpatory blurring between the unavoidable, the predictable, and the intentional. The accountants calculations
allowed steamboat owners to protect themselves from risk without taking responsibility.
The risks taken by individual steamboat capitalists (and transmitted to their
subordinate captains, engineers, and pilots as imperatives) responded toand
were determined bythe challenges faced by the steamboat sector as a whole.
One critic described the process by which the number of steamboats continued
to grow, even as the rate of profit in the river trade began (and then continued)
to fall: At an earlier day [steamboats] cost much less than at present, and
a company, or even an individual, who represented any unencumbered real
estate could easily secure sufficient credit to build a steamboat without any
money. Thousands of men in the Mississippi Valley have lost their homes, their
farms, and their all, by pledging them to pay for building a steamboat they had
no use for. The result, of course, was to increase competition, and ruin those
who were engaged in legitimate business.75 James Hall suggested a connection between specific steamboat disasters and overinvestment in steamboats
more generally:
A curious fact was ascertained by a committee of gentlemen, who were
appointed a few years ago, by a number of steamboat owners, to investigate the whole subject. They satisfied themselves that although the bene
fits conferred on our country by steam navigation, were incalculable, the
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stock invested in boats, was, in general a losing investment. ... These

facts go far toward accounting for the enormous proportion of accidents
and losses which occur upon our rivers. A few instances, in which large
profits were realized, induced a great number of individuals to embark in
this business, and the tonnage has always been greater than the trade demanded.76
The river had become too crowded. Capitalists chasing the rumor of profit
jostled together like steamboats trading paint at a narrow riverbend; as more
capital was pushed onto the river, it became more difficult to turn a profit, and
consequently more dangerous to travel. Steamboats, Hall suggested, exploded
because of the flood tide of speculation upon which they had been floated.
Even though steamboat catastrophes were often referred to as accidents,
it was not really accurate to term the mishaps that befell somewhere between a
third and a half of the boats on the river accidents. Portents might be a
better term, or perhaps symptoms. These accidents were expressions of
the essential character of the economy they seemed to interrupt: speculative,
explosive, wanton. The explosions, the fires, the collisions, the snaggings, and
the sinkings were evidence of the undertow of the steamboat era: risks known,
but ignored; fears at the margin of hope. They were evidence of the violence
that the commercial boosters called history.
the story of the end of the steamboat era has often been told. By the 1850s,
the Mississippi River was yielding to the railroad as the commercial highwayof the West. Trade is seeking new channels, wrote one Western news
paper editor. Railroads are the greatest revolutionists of the age, and the most
radical republicans too. They do not respect rivers; and locomotives outstrip
steamboats. In consequence the tide of trade is setting eastward.77 Gradually,
the eastward flow of trade spread southward. At St.Louis and Memphis, at
Canton, Jackson, and Vicksburg in Mississippi, at Clinton, Opelousas, and
Terre-Aux-Boeufs in Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley was joined to the nations emerging railway system. At first, many of these rail links were intended
to carry produce to the river, but by the mid-1850s railroads were tapping the
river trade, bypassing New Orleans and carrying cotton directly eastward to
market. Trains ran faster, more directly, and with greater regularity. They in-
Limits to Capital
125
creased the predictability and velocity of the circulation of goods (and thus
of capital). And they ran year-round. The railroad continued the transformation of space represented by the steamboat: it accelerated the emancipation of
trade from the landscape. No longer did goods need to sit on the levee waitingfor water; no longer did merchants need to hoard and store merchandise
they had to keep on hand, but could not yet sell; no longer were passengers
strandedin the rail era, they were merely late. In the late 1850s, for the first
time in the nineteenth century, the port of New Orleans began to export more
than it imported. The Mississippi Valley was falling off the map.78
5
The Runaways River
Les rivires sont des chemins qui marchent. [Rivers are roads that move.]
Blaise Pascal, Penses
in 1857, herman Melville published a novel entitled The Confidence-Man,

which, even by the standard measures of misunderstood literary genius, was
a stupendous failure.1 The Confidence-Man was set on board a Mississippi
steamer, the Fidle, bound downriver from St.Louis to New Orleans on April
Fools Day. The Fidle is referred to as both a ship of fools and a ship of
philosophers, but, more than anything, is a ship of strangers, of people who
left their pasts behind as they embarked, and could be known only through
their appearance. Though always full of strangers, Melville wrote, she
continually adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange. The
book is pitched between two opposed propositions about proper conduct in a
world of strangers: Charity thinketh no evil, taken from First Corinthians
and chalked on a signboard by a deaf-mute beggar on the deck; and NO
TRUST, painted on the signboard of the steamboats skeptical barber. Confi
dence, Charity, and Trust: the dilemma of estimating inward intention from
outward sign, of how strangers can be known and their actions estimated
these were the dramas of steamboat travel along the nineteenth centurys commercial frontier, according to Melville. And, as anyone who has ever tried to
read the book can attest, The Confidence-Man provides no easy answers.
Throughout the book, the question of trust among strangers is posed in
terms of race and money. One of the books opening chapters, In Which a
Variety of Characters Appear, has at its center a crippled black man named
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127
Guinea, who begs on the boats deck. As the crowd about him grows, one
sour man shouts out, Looks are one thing, and facts another, and the others begin to turn against Guinea, questioning both his seeming debility and his
claimed freedom. In response, Guinea names eight men who will vouch for
him: the man with a weed in his hat; the gentleman in the gray coat; the gentleman with the big book; the herb doctor; the gentleman in the yellow vest; the
gentleman with a brass plate; the gentleman wearing a purple robe; and the
soldier. Indeed, throughout the course of the novel, each of these eight appears on the boat, and introduces himself to an unsuspecting mark by talking
about the black man who was on board at the beginning of the journey, but
who has since mysteriously disappeared. In the words of the man with the
weed in his hat, who is about to borrow money from a merchant (and in return
provide the merchant with a cant-miss inside tip about another man on board
with some stock to sell): [Does not] the circumstance of one man, however
humble, referring for a character to another man, however afflicted, argue
more ... of the moral worth in the latter? Each successive character, that is,
uses for guarantee the very man who first used him as guarantor, building
asort of Ponzi-pyramid of reputation on board the Fidle, and in the process
drawing the identities of the black and white characters into ever denser and
more unstable interdependence. Indeed, never do any two of these eight men
appear at the same time or in the same place, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that behind each of the mutually vouching money seekers is
actually one man in a series of disguises: the singular confidence-man of the
books title (the conclusion that a reader would reach by judging the book by
its cover).
The economy of vouching and crediting aboard the Fidle suggests nothing so much as the paper-and-credit economy of the Mississippi River system,where spirals of speculation were built out of insubstantial promises. The
Mississippi Valley was a region of wildcat banks and credit-issuing merchant
houses, of unbacked paper money and bills of exchangetermed endorsements. These last were promises to pay, guaranteed over and over again by
successive holders as they moved ever further away from the initial transaction
along the chains of debt that linked the Western economy to the rest of the
world. In a specie-scarce economy, questions of accountability were twinned
with those of identity in every trade. Doing business required a leap of faith,
128
or at least a leap of confidence, into an insubstantial medium of exchange:

commercial paper, vouched for only by the appearance of those who presented
it and by paper-thin representations of debtors who were no longer anywhere
to be seen.2
And as the presence of Guinea at the center of the web of imposture aboard
the Fidle suggests, the economy of personal identity in the Mississippi Valley
was always already racial, as well as commercial. Aboard the Fidle, there is
one man who stands out for his creditworthiness: a Gentleman with Gold
Sleeve Buttonsa man whose specie-backed authenticity is worn on his
sleeve. The hands of this man are, like his gloves, perfectly white; even amid
the grime and soot of the steamboats deck, these hands retained their spotlessness. What first appears to be a marvel, however, is eventually revealed
to be something else entirely. For it is not that the mans hands are not dirtied
by what they touchit is that they dont touch anything: the work of touching is done by a Negro body-servant. The secret of the Gentleman with
Gold Sleeve Buttons turns out to be the magic of slavery: his substance depends upon the laundered labor of his slave. When this spotlessly white man
finally reaches into his wallet to draw out the bills he contributes to the Asylum
for Seminole Widows, they emerge crisp with newness, fresh from the bank,
no muckworms grime upon them.
Behind the apparent solidity of specie lay the seeming constancy of racial
slavery (and the racial conquest that had turned Seminole women into widows). Yet racial difference itself is unstable and ineffable aboard the Fidle: its
supposed essence is as elusive as Guinea, who passes out of sight amid a crowd
of skeptical onlookers, only to appear as a white man in a later chapter. Like
many of his contemporaries, Melville portrays the Mississippi steamer as a
world in miniature, a microcosm of the nineteenth centurys commercial
frontier. And in Melvilles telling, anxiety and identity, race and money, confi
dence and credulity chase one another along that frontier in an unending circuit. A Mississippi steamer was a world of many chances, but few certainties.
Melvilles Fidle was not the only microcosm on the Mississippi. Indeed,
it was a nineteenth-century literary commonplace to describe a Mississippi
steamboat as a world in miniature. Like todays airports or train stations, the
Mississippi steamer provided a teeming representation of contemporary society. The historian Louis C. Hunter described it vividly:
The Runaways River
129
Western farmers accompanying their produce to market, southern planters returning with their families from a summer sojourn in the North,
country merchants on their annual buying trips, well-to-do emigrants
headed for a new purchase, politicians bound home from the nations
capital, artists and theatrical companies on tour, members of the titledaristocracy and intelligentsia of Europe, land speculators, editors, preachers, gamblers, and slave traders ... immigrants from abroad, migrating
families from the older states, artisans, laborers, and their families were
all thrown together, often for days, in this mixing bowl.
The social world of the steamboat was characterized by all of the curiosity,
desire, fear, and disgust that people experience when social hierarchy is compressed into temporary proximity. It was this mixture, perhaps, that Frances
Trollope was trying to capture when she compared Mississippi steamboats to
floating bathhouses.3
just as characteristic of steamboats was the nineteenth centurys emergent

strategy of social management: segregation. Deck passengers traveled at a
fraction of the cost of cabin passengers. They provided their own food, slept
rough amid the cargo, luggage, and livestock on the deck, and often paid off
their passage by helping to load and unload the boat, cutting and carrying
wood along the way, and performing other chores. Matilda Houstoun de
scribed what she had seen on the deck of the Leonora when she had traveled
from Louisville to New Orleans: We had some horses and mules and a vast
number of what are called deck passengers. The latter consisted principally
of emigrants from Ireland, loafing characters from the North, and German settlers with a very small amount of money in their pockets. ... [They] were exposed to all the inclemency of the season, and ... the sufferings, particularly
those of the women and children were severe. Houstoun went on to describe
(in a way that was presumably meant to be satirical) the callous lightheartedness with which those in the cabin regarded those on the deck. One afternoon,
she recalled, her group was momentarily frozen by the cry of Man overboard! followed by relief at the realization that it was only one of the deck
passengers and not one in whom we were interested that was at that moment
struggling for life in the rapid current. The following morning there were
130
mordant jokes at breakfast about how many deck passengers had been lost
overnight.4
For Houstoun, these incidents seemed exemplary; their protagonists were
specimens, characters, western men, immigrants, representatives of
a race of singular beings.5 Class differences among whites were made concrete aboard the Leonora; differences that might otherwise have been ignored
or papered over with the broad sloganeering of white supremacy were daily
acted out on the deck. Both Matilda Houstoun and Harriet Martineau referred
to the crying of the children on the deck, not so much because they empathized with their plight (or that of the parents), but because the noise the children made intruded on the other passengers sleep. Houstoun also referred to
the way even the cabin was impregnated with the odors of the deck, a
sensation of violation she shared with David Stevenson, who wrote that the
deck of a Western steamboat generally presents a scene of filth and wretchedness that baffles all description, but which he contrasted with the plentiful
supply of fresh air available to cabin passengers. To nineteenth-century observers, who would have associated close quarters and fetid air with the miasmas they thought caused disease, the contaminating smells of the deck held
the threat of contagion. When a man died on the deck of the Henry Clay, Harriet Martineau remembered, the captain had his body removed from the boat
and laid beneath a tree at a woodlot, hoping that this incident should be passed
over in entire silence, as he was anxious that there should be no alarm about
disease on the boat. And there were, finally, what the traveler Robert Baird
termed scenes of shocking depravity ... disgusting to every virtuous mind.6
Segregation on Western steamboats (like segregation anywhere else) both
mirrored and reproduced specific anxieties about differenceabout what, exactly, was threatening to rich white people about poor white people. Steamboats were unquestionably vectors of disease, but there was something more
to these accounts of social contagion than a simple fear of cholera.
At the heart of cabin passengers accounts of the disgust with which they
viewed the deck are descriptions of normal people doing normal things: trying to control their livestock and comfort their crying children, cooking over
an open fire, smoking, talking, laughing, drinking (perhaps even to the point
of falling overboard), relieving themselves, making love, getting sick, convalescing, dying, keening, mourning. But on the decks of the steamboats, in
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131
thevoyeuristic eyes of the passengers in the cabin, the very human normalitythe base commonalityof these activities provided a screen for anxieties
about the nature of race and class amid the changing circumstance of the riverworld. These images weave together animals, children, sexuality, filth, and
disease: they are images of social and sexual contamination. At some point
during the voyage of the Leonora, Houstoun and several of her passengers approached the boats captain to complain about the cruel and tyrannical treatment of the passengers on the deck; they were, one of the group said, being
treated worse than Negroes.7 For Houstoun and her friends, there was some
thing scandalous, even subversive, about the conditions on the deck. The abjection, the exposure, of the white people on the deck undermined the racial
premises upon which the Cotton Kingdom was founded.
The world in which Houstoun took refuge was the ladies cabin, which was
generally at the back of the boat, away from the heat and noise of the engines.
Unmarried men were not allowed in the ladies cabin, which was separated
from the main cabin, where all of the cabin passengers took their meals, with
the ladies seated together at the head of the table.8 The gendered order of
the steamboat cabin neutralized the threat posed by (and to) women in public.
It spatially reinforced the idea that white women in the cabin were virtuous
rather than promiscuous, no matter how far they were from home. The door
of the ladies cabin, according to Houstoun, opened onto a different world:
that of the gentlemens cabin, where the amusements were truly those of the
western worldnamely playing at cards with remarkably dirty packs, smoking cigars, using violent language, and drinking brandy and other fancy cocktails from morning to night.9 The door between the cabins served as a sort of
a buffer between the ladies and the (Western) world through which they
traveled, a sort of material marker of the space they inhabited as private and
domestic. In the ladies cabin, women were defined and protected by their relationships to menmother, wife, daughter. Like the segregation of deck and
cabin, however, the boundary between the ladies and the gentlemens cabins
conveyed a sense of difference and danger it could not finally contain.
There were dangers of various types. Houstoun had begun her journey
down the Mississippi by passing beneath a large sign reading BEWARE OF
THIEVES as she boarded the boat.10 The passengers aboard Mississippi
steamboats often carried a great deal of money. Planters traveling to town,
132
farmers returning from market, immigrants moving west, merchants restocking their stores: the Western waters were full of marks for a man with the
wrong sort of intentions and the right set of skills. Steamboats were notorious
for pickpockets, cat burglars, and especially gamblersto such an extent that
even today the words riverboat and gambler imply each other, much as do
the words raise and call.
The self-proclaimed King of the Riverboat Gamblers was George Devol, who started his career on the river as a teenager in the 1840s and published
a record of his exploits entitled Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi in 1887.
There were, it turned out, as many ways to fix a card game as there were card
games. Gamblers generally worked in teams. A standard con had one man
peeking at the cards in the hand of the mark, and signaling his partner by moving a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other or by covering the crest
on the back of the cards with his index finger. In another con, one partner
would deal and conspicuously lose several hands of a game like three-card
monte (three fast-moving cards; keep track of the jack to win). More players
would join in, only to find that the odds had changed in the dealers favor as
soon as they did. Still other cons involved taking side bets on a game played
between confederates; using marked cards that had been provided to the barkeeper in advance; dealing from the bottom of false-bottomed card boxes
(counterfeits of the boxes generally used, which were designed specifically to
prevent dealing from the bottom of the deck); one partner insistently raising
on a losing hand (cross-lifting), so the other could win without drawing undue attention; and on and on and on.11
At some point, it would all stop being funnysooner rather than later, if
you were among the gamblers unwitting marks. The stories of those who lost
their money to gamblers on the Mississippi suggested the flimsiness of the protection provided women and families by the curtain that hung between the
cabins. Gambling, warned Robert Baird in his emigrants and travelers
guide to the Mississippi Valley, was an amusement of the most dangerous
and seductive character, and one which promised only a hardening and chilling effect ... upon the heart.12 A young man who snuck away from his wife in
order to gamble with the money she had brought to their marriage, like theman
George Devol encountered on the H.R.W. Hill, might end like the wretch
condemned by Robert Baird: the fellow gambled day and night in the saloon
The Runaways River
133
of a Mississippi steamer, while his young, interesting, and beautiful, but

dying wife wasted away in the ladies cabin. A riverboat card game could entice a young man to abandon all that he should have held dearest for the fleeting pleasures of chance. There were sons who lost the legacies entrusted them
by their fathers; husbands who blighted the hopes invested in them by their
young wives; self-made men unmade by their own underlying weakness; men
who lost not only their fortunes, but ... their souls by gambling.13
Maintaining order on board was the responsibility of the boats captain.
Many of Devols tales told of victims who appealed to the captain to retrieve
their money and put the gambler off the boat on the nearest sandbar. Sometimes Devol managed to convince the captain that the complainant himself
had been running a hustle; sometimes the gambler already had the captain in
his pocket; sometimes he was forced to run for his life (Arthur Cunynghame
remembered that gamblers were made to walk as in a treadmill on the paddle
wheel of a steamer, or had their ears nailed to the bulkhead).14 The larger point
is that each steamboat was a small, unstable polity where order depended on
the willingness and ability of the passengers and crew to back the captains
authorityif need be, with violence.15 Every steamboat captain presided over
a potential kangaroo court; every passenger was a possible vigilante. Thomas
Hamilton noted that passengers on Western steamboats were often armed.
When he himself traveled by steamboat to New Orleans, a well-dressed man
in the cabin had the ivory hilt of an unmanly and assassin-like dirk protruding from his waistband.16
But even when gamblers were kept off, smoked out, busted, beaten, and put
ashore, their ghosts haunted the steamboats. Stories about riverboat gamblers
were standard in the travel literature of the day, as well as in penny-press
broadsheets like the National Police Gazette. Those stories accompanied passengers onto the boats. No one can travel the Mississippi, wrote Arthur
Cunynghame, without hearing stories of the knavish tricks ascribed to a set
of men called in the south, Gamblers.17 Various points along the Mississippi
were known to be frequentedhaunted was the favored contemporary
synonymby gamblers; when the boat touched at Randolph or Vicksburg or
Natchez, conversation in the cabin turned to gamblers, thieves, ruffians and
the rough measures necessary to keep them at bay.18 New Orleans, wrote J.S.
Buckingham, was the principal haunt of gamblers, sharpers, and ruffians
134
in the Mississippi Valley. During the winter months, he continued, they

throng [to the city] to prey upon the unsuspecting. When the season is over
they disperse themselves through the towns of Natchez, Vicksburg, Memphis,
St.Louis, Louisville, and Cincinnati, and lead a similar fraudulent course of
life during the summer and autumn, gambling, cheating, and swindling in the
steamboats by the way.19
The gamblers itineraries traced the flipside of the commercial ties that
stitched together the Mississippi Valley economy. Devols list of his takings
provided an account of the sorts of wealth that could be skimmed off the leading edge of the nations commercial frontier: the diamonds that belonged to a
young mans wife; the watch, spectacles, and sermons of a hypocritical minister; a daguerreotypists kit, together with the boat on which he plied his trade;
the wages of the crews of several steamboatssums that Devol won from the
moneylender who supplied the docks; all of the money that a gang of Texans had sewn into their coats and stuffed into their boots to keep it safe on
their way to New Orleans to celebrate New Years Eve; the gemstone stickpin
and vest buttons of a double-crossed partner; twelve bales of cotton from a
planter on his way to market; forty-five slaves from a slave trader on his way
downriver; a seventeen-year-old whom he termed one of the prettiest quadroon girls he had ever seen; an old black woman pledged for a thousand-
dollar debt.20
The moral of many of Devols stories was that he merely did to others what
they would have done to hima hustlers version of the Golden Rule. When
a sucker sees a corner turned up, or a little spot on a card in a game of three-
card monte, he does not know that it was done for the purpose of making him
think that he has the advantage, Devol wrote. He feels like he is going to
steal the money from a blind man, but he does not care. By his own account,
the king of the riverboat gamblers was simply a projection, an objectification, of the greed of those upon whom he preyed. I have downed planters
and many good business men, who would come to me afterwards and want to
stand in with my play, Devol continued, and yet the truly good people never
class such men among gamblers.21 Devol was a professional gambler, not a
cultural anthropologist, and so it was enough for him to note the hypocrisy of
his critics without probing the anxiety that lay behind it. But he had a point:
the greed upon which he played was not characteristic only of the gamblers,
The Runaways River
135
thieves, and ruffians with which he was classed, or the barrooms and smoky
bordellos in which he plied his trade, or of Natchez or Vicksburg or New Orleans. It was utterly characteristic of the full-throttle capitalism of the Cotton
Kingdom. Devol was just a symptom.
While Devol cast his success as proof that the boundary between gambling and business as usual was, in the final analysis, bogus, he still needed
a cover when he boarded a steamboat and began to play a mark. I had the
Negroes all along the coast so trained that they would call me Massa, when I
would get on or off a boat, Devol wrote. I would go on board, with one of
the Negroes carrying my saddle-bags and those sucker passengers would think
I was a planter sure enough; so if a game was proposed I had no trouble to get
into it.22 The irony was perhaps too great for even Devol to appreciate: a
petty criminal garbing himself in the supposed respectability of a stealer of
souls. Devols hustle, that is to say, was in part a racial masquerade. Like Melvilles confidence man, the whiteness of his character was vouchsafed by a
black man. And just as Devols card games allow his readers a peek at a larger
set of nineteenth-century anxieties about the corrosive effect of commercial
culture, his race-vouching gambit tips us to keep a close eye on the racial theatrics of the steamboat cabin.
like money, slavery was a stock topic of conversation among steamboat

passengers. Large sections of the travelogues published by Arthur Cunyng
hame, Matilda Houstoun, Charles Lyell, and J.S. Buckingham were given over
to rehearsals of debates between the moderate anti-slavery of the writers (or,
to put it more directly, their Negro-phobic free-laborism) and the paternalist
pro-slavery of their fellow passengers. Topics discussed included the eagerness with which slaves looked forward to the end of the harvest; the fondness
of the black race ... for dancing and all kinds of music; the quality of slave
housing; the condition of American slaves versus that of people confined to
workhouses or impressed onto men-of-war in Great Britain; the valuation of
enslaved children for sale by the pound; the supposed culpability of enslaved
women for the high rate of mortality among their infants; the way in which
slaveholders were judged by the condition of their slaves and the corresponding effect on their conduct; the reputed cruelty of black drivers; the ways enslaved people made money from the garden plots allowed them by their own-
136
ers, and whether or not said owners later found themselves indebted to their
slaves; the cunning ... of most of the Negro race; the question of whether
slavery was a much greater curse to the owners than it was to the slaves; the
ingenious ways in which enslaved people made themselves mortally ill in
order to avoid labor; the terrific increase in the slave population; the fearful
thought that a conflict for emancipation would sooner or later take place
an eventuality which, according to those with whom Houstoun met as she
traveled to New Orleans aboard the Leonora, would likely result in an indiscriminate massacre by the slaves.23 These conversations represent an impor
tant aspect of the intellectual history of the Cotton Kingdom: the process by
which steamboats served to disseminate ideas about slavery and mastery up
and down the river. They also must be understood as white-supremacist rituals, serving as a vehicle by which white people unknown to one another could
make connections based on a conversation about black people. In the process,
they reinforced a racialized notion of the subject and object of the conversationus and themand, finally, resolved ideological differences about
the morality of slavery with a shared horror at the notion of a war against
white people.
Overlapping and punctuating these conversations, however, was another
set of dialogues about racial difference and anxiety. When Buckingham was
not busy discussing the comparative merits of impressment and enslavement,
or worrying about the rate of black reproduction and the possibility of a racial
apocalypse, he was apparently occupied with minute observation of the racialetiquette of the steamboat cabinespecially at mealtimes. On board with
Buckingham were three women he described as mulattoes of dark-brown
colour ... who remained sitting in the cabin all day, as if they were on a footing of perfect equality with the white passengers. When mealtime came, he
continued, then was seen the difference. ... They were not high enough in
rank to be seated with the whites, and they were too high to be seated with the
blacks and mulattos, so they had to retire to the pantry where they took their
meals standing, and the contrast of their finery with the place in which they
took their isolated and separate meal was painfully striking.24 Charles Lyell
told a similar story. Aboard the boat on which he traveled down the Mississippi
was a young maid, fairer than many an English brunette, but who, though a
free woman, did not happen to belong to the white aristocracy. When it was
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137
noticed halfway through dinner that she was sitting at the table where the of
ficers of the ship and the children were dining, this prodigious breach of
decorum brought dinner to a halt as the maid was sent away, the stewardess
who had seated her at the table was taken to task (observing, in self-defense,
that the girl was undistinguishable by her complexion from a white), and
apologies were made to the parents of the white children with whom she had
been seated. There was also aboard, Lyell noted, a quadroon lady ... of very
respectable appearance and manners, who was taking all her meals in her own
state-room, thus avoiding the risk of meeting with similar indignities.25
These parlor theatrics served to shore up the inherent instability of the idea
that human beings could be divided into races. The presence of these women
in the cabin was threatening precisely because they seemed to belong there; in
the absence of other information, they might simply have disappeared into the
crowd. The micro-choreography of segregation served to reiterate the presence of otherwise evanescent differencethe presence of fictional portions of
black and white blood upon which the Southern social order depended for coherence. Yet these command performances of difference left an aftertaste of
doubt. As Arthur Cunynghame put it, about one of the men he met on the
Mississippi: One of these men was almost as white as an European, indeed,
much more so than many Portuguese whom it has been my lot to encounter,
and must have possessed a considerable proportion of the freeborn citizens in
his veins.26 Why, he asked, should a tiny fraction of black blood hold dominion over so much white blood in the laws of the land?
Alongside that hairline fracture in the ideology of blood ran another. For
if the figure of the tragic mulattowhite in every visible respect, and yet
notheld a certain kind of fascination for travelers on the Mississippi, what
about the person who was not white in every respect, but seemed so? The flipside of the racialthe racistsummoning which so insistently tried to bring
black blood to the surface by segregating the near-white from the white was
the anxiety that some on-board blackness might go undetected. Charles Lyell:
When we sat down to dinner in the cabin, one of the creoles, of very genteel
appearance, was so dark that I afterwards asked an American, out of curiosity,
whether he thought my neighbor at the table had a dash of Negro blood in
hisveins. He said he had been thinking the same thing, and it made him feel
very uncomfortable during dinner.27 Once pledged to the rituals of white-
138
supremacist purification, people found it hard to know where to stop; at moments like this, the everyday practice of whiteness threatened to undermine
the social solidarity it supposedly represented. Every white face might mask
some sort of hidden social impurity.
When a traveler named Robert boarded the Western World, bound from
New Orleans to Cincinnati in March 1850, he was, to all appearances, a white
man. I should have thought he was of Spanish origin, remembered one of
his fellow passengers, he was a man of clear skin and dark complexion.28 But
even more than the way Robert looked, the passengers aboard the Western
World remembered how he acted: he had more the appearance of a gentleman
than a plebian; he was very genteely dressed and of a genteel deportment;
and, as almost every one of his fellow passengers who was later asked about
him seemed to remember, he usually seated himself at the first table, high up,
near the ladies.29 As the phrase near the ladies suggests, Robert was alleged
to have inverted the order of the steamboat cabin. He was suspected of clothing himself in rules of decorumthe rules that defined the race-class-and-
gender social order of the steamboat cabin.
Roberts fellow passengers later claimed that his supposed whiteness had
been a visual effect of his surroundings: that it was only on the surface; that
the rituals that were supposed to regulate the social summoning of evanescent
blood had been turned inside out. And yet: Robert made them nervous. At
first there were rumors, and then jokes. I heard no complaints made about
him being in the cabin, remembered Rufus Blanchard, just some jokes passed
to the effect that, if he actually had African blood, he was a very smart fellow.
Indeed, Blanchard noted, the joke had initially been on him. Hearing a suggestion that there was a passenger on board who probably had African blood in
him, I thereupon asked my informant if it was such a person, pointing out the
wrong person.30 Once the presumptive racial order of the Western World had
been called into question, it was difficult for those aboard to regain their bearings. Even those who thought that Robert was not all-the-way white had to
admit that there were people they knew [sic] to be free and white who were
darker than this person.31
The rumors and the jokesthe doubtsintensified as the Western World
traveled farther north. When it reached Memphis, the captain summoned Robert to his office, where, behind closed doors, the captain, the ships clerk, and a
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139
cotton factor from Memphis, who had apparently been asked on board due to
his experience with such things, examined Robert, asking him questions about
where he had been born, where he had lived, where he was going, and so on.
The factor was suspicious that he was not a white man, but told the captain
that he would run no risk in the matter. The captain then told the boy that
he would have to get off, and be confined until he could prove himself a white
man, and not a runaway. If he should prove a white man, the factor remembered the captain telling Robert, [the captain] would be extremely sorry
for this course.32
The immediate problem Robert posed for the captain was soon covered up.
A man named Williamson came forward and claimed that Robert was his slave.
The jailer in Memphis found Williamsons claim credible enough to send Robert back to New Orleans to be sold.33 But the doubts he had raised were harder
to lay to rest. Robert was put off at Memphis not because he was known to be
black, but because nobody could say for certain that he was white. The same,
of course, could be said about anyone else on the Western World. And while
Roberts passage up the Mississippi did not leave in its wake a wholesale reconsideration of the fictive character of racial identity, it did occasion a considerable breach in the practical ethics of white solidarity. Long after Robert had
been put off the boat, one group of passengers continued to attack another for
having treated a white man like a slave, while the latter group accused the first
of being abolitionists for saying so.34 The hairline fracture in the racial order
that had become visible in the cabin of the Western World could not bear much
pressure without beginning to widen beneath the weight of its own absurdity.
Unlike Robert, who died in the slave market and was buried in the potters
field, a man named Felix was able to cloak his slavery in his whiteness long
enough to make it out of the Mississippi Valley. As the testimony of many witnesses later revealed, there had always been questions about Felix. Many people in St.Louis, where he had grown up, assumed he was white. Thomas Labaune, who had known Felix as a child, remembered that he had always seen
him running about in the yard of his master, Gabriel Chouteau, and always
thought he was from their breed. He did not realize Felix was a slave until
the latter turned up among a gang of men he had hired to clear wood. Even
then, he asked the foreman why he had hired that white man. Daniel Beasly
told a similar story. Before Felixs infamy, Beasly had been called upon as
140
public officer to whip a slave belonging to Chouteau. When Beasly went to

find the slave, he walked right by Felix taking him for a white man. After
that, Beasly continued, [I]advised Mr.Chouteau to sell him as he was way
too white.35 Felix was, in the parlance of the day, too white to keep: likely to
blend into a crowd, board a boat, and sail away to freedom.
But not before Chouteau sold him down the river to New Orleans. The
chance that Felix would escape was, apparently, the least of Chouteaus worries; when Felix was finally sold, it was said that the reason why [Chouteau]
sent him off and sold him was that Felix cuckolded his master. Felix apparently spent several years in New Orleans as a slave, before hiring himself
aboard the Missouri as a white man and working his way first to St.Louis, then
to Galena, Illinois, and finally to Niagara Falls, New York, where one of the
men who had known him on his journey (a clerk on the Brazil, which Felix
took from St.Louis to Galena) later found him waiting on tables at the Principal Hotel.36
Those who had met Felix along the way were at pains to explain why they
had thought this white man was white (lest they or their employers be held legally responsible for repaying his erstwhile owner). Goddamn the boy is so
white that you cannot tell if he is a white man or a slave! shouted the captain
of the Missouri when confronted with the accusation that Felix had escaped
aboard his boat.37 The hands aboard the boat backed the captain in terms that
would have been clear to anyone who had ever been aboard a steamboat where
there was a doubt about a passenger. Felix was so white that [I] never would
have refused him a seat at the table, said one; if Felix had taken passage in
cabin, [I] would have allowed him to sit at the table as a white man and would
not have ordered him to leave the table as being a colored person any more
than any passenger on board.38 Daniel Beasly made even more pointed comparisons: [I]would not have taken him for a slave more than any white man in
the street. ... He is as white as any man in this court room, he proclaimed,
hastily adding, with two or three exceptions.39 And that was really the point:
in the wake of his escape, Felix left a trace of awkward self-consciousness.
AmI, each of the self-styled white men in the courtroom must have wondered,
one of the two or three whitest, or is my whiteness, too, suspect?
The cases of Robert and Felix were spectacular examples of how the techniques of governance and social control in the Cotton Kingdom could be
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141
turned inside out: they used the visual code of white supremacy to undermine
the code itself. Apart from their sheer existential significancethe subversive
bravura of a performance like Roberts, the amazing itinerary of a life like Felixs, the heroism of these escape attemptspassing slaves had an effect that
went well beyond their numbers. A historian might say that they revealed the
fictive character of race on its most vulnerable margin. But aboard Mississippi
Valley steamboats in the nineteenth century, their impact was less abstract,
more directly felt: the fact that they existed, the fact that they were possible,
made white people nervous.
There were other, more quotidian consso many, in fact, that one slaveholder estimated that thousands of slaves had been carried by [steamboats]
to the free states in the 1840s alone.40 The steamboat economy depended upon
black laboras many as 3,000 slaves and 1,500 free people of color were
working on riverboats at any given time in the 1850s, close to a quarter of the
total workforce on the Western waters.41 Slaves and free people of color served
as stevedores, stewards, waiters, cooks, chambermaids, and especially stokers
on the Mississippi River.42 Aboard steamboats, the demand for labor, rather
than the categories of caste, often determined who was assigned to do what
work: enslaved people, free people of color, European immigrants, and
working-class whites (the instability of categories themselves being a part of
the story) worked side by side on the docks, decks, and cabin floors. The work
could be hellish. For the stoker, or fireman, cleaning the boilers required that
one lie flat on ones stomach on the tip of a twelve-inch flue, studded with
rivet heads, with a space of only fifteen inches above one s head, and in this
position haul a chain back and forth without any leverage whatever, simply by
the muscles of the arm with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade.
Steamboat labor entailed being away from home for long stretches, serving
drunken, demanding passengers, disembarking to cut wood and haul cargo no
matter what the conditions or the dangers, stoking and tending the scalding
boilers. It was not work that many wanted to do. Whether the laborers were
free or not, they were generally employed by the season. Hiring free men or
renting slaves gave steamboat owners greater flexibility than buying slaves;
they did not have to provide for their workforce during slack times, nor did
they have to worry about the longevity of any specific worker. Besides the risk
that they would have to indemnify the owner of a slave injured, killed, or es-
142
caped on their boats, steamboat owners had only to worry about a workers
ability to survive a single season. The following season they could hire or rent
someone else. We have on the river, proclaimed one steamboat pilot in a
statement that projected the attitudes of the steamboat capitalists as resulting
from the characteristics of their hirelings, an indifferent sort of men.43 The
steamboat economy introduced some of the flexibility and heedlessnessthe
interchangeability of workers, the indifference to the reproduction of the labor force except in aggregate, the ability to respond to changing economic
conditions by cutting labor costsgenerally associated with industrial labor
relations into the heart of the Mississippi Valley economy.44 Indeed, steamboat
capitalists treated their labor force much as they did their capital: run hard and
hot until expended; discard; repeat.
the perplexities of the contrasting imperatives of capitalist accumulation, steamboat technology, and racial control were expressed in the laws governing the employment of blacks on boats. An 1816 Louisiana law required
that steamboat captains take any Negro or mulatto man or woman, persons
of color, being hired aboard a steamboat and present each prospective worker
at the office of the mayor of the city of New Orleans, along with authentic
written proof, or by oath of two credible witnesses, that the person in question
was either free or a slave being hired under the written direction of his or her
owner.45 By setting up a mechanism to account for black labor, the 1816 law attempted to resolve the contradiction between social order and economic prog
ress that was emerging at the heart of the Mississippi Valley economy. The
very boats on which the economy materially depended could be used to escape
its reach, and the very people whose labor was required to run the boats could
use the boats to run themselves.46
The double-checking and proving-out that the state believed was required
to maintain racial order was impractical for steamboat owners and captains,
who were faced with the problem of filling out a crew on a schedule dictated
by the demands of their passengers and their cargo, as they tried to wring as
much profit as they could from the capital invested in their boats. Their standard operating procedures were considerably less formal than those prescribed
by law. [I]never knew a steamboat captain to go there at all, said the captain of the El Dorado, referring to the mayors office.47 Steamboat captains,
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143
who had to fill out their crews under the pressure of making a timely departure, often sent their mates or stewards to hire a crew from among the men on
the levee. The stories later told about slaves who had escaped on steamboats
often noted that they had been regulars at these informal labor fairs. For instance, a slave named Peter, who eventually escaped aboard the Lion, was always running about on the levee to be shipped as a fireman.48 From the perspective of steamboat capitalists, the timely circulation of capital through the
steamboat economy required a relaxation of the laws governing the circulation
of labor. On Mississippi steamboats, the imperatives of racial capitalism were
sometimes self-contradictory.
As the registration system prescribed by the 1816 law suggests, pieces of
paper played an important role in the effort to align the requirements of cap
italist accumulation and racial regulation.49 In theory, the ability of free people
of color to move freely and seek employment depended upon the free papers that proved their status. The most organized among the steamboat companies kept proof of the freedom of their employees locked in a box in the
clerks office. Like any tool of identification, free papers could be faked: they
were only as good as the person reading them. The engineer who took Peter
on board the Lion, for instance, remembered that Peter had free papers with
him the first time [I] shipped him, but also that [I]did not look at the free
papers of the Negro.50 The engineer either did not know or did not care if the
papers Peter exhibited were authentic. Perhaps he could not read. Perhaps
there were no papers at all.
Although paper was the legally accepted way of proving freedom, the
steamboat business sometimes operated according to a different standard of
proof. People of colorwhether free or enslavedwere often hired, regardless of legal status, on the word of others. A man named Thomas Taylor
shipped aboard the Tiger on the word of the ships cook. Taylor said that he
had come here from New York on the ship Orleans [under] Captain Lucas ...
that he had been taken sick and was carried to the hospital ... where he lost his
free papers. The cook aboard the Tiger backed him up, telling the captain
that he had seen the Negro in Liverpool and visited him and his family at
No.12 Mulberry Street.51 Likewise, when Peter boarded the Lion, some of
the hands remarked that the boy was known by everyone on the levee ... as a
free man.52 Before a man named Jacko was hired on board the A.M. Wright as
144
a free man, remembered the steward who hired him, he was on board the boat
often. ... He used to come and see a boy named Andrew Lockett, with whom
he was intimate.53 Another named Jack, when he first boarded the Chesapeake,
did so in the company of another Negro formerly employed on board of the
boat, who represented himself as his brother. Another named Sam made his
way onto the Lady Washington in company with a sister of his, a connectionof the wife of the cook.54 Enslaved people s social networks, which overlapped those of the levee more generally, could provide enough cover
enough credibilityto get a paperless person onto a boat.
Those who tried to escape slavery on steamboats needed to supply themselves with a past; they had to use counterfeit papers or mistaken testimonials
or outright lies to give themselves a history believable enough to at least get
them up the river. Sometimes they just acted it out. When a man known as
Prince boarded the New York in November 1836, he told the engineer that his
name was Ned, and that he had just arrived in New Orleans aboard the Farmer.
He was, he said, a fireman; and when the engineer agreed to hire him, he went
to get his clothes from the Farmer, or at least he went off in the direction
where the Farmer was then lying. The engineer later admitted that he had relied on Princes own representation that he was free: All of the instructions
of the Captain to me was to never hire a colored man unless on production of
his free papers, but thinking his statement true that he was free and had just left
the Farmer, [I] did not demand of him his free papers.55 Perhaps Prince really
had come down on the Farmer; perhaps he really did go back to get his clothes;
perhaps the engineer really did think he was free: it did not really matter.
Princes pantomime had provided a representation of a past convincing
enough to get him from the boat he claimed to have taken downriver onto one
that would carry him uprivertoward freedom. A man named Scott managed
a similar self-transformation. Hired by his owner aboard the DeWitt Clinton to
work as a cook, Scott spent the season acting as if he had no master. Acting
free was not enough to get him free, at least not aboard the DeWitt Clinton. But
the next season he used the reputation he had made for himself to hire himself
as a cook on the Louisiana, which he took upriver as far as Louisville, before
he disappeared from history, or at least from its written record.56
Some slaves boarded steamboats without even the protection of a threadbare alibi of the sort furnished by Prince or by Scott. Indeed, as dependent as
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145
was the Mississippi River economy on slave labor and as chaotic as was the
process of loading a steamboat, the important question was not who got on
before the boat departed, but who got off. It is impossible for us to know who
is and who is not on the boat until we leave the landing, remembered Captain
Wilder, who ran the ElDorado between Jackson Square and the mouth of the
river. Passengers are continually coming aboard and passing and repassing to
take care of their friends, he continued. Negroes come on board to see their
friends, their master or mistress as the case may be, or to take baggage, cotton,
or anything else on board. Once the boat was on the river, the crew worked
from end to end, taking tickets and checking papers, making sure that no one
had slipped on board. In the case of the ElDorado, at least, this procedure provided time enough for a slave named Enos Phillips to slip his wife and two
children on board. They made it safely as far as Balize (at the mouth of the
Mississippi), where they planned to board a ship bound for England, but were
finally undone by a telegram sent ahead by their owner.57
Henry Bibb was more successful, so successful that his story seems to encapsulateenumerate, evenmany of the strategies of a slave attempting a
boat-borne escape. Instead of free papers, Bibb used an empty trunk to secure
his passage onto a boat: Soon a boat came in which was bound to St.Louis,
and the passengers started down to get on board. I took up my large trunk, and
started after them as if I was their servant. ... The passengers went up into the
cabin, and I followed them with the trunk. Once the boat was under way,
Bibb carried his trunk down to the deck, and insinuated himself among the
passengers there. After standing for several rounds of drinks, Bibb asked one
of the men to go up to the clerks office, and buy him a ticket. When they
came round to gather the tickets before we got to St.Louis, my ticket was taken
with the rest, and no questions were asked me, he remembered.58 The same
was done by John Parker, who boarded the upstream Magnolia by lying in wait
for the lanterns lighting the gangplank to burn down, as the boat was being
loaded one night.59
William Wells Brown knew the river better than most. He spent several
years as a Mississippi River slave traders enslaved assistant, running between
St.Louis and New Orleans. Eventually sold to a steamboat captain in New
Orleans, he rode up with the man as far as Louisville, and when the boat made
a landing on the Ohio side of the river, he remembered, I[took] up a trunk,
146
went up the wharf, and was soon out of the crowd.60 In the first half of the
nineteenth century, tens of thousands of slaves were sold down the Mississippi
River by traders like the man who owned Brown. The Mississippi River trade
the agricultural goods and cotton, the money and the slavesgave the institution of slavery a whole new life in the first half of the nineteenth century:
it determined the course of African-American history, and it debouched in the
largest slave market in North America. Yet the upriver passages of men like
Brown chart a powerful countercurrent. In addition to connoting a threat
(slaves feared being sold down the river), the Mississippi represented an opportunity. Solomon Northup, who had been kidnapped from New York and
shipped around the coast to New Orleans, hoped to be sold in the latter city,
for, he remembered, I conceived it would not be difficult to make my escape
from New Orleans in some north-bound vessel.61 John Parker, who did just
that, remembered that once he arrived in New Orleans, there was a fascination about the river that I could not resist, because I knew that was my only
escape from my bondage.62
At the shadowy edge of these stories lie the traces of the networks of trust
and solidarity that made it possible for slaves to escape. Although enslaved
people ran away one at a time, very few did so alone; they depended upon relatives, friends, and, sometimes, total strangers to help them reach freedom.
Jacko boarded the A.M. Wright under the auspices of his friend Andrew
Lockett; Jack got aboard the Chesapeake on the word of someone who represented himself to be his brother; Sam was allowed on the Lady Washington in
the company of his sister, who may or may not have been related to the
ships cook by marriage (those who knew her disagreed when questions were
later asked).63 The premeditated actions of friends and family were only the
most intimate and predictable results of larger networks of solidarity among
the enslaved. John Parker, whose hunger drove him to desperation as he hid
on the levee waiting to sneak on board a steamboat, finally tried to steal some
food out of a nearby kitchen, where he was discovered by the cook. There
was no fooling that cook, he later wrote. She took one short look at me. My
heart sank low down, and I thought it was all over for me. But she was a wise
and friendly soul who knew. Without either of us saying a word, she went to
the cupboard, took out a good-sized bowl, put it in front of me, handed me a
ladle, pointed at the pot of soup, and went out of the room.64 The action
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147
of this enslaved woman, who put herself at risk in order to help a man whom
she had never seen before and would never see again, hints at an eddy of wordless affiliation among the enslaved that ran against the downriver flow of the
Mississippi economy. Slavesrarely, perilously, but always consequentially
could disappear from their owners history and into a world of concealed
networks and actions that could only be known by Negro evidence, as a
steamboat captain tracking a slave who had escaped aboard his boat put it.65
In the end, such escapes had to be accounted for. Someonesome white
personhad to pay for what these black slaves had done. The law as written
was clear in its apportionment of responsibility. According to the 1816 law and
its subsequent revisions, responsibility for ensuring that a slave did not escape
on a steamboat lay with the master and commander of that boat.66 Strictly
speaking, it did not matter whether the captain knew whether a slave like Robert or Felix or Jacko or Sam was on board. A slave might have booked a cabin
passage and passed for white, or been hired by the steward at a shakeup (employment fair) on the levee, or escaped the attention of an overstressed clerk
taking tickets on the deckwhatever the case, it was the captains fault.
There are several things to say about this law. By making captains liable for
the value of slaves who escaped on their boats and by levying an additional
$500 fine, the law represented a novel accounting of the meaning of human
agency under the changing circumstances of racial capitalism in the Mississippi Valley. The 1816 law represented a managerial construction of responsibility. Owners, who set the schedules and reaped the profits, were absolved;
somewhere along the chain that carried the steamboats profit backward into
their pockets, their responsibility for what happened aboard those boats ap
parently disappeared. (Although many steamboat captains owned their own
boats, not all of them did; and when they did, the law applied to them in their
capacity as captains rather than as capitalists.) Shipboard subordinates, too,
were absolved. Despite coming into court and swearing that they had mistaken
slaves for free people of color in dockside hiring fairs, that they had mislaid
forged passes or not looked at them at all, that they had taken the word of
people they hardly knew as attesting to the freedom of people they did not
know at all, the clerks, cooks, and engineers aboard Mississippi riverboats
werenot held liable for the value of those who escaped on their watch.
Amid the rapidly changing circumstances of the riverworld, the workings
148
of capital were too attenuated, and those of labor too diffuse, to be successfully regulated. The 1816 law settled instead on a fiction of managerial accountability that remained intact throughout the antebellum periodnamely,
the idea that a captain could control and should be held responsible for whatever happened on his boat. Never mind that the business-structured imperatives of an on-time departure meant the captain in leaving the wharf has as
much as he can do to look out for his steamer without looking for slaves.
Never mind that the captain might not know the cook had hired a relation of
his wifes sister to serve in the scullery. Never mind that no one at all knew
John Parker was hiding in the hold of the boat. The captain was responsible.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the law holding captains responsible whenever
slaves escaped on the boats they commanded occasioned a great deal of appellate law. Steamboat captains generally took one of two courses in these upstream battles against the law. Sometimes they would suggest that the slaves in
question were incorrigible. The commercial law of Louisiana, in keeping with
the racial science of the day, treated running away as a vice of character
or a disease (infamously termed drapetomania by the Louisiana race doctor
Samuel Cartwright).67 A slave named George had been sold under an act of
sale which explicitly stated that he was not warranted against the vice of
running awayand the captain of the Chieftan pointed this out when defending himself against a suit filed by George s owner. How could he be held
responsible for the slaves escape? If George had not sneaked aboard that boat,
he would have found another.68 The Chieftan was simply a vector of a first
cause beyond the captains control.
At other times, the captains would suggest that the slaves owners were incorrigible, or at least incompetent. The best defense in a suit brought for the
value of an escaped slave was apparently a good offense. After a man named
Enos escaped aboard the ElDorado, the ships captain based his defense partly
on testimony that the slaves owner was a very mild master. ... [His] Negroes were not kept strictly. The elusive Felix had been allowed to travel
about the country as a free man and without [anyone] controlling him in any
manner; the captain of the Missouri argued that this had been going on for a
long time before Felix escaped. He appeared to be his own master controlled
by his own person, added one of the captains witnesses. Likewise in the case
of Scott, who escaped aboard the Louisiana: He seemed to have no master.
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149
He acted as he pleased.69 These slaves, the captains were asserting, had escaped because of the failings of their owners. According to the like master,
like man theory of racial mastery, the supposedly lax oversight exercised by
owners who allowed slaves to behave as if they were their own masters induced a sort of cumulative corruption of their character: when unmastered,
even once-dutiful slaves would eventually stray.70 Those seeking damages
fortheir steamboat-escaped slaves sometimes found their own reputations as
slaveholdersas menat issue in the courtrooms where they pursued their
causes.
Although the difference between these various ways of apportioning responsibility had significant legal implications for the parties to court cases arising under the 1816 law, each of the commonplace accounts of slaves escapes
shared a basic racial premise: enslaved people were not the subjects of their
own actions, at least not when they ran away. Whether arguing that running
away was caused by an underlying disease or brought on by bad mastery,
whether arguing that steamboat capitalists or captains or even cooks should be
held responsible for slaves who escaped on steamboats, the lawyers and litigants involved in these cases operated under the assumption that a full account
ing of responsibility could be made without reference to the individual, personal, existential, biographical motivation of the slaves in question. Robert,
Felix, Jacko, and Sam emerge from the docket-record pages of these court
cases not as human beings with complex motivationspeople willing to risk
everything they had on an upstream bid for freedombut as the objects of
external stimuli, as figments of white supremacy. Thus were the countercurrents of enslaved resistance on the Mississippi reincorporated into the slaveholders historical record. Thus was black aspiration recirculated as white supremacy.
Yet like a barely concealed snag causing a ripple on the otherwise smooth
surface of the river, these escapes left a trace of doubt in the minds of those
who navigated the Mississippi. At any given moment in the steamboat era,
there were hundreds of boats on the river, servicing hundreds of thousands of
white settlers and a comparable number of slaves, providing the most visible
symbol of the tens of billions of dollars invested along the leading edge of the
greatest economic boom the world had ever seen. The rapiditythe propulsive forceof the Valleys capitalist development vastly outstripped the avail-
150
able techniques of identification and verification. In the blinding flash of the

boomtimes, it was hard to know who anyone really was. The eras emblematic
trickstersthe con men, gamblers, and escaping slavesembodied the fears
of a world in which identity had been unmoored from geography, in which
people could turn up in the most unlikely places, in which certainty was a fantasy and plausibility served as the coin of the realm, in which anyone could be
vouched for and no one could be trusted. It was a world in which the confi
dence upon which business depended was always twinned with anxiety.
6
Dominion
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and
replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Genesis 1: 2729
And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? Shalt thou indeed
have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for
his words.
Genesis 37: 79
when september 1841 came and the cotton bloomed in the fields along the
Red River, Solomon Northup was driven out to pick it. Northup was new to
Louisiana, and he had been sick for several weeks, feverish, nauseous, emaciated. And he was new to cotton, unable to grasp the fiber and place it in his
sack with the same dexterity he saw among the other slaves in the field. He
worked slowly along his row, fearful that his lagging progress would be noticed, and his sick and drooping body infused with the temporary energy
... of the drivers lash.1
The plant Northup picked had transformed the Mississippi Valley into one
of the richest agricultural societies in human history. It was a new thing on the
face of the earth, created in Rodney, Mississippi, around 1820. Gossypium barbadense, this worldmaking strain of life, was a hybrid: it blended Georgia and
Siamese cotton, which had been planted in Mississippi from the end of the
eighteenth century, with the Mexican cotton introduced to the region in the
nineteenth. In the first instance, it was the work of the winds and the insects,
152
which cross-pollinated fields that had been planted with various strains; in the
second, of a group of scientifically inclined planters, who had culled seeds
from their most promising plants and, in the process, had narrowed the genetic
spectrum of the cotton in their fields down to that of a single strain. Originally
known as Mexican cotton for the strain that provided its defining characteristics, this changeling was soon patented as Petit Gulf cotton for the bend in
the Mississippi along which it had been created, and was transformed into an
income stream for the lucky planters of Rodney and the New Orleans merchants through whom they sold it.2
Over the next thirty years, planters and seed merchants introduced countless other hybrid strains of Petit GulfVicks, Tarvers, Hogans, Browns
Seed, Sugar Loaf, Money Bush, Mastodon, Pitts Prolific, Multibolus, Mammoth, Rob Smiths 25-Cents, Banana, Chester, Prout, Pomegranate (the latter
four were allegedly Hogans sold under other names).3 Because the defining
qualities of both plant and seeds annually degraded through exposure to the
airborne pollen of other strains, those who could afford to do so bought new
seeds every three or four years in an attempt to maintain a seed stock which
would reliably produce plants of the desired quality.
Quality was determined according to the production, the quality of the
lint, and picking qualities of a given strain, with Petit Gulf representing the
ideal hybrid of ecological and economic characteristics.4 It grew prolifically in
various soils and climates. It bloomed two weeks earlier than other strains,
which lengthened the picking season. At least in the short term, it was immune
to cotton rot. And it produced long, fine cotton fibers, which made it exceptionally marketable.5 But foremost among the qualities of Petit Gulf cotton
was what planters called pickability. Whereas fifty pounds of picked cotton
per day had once been accounted fair work for an adult, in the era of Petit
Gulf this amount would be tasked to a child, enthused one planter; an adult
might be required to pick 200 pounds or more.6 Petit Gulf (and its hybrid descendants) bloomed in large, wide-open bolls, the sharp edges of the dried bur
peeling backward to expose the lint. In Petit Gulf cotton, nature was adapted
to the mechanical capabilities of the human hand.7
And in the Cotton Kingdom, hands were likewise suited to their labor.
Charles Ball remembered that when he was offered for sale, prospective buyers would grasp his hands and work his fingers through a set of motions, to
Dominion
153
ensure they were capable of the quick motions necessary in picking cotton.
When slaveholders were asked to describe the way their slaves looked, they
often began with the hands, noting missing or mutilated fingers, small hands,
or short fingers.8 There was, that is to say, a two-sided character to the way
slaveholders viewed the relationship of ecology and labor in the Mississippi
Valley. Plant was to be shaped to hand, and hand to plant; natural complexity
was simplified into a single strain; human capacity was rendered increasingly
productive, even as it was reduced to the capillary repetition of a single
motion.
Indeed, the hand was the standard measure that slaveholders used when
calculating the rate of exchange between labor and land. Cotton planters began the year by calculating to the hand. By multiplying the number of hands
times the number of acres each hand could be expectedwould be forcedto
tend, they planned their sowing. A good cotton crop, wrote one, [is] ten
acres to the hand; under favorable circumstances a little more may be cultivated, and on some lands less. And at the end of the year, by calculating bales
per hand, or bales per hand per acre, they measured their success. A bale and a
half to acre on fresh land and in the bottom. From four to eight bales per hand
they generally get: sometimes ten when they are luckythis was how one
Mississippi planter described the commonplace benchmarks used to measure
the quality of the crop. His land on the creek is very good and will not plant
an acre of cotton that will not yeald a bale per acre, wrote another of his
Amite County neighbor.9
Beneath the threadbare trinomial accounting of acres, bales, and hands,
some discerned a deeper economy. Yield per acre served as a ready shorthand
measure of soil quality in an era when knowledge of organic chemistry was
still limited. When planters decided whether to plant five or eight or ten or fif
teen acres per hand, they were making an estimate, often quite explicitly, of the
quality of their soil. Would their cotton bloom early and full enough to keep
their hands busy through the picking season? Would there be hands enough to
tend all the acres they had planted, or would their cotton end up choked in
grass and blown away by the wind before it could be picked? In addition to the
quality of their soil, planters used the hand to assess the worth of their slaves.
Slaves in the Mississippi Valley (and elsewhere in the cotton South) were mea
sured against their work. Healthy adult men and women were accounted full
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hand; suckling women, half-hands; children in their first years of work,

quarter-hands; and tiny children were no count at all. When hands fell short
when they were not up to the taskthey were hectored, threatened, tortured, or starved to make them work better and faster. In effect, their senses,
their muscles, and their minds were reeducated to suit their work. Measuring
crops and slaves to the hand was an ecological as well as an economic mea
surean attempt to regulate the exchange between slaves and soil by prescribing benchmark measures for the process by which human capacity and earthly
fertility were metabolized into capital.10
the story of Petit Gulf cotton and the hands that picked it suggests that
the plantation was not simply a way of organizing labor, but a way of organizing nature. It likewise suggests a history of slavery in which picking cottonwas not only labora dimension of slaves relationship to ownersbut
also work: a dimension of the relationship of human beings to the natural
world. And finally, it suggests a history in which the effects of staple-crop-
producing agro-capitalism were evident not simply in the effects that planters
and slaves had on the landscape, but also in the bodies and material lives that
were shapedeven determinedby work.
The enslaved people who built the Cotton Kingdom started by clear-cutting
the woodlands of the Mississippi Valley. There was no let up in the driving,
remembered John Parker, who had been sold from Virginia. Whole forests
were literally dragged out by the roots. The first clearing was often done by
slaves with axes, who felled oaks and cypresses, and then hauled the wood out.
A full hand accustomed to working with an axe might cut an eighth of an
acre a day; if a planter cleared enough land to employ the same hand fully, the
cultivation of a first crop of cotton took three or four months. Subsequent
clearings often began with the girdling of the trees on a given tract. Louis
Hughes of Mississippi described this as the process of wounding the tree by
stripping a neat band of bark from around the base of the trunk. Shorn of its
protective layer and vulnerable to diseases, molds, insects, and dehydration,
targeted trees typically died within three years and were subsequently cut and
then burned after the cotton crop had been brought in. Whatever trees fell
in the busy summer months were left lying until winter, when they were
grubbed out with the underbrush and likewise piled and burned. Impatient
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to get their land into cotton, planters sometimes ran their rows between the
decaying trunks of the girdled trees. Hughes himself remembered how diffi
cult it was to run a plow around the roots of a relic stump.11
Slaves split the harvested wood into the fence rails that delimited the fee-
simple cartography of the emergent landscape. They cut the wood into the
boards they would use to construct their rude cabins, the somewhat more re
fined dwellings of their owners, and the barns, stables, and smokehouses that
defined the regulated flow of grain, flesh, and energy through the plantation
economy. They burned the wood on the hearths that transformed flesh into
meat and grain into cereal. Slaves and slaveholders alike relied on that wood to
warm their bodies. It was pulped into the reams of paper upon which both
settled title and speculative ploy had come to depend. It was heaved by the
cord into the engines of the steamboats that carried cotton to market and to the
presses that shaped raw cotton into bales. It was left to decay at the margins of
the cotton fields, and tumble from the eroded banks into the rivers and the
streams.12
When layers of vegetation were cut away, water traveled more quickly
through the Valleys hydrological cycle. Runoff eroded the newly cleared
fields, carrying away topsoil full of carbon-stored energy accrued over thousands of years. As the traveler Joseph Holt Ingraham put it, Every plough
furrow becomes the bed of a rivulet after heavy rainsthese uniting are increased into torrents before which the impalpable soil dissolves like ice under a
summers sun. Floods became more frequent and more intense. Planters tried
to protect their lands from floods, first through an ad hoc system of locally
built levees which dated from the eighteenth century and relied on the pressure
of neighbor upon neighbor (and slaveholder upon slave) for upkeep, and later
through a federally funded and state-administered effort to channel the Lower
Mississippi along a fixed course. While upriver levees opened rich alluvial
lands to cultivation (and deforestation), they increased the risks of flooding
downstream, particularly in and around New Orleans. And when levees were
breached, as they frequently were throughout the antebellum period, they
inverted their function, holding water in rather than out, and creating new
swamps at the margins of the new fields.13
Following the course of that water, one could argue that the emergence of
the Cotton Kingdom shifted the axis of nature from vertical to horizontal.
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Layers of biomass were cut down to the ground, burned, and shipped away
toready the bare earth for plowing and planting, leaving behind, according to
the former slave Moses Grandy, a few bewildered squirrels and raccoons foraging in the newest of the cleared fields.14 The planters brought human beingsacross from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and down from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri to clear their fields, tend the cotton, and attend
to their needs. They bought grain and salted meat shipped down the Mississippi to feed themselves and their slaves. They first imported and then raised
domestic animalscows, horses, mules, pigs, and dogsto help them do their
work. Through their own labor, but more often that of their slaves, they repatterned the land according to its stage of development: old-growth forests and
cypress swamps were pocked and then checkered with clear-cut fields in the
first decades of expansion; later, as the soil wore thin and grew tired, scrubby
forests of cedar and loblolly pines and swampy meadowsoldfieldtook
over the wasted land as the fields were pushed into the woods on their margin.15 From the air, the face of the landscape would have presented a visual
image of the whole of nature arrayed in the service of a single plant.
That plant demanded careful attention. The cotton season began with the
preparation of the field. Wrote one farmer: My rows are always laid off by
stakes, with a shovel-plough, and then two furrows turned to it, one from each
side, with an efficient turned plow; this is performed as early in March as I can,
endeavoring to postpone my spring ploughing until after the heavy rains.16
Among cotton planters, the optimal distribution and orientation of those rows
was a subject of considerable argument, or what the planters called judgment. Depending on who was talking, it was essential that rows be laid out
anywhere from three to five feet apart. Because the rows were more broadly
spaced across than the plants were along the rows, many planters ran their
rows east-west, thus maximizing the daily southern exposure of each plant to
the sun. No topic aroused the ire of agricultural reformers so much as the endemic erosion that resulted from commonsense heliocentrismthat is, orienting the rows on an east-west axis no matter what the pitch of the field. They
termed it hydrophobic agriculture, the cripple and kill system, a vandal
policy, and compared its practitioners to carnivorous animals [who] seem to
have a natural propensity to destroy. They complained that farmers abandoned land within ten or fifteen years of clearing it, leaving the old fields and
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hill-sides worn-out and wasted while the branches, ponds, and lagoons without are filled and choked up with fertility. The reformers advocated the horizontal system, in which gradually declining rows would be laid out across
the incline of the land, and bounded and interspersed with ditches to control
runoff. By the falling of the rain, one explained, the lighter and finer particles of the earth are taken up and float in the water, which is called sediment,
and all of which is returned to the land, if the water is held by the water furrows. Because even a 5percent grade could lead to soil erosion, the horizontal
method prescribed a third dimension of rationalized practicemost notably a
huge, triangular level constructed out of eight-foot-long boards and chucked
under one corner with a three-inch block, so that an incline of three inches for
every eight feet might be exactly traced across the face of an undulating hill.17
Passing over, for the moment, the appropriative I-language, the labor-
eliding passive voice, and the slippery subject-verb relationships that deform
the grammar and define the meaning of virtually every recorded statement
made by cotton planters about their agricultural practice, we can follow the
progress of the season in the ways that planters talked to one another about
what needed to be done. When the rows were laid out and the seedbeds
raised, the field was ready for plantingsometime in the last week of March
or the first weeks of April.18 Seeds were selected from those culled in previous
years or were purchased anew, and, among the reformers, were sometimes
treated with salt water, with lime and potash, or with brine made by steeping
stable manure. A furrow was cut into the beds, most often with a light plow,
and then five or ten seeds at a time were deposited in a small hole (a drill),
which was then covered over with loose dirt from the bed through the action
of foot, hoe, or harrow. Seeds were to be placed by a careful hand anywhere
from fourteen inches to three feet apart, depending on how full the planter
expected his plants to growthe object being to keep the branches from becoming tangled with those of the plants on either side within the row.19 The
numerous dangers posed to the cotton plants made redundancy in planting a
given, and agricultural reformers railed against the wastefulness of those who
broadcast their seed: There is no one custom so uniform among cotton
planters as that of consuming and throwing away in the process of planting
sixto ten times as many seed per acre as are necessary to secure a good and
certain stand. This is a bad policyunnecessary, and a waste of both time and
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money. A better stand and more uniform can be had by planting only one
peck to a half bushel per acre, as we take great pleasure in showing every year.
It consumes more time to chop out the superfluous quantity that comes up
from such profuse planting, than was required in the process of planting.20
As the cotton began to grow, it was thinned or chopped, the weaker
cotton plants being culled from the base of those the planter hoped to bring to
fruition. Various combinations of hoe and plow were used to do this work,
which involved cutting a row of (ideally) healthy and evenly spaced cotton
plants out of the stands that had sprouted in the fields. Cottons greatest
antagonistthe grass that grew up between the cotton plants, and competed
with them for nutrients, water, and sunlightwas chopped out with a hoe or
pulled out by the roots. A plow or harrow was then run between the rows, first
turning the dirt outward from near the base of the plant to uproot anything
growing nearby, and then back again to turn dirt from the edge of the ridges
onto the base of the exposed plants. A crop might be hoed anywhere from two
to four times before being laid by (allowed to mature) toward the middle of
July, once the cotton plants had grown to a sufficient size that their roots could
dominate the subterranean struggle for nutrients and their branches could
shade out any competition for sunlight.21
Toward the end of August, the plants having flowered and the flowers given
way to bolls now opened on the branch, enslaved men, women, and children
were sent out into the fields to pick cotton. The picking of cotton should
commence just as soon as the hands can all be profitably employed, advised
one planter, say as soon as forty or fifty pounds to the hand can be gathered.
A field planted in cotton might be picked anywhere from three timesthe
bottom, middle, and top cropsto six or seven, as the plant continued to
grow and bloom through the fall and early months of the winter.22
As the cotton was taken in, it was sometimes set out on a scaffold to dry in
the sun. With proper care and attention, explained one planter, great improvement may be given to the complexion of the staple by a little heating in
bulk. And in any case, the cotton when ginned out ought to be so dry that
the seed will crack when pressed between the teeth. It is often ginned wetter,
but just as often the cotton samples blue. (That is, the color would be poor if
the cotton was not thoroughly dried first.) The fine wires that lined the gins
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spinning roller separated the seeds from the cotton fiber knotted around it.
Ginned cotton was often separated into piles of roughly similar quality before
being pressed into bales. Finished bales, wrapped in burlap or cotton baggingand wired tight, weighed about four hundred pounds. Too much pain
cannot be taken in preparing cotton for market, advised one planter. Neat
packing is of no small importance in the sale of cotton, and no little taste may
be displayed in making the package.23 With that, the cotton was sent forward
for sale.
The radical simplification of the landscape was attended by the forcible
reconditioning of the hands that worked the land. Many of them were among
the hundreds of thousands or so people who were transplanted to Mississippi
and Louisiana through the interstate slave trade. They went into the fields for
the first time stripped of the social networks and, in many cases, the skills that
had enabled them to survive slavery under the different crop regime of the
Upper South. And they did so as members of slave communities that had been
reconfigured around slave-buying planters desires. The slave trade focused
with particular intensity on people of prime agethat is, fifteen to twenty-
five. These were people who had survived childhood and grown strong enough
to tend cotton, and who were old enough to reproduce. Putting it in the way
that Mississippi planter John Knight did when he described the slave force he
was trying to assemble in the market, one could say that a planters ideal was
half men and half women ... young say from 16 to 25, stout limbs, large
chests, wide shoulders and hips, etc. Putting it another way, one could say
that planters in the Mississippi Valley preferred to outsource the raising of at
least their plantations first generation of slaves to the Upper South, while reserving for themselves the benefit of those slaves years of greatest productivity and fertility.24
Cotton planters preferred field slaves, whose immune systems had already
been acclimated to the epidemiology of the Mississippi Valleythe Creole slaves whom one slaveholder estimated sold at a 25 percent premium in
the New Orleans market. Imported slaves often suffered through an extended
period of illness after they arrived in the Lower South, a period slaveholders
referred to as their seasoningthe process by which their bodies were acclimated to local environmental and labor conditions. Slaveholders used color
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as a proxy for this inward accommodation of human being to landscape. According to the American Cotton Planter, a monthly journal published in Montgomery, Alabama, during the 1850s and read by planters across the Deep
South: If stout, hearty, durable, long lived slaves are wanted, and if pecuniary interest is a permanent consideration, the pure African should be chosen in
preference to the mulatto; and the blacker the better. The jet black, shiny, unadulterated, greasy-skinned, strong-smelling negro is the best every way. Here
were Negrophobia and commercial practice twisted together and called science.25 And then distributed as a set of slave buyers rules of thumb. I must
have if possible the jet black Negroes, they stand this climate the best, wrote
Mississippi planter John Knight as he planned a foray into the slave market.26
Thus were human beings reconditioned (and read) according to their application to the culture of cotton.
Prosperous slaveholders often tried to mark the boundary between their
houses and their fields with different sorts of slaves. Those who could afford
to do so purchased household slaves whose skin color was taken as prima facie
evidence of suitability. According to prevailing medical ethnography, slaves
of mixed blood were best suited for those offices requiring more intelligence,due to a mental superiority which is inherited from the white progenitor. Such characteristics render mulattoes very valuable as house-
servants, mechanics, body-servants, carriage-drivers, negro-drivers, or
overseer.27 The girls are Brownskin and good house girls, wrote a slave
trader about young women he hoped to sell. Similarly, a slave named Mary Ellen Brooks was variously described as delicate, intelligent, well-suited
for a house servant, fancy, and a mulatto by the men who sold her. These
slave traders knew that cotton planters used household slaves to distinguish
between domestic and economic space, between the refined lives they lived
and the contaminating soil from which they drew their wealth. Slaves skin
color came to articulate the distance between the sphere of (white) consumption and that of (black) production, between slaveholders houses and their
fields, between intellectual and cultural attainment and gross physicality and
unending toil. That the men who described Brooks were doing so in connection with a lawsuit arising from her rape and murder at the hands of a Louisiana planter who had claimed to be buying the little girl ... to wait upon his
wife and do the sewing for a small family suggests the extent of the moral rot
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that lurked just behind these slaveholding pantomimes of civilization, good

breeding, and refinement.28
Slaveholders projected specific capacities onto enslaved people s bodies,
and matched them with the tasks dictated by the cultivation of cotton. Louis
Hughes remembered that when a plantation was cleared, men usually felled
the trees and cut the wood, while women grubbed out the underbrush. I never
saw women put to the hard work of grubbing until I went to McGee s, he
wrote of his introduction to a particularly hard master in Mississippi, and
[once I saw that] I greatly wondered at it. Similarly, men generally drove
mule-drawn plows, while women labored alongside men using hoes to cut the
grass and weeds away from the base of the cotton plants. Finally, men did most
of the translocal work in the Cotton Kingdomhosteling, carriage driving,
message carryingwhile women were more often employed inside slaveholders houses and in bearing, nursing, and caring for children.29 For now, it is
enough to say that enslaved people were assigned to plantation labor in ways
that both reflected and concretely reproduced slaveholding notions of their
gendered capacities.
Children from the ages of eight or nine to twelve or thirteen were assigned
to do work that would have wasted the skills and strength of a full hand.
The American Cotton Planter recommended that ditching, which required little
precision once a line had been established, be done by a small boy with a hoe
suited to his size. Children of this age were also set to dropping the cotton
seeds into the drills, carrying water for use by members of the white household and by adult slaves in the fields, and washing the dirty linens and soiled
clothes belonging to the white people. If we did not get the clothes clean,
remembered Peter Bruner, my mistress would send me over to the tanyard
and have my master whip me, and I let you know she examined every piece
thoroughly. Children from nine to twelve years of age and women who
were known as sucklers, that is women with infants, remembered Louis
Hughes, were sent out in August to pick the first crop of early opening bolls
that bloomed close to the ground. Along with all the old people that were
feeble, nursing mothers and children were detailed to the trash gang, which
followed the principal workforce along the rows to pick whatever cotton had
evaded their fingers and remained in the boll. For slaves, the labor they did
became a way of marking biographical time. William Hayden remembered
162
that he was hired out at the time I was large enough to plough with a shovel
plough. He was, a slaveholder might have said, just growing into money.30
the matrix of human qualitiesskin color, sex, and sizearrayed in the

service of the cotton plant was the outward manifestation of a process of
physical reorganization that occurred within every human being employed in
the cultivation of cotton. Charles Ball remembered hearing a slaveholder explaining that people under twenty years of age were prime articles in the
market because they would soon learn to pick cotton. As to those more
advanced in life, Ball continued, he seemed to think ... they could not so
readily become expert cotton pickers. When slaveholders talked, as they often did, about rows cut by an expert ploughman and seeds strewed by a
careful hand, about practiced hands and hands of the best judgment,
about the careful movements required of house servants or hands with a
short training who could pick almost, if not quite, as much without trash as
with it, they were describing a set of learned actionsa recoordination of
nerves and muscles, eyes and hands, which extended their dominion beyond
the skin of its subjects, into the very fabric of their form.31
This forced neuro-muscular transformation created embodied knowledge.
Of all the labors of the field, the dexterity displayed by the Negroes in scraping cotton is most calculated to call forth the admiration of the novice spectator, wrote one observer. The field-hand ... will select one delicate shoot
from the surrounding multitude and with his rude hoe he will trim away the
remainder with all the boldness and touch of a master, leaving the incipient
stalk unharmed and alone in its glory; and at nightfall you can look along the
extending rows, and find the plants correct in line, and of the required distance
and separation from each other. The extent to which cotton planters depended upon their ability to channel the intelligence and dexteritythe humanityof their slaves into labor success is perhaps best indexed by the resistance that cotton posed to mechanized farming. Long after other crops were
harvested by machine, cotton was still being picked by hand. The fact that the
bolls opened unevenly over the course of several months required judgment
and care in the picking, if the takings were to be maximized.32
Each of the countless actions sacrificed to the annual crop represented a
way of knowing and of working the earth. Former slaves were very specific
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about the bodily discipline required to pick cotton. Solomon Northup, who
used the words precision, dexterity, celerity, and knack to describe
the abilities of accomplished pickers, described his own efforts to pick cotton
in a way that itemized the steps in a process he found incomprehensible: I
had to seize the boll with one hand and deliberately draw out the white, gushing blossom with the other. Depositing the cotton in the sack, moreover, was a
difficulty that demanded the exercise of both hands and eyes. I was compelled
to pick it from the stalk where it had grown. I made havoc with the branches,
loaded with the yet un-broken bolls, the long cumbersome sack swinging from
side to side in a manner not allowable in a cotton field.33
Indeed, the detailed descriptions of former field hands such as Solomon
Northup, John Brown, Louis Hughes, and Charles Ball provide a better account of the culture of cottonfuller, more informative, more tactile, more
masterfulthan anything found in the pages of the American Cotton Planter.
They run to dozens of pages, and include the sort of calendrical and spatial
overviews of cotton culture that rival anything found in the planters periodicals. But more than that, they are full of eye-level detail and practical wisdom
absent from the sources produced by slaveholders: Sometime the slave picks
down one side of a row, and back upon the other, but more usually there is one
on either side, gathering all that has blossomed, leaving the unopened bolls for
a succeeding picking. ... It is necessary to be extremely careful the first time
going through the field, in order not to break the branches off the stalks. The
cotton will not bloom upon a broken branch, wrote Northup in the midst of
his lengthy account of cotton.34
Northups itemization of the skills necessary for cotton picking could be
extended to the whole run of tasks required of slaves. What was the best way
to plane a log into boards, or run a straight fence line across a curving hill?
Where did the cows hide when they were turned into the woods? How much
downward pressure on the plow was necessary to cut an even furrow about
five inches deep? How could a furrow be cut parallel to another across an unmarked field? Which seeds would grow into the best plants? How close to the
base of the plants should one plow, in order to throw up enough dirt to cover
the weeds on the surface without cutting the roots beneath? How could one
translate ones sense of the field to the animal at the end of the reins? What
was the best way to cut an even grade across a declining surface? How should
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one aim the blade of the hoe, so as to get close enough to hill a plant without
scraping its stalk? How hard should one swing a hoe, in order to cut grass
without breaking the handle? How much cotton would press out into a four-
hundred-pound bale? How could one lay on whitewash thickly enough to
cover rough-cut wood, but not so thickly that it clotted and flaked away? How
long should leather be left in a tanning vat? What was the method for bending
a board without breaking it? What was the best way to master a team and keep
a wagon from getting mired in a rut? How hot should an iron get before one
touched it to the clothes? How could a cook bring an entire meal to completion
at the moment the guests sat down at the table? What was the best way to polish a carriage to the point that a slaveholder could see his reflection in its face?
How could one manage to appear cheerful, or willing, or downcast as the moment demanded? How could one sleep wakefully while awaiting a call during
the night?35
In its primary guise, slave labor was a bloody and hierarchical social relation. But the labor that slaves did was also work: the application of human energy and imagination to the physical world. It is in this aspect that we can begin to understand the satisfactioneven the pridethat ex-slaves expressed
about some of the work they had done in slavery (though certainly not all of
it), and about their own mastery of the conversion of the natural world into
usefulness. The examples, drawn from the accounts of the escaped, are many:
Solomon Northup noted that after his struggles in the cotton field, the cultivation of sugar suited me; Charles Ball remembered the time he had spent cutting a field from the forest as a time of happiness; John Brown boasted that
at farming, at carpentering, and at all kinds of labor, I was a match for any
two hands; Louis Hughes presented an affecting image of trying, as a child,
to ring the plantation bell in such a way that it voiced the words, Come to
dinner, and expressed pride in meeting slaves who could pack a bale of cotton
to within ten pounds of a given limit without the aid of a scale. In Mississippi,
Hughes recalled, there were slaves who could turn their hands to almost anything.36
Thinking of such efforts as work first and only then as labor is important for
several reasons. It gestures toward a realm of enslaved people s embodied experience that was conditionedeven determinedby slavery, yet never fully
reducible to their status as slaves. It helps us to imagine a world of sensations
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and satisfactions that haunts the edge of our historical vision: the ways that
slaves came to know and master nature, the knowledge they had in their hands,
the pride they felt in it. It helps us to understand slavery as the violent appropriation not only of abstract labor, but also of material knowledgeof ways
of knowing that planters might command or even claim as their own, but that
they could never fully understand.37 Thus do we find the celebrated Mississippi
planter and agricultural reformer M.W. Phillips explaining, in his article enti
tled Cotton Seed, that his own prize seeds were selected from the field
bymyself and an old Negro woman. Thus was Vicks Prize Cottonseed advertised as having been selected from the fields by its namesake s most intelligent Negroes. Thus did Governor James Henry Hammond advise planters
throughout the South that a few old hands, or very young ones, breeding
women, sucklers, and invalids should be set to the crucial task of sorting
thecotton by grade (an operation both visual and tactile) before it was packed
into bales. Thus can we understand Frederick Law Olmsteds observation that
there is always on hand ... some Negro who really manages his owners plantation, his agricultural judgment being deferred to as superior to that of any
overseer or planter in the country. Thus was the slaveholding contradiction
between not knowing and claiming knowledge expressed along the juncture of
the unfathomable and the incomprehensible, the lived experience of slaves and
the efforts of planters to explain what they themselves only half knew. And
sothe masters of the Cotton Kingdom left behind barely readable explanations of the very basis of their prosperity: The necessity for running the first
furrow on the lower side is obvious to every ploughman. It is because having
an open furrow to turn the furrow slice into, the resistance that would be other
wise offered to it by turning up the hill is removed, while returning on the upper side, the plough having the advantage of turning the furrow slice down the
hill is enabled to lay the dirt up much better than if it was turning up hill, without the advantage of an open furrow to receive its furrow slice.38
It is with planters disjointed knowledge of their cotton crop in mind
thatwe should return to their synecdochic dismemberment of the slaves into
handsor, in another formulation, the reduction of the slave to the planters third armand the grotesque image of self-activated hoes and plows
turned out into the fields to tend the cotton: I incline to the opinion the hoes
should precede the plows, chopping into bunches, passing very rapidly on. ...
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In the second working the plows should in all cases go before the hoes. ...
Now the hoes have an important and delicate duty to perform. ... The hoes
have much to do in the culture of this crop, and must be prepared to devote
pretty much all their time to it, constantly passing over and perfecting that
which cannot be done with the plows.39
Planters were well aware of the gap between the practical knowledge obtained by their hands and their mastery of their own crops and fields.
They strove to bridge that gap with their eyes. One need look no further than
the word overseer to grasp the point that the discipline slaveholders exercised over their slaves on a daily basis was defined by visual power.40 Slaveholders spoke of superintending and directing their slaves, of the need to
look each day at all the work going on, inspect the buildings, boats, embankments, and sluice-ways, and examine the sick.41 The thousands and thousands
of pages of J.A. Turners Cotton Planters Manual, the American Cotton Planter,
the Southern Agriculturalist, the Southern Cultivator, and other publications
might be read as a set of extended efforts to translate a practical knowledge
that was most readily obtained by the field hands (and thus expropriated from
them) into a set of visual termsletters, words, charts, illustrationswhich
could be consumed through their owners eyes. Likewise, the translation of
the landscape into a measured gridrows five feet apart, furrows three inches
deep, cotton seeds dropped from a distance of three feet, and countless other
agricultural precepts, both inherited and createdall of these were efforts to
measure, rationalize, and exert control over the process of growing cotton to
the hand.
The clear-cut fields and parallel rows that defined the landscape of the Cotton Kingdom provided slaveholders (and their overseers) with a visual grid
they could use to measure their slaves labor. Slaves in the Mississippi Valley
were generally organized into gangs, and were watched as they worked.
Charles Ball explained: The work we had to do was to hoe and weed cotton,
for the last time. ... The captain was the foreman of his company, and those
under his command had to keep up with him. ... By this means, the overseer
had nothing to do but to keep Simon hard at work, and he was certain that all
the others must work equally hard.42 The rate at which slaves progressed
across the field provided those who watched them with a rough visual proxy
of their work rate.
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Former slaves accounts of their labor convey a sense of constant awareness

of the sight lines that defined the field of slaveholding power. Epps, I soon
found, whether in the field or not, had his eyes pretty generally upon us, remembered Solomon Northup. From the piazza, from behind some adjacent
tree, or other concealed point of observation, he was constantly on watch.
Similarly, Ball recalled that the first time hed gone into a cotton field, he had
tried to begin a conversation with another slave, only to be startled, before the
man had time to reply, by someone yelling, Mind your work there, you rascals! Looking in the direction of the sound, Ball continued, I saw master
Tom, sitting under the shade of a sassafras tree, at the distance of about one
hundred yards from us.43 The clear-cut fields and parallel rows provided
slaveholders with a disciplinary acrostic they could use to measure and regulate the rate at which their slaves worked, marking the otherwise invisible conversion of human energy into labor. This grim version of hide-and-seek was
even more intense in the concentrated interior spaces of slaveholding households. Many slaves, Frederick Law Olmsted noted, detested the close control of domestic slavery, where their every movement could be observed.44
Slaveholders visual power had limits. Olmsted remembered watching an
overseer surveying a group of working slaves from the vantage point of the
back of his horse. The added height of his horse allowed the white man to see
over the growing cotton plants and to survey several rows at a time. Still, as
often as he visited one end of the line of operations, the hands at the other end
would discontinue their labor, until he turned to ride towards them again.
Cotton in full bloom could grow so high that the pickers in the field [were]
well-nigh hidden by the tall, luxuriant plants, from the limbs of which a large
crop already hangs from the open bolls. Mississippi slaveholder R.D. Powell
provided an extended account of the way a slaveholders vision could be deranged by resistant slaves. The Negroes attempted in a very friendly way in
May to make Carter lose the crop. After finding himself in the grass he took
the place of the headman, or Driver, &put him to work on the first row & all
the other hands to follow him, &all the hands slighted their work by covering
up the grass lightly, and not cutting it up when small, and he became so restless
that he did not take the time to see how the work was done, &had his plows
running about, &plowing a spot here, &and a spot there, &where they did
plow, they would let the plows run over the grass, &not plow it up. In these
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passages, one has a sense of the overseers shuttling back and forth, widening
their focus and then zooming in, trying to regain their visual advantage; and of
the slaves seeing the world through their owners eyes, and then slipping their
resistance into the margins of the frame.45
Among slaveholders, such resistance was sometimes referred to as providing eye service.46 Slaveholders overseers were themselves enmeshed in a
process by which slavery, landscape, and human body were being mutually
reformatted. Just as slavery was made materially manifest in the novel and
often violent recoordination of eyes, nerves, muscles, and hands (hands),
so, too, was masteryor its synonyms supervision and oversight
expressed through human-animal-ecological hybrids such as the one described
by Olmsted: the field of vision of an overseer on a horse riding up and down a
row of slaves working their way across a clear-cut field planted in rows of cotton. The field of visual masterythe discipline through which the senses and
capacities of human bodies, black and white, were shaped by the demands of
the mode of production (forced labor and oversight) and the limits of the
landscapewas full of blind spots and hiding places. Indeed, as we will see, it
ended at the edges of the cotton fields.
When slaveholders did not like what they sawwhen slaves were perceived
to be less than equal to their tasksthey disciplined their hands. Solomon
Northup remembered the lash as a sort of universal equivalent, a mechanism
by which the severity of mistakes could be scaled into an astringent standardmeasure: The number of lashes is graduated according to the offense.
Twenty-five are deemed a mere brush, inflicted, for instance, when a dry leaf
or piece of boll is found in the cotton, or when a branch is broken in the field;
fifty is the ordinary penalty following all the delinquencies of the next higher
grade; one hundred is called severe: it is the punishment inflicted for the serious offense of standing idle in the field. Moses Grandy remembered his owner
Jemmy Coats as a severe old man: Because I could not learn his way of
hilling corn, he flogged me naked with a severe whip made of a very tough
sapling; this lapped round me each stroke, the point of it at last entered my
belly and broke off, leaving an inch and a-half outside. I was not aware of it
until on going to work again it hurt my side very much, when on looking down
I saw it sticking out of my body: I pulled it out and the blood spouted out after
it. The wound festered, and discharged very much at the time, and hurt me for
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years after. John Brown similarly bore the scars of his habituation to new labor for the rest of his life. Brown remembered bending down one day to show
his owner where the handle of his plow had come loose from the blade, making it impossible for him to run a true line, and then being knocked backward
by a kick he never saw coming. The blow struck me right between the eyes,
breaking the bone of my nose, and cutting the leaders of my right eye, so that
it turned quite round in its socket. I was stunned for the moment, and fell, my
mouth filling with blood, which also poured from my nose and eyes. I have
never been able to see so well since, and cannot now look long at print without
suffering much pain. The letters seem cloudy. To this day my right eye has remained out of its proper place.47 Slaves scars bore witness to their forcible
reeducation in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Valley.
Labor provided the spatial framework of slaveholding surveillance: slaves
were supposed to be in certain places at certain times. To be elsewheremissing from the line, standing at the edge of the field, lurking around the kitchen
was seen by slaveholders as evidence of a larger, hidden disorder. It was to
be liable. But to be in place was to be vulnerable. Former slaves often gave
very concrete accounts of where their owners had tracked them down to discipline them. On one occasion when he was beaten, Isaac Mason remembered,
his master met me in the yard, after I had put up the horse he had been using;
on another, after he had run away and then returned home starving, my boss
met me when I was coming from the barn. Similarly, after William Green
told his owner that he would fight rather than accept a beating, he went back to
work; his owner, however, went immediately to the house and gets his pistols
and bowie knife, and comes to the barn where I was attending to the horses.
The intimacy of household slavery concentrated the interchange of service
and violence. Louis Hughes remembered that his childhood mistress would
try to box my jaws and pinch me when she encountered him in the house.
She would direct him to sit with her while she prepared the loom for weaving,
and then she would warp the thread herself and place it in the loom, then I
would have to hand her the threads, as she put them through the hames. For
any failure in quickly comprehending or doing my work, I did not fail to receive the customary blow, or blows, from her hand. Likewise in the dining
room, if any little thing was not pleasing to her at mealtime, he continued,
it was a special delight for her to reach out, when I drew near to her to pass
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her something, and give me a blow with her hand. Similarly, Henry Bibb remembered that his mistress was every day flogging me, boxing, pulling my
ears, and scolding so that I dreaded to enter the room where she was.48 These
memories bespeak spaces and routines that were dense with the threat of violence inflicted on bodies exposed by their labor.
Behind closed doors, in outbuildings, or in the woods at the margins of the
fields, the choreography of service, surveillance, and space defined a landscape
of sexual violence. In the room the adolescent Henry Bibb had feared to enter
was a white woman who would often seat herself in a large rocking chair,
with two pillows about her, and would make me rock her, and keep off the
flies. She was too lazy to scratch her own head, and would often make me
scratch and comb it for her. She would at other times lie in her bed in warm
weather, and make me fan her while she slept, scratch and rub her feet. Slaveholders used the well-grooved patterns of plantation life to construct a simulacrum of domestic and agricultural order over sexual predation. Solomon Northup remembered the drunken overseer Epps standing at the edge of the field,
making clear his lewd intentions by motioning and grimacing as he beckoned a woman named Patsey to leave her work and come over to him. Mary,
sent to the barn to look for nests where a number of the hens were supposed
to have been laying, was there surprised by her owners son, who ordered her
to take her bed among the hay and submit to his lustful passions. When Louisa Picquet was fourteen, she was hired out to a boardinghouse where her
owner sometimes stayed. She later recalled an instance when Mr. Cook told
me I must come to his room that night and take care of him. He said he was
sick, and he wanted me and another slave girl to come to his room and take
care of him. When Picquet told the woman who ran the boardinghouse of
her fear of being alone with Cook, the older woman went herself to care for
him. Late that night, when he had been left alone, Cook sent down by the boy
to tell me to bring him some mustard for his cold; again the landlady did his
bidding. Still later he sent down to say that his pitcher of water needed to be
filled; this time the landlady sent the boy to serve him. Over the next few
days, Cook stayed confined in his room and made a series of requests: for salt,
more water, for a button to be sewn on his waistband, for his boots to be
blacked, all designed to maneuver Picquet into his room so that he could rape
her. Finally one morning, having been told the previous day that she was out,
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Cook left his bed and came to me in the ironin-room, down stairs, where I
was and whipped me with the cowhide, naked. In some cases household labor
was less an alibi for sexual torture than it was the thing itself. Harriet Jacobs,
who had herself been pursued through the house by her master as a child, remembered a neighboring slave who was kept tied to his crippled owners bed
wearing only a loose cotton shirt. In Humphreys v. Utz, the Supreme Court of
Louisiana quietly determined the guilt of a slaveholder who had nailed an enslaved mans penis to the bedpost in the owners room. As their slaves were
pieced out in the market, deployed in their houses and their fields, and degraded before their eyes, slaveholders were defining the human condition of
mastery: the condition of gazing, claiming, supervising, delighting, penetrating, climaxing, and maiming at willthe human condition of owning.
In the broad light of day, slaveholders produced theatricals of discipline
and punishment that concretized their authoritytheir propertyin the public form of a wounded slave. Peter Bruner lost control of a team of horses,
which stampeded down the dirt road and covered a neighboring white womans very nice black silk dress with dust. In return, he recalled, she had
me come in and take off my coat and vest and had all of her slaves come in and
look at me while she cowhided me. On his first day on a new plantation,
Charles Ball was called by his overseer to watch the punishment of an old
woman who had left several hills of cotton in the course of the day, without
cleaning and hilling them in a proper manner, along with two others who
were charged in general terms with having been lazy, and of having neglected
their work that day. The overseer made all three women raise their dresses
and flogged them as they lay upon the ground. I had never seen people flogged
in the way our overseer flogged his people, remembered Ball.49 As well as
through the application of direct force to skin, muscle, and nerve, these slaveholders were attempting to control their slaves through the spectacle of violenceby conscripting their eyes into witness.
Perhaps even more insistently, slaveholders tried to cow slaves into submission by jamming their senses with the sounds of human suffering. It is the
literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the
slaves can be heard from dark until bed time, on Epps plantation, any day almost during the entire period of the cotton picking season, remembered Solomon Northup of his time in Louisiana. On one occasion, John Brown heard a
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man being beaten for three hours, groaning piteously all the time whilst his
master looked on and chuckled. On another he was summoned along with
others to register the punishment of a man who had been suspended by his
hands: His shrieks and groans were most agonizing, and could be heard at
first a mile and a quarter off, but as the punishment proceeded, they subsided
into moans scarcely audible at the distance of fifty paces. Louis Hughes
remembered standing trembling from head to foot after hearing his wife
beaten. One of William Wells Browns earliest memories was of hearing his
mother beaten in the field for arriving late at her place.
As soon as she reached the spot where they were at work, the overseer
commenced whipping her. She cried, Oh! PrayOh! Pray!Oh!
Pray!these were generally the words of slaves when imploring mercy
at the hands of their oppressors. I heard her voice, and knew it, and
jumped out of my bunk, and went to the door. Though the field was
some distance from the house, I could hear every crack of the whip, and
every groan and cry of my poor mother. I remained at the door, not daring to venture any further. The cold chills ran over me, and I wept aloud.
After giving her ten lashes, the sound of the whip ceased, and I returned
to my bed, and found no consolation but in my tears. It was not yet daylight.
Frederick Law Olmsted remembered a woman crying out as she was beaten
for missing the mornings work. Yes, sir! or Ah, sir! or Please, sir! she
cried as she knelt before the overseer. After a time, he told her to draw her
dress up around her shoulders and lie down. She now shrunk away from him,
not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, Oh, dont, sir! Oh, please
stop, master! Please, sir! Please, sir! Oh, thats enough, master! Oh, Lord!
Oh,master, master! Oh, God master, do stop! Oh, God master! Oh, God master! Olmsted recalled that he spurred his horse away from the field, and the
screaming yells and the whip strokes had ceased when I reached the top of the
bank. Choking, sobbing, spasmodic groans only were heard.50 We are accustomed to thinking of sounds as fleeting, as impressions that end when our eardrums cease to vibratebut these memories tell of sounds that were as lasting
as the scars on the former slaves bodies. These sounds, too, were part of the
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nexus of body and landscape which defined the Cotton Kingdom, slaves
senses turned against them, their hearing tortured with the sounds of others
suffering: lamentations, pleas for mercy, shrieks, groans.51
The interchange of visibility and vulnerability, power and pleasure, landscape and labor that characterizes the incidents we have come to label torture was diffused through the entire landscape of labor. Long before the
mainstreamone might even say civildiscussion of torture in our democracy defined the term down to the bare-minimum example of a single practice
(waterboarding, or controlled drowning), it was widely recognized that
chronic sleep deprivation produced sensations of acute physical and psychological disorientation.52 When not specifically deployed as torture or used in
order to extract as much labor as possible, chronic sleep deprivation was often
implemented as an offshoot of bizarre anthropological theory. It is common
opinion among the people that the Negro requires less sleep than the white
man, wrote a critic of this view in the American Cotton Planter.53 The conventional description of slave labor as lasting from sunup to sundown presents
the question of sleep deprivation under the cover of a folksy nostalgia. Henry
Bibb wrote that slaves often worked from early in the morning until late in the
night, before being sent in to weigh their cotton, and then they would have to
prepare something to eat before they could lie down to rest. ... By the time
they would get their suppers it would be midnight; then they would herd down
all together and take but two or three hours rest, before the overseers horn
called them up again to prepare for the field. Louis Hughes remembered being so tired in the field that I could hardly stand. Moses Grandy recalled being kept awake for five days running to wait upon his gambler master as the
white man played cards. I was standing in the corner of the room, nodding
for want of sleep, when he took up a shovel and beat me with it: he dislocated
my shoulder, and sprained my wrist and broke the shovel over me.54
Slaves often remembered the work they did as a form of extended, repetitive torture. John Brown recalled that when the slaves scraped the cotton,
they were compelled to go across a thirty, forty, or fifty acre field without
straightening themselves one minute, and with the burning sun striking their
head and back, and the heat reflected upwards from the soil onto their faces.
Making it to the end of the row, where one might briefly stand straight up and
perhaps drink some water, took between an hour and an hour and a half. Some
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slaves, Brown noted could not stand straight to save their lives from constant
stooping, their bodies bent in forced tribute to the cotton plant. In picking
season, Brown continued, the boll of the plant when split by ripeness, pricks
the fingers, even when you are careful and lacerates the flesh round the nails to
cause great soreness ... till the blood runs from the tips of their fingers, where
they have been pricked by the hard pod. . . . The perspiration, meanwhile,
streams from every pore of the body till the whole of it, head, hair, and all, are
covered with a crust of mud. Preparing the cotton for market was likewise
difficult: Packing is very hard, oppressive work. The dust and fibers fly about
in thick clouds, and get into the chest, checking respiration, and injuring the
lungs very seriously. It is a common thing for the slaves to sicken off with
chest diseases acquired in the packing room or gin-house, and to hear them
wheezing and coughing like broken-winded horses as they crawl about to the
work that is killing them.55 In Browns account, we see the outlines of the
gradual process by which human life was turned into cotton: the torturous
conversion of labor to capital, and of living people to corpses.
The bullwhip served as a sort of universal equivalent by which the system
of converting pain to production could be measured; recall the scale of punishments for various offenses against cotton plants, provided by Solomon Northup. Yet the whipstanding apart from the work process as a term through
which different sorts of concrete offenses (breaking a branch, coming up short
at the end of the day, running away) might be compared to one another
suggests an analytical separation between work and torture. The apparent frequency with which slaves were wounded with the tools of their labor supports no such clear separation. Leonard Black was knocked down with a
johnny-cake board when he spilled some cornmeal, and was struck in the
mouth with an iron-toothed rake when he offended in the field. Isaac Mason
was beaten with a pitchfork in a feedlot. Peter Bruner was nearly drowned
in a tanners vat; I thought I was nearly drowned when I came out, but as it
happened I was still alive. James Longuens owner jammed the handle of a
broken hoe into his mouth. John Browns owner rubbed the worms he found
on his cotton crop into the mouths of the slaves who had overlooked them.
Moses Roper was suspended by his arms from the spinning wheel of a cotton
press.56 And so on. Whenever slaveholders turned tools into weapons, they
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emphasizedplayed outthe symbiosis of labor and torture essential to remaking the landscape and its inhabitants in the image of cotton culture.57
Sometimes slaveholders used extreme speedups of the labor process to torture their slaves. John Brown and Jacob Stroyer both recalled being forced to
run throughout the day as a form of punishment. Moses Roper recalled an old
man named Phil who could no longer keep tilling his row; for this his master
used to chain him round the neck, and run him down a steep hill. Peter Still
remembered a pregnant woman named Delphine who finally lost her child after being compelled day after day to plow with her mule at a trot. She dared
not stop, for his eye was ever on her. Andrew Jackson was tied by his neck to
a horse and run barefoot down a road. So was Roper. So was Simon, whose
torture, because it became the subject of a legal action in the State of Mississippi, was recorded in the sort of state archive generally beloved by those who
believe that the accounts former slaves gave of their lives were exaggerated.58
The use of animals in many of these tortures was, as we will see, anything but
incidental. For now, it is enough to say that such tortures expressed the ultimate logic of calculating cotton production to the hand: human bodies were
grotesquely stretched to meet the limits of merciless traction. Think of Roper
hanging from the cotton press, literally rotating around the cotton he had
helped to pick.
7
The Empire of the White Mans Will
They are food for the cotton-field.
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell. ... The harder the
slaves were driven, the more careless and fatal was their farming.
throughout the antebellum period, the Lower Mississippi Valley, declared by its chroniclers to be the richest agricultural region in the world, imported most of the wheat, corn, beef, and pork its residents required to live
from the Midwest and the Ohio Valley. The entire economy was devoted to
agriculture, yet it could not feed itself. Cotton, it was said by one planter, was
so much more profitable than other kinds of cultivation, that planters supplied themselves almost entirely from the upper country. There were, scattered among the many plantation owners who planted nothing but cotton, a
few planters who tried to diversify their crops, usually with corn. Corn would
provide feed for livestock, who could in turn reduce Southern planters depen
dence on imported foodstuffsa concern that became particularly pressing
during the Depression of 1837, when a sharp drop in the price of cotton made
imported food seem even more dear. We were driven by necessity to break
our intolerable bondage to the grain growing states, and raise within ourselveswhat was necessary for our own consumption, wrote one Hinds County
planter in what most would have regarded as a too-optimistic assessment of
the potential of Mississippi Valley plantations to feed their owners.
Planters who valued self-sufficiency used corn to feed the cattle and pigs
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they hoped would reduce their reliance on imported foodstuffs. Cattle and pigs
were marked with patterns cut into their ears or with brands on the flank, then
turned out into the woods, swamps, and roadways to forage for feed. In the
autumn, Charles Ball remembered, Neither the hogs nor the cattle required
any feeding at our hands. The woods were full of nuts and the grass was abundant. Hogs were generally driven in from the woods to be slaughtered after
the cotton had been shipped, but while it was still cold enough to preserve their
flesh as it was processed into meat. Each carcass is cut into six parts, explained Solomon Northup, and piled one above the other in salt, upon a large
table in the smoke-house. In this condition it remains a fortnight, when it is
hung up, and a fire built, and continued more than half the time during the remainder of the year. This smoking, he continued, is necessary to prevent
the bacon from becoming infested with worms. For planters, this feral economyfrom forage to flesh to meat and milkhad the advantage of providing
protein at the cost of little extra labor: the cows and pigs themselves did much
of the work of converting nature to the service of the cotton economy (as well
as, in many cases, converting the bounty of the public domain into the benefit
of private consumption).1
There were, however, well-known limits to stock raising in the agro-
capitalist ecology of the Cotton Kingdom. Like corn, livestock drew upon the
same land and labor as cotton. The energy of each sector of earth could be
converted to stock or staple, but not both; the labor of each hand had to be
committed to raising either fodder or fabric. In an economy where both planting and productivity were measured by a calculation of bales per hand per
acre, allocation of either land or labor away from cotton and toward corn, cattle, or hogs represented an unaccountable loss in the minds of cotton-crazed
planters. Or at least an unaccounted loss, as was suggested by one planter who
observed that large plantations were not suited for the raising of pigs, for it
is found to be almost impossible to prevent the Negroes stealing and roasting
young pigs. And so, during the antebellum period, planters throughout the
Mississippi Valley (and elsewhere in the Cotton Kingdom) imported food in
order to export cotton. In an 1860 article, the pro-slavery essayist David
Christy defended slavery in terms that were, at once, economic and ecological:
From this view of the subject, it appears that slavery is not a self-sustaining
system, independently remunerative; but that it attains its importance to the
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nation and the world, by standing as an agency, intermediate, between the

grain-growing states and our foreign commerce. As the distillers of the West
transformed the surplus grain into whisky, that it might bear transport, so slavery takes the products of the North, and metamorphoses them into cotton, that
they may bear export.2 The local result of this economy, in which Southern
slaves metabolized Midwestern corn into cotton to be sold in the Atlantic market, was clearly described by the former slave Charles Ball. When corn has to
be purchased on a cotton plantation, he wrote, the people must expect to
make an acquaintance with hunger.3
Cotton planters regulated the metabolism of nature into energy in weekly
rations. Meat is generally not fed to the laborers in this part of the state,
wrote one planter, before providing tallies of the weekly rations provided on
nearby plantations: One bushel of potatoes a-week, from about October 1st
to February1st. Then one peck of corn, ground as preferred; or one peck of
broken rice. Meat occasionally. One bushel of potatoes, or ten qts. corn
meal, or eight qts. of rice, and four qts. of peas, with occasional fresh meat,
and twenty barrels of salt fish and two barrels of molasses during the year.
Number of people170.4 For planters, these rations represented points along
an indifference curve between cotton and provender where the cost of food
was generally treated as the dependent variable. In good times, the slaves
might fare better and get a little meat; in bad times, they might starve, their
meager allowance of corn stinted rather than it shall be said the master was
obliged to sell them, remembered Charles Ball.5
The narratives of ex-slaves contain more information about food than any
topic other than beatings and escapes. Long after they had escaped slavery,
narrators remembered their weekly rations. Three and half pounds of bacon
and corn enough to make a peck of meal. The practice among slaveholders
was to allow each slave one peck of corn weekly, which was measured out ev
ery Monday morning; at the same time each one receiving seven salt herring.
With respect to food, he used to allow us one peck of Indian meal each, per
week, which, after being sifted and bran taken from it, would not be much
more than half a peck. A peck of unsifted meal, and three and a half pounds
of bacon, was the weekly allowance. The piece might be more than half bone,
yet no additional weight was allowed on that account. No vegetables were provided. A peck of meal and three pounds of bacon a week; some did not give
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so much meat. For my breakfast I had a pint of pot liquor, half a herring,
and a little piece of bread. Whether this would stay the cravings of a young
appetite or not, there was no more to be had. Since my arrival . .. I had
never enjoyed a full meal of bacon. Our allowance of food was one peck of
corn a week to each full-grown slave. We never had meat of any kind.6
Malnutrition was visible to the eye.7 Diets low in calories and especially in
protein led to the wasting away of subcutaneous fat, in which the human body
stores energy. The skin of malnourished slaves would hang in loose folds, dry
and wasted for want of nutrition; their hair would become brittle and discolored. Charles Ball again: A half-starved Negro is a miserable-looking creature. His skin becomes dry, and appears to be sprinkled over with whitish
husks, or scales; the glossiness of his face vanishes, his hair loses its color, be
comes dry and when stricken with a rod, the dust flies from it. ... Many young
girls who would have been beautiful, if they had been allowed enough to eat,
had lost all their prettiness through mere starvation; their fine glossy hair had
become of a reddish color and stood out round their heads like long brown
wool. Or Henry Bibbs observation, after he was sold to a cotton planter who
lived along the Red River: When we arrived there, we found his slaves poor,
ragged, stupid, and half-starved. The food he allowed them per week was one
peck of corn for each grown person, one pound of pork, and sometimes a
quart of molasses. In January 1836, the Northern traveler James Burn Wallace saw a group of half-starved Negroes being unloaded from a boat above
Vicksburg, as he was going upriver from New Orleans. Bibb noted that such
slaves, when sent to market, were often forced to wash their faces in greasy
water to hide the privation evident in their rough dark faces.8
Planters used food to control their hungry slaves. Molasses and meat at
Christmastime were the standard expression of slaveholders benevolence.
Louis Hughes and Solomon Northup both devoted pages in their narratives to
detailed descriptions of holiday banquetstrench-smoked turkey, pork, and
beef, biscuits and fruit preserves, molasses and milkand of the way that their
owners came down from their house to watch the slaves enjoy the meal. Only
the slave who has lived all the years on his scanty allowance of meal and bacon
can appreciate such suppers, Northup wrote. Even more to the point than the
theatrical exchange of meager bounty for feigned loyalty was the conversion
of calories to energy, and some planters apparently monitored that closely
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enough to know that their slaves had very little margin for survival. Rations
were commonly increased during periods of the year when (even) more labor
was required of the slaves. At time when the labor is hard, a quart of soup a
day, and in light work, twice a-week, advised one model planter. The general opinion, confided another to Frederick Law Olmsted, is that Negroes
work much better for being supplied three or four pounds of bacon a week.9
but refor m-minded planters did not solely, or even chiefly, concern
themselves with the fact that their slaves were starving. Reformers warned
other planters that by choosing to allocate their land and labor with an eye toward maximizing cotton production and relying on imported grain and meat
to nourish a human population too focused on cultivating cotton to feed itself,
the planters were following a false economy. Cows and pigs allowed to forage
at will were spewing the fertility of the country back into the woods, swamps,
and roadways, where it escaped the dominion of the cotton plant. What worried reformist planters most was manure.10
At least from the publication of Justus von Liebigs Organic Chemistry in Its
Applications to Agriculture and Physiology (issued in German and English in
1840), manure was the basis for scientific agriculture and modernization in the
nineteenth century. Liebigs Chemistry allowed farmers to see plants in a new
way. By tracing the process of growth and decay at a molecular level, Liebig
enabled farmers to visualize how their crops were depleting the nitrogen in
their fields, and to see how the very nutrients drawn off by staple crops could
be replaced through the planting of other crops (such as clover) and fertilizers
(such as manure and guano), which returned fertility to the earth at a rate equal
to its extraction. Liebigs Organic Chemistry, in the hands of Karl Marx, would
provide an ecological model for the critique of industrial capitalism. For Marx,
the transformation of a rural peasantry into an industrial peasantry had occasioned a rift between ecology and economy. Urban workers who could no
longer feed themselves were drawing upon the rural economy for food, but
instead of returning the nutrients they consumed to the soil in the form of fertilizer, they wasted it in their rank, promiscuous shit.11
In the same years that Marx was reading Liebig, Southern agricultural reformers were using the chemists work to critique their own societys grain-
flesh-meat-manure ecology.12 For Southern readers of Liebig, the wealth of
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the land was being drained away by the false economy of to-the-hand mono-
cropping. As the mission statement of the reformist journal American Cotton
Planter put it, American cotton planters produce too little grain, and consequently too little bacon. ... It is a fixed fact, that where there is no stock raised,
there will be little manure, and where there is no manure, rich land grows poor
and poor land grows unproductive.13 Rather than cycling nutrients though
the circuit of grass-meat-manure fertility, slaveholders had created a wasteful
economy in which manure was held in the Midwest while the Cotton Kingdom
imported meat to feed its slaves.
Reformist planters imagined a landscape in which perhaps a fourth of the
land and labor allocated to cotton would be given over to provender and stock.
One recommended that planters raise twenty head of cattle for every five
slavesa ratio which (at an estimated rate of 120 pounds of voided matter per
cow per day) would have required each slave to shovel and spread almost
88 tons of manure a year. He bragged that by so doing on his own plantation,he had been able to make 2,500 bushels of good rich compost manure
per hand every year. Achieving such improvement required an investment
of both capital and labor that would reorder the agricultural landscape. The
planter went on to explain: The farmers golden rule is emphatically applicable herea place for every thing and every thing in its place. Each kind of
stock must be provided with lots and shelter, and they must be induced or
driven into their quarters every night during the entire year. These lots, stables
and shelters are to be constantly and regularly kept well littered with vegetable
matter, which being broken and tread upon by the stock walking and trampling over it, forms a most valuable absorbent for preserving the fluid portions
of excrements.14 Manure is wealth, your manure is your gold mine, the
failure to produce manure resulted from the want of determination: there
was a manic retentiveness to the literature of Southern agricultural reform.
But the reformers were right: the bovine digestive system is an extraordinarily
efficient mechanism for converting grass, fodder, and even forage into fertilizer.15 Their shit-savings were a form of liquid capital.
Indeed, as the South Carolina planter Francis Bulkely wrote in a widely reprinted article, which concluded with a long quotation from Liebig, the depletion of the Southern soil was due not only to the economy of extraction, but
also to that of expulsion. The South was exporting its fertility along with its
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cotton: The Southern States are now annually sending to a foreign market
three million bales of cotton. ... These twelve hundred millions of pounds are
twelve hundred millions of something essential to the fertility of our soil,
which is, in the same degree diminished in productivity by their exportation to
foreign countries. If the vessels on which our cotton is freighted to the old
world, brought back every year fertilizing substances which would replace the
elements carried off, we should then consider the account balanced.16 Following the argument through, Bulkely noted that the South was wasting not only
manure, but also bones. After analyzing the chemical composition of the cotton plant and comparing it to that of corn, he argued that the nutrients of the
latter might be recycled to the benefit of the former through a more thoroughgoing use of meal ground from the bones of dead animals.
Crops that become the main food of man and animals derive their value
as a food in a great degree from the phosphate of lime that they contain.
This substance is secreted by the digestive functions of the animal economy, carried into the circulation of the bones and there deposited, imparting to their structure such firmness and strength as no other quality
of food can give. ... Now comes the loss. The bones are never saved
never restored to the fields which originally yielded their substance to the
seed of the cotton crop. On the contrary, whether in town or city, they
are thrown aside into some receptacle of useless rubbish. ... Who shall
estimate the amount of phosphate of lime lost to the soil by the bones of
all our horses and mules that dieof all the cattle, sheep, and swine that
are annually consumed by all classes of the Southern population? . . .
The English agriculturalist, meanwhile has ransacked the globe for supplies of this invaluable fertilizer. So far back as the year 1837, the valueof
bones annually imported into England from foreign countries, amounted
to two and quarter millions of dollars; and at the present period probably
exceeds five times that sum.17
This vision of shiploads of bones and manure circling the globe in an endless
cycle of agro-capitalist repletion depended on the conceptual association of
meat, manure, death, and wealth. It projected a story of capital formation on a
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global scale out of the terms of enslaved abjection (and slaveholding social
reproduction) in the everyday ecology of the Cotton Kingdom.
It is difficult to underestimate the benefits which manure-minded planters
thought would grow out of the improvements they were prescribing. As M.W.
Phillips of Mississippi put it, It is, I admit, a tedious process to haul out three
or four hundred bushels of stable manure; but no less so is it to clear, fence,
and break up new groundnor more tedious than pulling up stakes, severing
all the tender endearments of mine own native land, to seek at a heavy cost of
time and money, a home in the western wilds, there to suffer the combined attacks of mosquitoes and fever and ague! Where soil exhaustion led to the
dispersion of the population across the landscape in search of better land, replenishing the earth with manure would support the concentration of population necessary for social development. If a planter discovers his soil is becoming more productive, he will not think of leaving it to go in pursuit of fresh
lands, Daniel Pratt explained in the pages of the American Cotton Planter.
If he considers himself settled he will want a good dwelling house, good
Negro houses, barns, stables, gin house, etc. How is he able to obtain
them? If he wants good houseswhich he most assuredly willhe will
have to seek for good Mechanics to build them. ... We shall not only be
able to build good houses, but we will have Machinists, Engineers, Manufacturers, and persons suitable to carry on every branch of mechanical
business which we need. ... If we at the South can get on some plan for
improving our lands ... our society will be vastly improved, our population more dense.18
By regulating the metabolism of the soil, Pratt was arguing, one could likewise regulate the transformation of economic activity into civilization.
Social development held within it the potential for enhanced pleasure for
the planters who were to be its main beneficiaries. For what do we live? Pratt
asked. Is it to hoard up silver and gold? Is it to say we have a plantation of one
or five hundred Negroes, or that we make 1000 bales of cotton? Is it to slave
ourselves to accumulate property and not enjoy it? Having framed the wasteful culture of to the hand as a form of slavishness, Pratt went on to suggest
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the sort of self-care possible under the culture of improvement. We can take
more satisfaction in worshipping God in a good comfortable house, suitable
for the worship of such a being, than we can in a log cabin. ... We can see
more satisfaction in a good, well-ventilated house, with good furniture than
we can in a little pent-up log cabin with stools.19 Pratts manure-intensive vision of social development culminated in what he termed the transformation
of temporal into spiritual happiness. But as the parallelism of the contrast
between slavishness and self-care on the one hand, and the well-ventilated
house and the pent-up cabin on the other, an olfactory economy underlay
his auto-apotheosis.
The regulation of smells was an elementary aspect of the sort of agricultural civilization advocated by reformers like Pratt. Indeed, only three pages
after Pratts article in the American Cotton Planter was an article entitled Farm
EmbellishmentsBuildingsFences, which proved to be an extended analysis of the virtues of painting barns, outbuildings, and fences with lime-based
whitewash. Along with the aforementioned emphasis on proper ventilation,
whitewashing represented the best practices of social medicine in the age before germ theory. In the noxious odors of the latrine or in the emanations
from the damp earth, nineteenth-century planters (along with some of the
eras best scientists) perceived the existence of deadly miasmasinvisible
clouds of poisonous air.20 Whitewashing outbuildings was said to contribute
materially in promoting the health of our families. ... The neutralizing influ
ence of the alkali of the lime thus spread out tastefully upon our out-buildings
... exert[s] chemically upon the noxious miasm floating in the air during our
autumnal evenings and thus protect[s] us from chill and fever.21 Counterpoised to these efforts to establish a sort of olfactory domesticity were planters characterizations of the odor of poverty and deprivation as revealing the
essential degradation of the people they enslaved (and impoverished and deprived). So notoriously filthy are negroes that many persons will doubtless
smile at the very mention of cleanliness when used in connection with a people
closely allied to hogs in their nature and habits, wrote Dr. John Stainback
Wilson in the American Cotton Planter.22
Social development in the age of manure was accompanied by the fearful
odor of miasma. In this context, we can understand Pratts emphasis on ven
tilation. The house he was imagining for himself would insulate him from
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the contaminating odor of the landscape that provided his wealthindeed

(following the common formulation), from the odor of the manure that was
wealth itself. We can perhaps even imagine the architecture of this spiritually
minded planters own house, which surely allowed him to closet himself away
when he voided his bowels.23 And of course that was the point. Reformist
planters were building a social order out of manure, but they could never quite
outdistance its stench; nor the lewd accusation from their own bowels that they
were, in the end, not so very different from the animals they herded into their
barnyards so that the manure might be made into capital. To patrol the boundary between their aspirational sanctity and the animal materiality it could never
outrun (indeed, upon which it depended), they had slaves. To carry out their
night soil. To shovel out their steaming barnyards and rake manure into their
rendered fields. To awake every morning and sweep the large yard. To
hoard ... the filth from the wash house, stercorary, pig-pen, hen-house, and
pigeon-cote so much neglected by us. To sweep the ground under and around
the houses ... every month. To take up the sweepings of the Negro and
fowl-house yards, and the rank weeds that spring up about them. To remove
the accumulation that will gather about all the habited places, and more especially the habitation of the Negroesthat is, to collect their own defecation
from the high grass to which they had retreated in the night, or from the open
yard where it lay exposed (this last suggestion from a sitting governor who
was apparently too pressed by his cotton to build an outhouse).24 To deliver
their own waste, along with that of all the rest of creation, to the capital fund.
within the cycle by which nature was converted into labormatter into
energycotton planters established rules that mirrored and affirmed the plantation social order. Food was separated into higher and lower orders and distributed accordingly. In outlining the social meaning of food in the Cotton
Kingdom, one might begin with Louis Hughess typology of vegetables: the
coarse was provided to the slaves; the delicate, reserved for the owners.
Or with Charles Balls typology of fish: Of the common fish, such as pike,
perch, suckers, and others we had the liberty of keeping as many as we could
eat; but the misfortune was that we had no pork or fat of any kind to fry them
with. ... We could have lived well if we had been permitted to broil the shad
on the coals and eat them, for a fat shad will dress itself in being broiled, and is
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very good without any substance being added to it. All the shad that we caught
were carefully taken away. Or with a planters careful instruction that when
a beef is killed the fifth quarter (meaning the head, and explicitly excepting
the hide) be provided to a favored slave. Or with Susan Dabney Smedess reminiscence about the alimentary politics preserved by her slaveholding relatives
as they relocated their plantations from Virginia to Mississippi: One of the
first [difficulties] was the unavoidable delay in getting supplies of meat for the
servants ... although the supply on hand was ample to last the white familiestill more could be procured.25 One could then follow the logic of these
examples throughout the entirety of the plantation economy and its far-flung
network of supplementary imported food: cornbread, bacon fat, and molasses
for the slaves; biscuits, meat, and sugar for their owners. Not to mention salt,
milk, and butter. Or chicken, turkey, duck, and goose. Coffee, tea, and tobacco.Cornish game hens, fine wines, liquor, and imported fruit.26
By regulating the food that passed the lips of their slaves, planters materially affirmed and naturalized a version of social order based upon higher-and
lower-order bodily functions: taste on the one hand; digestion on the other.
Whereas slaves cooked, ate, lived, and slept in the same space or field where
they worked, the transformation of flesh into meat and grain into cereal was
most often spatially and functionally isolated from the rest of slaveholding
life. In the kitchens of slaveholders houses, enslaved people did the work of
transforming the carnal into the edible, the remnants of death into the substance of life. This transformation was expressed in its highest form in the disciplined theatricality of table manners. The use of fine china and silverware,
the interposition of serving between preparation and consumption, the dispensing of portions from serving platters onto individual plates, the sanctification of food with prayer: all these forms of preconsumption and embodied
social discipline expressed the passage of matter from the natural to the social
worldfrom the animal to the human.27
Indeed, even as they constantly pushed downward upon their slaves subsistence level, slaveholders likewise degraded the conditions under which enslaved people ate and drank. Slaves were provided with food like pot liquor,
table scraps, molasses, and fatbackthe by-products, or even waste products,
of more refined products reserved for slaveholders. The bulk of their diet consisted of items (like corn and peas) that were also fed to animals. Alongside
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Hughess memory of the association of slaves and peas might be placed the
opinion stated in the American Cotton Planter that the pea, in all its varieties,
furnishes the planter cheaply with an invaluable article of food for the fattening of stock and for the Negro, when properly used. Beneath each image lay
the mean apportionment of King Cotton, as described by a planter bemoaningthe passing of oxen: A large number are annually consumed in the teams
from the state of the roads during the hauling season, the carelessness of the
planters and overseers, and the rascality of Negroes who often drive the beasts
for days with scarcely any feed, reserving what was given to them for use on
the road to sell for their own benefit. Animal feed converted by the planters
starveling economy into slaves food: perhaps the only image to approach the
socio-ecology of the Cotton Kingdom with greater force than this was provided by John Brown, who remembered his body breaking out into running
sores after his owner tried to vertically integrate his operations by feeding his
slaves on cottonseed oil.28
The structured competition of enslaved human beings and domesticated
animals for food was processed into a surplus of social meaning. The former
slave Andrew Jackson recalled that his master fed them the refuse of his table
where he fed his dogs. When I was a boy, recalled Lunsford Lane, the
pot-liquor, in which the meat was boiled for the great house together with
some little corn-meal balls that had been thrown in just before the meat was
done, was poured into a tray in the middle of the yard, and a clam shell or
pewter spoon given to each of the children, who would fall upon the deliciousfare as greedily as pigs. These nauseating command performances provided slaveholders with a set of images structured by their control of the food
supplyimages that identified whiteness with refinement and taste, over and
against the elemental economy of flesh and feed. And they provided (ex)slaves
with an image to mark the unnatural character of slavery: human beings
treated like animals.29
Nowhere was the process by which slaveholders converted black hunger
into white supremacy more apparent than in the processing and distribution of
meat. When an ox was slaughtered, Louis Hughes remembered, the best meat
was sent to the Boss. Isaac Mason gave some sense of the remainder that was
termed meat in describing a Christmas breakfast: six pounds of sausage
meat, which was the scrapings of the meat block, and after we had extracted
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the wood of the suffering block from it, we had approximately, three pounds
of meat. Similar memories from Henry Bibb: My food was coarse corn
bread and beef shanks and cows heads with pot liquor, and a very scanty allowance of that. I have often seen the meat spoiled when brought to us, covered with flies and fly bows, and even worms crawling over when we were
compelled to eat it, or go without any at all.30 The splintered traces of the
process by which muscle was made meat, the malevolent individuality of the
boiled head, the repulsive carnality of the infested flesh: decay could not be
cooked out of this meat.
The indecent proximity of meat and mortality frames a story told by Isaac
Mason about an occasion on which he was presented with a gift of food. In
August 1846, he remembered, his masters family became short of meat.
Mason and another hand were sent out into the forest to bring back a steer for
slaughter. They returned the next afternoon, having spent a day and a half
trying to find and capture the animal. At five oclock he was slaughtered and
hanging on the gallows, and by seven oclock that night he was in the cellar,
salted down and packed away for future use. In less than three days our supply
of beef was completely spoiled, having maggots in it nearly as long as a little
finger. A new life had come into it. At this time, a niece of Masons mistress,
daughter of a slaveholder who lived nearby, was residing with his owners,
helping them attend to their children and housekeeping. When this miss of a
housekeeper discovered the great calamity that had befallen the store of beef
making it unfit for the delicate stomachs of her aunt, uncle-in-law, cousins
and her ownshe ordered that some of it be taken to the kitchen and boiled for
the hands. ... None of us could eat it. It had to be rejected because the stomach refused it. I was so bold to cast my portion out to the dog, an act, I thought
unseen by any but those who were with me. For Mason, as he later remembered it, this had been an assertion of his full humanity: A slave s stomach
was considered not to be human, but this undainty dish proved that it was.31
When Masons owner heard what he had done, he went out to the barn
where Mason was putting up his horse and, holding a large stick in his hand,
ordered Mason to go down into the cellar to pay the penalty for being impudent to Miss Wallace. Mason refused and fought with his master, pushing
him over a pile in the wood, and gaining enough time to run into the woods as
the white man went to get his gun. After two days, the slaveholder sent word
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for Mason to come in. When he did, the two men argued again about the
spoiled meat. To use his own expression: It was an insult to Miss Wallace because she had sent it out to the kitchen. I replied that I did not know it was an
insult, I did not mean to insult her, and she did not know how bad it smelled.
Mason was then sent back to the field to work, and for several months heard
nothing more of the matter.32
When the crop was in and his owner could spare his labor, Mason was sent
with a horse and a cart to Mr.Wallaces place to pick up a barrel of turkeys and
geese. Arriving at the plantation of the man whose daughter he had insulted,
he was given a pitchfork and told to muck straw into the manure collected in
the treading yard. This he did for several hours until it began to grow dark
and he asked Mr.Wallace would he please give me the turkeys and geese? ...
He, to my great astonishment, struck me with his pitchfork with so much force
that he broke it over my shoulders.33
Masons story tracks several aspects of the human-animal ecology of antebellum slavery. There is the by-now familiar story of the metabolism of nature
into human energy, and the way that cycle was routed through the ritual hierarchies of enslavement, first as gift and then as an insult. But what is striking
about Masons story is that he was being trafficked through the same circuits as
the food, traded backward along the chain of gifts that cemented the two
households to each other: the beef that Miss Wallace (herself an avatar of social connection) gave to the slaves; the turkeys and geese her father was supposedly to send to Masons owner.34 And when these white men planned to
beat Mason down, they chose to do so in a cow-shit pen and a cellar where
theslaughtered meat was stored. He was to be broken amid the filth and rendered flesh.
Analogous proximities of human to animal flesh structure many of the accounts that escaped slaves gave of their time in bondage. William Wells Brown,
who had been the enslaved steward of a Mississippi River slave trader, referred to his owners cargo of human flesh. Henry Bibb likewise referred to
being sold in the human flesh market. While it might be argued that these
were writerly metaphors, it is also clear that they acquired their rhetorical
force by resignifying what was, in fact, the slave markets essential character
even its occasional practice. When John Brown was ten, for example, he
wasweighed in a balance-scale against a saddle and sold by the pound. That,
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likewise, was how the slave trader Tyre Glen paid for slaves: $600 for plow
boys, five to six dollars per pound[;] if the boy is very likely and ways [weighs]
6090 or 100, seven may be given.35
In many cases, the connections between flesh, feces (the dead matter which
bore witness to the material commingling of human being and animal flesh),
and enslaved abjection were anything but metaphorical. William Wells Brown
remembered that slaves in the interstate trade, like those who had preceded
them in the Atlantic trade, traveled southward trapped in their own filth. Moses Roper remembered a woman who was given a dose of castor oil and salts
together, as much as she could take, and then sealed into a coffin-sized box
overnight. Other slaves were punished with meat. Jacob Stroyer remembered
a man named Jim being beaten for stealing a hog. A cured middling of a hog
was [then] tied around his neck. ... One morning when the overseer went to
his place of confinement to take him into the field, he found him dead, with the
large piece of meat hanging to his neck. More commonly, slaves had notches
cut into their ears or were branded like cows and pigs turned out to forage.
These practices were extensively documented in the descriptions that slaveholders themselves gave in the advertisements they placed for their runaway
slaves. John Brown remembered one such case, a runaway whose master had
branded his own initials, T.S., onto the fleshy part of his loins.36
Such tortures often took place in the slaughterhouses and smokehouses
where animal flesh was prepared for human consumption. William Wells
Brown recounted the story of Lewis, a Mississippi slave who had been taken
up at night while traveling to visit his wife. When Brown saw him, Lewis was
hanging between the heavens and earth ... tied up to a beam, with his toes
just touching the floor. When Brown himself was caught out on the road, he
was tied up in the smokehouse, and very severely whipped. Louis Hughes
remembered that his mistress followed his wife into the smokehouse, where
she had been sent to cut meat. I am tempted to take that knife from you, Ma
tilda, she threatened, and cut you in two. When he was suspected of kidnap
ping a white girl, Charles Ball was directed to go down to the cellar. There, I
was ordered to pull off my clothes, and lie down on my back. I was then bound
by the hands and feet, with strong cords, and extended full length between two
of the beams that supported the timbers of the building. ... The doctor ...
opened a small case of surgeons instruments and told me he was going to skin
me alive. On another occasion, when he had been caught cooking a stolen
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sheep, Ball was hung from a post and beaten. He described the flensing sensation of his skin being cut away by the lash: I felt my flesh quiver like that of
animals that have been slaughtered by the butcher and are flayed whilst yet
half alive. My face was bruised and my nose bled profusely, for in the madness
of agony, I had not been able to refrain from beating my head violently against
the post.37
Time and again, the rites of the abattoir were fulfilled in flame. The accounts published in Southern newspapers describe such events: the slaveholders screaming execrations or soliciting confessions from the edge of death; the
slaves pleading, shrieking, moaning, crying out for mercy; the final, spastic
motions and smoldering viscera. Charles Ball suggested the wanton intimacy
of one such corporeal reduction by terming it the roasting of Dan.38
These repulsive theatricalstheir frequency and their nauseating consistencysuggest something more than the isolated actions of a set of particularly depraved slaveholders. Slaveholders standard operating procedure belabored a set of structured associations of enslaved human beings with domestic
animalsspecifically, with cattle and pigs. Even as they were forcing their
slaves into physical and symbolic proximity with animals, they were doing so
with particular intensity at the junctures of the human and natural worlds
where those animals were converted into meat. Their spatial practice and symbolic action associated their slaves with carnalitywith flesh.
That association was variously interpreted into meaning. The critics of
slaveryin particular, the formerly enslaved men and women upon whose
testimony so much of what has been said above reliesused that association
to condemn the unnatural character of slaveholding social relations, under
which a human being could be bought and sold like a barnyard animal, or
flayed like a piece of meat. Some of the most notable defenders of slavery, on
the other hand, refashioned the socio-ecology of the Cotton Kingdom into
racial ideology which affirmed the association of their own being with the
higher-order sensations of satiety and taste, and their slaves with the lower-
order functions of digestion and elimination. They processed starvation into
racism.
mississippi planter and agricultural reformer M.W. Phillips, a regular

contributor to the American Cotton Planter, wrote about soil exhaustion and
crop rotation, and extolled the virtues of manuring and self-provisioning. In
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one of his most widely reproduced articles, Phillips condemned planters before whom everything has to bend [and] give way to large crops of cotton.
Through the land- and slave-driving economy of cut and cover, Phillips
argued, the slaveholding South was diminishing the span of its own history.
Not one-fourth of the [slave] children born are raised, and perhaps not over
two-thirds are born on the place, which under a different policy, might be expected. I am told of Negroes not over thirty-five to forty-five, who look
older than others at forty-five to fifty-five. Or, in a formulation that we will
consider again below: I favour good and fair work, yet not overworked so
asto tax the animal economy, that the woman cannot rear healthy children,
nor should the father be overtaxed, that his vital powers be at all infringed
upon. And, finally, the exhortation (complete with scapegoat): Brethren of
the South, we must change our policy: Overseers are not interested in raising children, or meat or improving land, or improving the productive qualities of seed, or
animals.39
According to Frederick Law Olmsted, an observer and opponent of slavery, Phillips was a benevolent planter. Unquestionably, he was an exemplar
of the ameliorating and reforming sort of planter whom we have come to call
the paternalist sort.40 Yet the proximity of human and animal, of children
and meat, in this slaveholding homily should by now lead us to suspect that its
paternalism was rooted in perversion. Seen in the light of the agro-animal
landscape that Phillips himself did so much to improve and reform, he seems a
spectacular example of the limits of a strictly ecological critique of the agro-
capitalist economy of the Mississippi Valley. Phillips imagined the cotton
economy in terms of flows of energy, nutrients, and fertility, all of which he
was convinced were being expended at an unsustainable rate. He used images
of human, animal, and mineral depletion to represent an onrushing ecological
catastrophe. But he did so within the incised terms allowed him by his culturethe culture of cotton. Phillips was arguing that the slaveholding South
needed to slow the rate at which it was converting human beings into cotton
plants. He wanted to adjust the metabolism of social anthropophagy.
Stop and think for a minute about what Phillipsthis benevolent planter,
this advice-dispensing oxymoronwas saying. A third of enslaved pregnancies were never carried to term. Child mortality was at 75 percent. The fact
that he was claiming other peoples children as his own, tallying them alongside his cattle and cotton, seems almost unremarkable in the light of these
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extraordinary
figures. Perhaps he exaggerated; his essay was a philippic, designed to spur his society to change. Perhaps the real figure for child mortality
was a mere 60 percent, or55, or50.41 It is hard to find any solace in estimating
downward by a third, or even a half. Count them out one by one: tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dead babies.
It was not exactly that slaveholders were indifferent to the reproduction of
their slaves. Certainly (and this was the point that Phillips was making), most
recognized that their own social reproduction, their own legacy to the future
as a class, as members of families, as fathersdepended on the biological
reproduction of the people they owned. As with other forms of property,
slaveholders used enslaved people to articulate the connections between white
households and generations. As a slaveholders saying had it, there were three
things necessary to beginning a family: a wife, a house, and a slave to work
init. Among slaveholders, commonplaces like that could be rubbed down to
crass essentials. I do think you and Sarah stand a chance to marry, wrote
Isaac Jarratt to his cousin, but I fear it is ... a bad chance without a show of
some Negroes and beauty, both of which is lacking with Sarah, and unfortunately for you, you lack the Negroes. Charles Ball was such a Negroas a
young man, he was deeded to his owners daughter, who was getting married.42
This was Phillipss point when he contributed what he must have thought was
an edifying little homily to the American Cotton Planter.
Years ago I met and knew Mr. A.B. He was an industrious, prudent, economical man. He had few Negroes and a tract of land. ... He always ...
took excellent care of his slavesreally exposing himself most. Twentyfive years ago he had probably the same number of Negroestwenty-
five. He now pays taxes on over one hundred. Another friend his own age
had, say twenty-five years ago, not under forty Negroes. He did for many
years make doubly as many bales per hand in all probability, pushing his
hands, not by any means brutallyno, indeed; but at this writing he has
not over seventy-five, and very many of them bright Negroes, or their
progeny. . . . And in 25 [years] C.D. confessed to me that our mutual
friend could buy him out twice over.
Phillips did not write to mourn the dead, nor did he seem especially interested
in looking into the paternity of the bright Negroes, who were apparently
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the fastest-growing segment of the population on his friends plantation. His

moral was that slaveholders should judge their crops not by the money scale
but by the interests of their heirs.43
This forcible joining of family histories in which the fortunes of the white
line depended on the furtherance of the black was, as Phillips suggested, a very
particular notion of economy, one that his italics invited his readers to linger
upon: an economy in which human semen and ovum were turned into capital.
For this was what Phillips was emphasizingthe capital formation that followed from the cultivation of a crop of slaves, the long-term view that has
somehow been allowed for so long to trade through the historiography under
an assumed name: paternalism. The word seems a patent fraud, a counterfeit worn threadbare by repeated gullible acceptances. Unless, of course, we
see this unfathering, unmothering misnamingthis father-ist imposture by
which the children born of one man and one woman came to be understood as
the property of others, by which paternity was replaced with paternalism,
by which the child of one line was bequeathed to the benefit of anotheras
precisely the point.
If asked, the slaves of Mr.A.B. might have remembered this economical
man in something like the following terms. When I arrived at the age of
twenty, my master told me I must marry Jane. Or: Soon after I was brought
home, the overseer compelled me to be married to a man I did not like. Or:
In July, Claypoole told us we must ... get married according to slaveryor
in other words, to enrich his plantation by a family of young slaves. The alternative of this was to be sold to a slave trader who was then in the neighborhood making up a gang. Or: I heard the Deacon tell one of the slave girls,
that he had bought her for a wife for his boy Stephen, which office he compelled her fully to perform against her will. This he enforced by a threat. At
first the poor girl neglected to do this, having no sort of affection for the
manbut she was finally forced to it by an application of the drivers lash.44
To hear the Deacon tell it, he was doing his slave a favor by buying him a
wife. This formulation reappears in a letter written by Louisiana slaveholder
A.G. Alsworth, who was thinking about trading an aging man for a little girl
and some cows: Unless I can get a hundred head and a good girl that will
make a wife for some of my boys in a few years I will not sell Spencer.45 One
would like to believe that there was some sort of grammatical error in that sen-
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tence, though there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Alsworth meant

to do anything other than exactly what he said.
We are accustomed to thinking of sexual violence in slavery as the forcible
genital penetration of enslaved women by white men. And there is no doubt
that rape was an endemic feature of slavery; indeed, the landscape of slavery
and labor was a matrix of sexual vulnerability. Being enslaved was not only a
condition characterized by vulnerability to sexual assaultit was always already a condition of sexual violation.46 One might begin with the children,
who until the age of twelve or thirteen were provided with only a short cottonshift to wear; their buttocks and genitalstheir penises, their pudenda
could scarcely be concealed as they matured.47 One might think about the
women, who had no stockings or undergarmentsonly pantlets made
of old clothes they tied around their knees. One might follow the argument
through the slave market, where women and men alike were stripped naked
and felt up in public. One might point to the easy familiarity with which slaveholders used words like breed and breeder when they spoke about their
slaves.48 At the end of the series of images of acute invigilation and chronic
overexposure, we might begin to understand the slaveholders mania for
matchmaking.
As slaveholders articulated their own family linestheir worldly legacies
through the reproduction of their slaves, they extended their dominion to
spaces inside the bodies of the women they owned. The racial subjection and
sexual exposure of enslaved women were related to each other not only consequentiallythe one leading to the otherbut also consubstantially. Yet not
even the idea of slavery as a condition that was, in and of itself, sexual violation quite captures what A.G. Alsworth was doing when he set about trading
for a little girl to make a wife for some of my boys. The verb make is in
itself interesting: Alsworth was turning to the slave market to make a wife,
aperson; he was proposing a sort of hybrid model of social reproduction in
which the commercial addition of a little girl to his slave force would allow
him to cross over to a biological mode of reproducing his labor force. And
then he was going to present hertraffic herto his boys. He was the provider, the paternalist. Indeed, one might say, it was his phallic power that was
to be violently exercised through the action of these men: the semen would be
theirsperhaps the pleasure or perhaps the agony, and the shame as well; but
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the offspring, like the boys themselves, would be his. This agnatic economy,
in which the son of one manthe seed of one manwas passed to that
of another, was likewise an aspect of the sexual stipulation of race in the
antebellum South. It was typical of the perverse puppeteering through which
slaveholders attempted to insinuate themselves into even the most intimate dimensions of the enslaved human being.
Of course, slaveholders often did much more than that: they often used the
women they owned to convert their own semen into capital. Perhaps used is
too rational a word to describe the way the overseer Epps would gesticulate at
the edge of the field for Patsey to come and serve him; or the way Mr.Cook
would call down the stairs for Louisa Picquet to come up and bring him a
drink; or the way the infamous Dr.Norcom would pursue the teenaged Harriet Jacobs through his house, hiding behind the doorjamb waiting for her to
come through so he could tell her about the things he wanted to do to her,
whisper them in her ear.49 Perhaps there was no intentioned rationality, no
money scale, in this wild zone of assaultive revels, in the promiscuous expression of slaveholding power. Perhaps the children born of these unions seemed
to slaveholder fathers less thought-through consequences than accidental
by-products of their pleasures. In some casesthough many fewer than one
might be led to believe on a walking tour of New Orleanss French Quarter
their lives were diverted from the course which converted violence into plea
sure and thence into capital, and they were set free. In others, they were put
to work as slaves in the households of their father-owners (paternalism again).
In still others, they were soldconverted to cash in accordance with the best
practices of nineteenth-century capitalist ecology: the material remainder of
consumption committed to the further augmentation of capital.
Slaveholders not only diverted enslaved family lines to the service of their
own social reproduction and capital formation; they also stole mothers milk.
Asked about the opening passages of her autobiography, Louisa Picquet responded: When mother first went to Georgia she was a nurse, and suckled
Madame Cooks child with me. Afterward, she was a cook. I was a nurse. I always had plenty to do. Fast as one child would be walkin, then I would have
another one to nurse. Asked about the family of her owners, she gave virtually the same answer, I could not tell how many children [they had]; they had
a lot of them. I know I been nursin all my life up to that time. These families
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were consubstantiated both in the bright colored children who went unacknowledged or were sold away, and in the milk that nourished children too
young to know that they owned the breast from which they hungrily sucked.
This, too, was paternalism, or at least could be made to seem that way. William Green remembered that his mother pleaded with his owner to sell Green
in the neighborhood, rather than to a New Orleans slave trader, and that the
slaveholder eventually relented a little, having some little regard for her, she
having nursed him as a child.50
All of these ways of alienating the capacities of enslaved human beings
the diversion of semen, ovum, and lactationthat they might be realized in
the augmentation of enslaving families were consonant with the ideal vision
expressed by the Mississippi reformer M.W. Phillips. What disturbed Phillips,
what struck him as wasteful and shortsighted, was not the serial conversion of
human beings into lineal holdings, or the membrane of savage intimacy that
joined families like his own to those toiling in their parlors, their pantries, and
their fields. What disturbed Phillips were dead babies, perhaps even the sound
of them dying as he passed along the pathways and roads that lined his neighbors fields.
Enslaved children were often raised (when they survived) at the margins of
the cotton crop. According to reformers like Phillips, their owners followed
the same model in raising a crop of slaves that they did in raising a crop of
cotton: seed was prodigally spreadbroadcast, in the original sense of the
phrase; what grew to fruition was harvested and tallied as gain on the money
scale. What could not survive was plowed back into the earth. Cotton planters, according to Phillips, were both deeply interested in the reproduction of
their labor force in the aggregate and astonishingly indifferent to the survival
of any given (future) laborerany given person. The standard measure of
the Cotton Kingdom, the trinomial algebra of bales per hand per acre, allowed
little margin for women to nurse their children. Together with elderly slaves,
nursing mothers and children were sometimes termed the trash gang. Nursing mothersor sucklers, as slaveholders termed themwere conventionally designated as half-hands. Children over the age of ten were rated as
quarter-hands. Before that age, according to the standard measure, the value
of enslaved children was purely speculative: they were hypothetical. As the
slave trader J. W. Boazman put it, Servants are less valuable with children
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than without. William Wells Brown remembered that Boazmans colleague in

the slave market, a trader named Walker, simply gave away an infant of four
or five weeks as he traveled southward with his slaves. He was tired of listening to the noise.51
The piteous sound of an unknowing child crying out for comfort was as
much an aspect of the landscape of the Cotton Kingdom as the lowing of
stock, the yammering of the overseer, or the hooves of the horse of a benevolent man like Phillips striking the road in passing. Louis Hughes remembered that an old woman was left in charge of the babies for most of the day,
but that nursing mothers were allowed to go in three times a day to breastfeed.
Sometimes, he added, the little things would seem starved. ... The cries of
these little ones, who were cut off almost entirely from motherly care and protection, were heart-rending. Breast milk, he added, was soon replaced with
pot liquor, which deranged their stomachs. After such a meal, one little boy
on the place was taken with cramp colic, in a few minutes his stomach was
swollen as tight and hard as a balloon, and his teeth clenched. Kate Pickard
likewise recalled the sound of infants crying after their mothers returned to
the fields at the end of a few minutes nursingbut the cotton must be
picked, she ruefully remembered. According to Charles Balls memoirs,
The mothers laid their children at the side of the fence, or under the shade of
the cotton plants, whilst they were at work; and when the rest of us went to get
water, they would go to give suck to their children, requesting someone to
bring them water in gourds. Children who were brought out into the fields
were often tied to keep them from crawling away, according to Henry Bibb.
Those women who had sucking children, remembered Moses Grandy, suf
fered much from their breasts becoming full of milk.52
The cotton must be picked. Their breasts becoming full of milk. Again, we
come to the point at which the human being was tailored to the culture of cottonat which the conversion of milk into life was diverted by the conversion
of labor into income and thence, prodigally, into capital. That a man like Phillips might see his way clear to a world in which milk itself might be more effi
ciently converted into capital should no more lead us to confuse agricultural
reform with paternalism than it should be allowed to dampen the insistent
cries of the child expiring at the end of the row. Motherhood and mourning
were inseparable in this economy. Vina Still remembered her children thus:
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She had, during the autumn of 1833, buried a baby a week old; and little Silas,
after remaining with her just one year, was borne away to the hill-side in August, 1836. Again in March, 1840, a little daughter, five months old, was strangled by the croup. In July, 1841, another little boy was welcomed to their humble cabin. They called him Bernard, and for three years he remained the pet of
all the little household. Then he was seized with spasmsand soon his merry
voice was hushed, and his little form grew cold and stiff in death. Louis
Hughes watched his twins grow puny and sickly before they finally died
because the milk the mother nursed to them was so heated by her constant
and excessive labors as to be unwholesome. Henry Bibb dug a grave and buried his child without even a box to put it in.53 Under the dominion of cotton,
reproduction (childbearing, motherhood, fatherhood) was labor (care given,
love spent) in the service of capital: the conversion of living humanity into
dead labor. One has to wonder if planters ever reworked the connection that
Phillips made between their wasting fields and their wasting people into a
seemingly obvious conclusion: that the bones of these dead babies might be
harvested from their humble graves and used to catalyze the fertility of the
earth into cotton plants.54
when a benevolent planter like M.W. Phillips came in from the fields, he
entered a different sort of world. There was the heavy sweetness of oleander
and hyacinth in the air. The sharp solidity of boxwood. Babys Breath, Bachelors Button, and Johnny-jump-up blooming in the garden, flowering vines
hanging from their frames. The rustling of the oaks lining the drive. The plea
sures of the porch as the sun set. The children, the correspondence, the news
paper, the Bible, stories and sermons read aloud. A cool drink and gentle
breeze. The changing of the seasons. The muted sounds of the slaves in the
field. Dinner coming to the table: turtle soup, sugar-cured hams, doughy biscuits, salty greens, almond pudding, fresh strawberries, rich red wine. We had
so many courses, wrote the slaveholder Miriam Hilliard on March29, 1850,
that Mr.H. and Brother Geo. rather rebelledturned up their sleeve cuffs
and declared they would not eat another mouthful.55 A comical figurative
overturning: pleasure to the point of pain, privilege to the point of rebellion,
the agony of the world recomposed into magnificent sensory tribute. These
pleasures were the direct experience of masterywhat it felt like. Even more
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than that, they were masterys empirical proof, its exemplification. We can
trace the process by which the material results of slave-based production were
translated into the ideological justification for that production in the writings
of the Louisiana slave doctor and racial theorist Samuel Cartwright.
For Cartwright, there were physiological laws governing [the] economyof slavery, laws that could be discovered through observation and experimentation: the material life of plantation slavery was a surface manifestation of purposes deeper than even the planters own. As he tacked between the
world as he encountered it and the belief that the world was as it should be
between is and oughtCartwright paid particular attention to the senses.
Describing those he variously termed the Negroes, the Nigritians, and
the Prognathous Species of Mankind, Cartwright framed his discussion of
racial difference not simply around the question of colorvisuallybut with
reference to sound, smell, taste, and touch. All the[ir] senses are more acute,
but less delicate and discriminating than the white mans, he wrote. He has a
good ear for melody but not for harmony, a keen taste and relish for food but
less discriminating between different kinds of esculent substances than the
Caucasian. . . . The Negro approximates the lower animals in his sense of
smell, and can detect snakes in that sense alone. For Cartwright, Negroes
were distinguished by their powers of digestion: they prefer the fattest pork
to the lean, and began smoking, chewing tobacco, and drinking alcohol with
none of the revulsion which whites had to overcome in order to enjoy these
baser pleasures. By their excrement: The secretions and exertions [are] copious, excepting the urine, which is rather scant. By their smell: The skin of a
happy, healthy Negro is not only blacker and more oily than an unhappy, unhealthy one, but emits the strongest odor when the body is warmed by exercise
and the soul is filled with the most pleasurable emotions. In the dance called
patting juber, the odor emitted from the men, intoxicated with pleasure, is often
so powerful as to throw the Negro women into paroxysms of unconscious,
vulgo hysterics. One can almost see him making his rounds with a small notebook, a stubby pencil, and a quizzical looksniffing their oleaginous cooking
and stuffy cabins, estimating the bulk of their promiscuous turds, nodding
sagely while watching them void their bladders, standing alone in the dark,
listening to their sex.56
Cartwright is an easy man to dislike; his smutty knowingness seems almost
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infantile. Yet he was something more than a useful idiot: he was an intellectual
superstar. The quotations above come from essays that were reprinted in E.N.
Elliots Cotton Is King, an 1860 summa theologica of pro-slavery thought. Cartwrights genius lay in his ability to make his direct experience of the plantation
seem to be more than something in and of itself. He could interpret fatty meat
boiled in water, the smell of sweating slaves, a fantasy of their sex not as social
history or economic history or political history, but as natural history: as race.
And for Cartwright, the material life of the Cotton Kingdom was proof
enough of its own necessity. Much of his analysis emerged from a problematic
of labor discipline: it reworked enslaved resistance, exhaustion, starvation into
Negro-ness. Cartwright noted the unwillingness of slaves to work without being hectored, goaded, or beaten, and attributed it to biophysical inability
defective haematosis. Cartwrights racial theory was centrally concerned
with respiration. He watched slaves sleeping, and noted: Negroes glory in a
close, hot atmosphere; they instinctively cover their heads and faces with a
blanket at night, and prefer laying with their heads to the fire, instead of their
feet. He took readings of the lung capacity of several small children with a
device he called a spirometer. The result is that the expansibility of the
lungs is considerably less in the black than the white race of similar size, age,
and habit. A white boy expelled from his lungs a larger volume of air than
a Negro half a head taller and three inches larger around the chest. Cartwrights observations led him to the conclusion that Negroes consume less
oxygen than the white race, a fact that, in addition to his experiments, was
proven by their motions being proverbially much slower, and their want of
muscular and mental activitythat is, by their failure to work as hard or as
well as white people wanted them to.57
It was thus physiology that decreed slavery (rather than the condition of
enslavement that surfaced in physiological signs). Like an animal in a state
of hibernation, Cartwright wrote, waiting for the external aid of spring to
warm it into life and power, so does the Negro continue to doze out a vegeto-
animal existence in the wilderness, unable to extricate himself therefromhis
own will being too feeble to call forth the requisite muscular exertion. For
that, Nature had provided the white man, and his exaggerated will, more
than he has use for; because it frequently drives his own muscles beyond their
physical capacity for endurance. Cartwright expanded for several pages upon
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the will, a passage so extraordinary and so revealing that it is worth quoting

at length:
A man possessing a knowledge of the Negro character can govern an
hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand of the prognathous race by his will
alone, easier than one ignorant of that character can govern a single individual of that race by the whip or a club. However disinclined to labor
the Negroes may be, they cannot help themselves; they are obliged to
move and exercise their muscles when the white man, acquainted with
their character, wills that they should do so. ... No other compulsion is
necessary to make them perform their daily tasks than his will be done. It
is not the whip, as many suppose, which calls forth those muscular exertions, the result of which is sugar, cotton, breadstuffs, rice, and tobacco.
These are the products of the white mans will, acting through the muscles of the prognathous race of our Southern states. If that will were
withdrawn, and the plantations handed over as gracious gifts to the laborers, agricultural labor would cease for want of the spiritual power
called the will, to move those machinesthe muscles. ... The same ordinance which keeps the spheres in their orbits and holds the satellites in
subordination to the planets, is the ordinance that subjects the Negro race
to the empire of the white mans will. From that ordinance the snake derives its power to charm the bird, and the magician his power to amuse
the curious, to astonish the vulgar, and to confound the wisdom of the
wise. Under that ordinance, our four millions of Negroes are as unalterably bound to obey the white mans will, as the four satellites of Jupiter
the superior magnetism of that planet.58
Cartwright was not specific about the organic location of the will, but his
description of enslaved muscles and nerves animated by slaveholding purpose
recalls the sort of visual power emphasized in the agricultural periodicals. Indeed, substituting the word oversight, supervision, or management for
Cartwrights will would render the passage indistinguishable from much of
what was printed in the American Cotton Planter or the Cotton Planters Manual.
But there was more to it than that: Cartwright was talking about an activist,
dominative, violent sort of willa field of force. Cartwrights racial meta
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physics took the structured slaveholding power of the Cotton Kingdomthe

sight lines, the hungering landscape, the horses and dogsand raised it to a
higher order of explanation, a slaveholding apotheosis.
The same prolific logic which allowed Cartwright to generalize from his
spying, turd sorting, and breath capturing to first principles of human development, and to amplify his observation of the disciplinary ecology of the
plantation into a universalizing account of the sources of slaveholding power,
also characterized his vision of world history. His observations, he wrote,
showed that there exists an intimate connection between the amount of oxygen consumed in the lungs and the phenomenon of body and mind. They point
to a people whose respiratory apparatus is so defective, that they have not suf
ficient industry and mental energy to provide for themselves. Slavery, that is
to say, was a global-racial-historical necessity, at least if Negroes were to
survive: The African will starve rather than engage in a regular system of
agricultural labor, unless impelled by the stronger will of the white man. And
on such truths rested the Republic: The framers ... built the Constitution
upon the basis of natural distinctions or physical differences in the two races
comprising the American population. A very important difference between the
two will be found in the greater amount of oxygen consumed by the one than
the other. ... It is to anatomy and physiology we should look when vindicating the liberty of human nature, to see that its dignity and best interest be preserved.59 Cartwrights inductive racism took him from the lethargy of exhausted, starving, resistant slaves in the field to the certainties of physiology to
the bedrock truths of human history: slavery was necessaryindeed, it was
the stuff of liberty. The plantation was the motor of human history.
Collected along with Cartwrights essays in Cotton Is King were the writings of Chancellor Harper of South Carolina. Harper began from the premise
that the institution of slavery is the principal cause of civilization. He based
that statement on a remarkable reworking of the labor theory of value. His
formulation went roughly as follows: (1)Labor is pain; (2)Man is averse to
pain; (3)He will not [willingly] labor beyond what is absolutely necessary to
maintain his existence; (4)The coercion of slavery alone is adequate to form
man to habits of labor. Without it, there can be no accumulation of property,
no providence for the future, no tastes for elegancies, which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization.60 For Harper, civilization was surplus
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the margin that could be extracted from laboring humanity beyond what was
necessary to the bare reproduction of the population. And that surplus was to
be measured sensually: in the particular admixture of cultivated sensation and
intellectual capacity which the Enlightenment termed sensibility.61
To Harpers mind, a plantation was a social expression of the indwelling
truths of human sensuality. The anatomist and physiologist, he wrote, tell
... that the races differ in every bone and muscle, and in the proportion of
brain and nerves. And in the diminished sensibilities of the African Negroes lay the key to understanding the purposes of history: In general their
capacity is very limited, and their feelings animal and coarsefitting them peculiarly to discharge the lower, and merely mechanical offices of society. We
will have ample time to reflect on the star turn taken by this vision of slavery
and world historyslavery as world historyin the decade before the Civil
War. For now, it is important to think in the other direction: about the earthly
predicate of this globalist vision of race-as-sensation, about the daily sensuous
division of the plantation worldhigher and lower, finer and coarser,
smoother and rougher, harmony and melody, fragrance and stench, clean and
contaminated, purity and dangerin which it was rooted. How can you
compare the pleasures resulting from the exercise of the understanding, the
taste and the imagination, with the animal enjoyments of the sensesthe
gratification derived from a fine poem with that from a rich banquet? How are
we to weigh the pains and enjoyments of one man highly cultivated and of
great sensibility, against those of many men of blunter capacities for enjoyment or suffering?62 Harpers was a metaphysics of the drawing room, the
site where the surplus he claimed for himself was experienced in the delightful
fancies of his own mind, fancies which had the remarkable effect of being selfjustifying on both a rhetorical and an ontological level. The fact that he had
the time and ability to think about penning a justification of racial slavery was,
in and of itself, a justification of racial slavery.
Given his emphasis on the intellectual, the spiritual, and the immaterial
benefits of slavery, it comes as a bit of a surprise that Harper forthrightly
perhaps brazenly would be a better wordturned his attention to the question of slaveholding rapists. But there it is: I do not hesitate to say that the
intercourse which takes place with enslaved females is less depraving in its effects than when it is carried on with females of their own caste. In the first
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place, as like attracts like, that which is unlike repels; and though the strength
of passion be sufficient to overcome the repulsion the attraction is less. He
feels that he is connecting himself with one of an inferior and servile caste, and
that there is something of degradation in the act. As for the women upon
which these reluctant rapists so frequently forced themselves: I will say that if
they are to be exposed to the evil, it is a mercy that the sensibility to it should
be so blunted.63 For Harper, instances of interracial sex were statistically evident but existentially insignificant. On the one hand, white men were so distanced from the act by their higher nature that it was hard to say they were ac
tually doing it in the first place; on the other, black women were so limited
intheir capacity to experience feeling that it was hard to say the sexual acts
mattered at all. Harper wrote as if his own filthiness would leave no trace upon
the page.
So we might imagine Harper in his drawing room/sensibility sanctuary,
composing an essay titled Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics, having a
marginally debasing but nevertheless pleasurable fantasy of sexual impunity
(is this image unfair?), holding his Bible in his other hand. At the core of
Harpers reworking of the plantation into Order was his reading of the Bible,
and in particular some passages on the relations of human beings and animals:
Are these regions of fertility to be abandoned at once and forever to the alligator and the tortoisewith here and there perhaps a miserable, shivering,
crouching free black savage? Does not the finger of heaven itself seem to point
to a race of men ... and indicate that we should avail ourselves of these in ful
filling the first great command to subdue and replenish the earth? That was an
allusion to Genesis1:28. He also quoted it elsewhere in the same essay: Ye
shall have dominion over the beasts of the field, and over the fowls of the air.
And then, immediately following, Leviticus 25:44: Both the bond-men and
bond-maids which thou shall have, shall be of the heathen among you. Of
them shall you buy bond-men and bond-maids. And right after that, Leviticus, 25:45: Moreover of the children of strangers that do sojourn among you,
of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begot
in your land, and then they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as
an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them by possession. They
shall be your bond-men forever.64 For Harper, the animal and human orders
of the universe were of a piece. The agricultural order that surrounded him as
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he wroteplant, animal, and human being, all arrayed in productive tribute

was a local instance of Gods larger purpose: the plantation as Providence.
At various points in his essay, Harper advanced through analogies between
enslaved human beings and domesticated animalsanalogies that specified
and substantiated his understanding of the relationship between dominion and
mastery. He proposed that slaveholders property interest in their slaves was
effective protection against excessive punishment: Who but a driveling fanatic has thought of the necessity of protecting domestic animals from the
cruelty of their owners? ... Is it not natural that a man should be attached to
that which is his own, and which has contributed to his convenience, his enjoyment, or his vanity? This is felt even toward animals and inanimate objects.
He argued that a concerted effort should be made to bring up slaves in ignorance: Would you do a benefit to the horse or the ox, by giving him a cultivated understanding or fine feelings? He suggested that it should be a generally accepted principal that some were suited by Nature for enslavement and
some for mastery: And why should it not be so? We have among domestic
animals infinite varieties, distinguished by various degrees of sagacity, courage, strength, swiftness, and other qualities. ... It is most important that these
varieties should be preserved, and that each should be applied to the purposes
for which it is best adapted. No philo-zoost, I believe, has suggested it as desirable that these varieties should be melted down into one equal, undistinguished
race of curs or road horses. He concluded, against all available evidence, that
the idea of a revolution or political movement led by the enslaved was a historical impossibility: The angry ape will still play fantastic tricks, and put in
motion machinery, the action of which he no more comprehends or foresees
than he comprehends the mysteries of infinity. The insect that is borne upon
the current will fancy that he directs its course.65
On one level, all of this traffic between the animal and the human, between
dominion and mastery, between Genesis and Leviticus was to be expected.
Harper was an organic intellectual drawing upon the commonsense terms of
an agricultural elite; of course, he used images drawn from agriculture and
animal husbandry to back his arguments with all of the authority of the material world as witness. Indeed, that is precisely the point. The agricultural order
of the landscape, the standing order of slavery, the natural order of the races,
and the divine order of earthly dominion were not separable for a man like
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Harper; they were fractal aspects of one another. His eschatology was rooted
in his ecology.
Historians have generally concluded that the writings of men like Harper
dehumanize African-American slaves. This formulation has the virtue of
signaling their repudiation of Harpers views, and of reasserting a normative
account of humanity as the standard of historical ethics: these are not the sort
of things that human beings should be allowed to say about one another. Yet a
troubling problem remains. Harper, Cartwright, and indeed countless other
slaveholders and racists in the history of the world were fully able to do what
they did and say what they said, even as they believed and argued that their
victims were human. Imagining that perpetrators must dehumanize their
victims in order to justify their actions, inserting a normative version of humanity into a conversation about the justification of historical violence, lets
themand usoff the hook. History suggests again and again that this is
how human beings treat one another. Even as he continually referred to domestic animals in his essay on slavery, Harper always did so by analogy. He did
not say blacks were animals; he said they were like animals. Indeed, he was
quite clear in affirming his belief that slaves were human beings, members
of a cognate race.66 There was a religious reason for his malign precision: to
argue otherwise would be to question the biblical account of the origins of
mankind in the coupling of one man and one woman in the Garden of Eden.67
But there is little evidence to suggest that Harper and his class felt any conscious or unconscious need to change their behavior in light of any concern
for their common humanity with their slaves. Indeed, it seems quite clear that
no small measure of the reliance they placed on their laboring slavesto nurse
their own children, bring in the cows, sow the cotton, select the seeds, weigh
the bales, cook the mealssignaled their reliance upon their slaves humanity. Likewise the satisfaction that they got from violencethreatening, separating, torturing, degrading, rapingdepended on the fact that their victims
were human beings capable of registering slaveholding power in their pain,
terror, grief, submission, and even resistance.
A better way to think about slavery might be as a concerted effort to dis-
humanize enslaved people. Slaveholders were fully cognizant of slaves humanityindeed, they were completely dependent upon it. But they continually attempted to conscriptsimplify, channel, limit, and controlthe forms
208
that humanity could take in slavery. The racial ideology of Harper and Cartwright was the intellectual conjugation of the daily practice of the plantations
they were defending: human beings, animals, and plants forcibly reduced to
limited aspects of themselves, and then deployed in concert to further slaveholding dominion. In the 1830s, this plantation-based version of human his
tory transformed the Mississippi Valley into the Cotton Kingdom. By the
1850s, it was ready to go global.
1. Toussaint LOuverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution. The successful overthrow of one of
the richest plantation economies in the Americas by its erstwhile slaves made the Mississippi
Valley less valuable to France, and thus facilitated the Louisiana Purchase. The revolution in
Haiti haunted Valley slaveholders all the way up until the Civil War. Library of Congress.
2. Thomas Jefferson. The vast territory of Louisiana became part of the United States during
Jeffersons presidency. In some moments, Jefferson imaged the Mississippi Valley as an empire
for liberty, populated by smallholding, self-sufficient, white yeomen farmers. In others, he
hoped it would serve as a dumping ground across which the nations potentially insurrectionary
black population might be diffused. Library of Congress.
3. Andrew Jackson. First as a general in the U.S. Army and later as the president, Jackson fought
wars against European empires in the Americas and against the Native American nations of the
Mississippi Valley. By creating a cordon sanitaire along the Gulf Coast, he hoped to protect the
United States from the specter of an alliance between an invading army and the Africans, African Americans, and Indians living within the expanding boundary of the United States. Print
Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public
Library.
4. Land Office map of Mississippi. This map of Mississippi from 1837 shows the baseline of the
surveys made by the General Land Office. By laying a grid across the landscape, the surveyors
hoped to make the land measurable, manageable, and salable. As the blank spots and overlapping quadrants in the northwest corner of the map attest, the material work of surveying sometimes made creating an accurate abstract outline of the land impossible. Authors collection.
5. Enslaved man being inspected for sale. Land in the Mississippi Valley was made vastly more
valuable by slaves. In the years 18201860, more than a million enslaved people were moved
through an interstate slave trade, which underwrote the resurgence of American slavery in
theemerging Cotton Kingdom and caused inestimable suffering for African Americans. MidManhattan Picture Collection, New York Public Library.
6. John Murrell. This image depicts Murrell enticing a slave by offering him the first sip from
a shared bottle. This signal of boundary-crossing intimacy figured prominently in the slave revolt scare that convulsed Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835. Reproduced from H.R. Howard,
comp., The History of Virgil A. Stewart (New York: Harper, 1836).
8. Birds-eye view of New Orleans. The port of New Orleans was the largest in the South.
Every year, the city exported millions of pounds of cotton that fed the global economy of the
nineteenth century, and imported millions of dollars of credit that created liquidity in the Mississippi Valley and in the United States as a whole. Both the cotton trade and the credit market
were founded upon the labor and assigned value of enslaved people. Print Collection, Miriam
and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library.
7. Mississippi River plantation map. Deep plantations with narrow frontages were designed to
maximize the number of planters who could have direct access to the Mississippi River (and thus
to markets). Library of Congress.
9. Mississippi River channel map. The

sinuous Mississippi changed course so
often that maps of it were outdated
almost as soon as they were published.
The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal
Map Division, New York Public Library.
10. Slaves loading cotton at night. This stylized image, from James Buckinghams book The
Slave States of America, depicts enslaved people loading cotton onto a steamboat by torchlight.
It is characteristic of the representation of slavery in the Mississippi Valley as sublimebeautiful, awesome, terrifying, incomprehensible. Widener Library, Harvard University.
11. Steamboat Mayflower. As the Mississippi Valley economy grew and the river became crowded
with boats, steamboat owners competed for passengers by making their boats into ever more
elaborate floating palaces. This image of the Mayflower, a boat that ran between St.Louis and
New Orleans, is from 1855. Library of Congress.
12. Steamboat race. A reputation for speed was an invaluable asset in the competitive steamboat
business, and steamboat races were a regular feature of life on the Mississippi. Library of Congress.
13. Explosion of the Ben Sherrod. Mississippi steamboats were powered by high-pressure steam
engines, a cheaper, dirtier, more dangerous technology than was used in similar boats elsewhere
in the world. When steamboat owners competed for business by running their boats harder, hotter, and longer, those boats were more likely to (and often did) explode. Kress Collection of
Business and Economics, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School.
14. George Devol. Steamboats,

which brought strangers into
close quarters for long periods of
time, were notorious for both
their social life and its attendant
dangers. George Devol was the
self-proclaimed king of the Mississippi riverboat gamblers. Library of Congress.
15. Cotton gin. The cotton gin removed the seeds tangled in the fibers of short-staple cotton,
such as the Petit Gulf cotton that came to be planted all over the Mississippi Valley. It enabled
growers to make money from a plant genetically adapted to the ecology of the Mississippi Valley, and, in so doing, gave new life to slavery in the United States. Copyright Bettmann/
CORBIS.
16. Cotton field. The majority of the enslaved people in the Mississippi Valley spent most of
their waking hours tending to cotton: planting, picking, ginning, packing, shipping. Their stolen labor underwrote the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century and much of U.S. economic development. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/Photographs and Prints
Division, New York Public Library.
17. Cotton press. Once picked, cotton was packed into bales of approximately 400 pounds. Samples were cut from the bales and distributed to potential buyers. Cotton planters remained liable
for damage to their cotton for weeks after it was out of their control. Library of Congress.
18. Mississippi steamboat packed with cotton. Steamboats transported millions of pounds of
cotton up and down the Valley to New Orleans, where it was marketed and transshipped to the
industrial centers of the Atlantic. Eighty-five percent of the cotton produced in the United
States was shipped to Great Britain. Courtesy of Glen C. Cangelosi, M.D.
19. Caretaker and child, slave and owner. This extraordinary image from the Arkansas side of
the river captures the interchange of dominance and dependence that characterized slaveholding life, as well as the proximity of intimacy, caretaking, and terror that defined the lives of the
enslaved. Library of Congress.
20. The carceral landscape. This image of enslaved people at work emphasizes both the visual
power of the overseer and the wooded refuge at the edge of the fields. The act of fleeing into the
woods transformed the landscape from one in which power was defined by sight into one de
fined by sound. Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection, New York Public Library.
21. William Wells Brown. Brown was the enslaved steward of a Mississippi River slave trader,
before escaping slavery and writing what is generally acknowledged to be the first novel published by an African American. The richly illustrated frontispiece from the Dutch-language edition of his narrative portrays various events from his time as a slave. When slaves escaped into
the woods and swamps surrounding the cotton fields, slaveholders often used specially trained
dogs to hunt them down. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/Manuscripts, Archives
and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.
22. Solomon Northup. Enticed from New York to Washington, kidnapped, and sold as a slave,
Solomon Northup spent twelve years as a slave in Louisiana. His narrative provides one of the
best accounts of the demands that cotton cultivation made upon enslaved people. Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture/Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York
Public Library.
23. John Brown. Sold as a child in the slave market, where he was priced by the pound, John
Brown was later stolen by a man he believed to be an associate of the notorious Mississippi
Valley bandit John Murrell. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/Manuscripts, Archives
and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.
24. DeBows Mississippi map. Published as a later appendix to the Census of 1850, under the
guidance of pro-slavery Louisiana editor and census director James D. B. DeBow, this map
emphasizes the geographic reach and centrality of the Mississippi Valley. U.S. Census Bureau.
25. Military map. This map from around 1850 portrays the maritime space of the Gulf of Mexico as an integral aspect of the strategic and economic space of the United States. Cuba and Nicaragua were seen by many supporters of slavery as key to ensuring the continuing prosperity
of the Mississippi Valley, as well as the global expansion of the slaveholders dominion. Authors
collection.
26. Narciso Lpez. The expatriate Lpez led several invasions of Cuba from the United States,
the last from New Orleans in 1851. After his death, arguments over his reputation served as a
way to repair the idea that American empire in the Caribbean was somehow necessary and inevitable in the face of the evident failings of American imperialists. Library of Congress.
27. William Walker, the Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny. The mercenary Walker became the
president of Nicaragua in 1856. Walker reopened the Atlantic slave trade to Nicaragua and tried
to promote Nicaragua as a destination for nonslaveholding white men looking to become masters. Library of Congress.
8
The Carceral Landscape
A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how
yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change place, and,
handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Thou hast seen a farmers
dog bark at a beggar? ... And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst
behold the great image of authority; a dogs obeyd in office.
Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 6
the f irst experience Moses Grandy had of freedom came to him in a

dream. I felt myself so light, I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I
was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers.1 The image of people
who could fly is a common one in African-American history, one commonly
understood as a sign of the vital presence of the Africanity of enslaved culture
in the Americas.2 Yet there is even more to the image than that; to understand
what it could be, we might begin with birds.
As Solomon Northup remembered them from the days when he was toiling
as a slave in Louisiana, the birds singing in the trees seemed happy. He
envied them, ... wished for wings like them, that I might cleave the air. Like
Northup, Chancellor Harper used birds to map the intersection of slavery, surveillance, and resistance, when he worried that ideas of resistance calculate[d]
to madden and excite the slaves continually reach them, through a thousand
channels which we cannot detect, as if carried by the birds of the air. The image seems conventional enough, indeed appearing so frequently that we might
regard it as encoding a sort of commonsense understanding of the character
210
of enslavement.3 Following the flight of the birds, we might say that Grandys
dream represented freedom as a bodily practicetranscending of the landscape of slavery, movement and expression unconstrained by the patterned
ecology of slaveholding agro-capitalism. And recognizing that, we must likewise recognize its opposite: enslavement was a material and spatial condition,
as much as an economic and legal one.
One dimension of this sort of materiality is hinted at by an entry Alonzo
Snyder made in his plantation record in January 1853: 4 hands getting six
thousand feet of lumber up the bank. Despite its brevity, this entry is packed
with historical subtext. Snyders cotton had been harvested, and although several of his slaves were still ginning and packing his final crop, he was far
enough through the season that he could turn his slaves to other labor. Indeed,
the entry occurs in a portion of the book that Snyder used to record the money
he made by hiring his slaves out during the slow periods of the cotton seasonmostly for construction work, such as building scaffolding, raising rafters, hauling lumber. At the end of the year, Snyder tallied his profits from
their hire, alongside the income from their cotton. This line of his plantation
record tells us a story about exploitation and abstraction, about how human
capacities were rendered as capital, about capitalism and slavery.4 But it also
tells us something else, starting with the numeral4: four slaves working together.
Much of the work that slaves did was by its nature cooperative. The cooperative character of felling trees, running straight rows, and drilling holes for
other slaves to drop seeds into is obvious enough. Likewise, the work at the
end of the season: ginning, packing, and hauling cotton were all tasks that required the coordination of intention and action among slaves. But even the
seemingly most individualized tasksthose for which slaves were held individually responsible at the end of every daycould be the occasion of cooperation. As Charles Ball remembered, It is the business of the picker to take
all the cotton, from each of the rows, as far as the lines of the rows or hills. In
this way he picks half the cotton from each of the rows, and the pickers who
come on his right and left take the remainder from the opposite sides of the
rows. Slave labor would have been impossible without a continual process
of cooperative awareness: watching, evaluating, recalibrating, responding.
Childcare, as well, was cooperative. Young children were often left in the care
211
of a designated minder when their mothers went into the fields. Slave communities were bound together by affective relations that crisscrossed generations
and lines of descent. Extend the list: from the women who aided one another
in childbirth to those who prepared bodies for the grave, from those who
washed and mended the slaves clothes to those who brought food and water
to the fields at midday. In daily practice, the extraction of labor was intertwined with and interrupted by the comfort the enslaved offered one another
as they worked. Moses Grandy provided a glimpse of the way that cooperative
labor could be inflected with other imperatives: If a man have a wife in the
same field with himself, he chooses a row by the side of hers, that with extreme
labor he may if possible help her.5
Slaves connections to one another, the everyday ties that added up to the
historical formation scholars have termed the slave community, were often
expressed in material form.6 Charles Ball remembered that the slaves with
whom he worked articulated their connections to one another through food.
When they came in from the cotton field to grind their corn in the dark, they
sorted themselves into a hierarchy of need: The woman who was the mother
of the three small children was permitted to grind her allowance of corn first,
and after her came the old man, and the others in succession. Later, Ball was
sold through the slave trade and placed in a cabin with a couple and their young
children. In his memoirs, he recalled one particular night:
Dinah (the name of the woman who was at the head of our family) produced at supper a black jug, containing molasses, and gave me some of
the molasses for my supper. I felt grateful to Dinah for this act of kindness, as I well knew that her children regarded molasses as the greatest of
human luxuries, and that she was depriving them of their highest enjoyment to afford me the means of making a gourd full of molasses and water. I therefore proposed to her husband, whose name was Nero, that
whilst I should remain a member of the family, I would contribute as
much towards its support as Nero himself.
Jacob Stroyer recalled, in an image that conveys both the frequency of such
small-scale communalism and its fragility, that one who was accustomed to
the way in which the slaves lived in their cabins could tell as soon as they en-
212
tered whether they were friendly or not, for when they did not agree the fires
of the two families did not meet on the hearth, but there was a vacancy between them that was a sign of disagreement.7
The material scarcity that people endured under slavery structured both the
meaning of these acts of communion and slaves agency itself. Many slaves
supplemented their diet with game hunted and trapped in the woods that edged
the plantations. As Ball settled in with Dinah and Nero, he began to supply
them with game. During the fall and winter, we usually had something to
roast, at least twice a week in our cabin. All the time the meat was hanging at
the fire, as well as when it was on our table, our house was surrounded by the
children of our fellow slaves; some begging for a piece. [But] it was idle to
think of sharing with them, the contents of our board; for they were often
thirty or forty in number.8 In Balls experience, the slave community was
organized into households that were slavery-structured hybrids of nuclear
families and those joined to them in the assignment of living space and the
distribution of goods. The slave community that Ball remembered was less
a negation of his life as property than an intersecting plane of existence. His
life as a piece of property and his life as a member of a family crossed over,
commingled, and interrupted each other. The food that Ball hunted and shared
was at once a subsidy to his owners economy, a source of energy for his labor,
and the material substance of a set of affective social relations that could never
be fully determined by the conditions of enslavement.
Although Ball was clear about the limits of the communal practices he de
scribed, such practices memorialize a fragment of the process by which the
meager rations of enslavement were reworked into a practical ethics of enslaved humanity. Slaves judged their masters by their provisions. Peter Bruner
conveyed the direct variance of the ratio of rations to esteem in the slaves
moral economy: Some few of the white people were good to the slaves and
desired them to have whatever they had to eat. John Brown remembered the
slaveholder Ben Tarver according to the same standard, but to opposite effect:
I know he did not give his slaves anything to eat till noon-day, and then no
more again until nine at night. They got corn, which they made into cake, but I
never knew them to have any meat. ... He was reputed to be a bad master.
Henry Bibb, who had been sold to a planter living along the Red River, re-
213
membered the man in similar terms: When we arrived there we found his
slaves poor, ragged, stupid, and half-starved. The food he allowed per week
was one peck of corn for each grown person, one pound of pork, and sometimes a quart of molasses. This was all they were allowed, and if they got more
they stole it.9
Stealing of this sort, of course, was one of the primary forms of enslaved
accumulation. As Frederick Law Olmsted traveled in the South, he was told
that everywhere on the plantations, the agrarian notion has become a fixed
point of the Negro system of ethics: that the great result of labour belongs to
the right of the labourer, and on this ground even the religious feel justified in
using massas property for their own temporal benefit. This they term taking, and it is never admitted to be a reproach to a man among them that he is
charged with it, though stealing, or taking from another than their master,
and particularly from one another, is so. What Olmsted described as an agrarian ethic, the slave Andrew Jackson justified in biblical terms with the injunction, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn.
Henry Bibb addressed the same question with a notion of moral economy
tinged by free-labor ideology: I did not regard it as stealing then, I do not regard it as stealing now. I hold that the slave has a moral right to eat, drink, and
wear all that he needs, and that it would be a sin on his part to suffer and starve
in a country where there is plenty to eat and wear within his reach. I consider
that I had a just right to what I took, because it was the labor of my own
hands.10
For slaves, the fact that the food they consumed was expended in (expropriated) labor was, at least in retrospect, a saving fact. When Louis Hughes wrote
about a slave who had been badly beaten, he structured his account around the
transformation of food into work: It seems the slave had been sick, and had
killed a little pig when he became well enough to go to work, as his appetite
craved food, and he needed it to give him strength to do his tasks. For this one
act, comparatively trivial, he was almost killed. The idea seemed never to occur to the slaveholders that these slaves were getting no wages for their work
and, therefore, had nothing with which to procure what at times was necessary
for their health and strengthpalatable and nourishing food. Henry Bibb
provided a summary statement of this moral ecology: For while the slave is
214
regarded as property, how can he steal from his master?11 The stolen property
did not disappear from its owners holdings; it was simply reconfiguredfrom
his consumption to his capital.
Bibbs neat solution suggests that we should revisit the dialectics of pig
roasting.12 Domination and resistance, in this case, structured each other. Historians have often termed such actions evidence of slaves agency, but in
so doing they have sometimes lost sight of the way that agency and resistancewere themselves structured by power and exploitation.13 Perhaps it was
[wrong], wrote Andrew Jackson, but we were often very hungry.14 The
starveling character of the Cotton Kingdom channeled slaves concerns
their resistance, their collective action, their subjectivityaround the question of food. Indeed, Bibbs saving argument that the food he took was (re)
converted to his owners service through his labor betrays the extent to which
the terms of his resistance reflected the terms of his oppressionthe extent to
which slaves agency was structured in dominance. Yet the determining limits of the prevailing order did not exhaust the meaning of enslaved resistancenor, finally, did they remain its limit.15
the practical ethics expressed by the notion of taking, which prescribed the relation of slaves to their masters, was matched by an ethic of solidarity that assured slaves they could expect support when they tried to escape.
Slaves who were out in the woods often received supplies from those who continued to draw rations from their owners. Solomon Northup remembered that
one night a young woman appeared at the door of his cabin and asked for some
bacon. He continued: I divided my scanty allowance with her. And when,
after several nights of such visits, his owner began to suspect something,
Northup began to carry her provisions to a certain spot agreed upon in the
woods, and he continued to do this throughout the summer. Isaac Mason,
whose owner had tried to kill him, was similarly sustained in his escape by a
fellow-slave who brought me food, which removed a portion of the sorrow
from my wounded breast. Slaveholders were of course aware of this off-the-
grid network, and tried to cut it off at the source. When Peter Still ran away,
his owner waited a month for him to come back, and then reduced his wife s
rations by half. When Anders ran away, suspected of having helped to murder
215
his Mississippi overseer, his pursuers found out from the Negroes that [he]
was harbored in the gin by the Negroes on the Magnolia Plantation.16
Anderss story suggests the contingencythe agonyof solidarity. It was
less an achieved state than a continual terrified request: Can you help me? Do
you know the way? Will you share what you have? Will you risk your life to
save mine? Many were the individuals whose supplications were unsuccessful.
Paul was given up by a woman he sometimes visited; Henry Bibb, by a little slave girl who shared a cabin with his mother and pretended to be asleep
when he came to visit; Leonard Black, by a man who had promised to run
with me; and so on.17 The very act of seeking communal aid was fraught with
considerable danger. Slaves had every reason to opt for self-preservation and
refuse to provide help; there were also powerful inducements to betray vulnerable outsiders. The very information network upon which the fugitives relied
could be broken and repurposed for counterinsurgency. Taking for the moment the part of those who refused to risk their lives in support of actions
taken by another (that is, those who acted the way most of us would have to
admit we would actthe way we do act every dayif we take seriously our
own responsibility of historical empathy), we can see, as if in relief, the extraordinary effect of those who ran away and then asked for help. In asking
in assuming it made sense to askthey conveyed a singular standard of solidarity. They stretched the terms of the ethics of comfort toward collective
action.
Then, bloody and broken, they were brought in from the woods or fields
where they had been run down. Charles Balls lacerated back was salved with
bacon fat and he was laid on the kitchen floor. An old blanket was then thrown
over me, and I was left to pass the night alone. Such was the terror stricken into
my fellow-slaves by the example made of me that, although they loved and
pitied me, not one of them dared approach me during this night. The perime
ter of fear that isolated Ball in his suffering was crossed by other slaves on
other nights. John Glasgow then doctored my eye, John Brown remembered. He washed the blood from my face, and got a ball of tallow, and an old
handkerchief from Aunt Sally, the cook up at the house. He gently pressed the
ball of tallow, made warm, against the displaced eye, until he forced it back
into its proper position, when he put some cotton over it, and bound it with a
216
handkerchief. Similarly, Moses Grandy remembered, To relieve them in

some degree after severe floggings, their fellow-slaves run their backs with
part of their little allowance of fat meat. The spectacular character of the
punishment of slavesthe fact that slaveholders used violence didactically,
exponentially, attempting to cow those who witnessed or overheard the beatings as well as those who bore themconcealed within it another lesson, one
that linked suffering and succor to solidarity.18
All of these escapes and beatings, all of these episodes in the history of enslaved suffering and solidarity, were also stories set down in the form of slave
narratives designed to spur their mostly white, mostly Northern, mostly anti-
slavery audience to more active opposition to slavery. But those published narratives showed the traces of prior tellings, in which slaves who had seen things
bore witness for othersin which memory was practiced as remembrance.
Solomon Northup recalled that when the slave Wiley escaped, it was the only
topic of conversation among us when alone. We indulged in a great deal of
speculation in regard to him, one suggesting that he might have been drowned
in some bayou, inasmuch as he was a poor swimmer; another that he might
have been devoured by alligators or stung to death by the venomous moccasin,
whose bite is certain and sudden death. Northup, indeed, recounted the story
of a Louisiana slave conspiracy that aimed to organize a company sufficiently
strong to fight their way ... to the neighboring territory of Mexico; his account was based not on his own knowledge, but on that derived from the
relation of those living at that period in the immediate vicinity of the excitement.19 Northup was bearing witness to the process of bearing witness: the
process by which enslaved people renewed the connection of the past to the
present and transformed their connection to the departedrunaway, briefly
encountered, sold, deadinto a bond with the present and the living. Slaves
memoirs are full of such stories and stories about stories, a narrative networkthat the historian Herbert Gutman termed slave passageways through
time.20
All of these threads of time were stretched along the rows of the cotton
fields where slaves worked: they chronicled the agency of the dead and the
living, cooperation and comfort, sharing and solidarity. It has become fashionable in recent years to oppose the terms work and culture, or power and
agency, and to use the former terms to bludgeon the latter, as if an incre-
217
ment added to the first in each pair of terms forced an equal and opposite diminution of the latter. In a strange way, these arguments are mirror images of
those they seem so concerned to oppose, those they claim have overemphasized the degree of slaves agency and autonomy. But rather than trying to
specify the terms of that agencywhat sorts of action were available to enslaved people in what sorts of circumstances, what sorts of notions of commonality undergirded their solidaritysuch arguments have simply tried to
cut it down to size.21
The lives of enslaved people were limited, shaped, even determined by their
enslavementbales per acre per slave, pounds per day, lashes and rations, field
and woods, solidarity and betrayal: these were the circumstances in which
slaves made history. Their love took the form of sharing food because those
with whom they shared were starving; they succored the wounded because the
wounded had been beaten; they sheltered the escaped because the escaped had
run away; they talked about the departed because the departed had been sold.
These specific forms (and others like them) were hosts of the slaves ethic of
care, which was neither separable from their enslavement nor reducible to it.
Those circumstances gave their actions material shape but did not exhaust the
meaning or liquidate the force of those actions. Slaves acted in solidarity because they recognized their fellow slaves not as agents, but as family members, lovers, Christians, Africans, blacks, workers, fellow travelers, women,
men, co-conspirators, competitors, and so on. Even as their enslavement provided the circumstances of their actions, it occasioned the expression and reproduction of ethics of care and practices of solidarity that transcended and
actively reshaped their enslavement.22
another way to approach the idea of enslavement as a condition materially defined at the juncture of body and landscape is to read ex-slaves descrip
tions of their landscape alongside the literature of nineteenth-century agricultural reform. When the runaway slave Louis Hughes had to stumble through
briar patches and old logs and driftwood, that had been piled up year after
year, or when Charles Ball passed through cedar thickets that continued
for three or four miles together ... with scarcely an original forest tree to give
variety to the landscape, they were describing the wasted landscape of oldfield that so outraged the agricultural reformers. Similarly, when John Brown
218
described hiding in an apple orchard, when J.D. Green told of jumping a fence
at the edge of the field, when Solomon Northup recalled the fruit trees that
lined his owners road, when Louis Hughes evoked the way a peach tree
switch ... cracked the skin so that the blood oozed out, or when Isaac Mason
described being knocked down by a pitchfork in a muddy feed lot, they were
portraying not simply slavery, but slavery in the landscape of agricultural reform, amid the fenced plots and fruit trees that the reformers equated with
improvement, with progress, and with civilization.23
The most basic parameter of this sort of landed bondage was distance: from
and to. When the slave trader who was driving Charles Ball southward judged
that he had put sufficient distance between his slaves and their homes, he took
the chains off the people in his coffle and allowed them to walk the rest of the
way unfettered, since he now considered them bound by his spoken admonition that they should give up all hope of returning to the places of our nativity, as it would be impossible to pass through the states of North Carolina and
Virginia without being taken up and sent back. Solomon Northup, who had
been kidnapped from New York, taken to Virginia, and then sold to Louisiana,
told no one his story, for fear that he would be taken farther on, into some
by-place, over the Texas border, perhaps, and sold. Distance, in these memories, functions as an aggregate term for various sorts of dislocation: separation
from family and community networks, and the devaluation of forms of local
knowledge which characterized those networks and which made resistance
possibleknowledge of whom to trust, where to hide, what road to take,
which lie to tell. For slaves, transportation (used in the eighteenth-century
sense of conveyance to prison colonies) was a form of spatial discipline
of incarceration.
The most advanced technology of the day (steamboats, turnpikes, trains
not to mention firearms, swords, whips, chains, prisons, and so on), the most
sophisticated commercial instruments (banknotes, negotiable paper, insurance
contracts), and the most advanced statecraft (bills of lading, interstate comity,
risk-allocating commercial law) were employed to speed the one-way passage
of enslaved people into ever-deeper slavery, to reduce the friction of travel
across space, which closed behind them with every southward step.24 In this
formulation, the carceral spaces of the Cotton Kingdom should be thought of
as much in terms of discipline as in those of distance. Or, to put this differ-
219
ently, distance in slavery was measured not simply in miles, but also in suf
fering: in wounding and exposure, in the fearful nausea of a human being
hunted like an animal, the mind-shattering loneliness of a person starving to
death somewhere on an unknown map.
The remaking of space as discipline began with the abrasion of bare feet on
the road. Runaway slaves often referred to the condition of their feet as an index of their vulnerability. Frederick Douglass remembered a time when the
cracks in his feet had been broad enough to receive the pen with which he was
writing his narrative. Andrew Jackson remembered that he had been slowed
by having to stop to bathe his bruised and swollen feet, and then, shortly after, had been run down while bare-foot in an open field. The men who captured him then amused themselves by making him run to the jailhouse. Likewise, when Peter Bruner and his fugitive-companion Phil were fetched from
the jail where the slave catchers had stowed them, their owner took off our
shoes and put them into his bag and said he intended to wear all the skin off of
our feet before we reached home.25
The limited capacity of human beings to endure pain thus served slaveholders as a sort of physiological perimetera line of control. William Wells
Brown remembered that on the eighth day after his escape, he was soaked
through by a heavy rain; had he not possessed a tinderbox, he later recalled, he
should certainly have frozen to death. The parsimonious rationing of shoes,
coats, and blankets defined a deeper disciplinary economy, a sort of calculated
disability limiting the enhancement of bare lifethe enabling of human activity through technologies as humble as the coatto forms that would be useless beyond the margin of a cotton field. Indeed, we might think of slaveholders power over their slaves as reaching into the fabric of those very bodies
ascharacterizing the embodied condition of enslaved humanity. To give a
very simple example noted by many of the narrativists, slaves were not allowed to learn to swim. Their nerves, muscles, heart, and lungs were not to be
coordinated in a way that would allow them to slip crosswise through the gridstructured surveillance of the Cotton Kingdom.26
Hunger was another limiting condition of escape. The restrictive character
of the landscape of the Cotton Kingdom was perhaps most pressingly evident
in slaveholders control of the food supply. Many slaves who had plans to run
away waited until the early fall, when the meager amounts of corn that had
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been planted among the cotton fields began to ripena crop-based calculation
which apparently eluded the cotton-obsessed Mississippi planter John Knight,
who bemoaned the fact that his slaves always seemed to run off at the most
pushing part of the cotton season. Runaways generally started off with a
knapsack of food, remembered the ex-slave John Parker, but soon they began
to starve. And when they searched for food at the outer margins of the fields
they passed, they were more likely to find cotton than corn. Time after time,
when runaway slaves were caught, it was because they had been forced by
hunger to come out of hidingto cross back into slaveholders field of visual
power. William Wells Brown was captured after he and a companion had fi
nally resolved to stop at a farmhouse, and try to get something to eat. Louis
Hughes, who had stowed away in the hold of a steamboat only to find himself locked down with the cotton, was caught when he started howling and
screaming, hoping that some one would hear me, and come to my relief for
almost anything would have been preferable to the privation and hunger from
which I was suffering. Peter Bruner was betrayed by a colored man he had
dared to trust with his story, in hopes that the man would bring him something
to eat where he was hiding by the side of the road.27
That these stories were told at all is evidence that there were enough leakagessecret passages, helpful confederates, unwary animals, dark corners of
cultivationto sustain the lucky few across the provision-scarce landscape
of the Cotton Kingdom. John Brown believed it was only the directing hand
of Providence that had allowed him to avoid a near encounter with a slaveholder when he went into a field to steal some potatoes. J.D. Green drew a
more immediate satisfaction one night when, after hiding all day in the woods,
he ventured to a farm-house, and having a club with me, I knocked over two
barn fowl ... and enjoyed a hearty meal without seasoning or bread.28 These
were tactical victories in a strategic field defined by the triumph of cotton over
cornby slaveholders reduction of the landscape to a marketable commodity, by an economy that was also an ecology, by an extractive practice which, in
its cleared sight lines and the starveling profusion of its sole staple, provided a
material structure for its own enforcement. By controlling the food supply, the
transmutation of nature into human energy, slaveholders were able to convert
distance into privation, space into starvation.
In addition to rendering distance palpable as discipline, the agro-capitalist
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transformation of the landscape provided slaveholders with a series of tactical

advantages over their runaway slaves. John Parkerwho had been sold in
New Orleans and then escaped to Ohio, where he had been a conductor on
the Underground Railroaddescribed the agricultural history of Kentucky in
terms of a campaign of counterinsurgency: When I first began my work
among the slaves, [the landscape] was still covered with virgin forest, broken
here and there by clearings, with many trails and few roads. ... As the settlers
began to build their cabins and make their clearings, the forest gradually disappeared. The increased population made it more difficult for the fugitives to
pass through the country successfully, since there were many eyes and few
hiding places to conceal.29 As Parker presented it, the land was not merely a
backdrop to slavery, a sparsely furnished stage upon which the master-slave
relationship could be immaterially transacted. The land was the thing itself,
the determining parameter of his condition as a slave. His laboring and potentially escaping body and the agro-capitalist landscape it inhabited existed in a
state of mutual formation and constant dialectical tension. They constituted
each other, the labor of the slave refashioning land into an agro-capitalist landscape even as the transformed landscape made the human being into a visibleand thus vulnerableslave.
As Parker described it, the transformation of the landscape imposed a corresponding set of transformations on the human beings who populated it, conferring a sort of supersensory power on slaveholders, who could now see
thingspeoplethat had previously remained out of sight and optically rendering a black figure who sought to cross that landscape into a new sort of hypervisibility. When Henry Bibb told of his narrow escape from capture on a
journey which had taken him all the way from Louisiana to Missouri, he introduced his account by describing the fearful character of stripped land for a
slave. I always dreaded to pass through a prairie. ... I walked as fast as I
could, but when I got about midway of the prairie, I came to a high spot where
the road forked, and three men came up from a low spot as if they had been
concealed. ... Had this been in timbered land, I might have stood some chance
to dodge them, but there I was out in the open prairie, where I could see no
possible way by which I could escape. The very space that rendered Bibb
soobvious also blinded him: he could not see any place to run. Andrew Jackson similarly described the sensation of feeling another set of eyes locking
222
himinto focus against a cleared background. I was moving cautiously along,

[when] I saw a man on a small hillock in front of his house, apparently watching my movements. I had learned to look on every white man as my foe, and
dared not pass near to any one. ... I was not mistaken. As soon as the man saw
my movements, he knew I was a fugitive, and ran to his house, a short distance
from where he stood, and taking his dog and gun made chase for me.30 These
passages recount the experience of being literally targeted, captured as if telescopically, made the focal point of a landscape in a moment of mutual recognitionthe frozen beat before one human being began to hunt another.
the mastery of slaveholders as they hunted their slaves was channeled

and amplified by being hybridized with other sorts of power, which enhanced
their own human capacity. Foremost among these were horses. Horses were,
of course, a symbol of power for slaveholders; Frederick Law Olmsted remembered that the swells of Natchez distinguished themselves by stabling
more fine horses than he had ever seen in a comparably sized city.31 But
horses were also the specific material form of slaveholding power. Indeed, the
association of horses with policing is so axiomatic that it might be said to
behidden in plain sight. The words slave patrol summon to mind a vision
of white men on horseback, an association so definitive that it elides the remarkable fact that the geographic pattern of county governance in the South
emerged out of the circuits ridden by eighteenth-century slave patrols, which
were themselves materially determined by the character of the landscape and
the distance that a man on horseback could cover in the span of a single
night.32
Beginning with the idea of the horse as a tool that converted grain into policing, one might define the several dimensions of horse-borne slaveholding
power. Most obviously, horses provided slaveholders with a geometric advantage over slaves who took to the roads of the Cotton Kingdom. They accelerated the exercise of slaveholding power. More than that, as the historian Rhys
Isaac long ago observed, a slaveholder (or patroller) on horseback visually
commanded the landscape; traveling several feet above eye level vastly expanded the immediate field of slaveholding power.33 For slaves on the road, the
sound of an approaching horse was a fearful portent; indeed, the list of fugitives who were run down on the roads by white men on horses perhaps even
223
exceeds the list of those who were captured when they crossed into a slaveholders visual field in search of food. Henry Bibb described one such encounter with mounted whites (the one that began when he ventured into the open
prairie):
They came along slowly up behind me, and finally passed, and spoke or
bowed their heads upon passing, but they traveled in a slow walk and
kept but a very few steps before me, until we got nearly across the prairie. ... They soon got out of my sight by going down into the valley,
which lay between us and the plantation. Not seeing them rise the hill to
go up to the farm, excited a greater suspicion in my mind, so I stepped
over the brow of the hill, where I could see what they were doing, and to
my surprise saw them coming right back in the direction they had just
gone, and they were going very fast.34
As Bibb described it, their horses afforded the slave catchers an almost insuperable advantage. There was nowhere for him to run: no way for him to overcome the space-shrinking advantage (an advantage reckoned in both vision
and velocity) of a mounted man on clear land. Bibbs enslavement was spatially fixedmaterially determinedat the zero-point convergence of the
limits of his bodily capacity, the technological advantage of horse-borne human hunters, and the open land on which they met.
It was not simply the extent to which horses provided a vector for the enhancement of slaveholding human agency that made them fearful to slaves; it
was also the extent to which horses remained the agents of their own actions.
As anyone who has ever observed the employment of horses in crowd control can attest, the unpredictable, uncontrolled character of horses makes
them especially terrifying to those against whom they are deployed. A horse
added a fearful layer of wildness to the already volatile encounter of a white
man and a slave on an isolated road. A slaveholder would play on this when he
tied a rope around the neck of a runaway and then tethered the slave to his
saddle, or when he bound a runaway and tied the captive into the saddle. Bibb
(on an occasion prior to the incident on the prairie) was transported in that
way: A carriage passing by jammed against the nag, which caused him to
break from the man who was leading him, and his fright threw me off back-
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wards. My hands being confined with irons, and my feet tied under the horse
with a rope, I had no power to help myself. I fell back off the horse and could
not extricate myself from this dreadful condition; the horse kicked with all his
might while I was tied so close to his rump that he could only strike me with
his legs by kicking. By the time the horse was caught and Bibb was cut off its
back, the breath was kicked out of my body.35 Only the fact that he had been
suspended several feet above the ground, and thus above the horse s hooves,
enabled Bibb to survive at all. No superintending law, no economic incentive,
no measure of human decency (however desiccated) could save someone in
his situation. He was a slave who had been intentionally placedpinioned
in a zone of action beyond human control or responsibility, a position of animal vulnerability.
Another space-determining technology of slaveholders control was writing. Charles Ball was working one day when he saw an enslaved child deliver
to the overseer a piece of paper that had been sent by the master. On that
paper, though Ball could not have known it, was written a message suggesting
(wrongly) that Ball had murdered a white woman, and that the overseer should
find a way to bring him in without arousing the slave s suspicion. A note like
that, or like the notes that slaveholders sent along with slaves who thus unwittingly carried instructions for their own punishment to the very hand that
would then beat them, created a sort of spatial relation, a force field, invisible
to all but the very few literate slaves. Slaveholders control of literacyof
theknowledge, technique, and technology of reading and writingprovided
them with a safe channel for privileged communication: a code.36
Written communication had the added advantage of serial reproducibility.
A single message could travel in many directions at onceas quickly as a
horse, a steamboat, or later a telegraph could carry it. Slaveholders could thus
fill spaceor segment it in as many directions as there were roads, rivers, and
telegraph wireswith information.37 Escaping slaves traveled through a landscape in which they were already known, or at least suspecteda landscape in
which word of their arrival had been sent ahead of them. Ex-slaves narratives
of attempted escape convey their uncanny feeling of being overtaken by the
transmitted news of their own fugitive status. The runaway John Brown remembered that when he stopped to ask directions, he was told by a colored
man that his escape was the subject of the notices he saw posted on walls all
225
around the town: Jepsy James had issued the notices, and sent them flying all
through the country by means of steamers and other modes of transmitting
information. J.D. Green encountered his own likeness in a bill at the corner
which had been put up that evening. Henry Bibb and a fellow fugitive were
ambushed by white men alerted to their presence by a notice that neither Jack
nor myself were able to read. ... They had seen a reward out, for notices were
put up in the most public places that fifty dollars would be paid for me, dead or
alive.38
Of course, there were plenty of whites who could not wait to start looking
for slaves who had been thus advertised. Frederick Law Olmsted was told by
an Alabama slaveholder that white men often traveled hundreds of miles to
hunt slaves. But the posted notices had a broader purpose than simply flooding the zone with bounty hunters; they had the power not simply to inform
people but to enlist them. Having read such a notice, one could not help starting to lookto give ones vision over to policing. In the first instance, this re-
visioning should be imagined as involuntary, reflecting the way that the technology of discipline in slavery infiltrated the sensoria of whites as well as
blacks, the way that both groups were materially and intellectually interpellated by the policing mechanisms of slavery. Slaveholders and slaves alike
often referred to fugitives who answered to a given description, as if their
arrival were a sort of timely response to a question that had been hanging
inthe air. And in a way, it was: having seen the news, one could not help wondering.39
The point at which the techno-enhanced visuality of slaveholding power
materialized as a boundary to enslaved mobility was the point at which someone asked the unanswerable question, Whom do you belong to? Seemingly
as common as the encounter of an unknown black and a curious white on a
country road, the question was, in effect, a pointed inquiry about local knowledge, about space. Answering it required the ability to tell what Isaac Mason
referred to, in a revealingly materialist way, as a palpable lie. As escapee
Peter Bruner phrased it, the question could not be answered without knowing
who a great many of the people were in a given area. The question imposed
the geography of ownership upon apparently errant slaves, who were then
forced to account for their locationas free people unaccountably without papers, as dutiful slaves without passes, or in some other way. Andrew Jackson
226
described a series of such encounters with what he termed the usual salutation: Where are you going, nr? Whose boy are you? One man he was
able to shake off by claiming to have a pass that would prove him the turnpiker he claimed to be, and then taking such a long time to look for it that the
white man gave up; another he was able to outpace, once he noticed that he
was lame and could not follow me, not get to a house very soon to give the
alarm.40
In recounting the history of these encounters, Jackson reflected on the character of the property rights these repeated questions made manifest: It often
appears to me that the slaveholders and southerners generally, are much more
regardful of their neighbors property and interests than the people of the
north. I cannot account for it on any other supposition than the very peculiar
character of the property. If slaves were like money, simply transferable by the
owner, I presume it would be quite different. But inasmuch as it often takes
legs and runs away, it becomes a matter of mutual interest for each to protect
his neighbors rights in order to render his own more secure. As Jackson
suggested, the ambulatory character of slave property determined patterns of
slaveholding class formation; because their property was mobile, slaveholders
came to see their individual interests in a common light. They came to understand themselves not simply as a class in themselves, but as a class for themselves. And from Jacksons point of view, this class position was anything
but abstract. Slaveholding property did not exist in the set of ambient social
conventions that allowed money to pass easily from one hand to another, or,
he might have added, in the registered deeds filed somewhere in the county
courthouse. It existed in social policing, in the way a black body on an open
road provoked a question that was always already structured by a supposition.
Supposing me to be a runaway, as men generally do in such cases, Jackson
concluded his discourse on the dialectics of property and policing, they
armed themselves with guns and dogs and gave chase. I soon heard the dogs
with their frightful baying, and the men hallooing at the top of their voices
Stop, you damned nr, or we will shoot you!41
If slaveholders visual field, their landscape-structured bodily power, often
translated seeing into a sort of wanton induction (shoot on sight), the accounts
provided by former slaves often frame enslaved seeing as a process of partial
occlusion and uncertain deduction. John Brown, escaped and questioned on a
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northbound steamboat, noticed the captain shake his head as he turned

away, and I concluded he doubted my story. Moses Roper, likewise on the
run, met some white teamsters along the road, who agreed to take me with
them as far as they went, if I would assist them. When the group stopped to
water the horses, however, Roper saw the men whispering, and fancying
Ioverheard them say they would put me in the Charlotte jail when they got
there, I made my escape into the woods, pretending to be looking for some
thing until I got out of their sight.42 These recollections slow down and itemize a process of watching and deducing (Brown noticed, then concluded;
Roper saw, then fancied, then ran) that, if these slaves were to save themselves, had to occur in the blink of an eye. Like the way eyes, muscles, and
hands were coordinated for the task of picking cotton, or, still more to the
point, like the landscape-empowered visuality of mastery, this way of seeing
represents a hybrid form of social embodiment: human being under the condition of enslavement.
Ropers account of the way he tried to look (as if he were looking for some
thing!) once he saw the way the white men on the road were looking at him
reveals something essential about the play of gazes and appearances: within
slavery, looking was a multiform action, performed and beguiled according to
set-piece understandings of the way things were supposed to look. When Solomon Northup explained what it meant to live for a decade as the property of
another man, he noted the way his labor had been converted into the white
mans possessions and then immediately turned to the embodied aspect of
enslavement: Ten years I was compelled to address him with down-cast eyes
and uncovered headin the attitude and language of a slave. Similarly, Jacob Stroyer used an image of embodied submission when he recalled his childhood fear of an overseer who beat him regularly for a reason Stroyer never
understood: when summoned, I ran to him as if to say by my actions, I am
willing to do anything you bid me, willingly. The fact that slaves and slaveholders shared a mutually comprehensible visual grammar of plantation orderof the daily command performance of dominance and submission
made it possible for enslaved people to hide behind their own hypervisible
appearance. Isaac Mason captured this doubleness of seeming and seeing when
he described the way he had loaded wood onto a boat while watching out for a
slaveholder whom he suspected would try to attack him while he worked: My
228
readers must not suppose that my eyes were idle while working there. My
hands were working to serve Mansfield, but my eyes were working or watching to serve ... Isaac.43
Runaway slaves were able to draw upon the animal order of the Cotton
Kingdom to explain what they were doing when they were caught out of place.
For slaves, hunting a lost horse was often the most plausible explanation for
being away from home. When William Hayden and Henry Bibb ran away,
they both took bridles with them as a sort of counterfeit pass. A similar trick,
recounted by Andrew Jackson and Moses Roper, was to hide beside the road
waiting for a horse-drawn conveyance. A fugitive could then, as Roper explained, follow along in the wagons perceptual wake: If I happened to meet
any person on the road, I was afraid ... would take me up, I asked them how
far the wagons had got on before me to make them suppose I belonged to the
wagons.44 The same animal energy which slaveholders harnessed to impose
their control upon the landscapethe way that a horse represented a geometric increase in the velocity of a human being over cleared groundcould be
used by an escaping slave as a form of cover. Indeed, the peculiar character of
equine animalitythe fact that horses (unlike pigs or sheep) could have their
energy efficiently converted to a vector of human action, and were (unlike
dogs) subject to promiscuous direction rather than governed by prior habits of
loyaltymeant that slaves were sometimes able to turn a slaveholders
horse and ride to freedom.45
pressing in upon the cleared fields and patrolled roads of the Cotton
Kingdom, as is evident in many of the stories recounted above, was another
sort of landscape. The 160-acre plats marked out on the survey maps of the
General Land Office, and the diagrams of the riparian division of the land into
plantationsgraphic schemas that provided the most familiar images of plantation geographydepicted the landscape as property. And that property
was actualized in daily agricultural and disciplinary practices: in the gestures
of clearing, planting, picking, packing, shipping, watching, beating, starving,
stealing, raping, and hunting. But at the edge of that landscape there was another sort of landscape. In uncleared woods and undrained swamps, in fields
gone to meadow and scrub pine, in both the residual landscape of the frontier
and the ruined postcapitalism of Southern oldfield, the spatial premises of
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the Cotton Kingdom, the structured and mutual formation of body and landscape called slavery, disintegrated.
Many slaves familiarized themselves with the off-the-grid landscape in the
course of their daily work. Their knowledge was gendered, in accordance with
their labor; as the historians Stephanie Camp, Susan ODonovan, and Anthony
Kaye have argued, it was generally enslaved men who were employed as hostlers and herders, jobs that required them to take to the roads and woods. It
was likewise men who were generally the traveling partners in abroad marriages, where the members of a single enslaved household were divided between neighboring enslaving ones.46 Yet it is clear that enslaved women had
ample occasion to venture into the woods and swamps surrounding the plantations. They were tasked with driving the stock out of the woods; they gathered
food and herbs; they tended the elderly slaves who had been sent out to spend
their last years in the (cost-saving, for their owners) isolation of the woods.
There was nothing secret or occult about the fact that enslaved people knew
the land in a way that slaveholders did not. Indeed, slaveholders depended on
their knowledgeon the ability of their slaves to track cows in the woods,
fetch the mail from the post office, carry notes to the neighbors, accompany
goods to market, bring cotton to the levee, and make a journey cross-country
on foot in the same time that it took a slaveholder to get there on horseback via
the road. The white gentlemen then mounted their horses, and set off by the
road. ... I had orders to take a short route through the woods and across a
swamp, by which I could reach the cabin as soon as the overseer, remembered
Charles Ball of one such occasion. Isaac Mason recalled another: The distance by the public road was ten miles, and it would be some time before I
could return. I was acquainted with a road that would take me directly there,
by crossing the lands belonging to other persons, and the distance would not
be more than three miles; so in order to economize time for the boss, I took
that route.47
Enslaved people were thus privy to a landscape only partially accessible to
their owners. Their narratives recall landmarks that seem coordinates of an
alternative geography of the Southone defined not by roads and cities (still
less by maps and timetables), but by the concrete experience of travel across
the land, and especially through the woods. Isaac Mason, sent into the woods
on another occasion to cut timber, spent the night in an old barn that I had
230
frequently seen in that neighborhood. William Hayden remembered traveling a road generally known as THE OLD TRACE, which had not been
traveled for some time. This was thickly covered with timber, the principal
part of which was young hickories. Such a landscape was historical and ex
perientialone known through practical navigation rather than ordinal abstraction.48
For enslaved people, the woods and swamps striated across the grain of the
land were a refuge from the mean dominion of cotton. Slaves took to the
woods to hunt, trap, and fish to supplement their rations. Deer, raccoons, rabbits, turkeys, opossum, pike, perch, catfish, and shad all populated the woods
and waters of the Mississippi Valley, and all were used by slaves to supplement
their rations.49 Charles Ball provided an especially detailed account of enslaved
woodsmanship: of how he baited deer with salt, and trapped raccoons and
opossum when the ground was thickly strewed with nuts; of the six-foot
rattlesnake he skinned and stretched on a board; of the way that the peculiar
behavior of his hunting dog alerted him to the presence of a panther while he
was working in a pond, stripping wet tree branches of their bark, from which
he planned to make some very good ropes. Indeed, Ball thrived in the
woods,to such an extent that his overseer said he could smell the meat on
Balls body, and began to suspect the slave of stealing cotton. Charles, you
need not tell lies about it; you have been eating meat, I know you have, no Negro could look as fat, and sleek, and black, and greasy as you if he had nothing
to eat but corn bread and river chubs. ... Let us know where you got the meat
that you have been eating, and you shall not be whipped.50
As it turned out, Ball had been harvesting not cotton but fish, which he had
transformed into bacon by means of barter. In the meat-poor agro-capitalist
ecology of the Cotton Kingdom, slaves generally had a ready market for their
game.51 The sort of outsourcing represented by sanctioning supplemental
provision patches or hunting for game contained troubling concealed costs, for
what slaveholders saved in food, they sacrificed in discipline. Ball found a
fence for his fish in the person of a white boatman, whose riverine business
allowed him ready access to his neighbors slaves.52
Enslaved itineraries were often consonant with the purposes of the cotton
economy; they were structured by the slaves required labor or by the outsourcing through which slaveholders forced their hungry slaves to sustain
231
themselves. Yet beyond tracing the geography of exploitation and human suf
fering in slavery, each itinerary represented an accumulation of vital knowledge. The itineraries of self-provisioning slaves and the nodal geography of
illicit interracial commerce intersected in the woods and swamps bordering the
cotton fields. As miserly slaveholders forced their slaves to provide for themselves by offering only the meanest rations, they enabled their slaves to learn
about the landscape in a way that placed them beyond their owners control.
Pressing down upon their slaves threshold of survival, they pushed their people out into the woods to fend for themselves, unwittingly allowing them to
acquire the knowledge necessary to more effectively resist and even escape
slavery.
The landscape of forage and that of resistance overlapped in the woods and
swamps of the Cotton Kingdom. Before Charles Ball had begun to steal fish
and sell them on the riverbank, he had drawn upon his knowledge of the animal landscape of slavery to sneak food out to a fugitive he had encountered
while searching for swamp turtles to eat. He had made his way, he remembered, with no path to guide me, but the small traces made in the woods by
the cattle. Leonard Black planned to run away with a fellow fugitive he had
met, similarly, in the pasture in which our horses were kept, ... about a half a
mile from the village where he lived. For the slaveholders investigating the
appearance of the dead body of the overseer Duncan Skinner in the woods
near his Mississippi plantation, the information that a slave named Reuben
hadbeen out to kill some squirrels provided what they took to be a crucial
break in the case.53 As we see from the image of Ball following the cows he
might have been sent to chase, or that of Black meeting a man in a horse-
chosen spot they both knew from their work, or that of Reuben using the cover
of a squirrel hunt as he lay in wait for his overseer, plantation slavery left traces
upon the landscapelandmarks for enslaved people as they looked for a passageway out.
When slaves ran awaywhether they planned to try for freedom or simply to hide out while waiting for a change in circumstancesthey ran into the
woods and swamps at the edge of the cleared fields. John Parker spoke for the
tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people who took to the woods during
the period of slavery: Once away from the fields across which I ran like a
scared rabbit, I hid in my friend the forest until night. Narrative after narra-
232
tive registers similar reversals of the parameters of the landscape of enslavement. Slaves camped in forests and swamps during the day and moved at night,
under the cover of darkness, to traffic their contraband and cook their stolen
food, to worship and to plot, to search for something to eat if they planned to
stay out, to care for, support, and sustain one another in both exigency and resistance, to take to the roads and wend their way northward until the dawn began to break.54 Frederick Law Olmsted remembered slaveholders gesturing
toward the thickets, swamps, and rugged ... hills with the peculiar resigned determination that characterizes the banter of men looking forward to
the hunt. The Cotton Kingdoms daytime landscape was edged with a crepuscular sense of incompletionof contingency, challenge, and even vulnerability. As obvious as it seems on the face of it, then, the fact that slaves ran for the
cover of the woods and swamps, that they moved at night and hid out during
the day, tells us something essential about the landscape of slavery: it was not
in a steady state.55
Under coveras runaways sheltered at night, amid the timber, deep in the
swamps, prone in a ditch beside the road, crouched beneath an overhanging
bankthe sensory landscape of slavery was transformed. If the geography of
slaveholding power was characterized by its visuality, that of resistance and
escape was characterized by auralityby the precedence of the ear over the
eye. John Parker, who was for years a conductor on the Underground Railroad based in Ripley, Ohio, described how he moved along a tree-lined road in
the dark: Being on hostile soil, I was careful to keep in the grass rather than
on the hard road, where my footsteps could be heard. I was fortunate I took
this precaution, for I had hardly gone a quarter of a mile when I heard voices
ahead of me. Secreting myself in the bushes, I waited to see who the men
were. Charles Ball evoked the soundscape of the swamp: With the coming
of the morning, I arose from my crouch, and proceeded warily along the
woods, keeping a continual lookout for plantations, and listening attentively to
every noise that I heard in the trees, or amongst the cane-brakes. ... As I cautiously advanced forward I heard the voices of people in loud conversation.
Sitting down amongst the palmetto plants, that grew around me in great numbers, I soon perceived that the people whose conversation I had heard were
coming nearer to me. I now heard the sound of horses feet.56
Even during daylight hours, but especially at night, the woods neutralized
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the advantage slaveholders enjoyed on open land. Horse-borne policing was

well-adapted to controlling the roads, the fields, and even the meadows, pastures, and prairies of the Southern landscape. In the woods, however, horses
often moved with more difficulty than human beings, and riders were more
prone to get caught up in branches hanging above the forage line than were
people on foot, who could duck through vegetation cleared to the height of
deer, cows, or pigs. In swamps, horses were useless. And as Ball suggested, the
noise that horses made on the roads and (particularly) in the woods provided
fugitive slaves with an early-warning system that they could use to track the
slaveholders who were trying to track them. Slaves who ventured out of the
woods in order to improve their time across the land listened intently to protect themselves. Charles Ball: At dark, I again returned to the road, which I
traveled in silence, treading as lightly as possible with my feet and listening
most attentively to every sound that I heard. After being on the road more
than an hour, I heard the sound of the feet of horses, and immediately stepped
aside and took my place behind the trunk of a large tree.57
Increasing the density of the landscape also increased the difficulty of slaveholding communication. Enslaved people, of course, were accustomed to
eavesdropping uponor even just listening toslaveholders. The more comprehensive the service that slaveholders demanded of their slaves, the more
information they gave away. The narratives of former slaves are filled with
stories of actions taken based on overheard snippets of slaveholding conversation: escapes made in anticipation of a secret plan to sell slaves or settle an
estate, news of runaways who had made it all the way to Canada, information
about the advancing strength of the Union Army during the Civil War. In
Louisiana, William Hayden went so far as to learn French so that he could
eavesdrop in case he was sold to a Frenchman.58 By definition, slaveholders
who were chasing their slaves through the woods or swamps faced a contingent situationone unfolding beyond the structured parameters of the Cotton Kingdom. In order to coordinate their actions, they had to communicate
on what was, in effect, an open channel. Andrew Jackson, who had thrown
himself over a precipice as he fled from a pair of slave catchers, crawled up
under the shelf of the bank, where he could hear the men discuss where he
had gone and finally conclude that he must have killed himself in the jump.
Similarly, Charles Ball remembered that he had repeatedly gleaned informa-
234
tion from listening in on the conversations of the white men who were out
hunting him. On one occasion, he heard enough of a conversation to orient
himself in relation to a nearby river; on another, he overheard a man say that
he had seen an advertisement at the store, which offered a hundred dollars for
the runaway, whose name was Charles.59
Because fugitive slaves often coordinated their signals in advance, they
sometimes started out with an advantage over their pursuers. In many circumstances, sound is a more useful sense than sight for coordinating collective action over distance; think of the starters pistol, the factory whistle, or the call to
prayer. Noise allows for those who are obscure to one another to be commonly
hailed, and it penetrates the consciousness of even the unaware. Isaac Mason
recalled the prearranged signal he used to find the man whom he had agreed to
meet in the woods: As a signal of our meeting in safety he would give the
signal crying out, yea! yo!60 Off the grid, in the woods and swamps where
they were no longer so easily fixed in a slaveholders gaze, where they could
lay up and listen as slaveholders came after them, where they could plot their
pursuers course in advancing sounds, where their owners structured power
was rendered contingent, tactical, by the landscape, fugitive slaves had the
advantage of holding the better ground over their mastersfor a moment,
sometimes for a day or even a week, sometimes, indeed, long enough to get
what they wanted before coming in again or even to make it all the way to
freedom.
to reassert control of the landscape, slaveholders used dogs. Frederick

Law Olmsted recounted a conversation in which a white man told him how
slaveholders trained their dogs. Dogs were trained when pups, to follow a
nr. [They were] not allowed to catch one, however, unless they were quite
young so they couldnt hurt him much, and they were always taught to hate
aNegro, never permitted to see one unless to be put in chase of him. The
useof bloodhounds transformed the landscape of escape. In the woods and
swamps, where slaveholders view was occluded and where slaves could use
their ears to evade their pursuers, dogs sense of smell made them the masters
of the landscape. Charles Ball, recalling a conversation he overheard between
his owner and the posse that had gathered to chase a slave named Hardy, conveyed a sense of how slaveholders relied on these mercenary specialists: The
235
overseer thought that from the intimate knowledge possessed by him [Hardy],
of all the swamps and coverts in the neighborhood, there would be little hope
of discovering him [without dogs]. The overseer advised them to wait the
coming of the gentleman with his bloodhound before they entered the
woods.61 Loyal to their masters (or those to whom their masters hired them)
and able to travel more rapidly than any human being across even the most dif
ficult ground, these weaponized dogs were implacable enemies, driven by a
purpose beyond that of even their owners.
Solomon Northup described the baying of hounds in the woods as a sort of
sonic tracer by which slaveholders could follow their progress remotely: Frequently their loud bay is heard in the swamps, and then there is speculation as
to what point the runaway will be overhauled. The narratives of former
slaves, many of whom had been fugitives, return again and again to the baying
of the hounds: the joyous, savage, indecent vigor with which they hunted; the
sense of the extreme liability of being run down along a vector from which
one could not depart. Louis Hughes recalled: I had been asleep, when suddenly I heard the yelp of the blood hounds in the distance. It seemed quite far
away at first, but the sound came nearer and nearer, and then we heard men
yelling. We knew now that they were on our trail. John Parker: I heard the
yelping of the hounds, [and saw] the despair of fugitive slaves. The sound
grew louder and louder, closer and closer. And Northup again: I stood upon
the fence until the dogs had reached the cotton press. In an instant more, their
long, savage yells announced they were on my track. ... Every few moments
Icould hear the yelping of the dogs. They were gaining on me. Every howl
was nearer and nearer. Each moment I expected they would spring upon my
backexpected to feel their long teeth sinking into my flesh. There were so
many of them, I knew they would tear me to pieces.62
Fugitive slaves tried to evade the dogs by jamming their senses with information that would put them off the track. J.D. Green had the run of a neighboring plantation where the bloodhounds were nightly released on patrol, because I had made them acquainted with me by feeding them at intervals
quietly. Northup, who had managed to evade the dogs on the day just de
scribed by swimming along the bayou (only to be captured shortly after), subsequently developed a new policy in relation to dogs: I never allowed an opportunity to escape, when alone, of whipping them severely. In this manner I
236
succeeded at length in subduing them completely. They feared me, obeying

my voice at once. Green and Northup, each in his own way, had remapped
the canine perimeter of their enslavement by associating their scent and sound
with mastery. Knowing how dogs perceived the landscape helped slaves to escape. From bog to bog, where I had stepped, they could still keep the track,
though impeded by the water, wrote Northup. At length, to my great joy, I
came to a wide bayou, and plunging in, had soon stemmed its sluggish current
to the other side. There certainly the dogs would be confoundedthe current
carrying down the stream all traces of that slight mysterious scent, which enables the quick-smelling hound to follow in the track of the fugitive. . . .
Around two oclock in the afternoon, I heard the last of the hounds.63
For dogs, the chase did not end with capture: their aggression knew nothing
of due process or even human property. Slaves who could not elude the dogs
and their outsized number among the fugitives is a testament to their desperate couragesearched, often in vain, for sanctuary. When pushed hard,
one of Frederick Law Olmsteds informants told him, a Negro always took
to a tree. Olmsted went on to repeat the following story told by a clergyman
about his neighbor:
He was out once with another man, when after a long search, they found
the dogs barking up a big cottonwood tree. They examined the tree
closely without finding any Negro, and concluded that the dogs must
have been foiled, and they were about to go away, when Mr., from
some distance off, thought he saw a Negros leg very high up in the tree.
... He called out, as if he really saw a man, telling him to come down,
but nothing stirred. ... He then cut half through the tree on one side, and
was beginning on the other when the Negro halloed out that if he would
stop he would come down. He stopped cutting and the Negro descended
to the lowest limb, which was still far from the ground and asked the
hunter to take away his dogs, and promise they shouldnt tear him. But
the hunter swore hed make no conditions with him after having been
made to cut the tree almost down. The Negro said no more, but retained
his position until the tree was nearly cut in two. When it began to totter,
he slid down the trunk, the dogs springing upon him as soon as he was
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within their reach. He fought them hard, and got one of them by the ear;
that made them fiercer, and they tore him till the hunter was afraid theyd
kill him, and stopped them.64
Compare that story to the following one, from Andrew Jackson:
While they were going over the cotton picking for the last time, one of
the slaves named Little John, ran away. The hounds were started upon
the mans track, and the overseer and a part of the slaves followed. But in
a moment all was still. At this awful moment of soul harrowing suspense,
anxiety to see our friend and fleeing victim was depicted in every countenance. But what did they see? Nothing of Johnbut the hounds in a
gore of blood, all over their heads and legs. ... John was not found that
night. Early the next morning search was made for the slave. Little John
was found, stiff upon the ground, torn and mangled by the hounds, in
the cane. His body had been dragged around, and the pieces were found
sticking to the snags as though he was a wild hog.65
In these stories, dogs seem to be the final instance of slaveholding powerthe
last savage tool for patrolling the unruly boundaries of the Cotton Kingdom,
for laying bare the verge of fugitive life.
When they were run down by dogs, slaves sometimes fought for their lives.
Charles Ball recalled encountering a dog as he slipped into a farmers yard to
steal peaches to sustain him on his flight: I stood still as a stone, but yet the
dog growled on, and at length barked out. I presume he smelled me for he
could not hear me. In a short time I found that the dog was coming towards
me, and then I started and ran fast as I could for the woods. Another dog
joined the first, and they soon caught up to Ball. I now thought of my masters sword, which I had not removed from its scabbard, in my great coat, since
I commenced my journey. I snatched it from its sheath, and, at a single cut, laid
open the head of the largest and fiercest of the dogs, from his neck to his nose.
He gave a loud yell and fell dead on the ground. The other dog, seeing the fate
of his companion, leaped the fence, and escaped into the field, where he
stopped and like a cowardly cur set up a clamorous barking at the enemy he
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was afraid to look in the face. A similarly spare account of the relationship
between enslaved human beings and repurposed dogs characterizes J. D.
Greens account of being set upon as he fell from a tree.
In this emergency, I called out the name of one of the dogs, who was
more familiar with me than the others, called Fly, and hit my knee to attract her attention and it had the desired effect. She came fondling towards me, accompanied by another called Jovial. I pulled out my knife
and cut the throat of Fly, upon which Jovial made an attempt to lay hold
of me and I caught him by the throat, which caused me to lose my knife,
but I held him fast by the wind pipe, forcing my thumbs with as much
force as possible. ... I made a powerful effort to fling him as far away as
possible, and regained my knife; but when I had thrown him there he lay
throttled to death. Not so, Fly, who weltered in blood, and rolled about
howling terribly, but not killed.66
These descriptions of dog killing are almost didactic; they describe not simply what was done, but how it was done. Many former slaves wrote about their
fights with slaveholders or other whites in similarly specific terms, beginningwith what they saw. At the core of John Browns description of the slave
trader who carried him South as a child was an account of the mans hand
(providing, in the process, a vivid counterpoint to the way the same slaveholder might have described Browns hands): He might have killed me easily
with one blow from his huge fist. Other accounts provided traces of what
must have been a constant strategic sense of the wounding latent in every object within a slaveholders reach. Isaac Mason was working along with some
other slaves to load a boat when he saw a slaveholder coming down to the
bank. On he came with his silver-headed stick in hand, he later wrote, in a
recapitulation of the flash reckoning he made of the situation. A like materiality characterizes J.D. Greens memory of his enraged owner: I knew he had
on heavy cow-hide boots, and I knew he would try to assist me in my outward
progress. And John Parker remarked, A whole book could be written on the
hobnailed boot as a weapon of offense and defense. The strategy of using the
hobnailed boot is an art.67
The representation of violence as a form of embodied knowledge is even
239
clearer in the accounts former slaves gave of the way they moved during fights.
Ordered to strip himself down to be beaten, Solomon Northup instead returned his owners malignant look:
Master Tibeats, said I looking him boldly in the face, I will not. I was
about to say something further in justification, but with concentrated
vengeance, he sprang upon me, seizing me by the throat with one hand,
raising the whip with the other in the act of striking. Before the blow descended, however, I had caught him by the collar of the coat and drawn
him closely to me. Reaching down, I seized him by the ankle and pushing
him back with the other hand, he fell over on the ground. Putting one
arm around his leg, and holding it to my breast, so that his head and
shoulders only touched the ground, I placed my foot upon his neck. He
was completely in my power.68
John Parker provided a similarly detailed account of a fight with a white man:
I had been through too many rough-and-tumble fights not to know the
tricks of combat. With the notice I had given my man, it was impossiblefor me to get in the first blow, which is a very important point in this
sort of contest. ... In one of my rushes, my opponents impetus carriedhim over me, throwing him heavily to the hard floor. I was on him
like a flash. When he staggered up I hit him fairly on the jaw, knockinghim down again. ... As he arose I swung hard on his jaw. He trembled all over. Then I hit him with every ounce of vengeance I could muster. This time he went down for good. I gloated over his bruised face,
discolored eyes.69
These are genre pieces. They are characterized, on the one hand, by the
operational aesthetics so important to antebellum popular writing, and, on
the other, by the thematics of becoming-a-man so central to slave narratives
more generally. As a free man, I had met him fairly and asserted my superiority, Parker concluded.70 Yet, magnetized though they are by form, there is
something about these descriptions that exceeds their literary resonance: a
sense of the concerted repurposing of ones own body. They refuse the con-
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ventional description of knowledge as a condition of the mind rather than

the body.71 There is satisfactioneven pleasurein these descriptions of in
flicting harm. The wounding has been choreographed, practiced, exercised,
earned, enjoyed, celebrated. It is to be reveled in. Such accounts provide a useful reminder of the sanguinary character of resistance; of the hard-earned
pleasure of being the perpetrator; of retribution. When we write a history in
which the word resistance blooms with a sense of its bruising satisfactions,
we will be closer to the world as it was known by John Parker.
nowhere is the violence that characterized that world more apparent than
in the trial records of Mississippi slaves accused of capital crimes. When Lot
Ellis and his brother Willis accused their slave Simon of killing an enslaved
child named Norvell, they based their suspicion on the rudimentary forensicconclusion that a footprint found near the boys body resembled that of
Simon. Using dogs to track the fleeing Simon six miles through the woods,
they found him up to his neck in the bayou, although the slaveholders alleged
they could still see the scythe blade in his submerged hand. As they ordered
Simon from the water, one of them struck him on the head, tearing open an
old wound and causing blood to stream down his face. The dogs then attacked
the stricken prisoner. As the posse of slaveholders led him back through the
woods, Simons owner advised him to come clean, saying, It will be better for
you to tell the whole truth about the matter. When Simon finally confessed to
Norvells murder, he was bound by a noose looped around his neck and tied
onthe other end to the pommel on one of his captors horses. Taken to a log
cabin, shown Norvells body, and placed before a makeshift jury of white men,
Simons words initially failed him, but upon being termed the murderer by
one of the white men present, he again confessed.72
The same elements run through any number of other accounts of the interrogations carried out by Mississippi slaveholders investigating crimes.73 For
example, Peter, accused of killing a white man, was interrogated while he was
chained to the floor of an outbuilding and surrounded by a volunteer jury
that one witness thought might have numbered fifty men. As the mob outside
expressed a determination to hang the prisoner forthwith, Peter confessed
after reportedly being told that it would be better for him to tell the truth.
Alec and Henry were likewise chained in a house that was surrounded by
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sixteen or twenty white men. They admitted murdering their master, after
being told it would be better for the guilty ones to confess[,] that the innocent
might not be punished.
When one of William Miless guests took ill at his breakfast table, his attention was arrested by the phenomenon of little streaks of smoke coursing
and running in little veins over the hominy and at intervals exploding in thick
clusters with a faint flash like Lucifer matches. Miles noticed that his slaves
Israel and John were peculiarly silent and had strange expressions on their
faces. They were separated and beaten within one anothers hearing and then
again out of earshot, until, upon being told that each had implicated the other,
they confessed. They had, they said, tried to poison their master with arsenic,
a plot they had hatched in the old field on the way to the post office.
The slave Isham was accused of murdering a white man named William
Hoggat. The evidence was a drop of blood (identifiable even when scraped off
together with the blacking that allegedly covered it) that had been found on
one of Ishams shoes. Hoggat had been murdered on the road about one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards from [the house of Ishams owner] by the
path or short cut across the field, but about four to five hundred yards by the
road that led to the deceaseds house. The body had then been dragged off
the road and thrown in a nearby sinkhole. Isham was taken to a bayou, where
another slave, Dick, had been tied to a log and was being whipped to make
him confess what he had done, if anything. One of the men interrogating
Isham remembered that Dicks screams could be heard quite plainly as another white man made the proposition to buy and hang Isham as his own
loss, and then told Isham that Dick had confessed and implicated him.74
These stories were told in Mississippi courtrooms, where at least part of the
issue under consideration was whether the confessions in question were legally
admissible. They had come before the court, presumably, because the very
slaveholders who had coerced confessions from their slaves wanted to make
sure that it was the state that carried out those slaves executions. Not because
the owners were squeamish about brutality, but because it was only in the case
of an execution under the auspices of the State of Mississippi that they would
get reimbursed for the value of their dead slaves. These cases, then, capture
one element of an ongoing struggle concerning a basic question: Who, ultimately, was sovereign over Mississippi slaves: their owners or the state?75 In-
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deed, such cases capture the ambiguous results of the efforts of Southern lawmakers to essentially buy the right to interrogate and execute slaves by paying
slaveholders a bounty for the dead.
One can sense in these cases not only a shared occasion, but also the sort of
sight-reading by which slaveholders tried to resolve the mystery behind the
appearance of a dead body in a landscape over which they had only partial
control. A knife held underwater, a footprint in the dust, a puff of smoke in the
grits, or a drop of blood smeared with boot-blacking might be transformed
into certain conviction of a slaves guilt. But above all, there is the physiognomy. These slaveholders believed that they could see the evidence of guilt as
it flickered across their slaves faces; and once they saw it, they tortured the
slaves until they got the confirmation they wanted. Indeed, it is their insistence
on a confession that outlines the limits of their vision. Ultimately, these slaveholders could never be sure they were right unless the slaves told them so.
Slaveholders used torture to close the gap between what their straining eyes
could see and what their overheated imaginations suggested. The picture of
Mississippi that emerges from these cases is that of a wild zone of unchecked
power through which slaveholders reasserted their power when they thought
it had been challenged. Suspected slaves were run down and attacked by dogs,
dragged through the woods on a noose attached to a horse, beaten with sticks,
cut with whips, stapled to the floor of a cabin while a mob gathered outside.
These nightmare images produced a climate of intimidation so pervasive that
in the Mississippi courts after 1850, the bare statement It will go better for you
if you tell the truth was legally considered evidence that a slave s subsequent
confession had been coerced. In Mississippi it became a settled principle of law
that in a very few hours outside the authority of the law, slaveholders could
make slaves say whatever they wanted.76
In addition to the sickening compass of the historical arc that joins these
stories to Abner Louima and Abu Ghraib, such accounts of enslaved human
beings in extremis share another set of historical traces. Many of these cases
shared not only a legal venue, but a physical setting as well: these events occurred beyond the bounds of the cotton economy. The extraordinary violence
of the incidents betrays slaveholders sense of their own vulnerability outside
the landscape of their materially predicated control. This was a landscape that
defied the slaveholders visual field of power, a landscape that disclosed itself
243
to them only in pieces, its woods and bayous occluding their sight lines. It was
a landscape that transformed the sensory terrain of mastery and resistance
aterrain in which slaves could hear their owners coming after them, and in
which slaveholders had to rely upon the noses of their dogs to guide them. At
the moments when these slaveholders followed their dogs into the woods or
beat a confession out of one of their slaves, they encountered the spatially embedded character of their power (and the material thickness of their slaves
resistance) as the fearful edge of their own apprehension. At the margins of
the fieldswhether in the residual frontier spaces of uncleared woods and
undrained swamps, or in the exhausted agricultural spaces of post-capitalist
fields gone to meadow and piney oldfieldit was clear that the Cotton Kingdom was less an accomplished fact than an ongoing project, less a fixed bastion of slaveholding power than an excruciating becoming: a landscape beingfiercely cleared in a counterinsurgency campaign to which there could be
no end.
9
The Mississippi Valley in
the Time of Cotton
Gambling converts time into a narcotic.
Walter Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century
at f irst glance, the experience of slaves in the Mississippi Valley seems

far removedindeed, conceptually antitheticalto the world of capital
ism.They labored far from the banks and factories of the North and Great
Britain. There was nothing mystified or abstract about the slave mode of production: exploitation did not occur under the cover of contract. Yet the cotton
they picked tells a different story. For the daily standard of measure to which
slaves in the Mississippi Valley were held marked the conceptual reach of the
global economy in the first half of the nineteenth century: lashes into labor
into bales into dollars into pounds sterling. Cotton planters, moreover, were
not simply concerned with their slave-generated profits (although they surely
were); they were also concerned with their slaves productivity. They extracted
profit from their slaves not simply by economizing on inputs (food, clothing)
and extending the working day (sunup to sundown was the commonplace),
but by trying to make their slaves work harder, faster, more efficiently. Between 1820 and 1860, the productivity of the average slave on the average cotton plantation in Mississippi increased sixfold.1
To track that productivity, slaveholders relied on tools like Afflecks Cotton
Plantation Record and Account Book, one of the bestselling books in the Mississippi Valley. Priced at $2.50 and published every year from 1847 until the Civil
War, Afflecks provided a list of the things to which a commercially minded
The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton
245
cotton planter should attend, and provided neatly lined printed pages across
which they could be tracked: pounds of cotton by the slave, by the acre, and by
the bale; prices gained for the same, less the cost of shipping and marketing;
total yield, total expenditure, total profit (or loss).2 Afflecks represented (or,
more precisely, urged planters to represent as they attempted to square their
practice to its empty rows and columns) the cotton business as a series of sum
totals: days, bales, dollars. Those increments were the measures of cotton-
planting success.
In the midst of the season, however, the cotton business was less a series of
summed-out totals than a set of polyrhythmic processes, causes and effects,
risks and calculations, sometimes in profitable consonance, sometimes in disastrous dissonance. To judge by the records that planters kept, three sets of pro
cesses were of particular concern to them: the natural processes by which sun,
water, and soil were converted into cotton; the labor process by which cotton
plants were made into marketable bales; and the financial process by which
credit was transformed into income, the money they had borrowed transformed into the sale of the cotton that represented its repayment. In order to
manage their crop, planters had to negotiate a series of exchanges between
the natural determinants of the growth of their cotton plants, the social determinants of the diligence with which it was picked, processed, shipped, and
sold, and the financial determinants of the time-scaled commercial instruments
which made it possible for them to plant the cotton in the first instance and sell
it in the final. Cotton was, in the parlance of the day, made at the juncture of
these processesecology, labor, marketing, and credit. Indeed, we might say
that, along with the cotton, planters themselves were made at the juncture
of these processes. The notations contained in their record books abstracted
represented as measured, tamed, masteredcentripetal forces which daily
threatened to escape their control; which, indeed, the planters came to believe
by the 1850s, were more powerful than almost any other force on the face of
the earth.
It was not simply the bare reckoning of pounds of cotton into pounds sterling that marked the cadence of Valley slave life; it was the rate of the conversion. Slaveholders prided themselves on the rate at which their slaves worked.
Of one, John Brown remembered that he had a name for possessing the fastest cotton-picking Negroes in the whole county. Of another, William Green
246
said that he called himself the Great Labor Savings Man. Time s money,
times money! repeated a cotton planter who found himself stuck on a slow-
moving steamboat; according to Frederick Law Olmsted, he worried that his
slaves were not working hard enough in his absence.3 Getting slaves to work
harder and faster and better: this was the meaning of the planters favored
terms, supervision and management. As one of the reformist planters put
it, If cotton seed be scattered very regular, so as to give a stand no stalks
touching, the hoe hand can thin out faster, and thus save time. If I were able to
plant my cotton crop with [this] neatness and order ... I believe I could cultivate an acre or two more per hand. ... If planters will devote more care and
attention in tilling their lands, and putting in their crops in a good manner,
they will be able to make more, and yet spare their servants and their beasts
much labor in the cultivation.4 The dominion of the planters gaze was ruled
by the imperatives of productivity. After all, they were not actually planning
to spare labor; they wanted only to convert it into cotton with greater effi
ciency.
With this in mind, it is worth returning for a moment to the Cotton Kingdoms ruling trinomial: bales per acre per hand. This standard measure was
widely employed. Indeed, the calculation of bales per acre per hand framed
the intensity with which planters overcropped their cotton and leached the fertility from their land. Revisited in light of the question of efficiency, however,
we can see that the formula was, in essence, a tool for calculating the productivity of labor. The ecological exhaustion of the planters fields was intertwined with the bodily exhaustion of their laborers: they were depleting their
lands in an effort to save labor. Given that slaves could plant about twice as
much cotton as they could pick in any given season, planters had to calculate
the amount of labor they could get out of their slaves in order to know how to
allocate their acres. As the American Cotton Planter declared in 1853, the great
limitation to production is labor.5
By the 1860s, defenders of slavery were pointing to the productivity of labor and the way it had increased over the course of the century as an essential
measure of the vitality, the progress, of the Cotton Kingdom. Not only has
the increased number of hands added to the production, but the number of
bales per hand that can be raised has risen from 4 and 5 to 8 and 10 per hand in
some localities, wrote the pro-slavery economist Thomas Kettel. Similarly,
247
referring to the seeming productiveness of slavery, David Christy noted

that the total cotton crop of 1853 equaled 395 lbs. per slavemaking both the
production and export of that staple in 1853 more than four times as large, in
proportion to the slave population, as they were in 1820.6 Far from being unconcerned with the productivity of their laborthe essential modern measure
of the extraction of surplusthese defenders thought it a defining feature of
Southern civilization.
As much as they were concerned with aggregate yieldsbales per acre
perhandthe governing standard of the Cotton Kingdom was calculated in
pounds per day. Looking at the records of the cotton planter Alonzo Snyder,
who owned Buena Vista plantation in Tensas Parish, Louisiana, we find that
during the week of September6, 1852, the slave John picked 280 pounds on
Monday, 135 on Tuesday, 320 on Wednesday, 330 on Thursday, 315 on Friday,
and 325 on Saturday. His total for the week was 1,705 pounds. Letty picked 320
pounds on Monday, 325 on Tuesday, 385 on Wednesday, 365 on Thursday, 365
on Friday, and 350 on Saturday. Her total for the week was 2,110 pounds. Sophia picked 135 pounds on Monday, 165 on Tuesday, 140 on Wednesday, 120 on
Thursday, 130 on Friday, 145 on Saturday. Her weekly total was 835 pounds.
And so on. Those totals represent the work of three of the twenty-five slaves
Snyder worked on Buena Vista. They are drawn from the third page of the
forty-three-page plantation record, and represent the third week of picking in
a season that lasted through the first week of January 1853. They are a few of
the thousands of such numbers in Snyders record book, representing millions
of pounds of cotton his slaves picked, cleaned, ginned, packed, and shipped on
his behalf.
There is nothing remarkable about Snyders record book, beyond the sheer
fact that it records the work done by human beings whom he considered to be
his property. Nothing that strictly separates it from thousands of similar documents lining the shelves of Southern archives. Slaves names were listed along
the left-hand margin, their weekly totals along the right-hand margin, and
their daily totals in columns in between, allowing the planter to track each
slaves daily and weekly progress against both their own past labor and that of
the other slaves in the field. Running totals for the poundage picked by the entire slave force could also be easily calculated on a daily or weekly basis, as
could each slaves total poundage over the course of the season.7
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The daily weighing of picked cotton was a ritual of plantation life in the
Mississippi Valley. Frederick Law Olmsted remembered visiting a Red River
plantation where a slate hung in the piazza, with the names of all the cotton
pickers, and the quantity picked the last picking day by each, thus: Gorge, 152;
David, 130; Polly, 98; Hanna, 96; Little Gorge, 52; etc.8 Those numbers were
used to track daily deviations from standards set at the beginning of the season; they were representations of both slaveholding discipline and enslaved
agony. Solomon Northup, who had been enslaved along Louisianas Red River,
explained: When a new hand ... is sent for the first time into the field, he is
whipped up smartly and made for that day to pick as fast as he can possibly. At
night it is weighed so that his capability in cotton picking is known. The
task might vary upward, but never down. Northup continued: The days
work over in the field, the baskets are ... carried to the gin house, where the
cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may beno matter
how he longs for sleep and resta slave never approached the gin house with
his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weightif he has not performed the full task appointed to him, he knows that he must suffer. And if he
has exceeded it by ten or twenty pounds, in all probability his master will mea
sure the next days task accordingly. As Charles Ball put it, the exchange rate
between the plantation record and the produce it represented was reckoned in
suffering: On some estates settlements are made every evening, and the whipping follows [the weighing] immediately; on others the whipping does not occur until the next morning; whilst on a few plantations, the accounts are closed
twice or three times a week. And nowhere, John Brown remembered, were
the daily rates calculated so meanly as in Mississippi.9
For slaves, violence was the metric of production. Failing to make weight,
leaving cotton in the boll, breaking the branches along the row, spoiling the
cotton with dirt or twigs, running away during the pushing part of the seasonall of these translated into a scale of punishments: fifteen lashes; thirty
lashes; two hundred; four hundred; so severely that the fibers of the shirt
healed fast to my back; until my clothes were all full of the blood that
flowed from my own body; until the blood ran out of his shoes; so that he
was out of work for ten days, two weeks, three weeks, five months; so that he
knew nothing for two days; so that it was five weeks before he could walk;
so that he was always subject to fits after that; so that no pen can ever de
249
scribe what my feelings were; so that language itself collapsed under the onslaught.10 These were the standard measures of cotton production, measuring
the speed and efficiency of the process by which capital and labor were transformed into cotton. As such, they were articulated with another set of standards that assessed the cottons quality: Inferior; Ordinary to Good; Ordinary;Low Middling to Middling; Good Middling; Middling Fair; Fair; Good
Fair; Good and Fineall of these assimilating to the standards of the Liverpool Exchange. The grading of cotton introduced the standards of exchange
into the calculus of labor discipline in Louisiana, for quality depended on how
quickly and carefully a crop was picked and processed.
To understand the relationship between the rate at which slaves labored and
the market grade of the cotton they pickedbetween the scale of punishments
and the standard assimilating to that of Liverpoolone must know some
thing about how cotton matured in the field. From the moment it bloomed, its
value was diminished through exposure. It is of great importance, not only
to the success of the work, but to the complexion and character of the staple,
to keep well up with the picking, wrote one planter in a cool summary of the
way that the ecological character of Petit Gulf cotton and the commercial imperatives of the Atlantic economy were resolved through what the planters
called care, but what in another context might have been called slave driving. The Petit Gulf cotton prized for its pickabilityfor the breadth of its
open boll, and the ease with which the fibers could be drawn from their roots
was correspondingly vulnerable to wind. Every breath of wind in the interval between the time a crop bloomed and the time it was picked diminished the
seasons yield. Wind on a dry, hot day blew dust and sand into the open bolls,
mottling their color and leaving them grainy to the touch. Still worse was rain.
A hard rain could mat the cotton fibers together and entangle them with the
damaged husk of the open boll. Cotton near the bottom of the plant could be
splashed with mud from the bed, leaving indelible brown stains on the fibers. A
light rain or morning dew tinted cotton gray. Frost toward the end of the season would stain it a deep red, effectively destroying the value of whatever was
left in the field. Even the blood from fingers abraded by the rough husks of the
cotton boll could stain the precious fibers contained within.11
The quantitative metric of pounds per day was a convenient proxy for the
biological process through which the marketability of the crop was diminished
250
if the cotton was left standing in the field after it had opened; but this metric
was a poor template of the crops ultimate quality. Slaves who knew that their
work would be measured by the pound at the end of the day had little incentive to pick clean cotton. They gathered up leaves and stems with the bolls,
dragged their sacks over the soil, emptied them on the ground at the end of the
row, packed them down with muddy feet, and so on. These things, one cotton merchant wrote, are rarely seen by the proprietor; and consequently,
when his merchant writes him that his cotton is a little dusty, he says how can it
be? You are surely mistaken.12 The merchants point, in line with dozens of
other criticisms about the lack of care taken with the cotton crop, was to
emphasize the direct connection between the degree of supervision of slaves
in the field and the quality of the cotton they produced.
As cotton approached sale, it was classed according to both color and staplethe length and strength of the strands, which determined how finely it
could be woven (today referred to as thread count). The impressions of the
hand counted, as well as those of the eye: it is strong and feels rough in the
hand; it is softer and silkier than the quality spoken of above; it is ordinarily too harsh; it is different in character from the second description, as well
as shorter in fibre; it is drier, fuzzier, and more like rough wool; our great
consumption and demand is for the soft, white, silky, moderately long cotton
of America; soft and silky, but not clean nor of a very good color, but still
decidedly American in color.13 Planters who tried to project the metropolitan
standard through the process of preparing their cotton often depended on their
slaves to embody (literally) that standard. First, in the field, where eyes and
hands determined the quality of the cotton picked: In the gathering from the
field, great care is taken to keep it clean, and free from trash and stained locks.
Then, in the gin house, where slaves determined which cotton was ready to be
ginned (that is, to have its seeds and other waste material removed)cotton
should never be ginned until the seeds are so dry as to crack between the
teethand sorted the cotton by grade in a rough approximation of the prevailing standard: It is of great importance to sort the cotton carefully into
several qualities, in ginning and packing, for by mixing all qualities together,
the average price is certainly lowered. Then, on the mote-table, where a
woman looks over it very carefully and picks out every little mote or stained
lock as fast as two men gin.14 There is something intimate about the knowl-
251
edge shared by the fingers and eyes of those in Louisiana and those in Liverpool, as they performed the capillary actions of the global economy of the
nineteenth century at either end of its reach.15
Cotton went to market in the form of bales, and the shape and condition
of those bales was the final determinant of its merchantability. Cotton bales
were large and heavy: between four and five hundred pounds apiece, four to
five feet long, and one to three feet on a side, depending on how densely they
had been pressed. They were wrapped with cotton bagging, and tied with rope
or wire. Their size made them difficult to handle, and they often reached market with country damagethat is, caked with dirt on their bottom side, from
having been skidded along the ground as they were maneuvered from the
press to the landing, from the landing onto the steamboat, from the levee to the
market exchange. Cotton that was exposed to rain at any stage during its journey might arrive in market wet-packed, its surface caked into a stiff, stinking
sheet. Finally, if cotton in the gin house had been improperly sorted, either
through lack of attention to separating the grades or as a result of efforts to
conceal low-grade cotton by packing it in bales plated with better cotton, its
sale might be compromised.16
Poor and fraudulent packing were sources of great concern to buyers and
brokers throughout the Atlantic cotton market, who apparently saw manifold
and material connections between the capitalism of the Atlantic market and
the slavery of the Mississippi Valley. A Southern promoter writing in DeBows Review in 1847, criticized the use of iron bands to bale cotton: On this
point reference need only be made to the horribly ragged and wasteful manner
in which cotton for sale is now usually introduced to the purchaser. When a
cotton buyer now examines a sample of cotton he knows that the cotton he
buys is not in the condition of the sample. Why? Because the bagging is torn,
the ends out, several pounds of cotton are materially injured by being exposed
to the mud, and much of it has become trashy and worthless. In 1857, the
president of the Liverpool-based American Chamber of Commerce and the
head of the Cotton Brokers Association wrote an open letter to American
planters, voicing a similar complaint:
Of late ... so many instances of careless packing have occurred causing
a discrepancy between the sample and the bulk, that serious loss has been
252
sustained both by the manufacturer and the merchant. ... The evil complained of has, from carelessness or otherwise, increased to such an extent that in a large proportion of shipments arriving in Liverpool, instances of false or irregular packing are discovered, and occasionally
whole parcels, consisting of 20, 50, and even 100 bales are found mixed in
the bale, and sometimes platedin other words, the outer bale from
which the sample is taken is more or less superior in quality to the interior of the bale.17
From carelessness or otherwise: the adjudication of the were-they-cap
italists question has generally hinged on the interpretation of phrases such
as this. Were cotton planters so heedless of the standards of the market
thatthey allowed their cotton to get stained in blooming, trashed in picking,
mixed in ginning, and damaged in shipping? Or were they sharp-eyed players,
closely watching their slaves as they handled the crop and looking after their
own interests, even to the point of fraud, as it went to market? When we read
letters, articles, and books by writers who projected the standards of the cotton markets or manufactories onto the labor of Southern slaves, are we to see
them as traces of the general tendency of the business towards the increasing
integration of standards and practices, or as voices in the wilderness?
few questions have occasioned the expenditure of so much ink in the

service of so many circular arguments as the question of whether the planters
who owned slaves and lived by their labor were capitalists. One group of historians has argued that capitalism emerged in the seventeenth century, and was
characterized by the separation of laborers from the land, the commodification
of labor power (that is, the performance of work for an hourly wage), the
emergence of the factory system of production, and the identification of contracts as the sine qua non of free labor. If one begins from these premises, it
is hard to argue that slavery was, in and of itself, capitalist (there was no separation of labor from the land, no wages, no contracts). Hence the enduring
formulation that slavery was precapitalist or archaic, or in but not of
the world capitalist system.18 Another group of historians has defined cap
italism as a global system of commerce and exchange that began to emerge in
the fourteenth century, long before the industrial revolution. Noting the
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centrality of slave-produced commodities (and, indeed, of slaves themselves)

to the commercial worlds of the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic, they have argued that slavery was unquestionably capitalist. How else
to describe the forcible transfer and sale of twelve million Africans to the
Americas? How else to account for the emergence of industry in the very region of England which had most directly profited from the slave trade?19
The first position has the virtue of specificity. It locates the emergence of
capitalism in a specific time and place (seventeenth-century and eighteenth-
century England). Moreover, by defining that emergence through focusing on
the mode of production, it places the history of working people at the center of
its account of capitalism. To the critics of this view, however, its analytical
specificity is hopelessly indebted to its Eurocentrism. It treats the history of
capitalism in England as a global developmental paradigm, subordinating
other histories by treating them either as analogies to the real thingtreating
enslavement in Africa as an episode in the history of primary accumulation
analogous to the enclosure of the commons in England, for exampleor as
deviations from its prescribed path, speaking of slavery as economically behind or backward. To ask why Mississippi wasnt more like Manchester,
such critics object, presupposes that there is a reason it should have been, that
there is a natural course of historical development. Indeed, as scholars from a
variety of perspectives have suggested in recent years, this version of history
suffers from an inescapable gulf between the specific historical circumstances
that produced its categories of analysisthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britainand the claim of those categories to be the universal
categories of historical experience.20
The second position has the ability to represent the simultaneous and
interdependent economic histories of Europe, Africa, the Americas, and, indeed, Asia. By focusing on exchange, it illuminates a set of deep historical interconnections among the regions of the globe, among various ways of organizing economic space and extracting profit. This emphasis on the question of
exchange, however, creates the risk of providing a history of capitalism in
which the mileposts unfold regardless of the sphere of productionin which
the actions of merchants and bankers define the timeline, and those of slaves
and wage-earning workers matter not at all. A history of capitalism which
does not make a foundational distinction between slave labor and free labor,
254
between direct domination and the freedom of the contract, between a plantation and a factory, between mercantile capital and manufacturing (not to
mention financial) capital is clearly insufficient to the task of analyzing the material interchanges between, and the ideological interdependency of, the histories of slavery and freedom.
A materialist and historical analysisa focus on what happened, rather
than on how what happened was different from what should have happened if
Mississippi had, in fact, been a bit more like Manchesterbegins from the
premise that in actual historical fact there was no nineteenth-century capital
ism without slavery. However else industrial capitalism might have developed
in the absence of slave-produced cotton and Southern capital markets, it
did not develop that way. Extracting the history of industrial development
(whether in Great Britain or the Northern United States) from the historical
context of its entanglement with slavery, itemizing its differences from the
economic field from which it had been artificially separated, labeling it cap
italism in pure form, and then turning around and comparing it to the slavery
upon which it subsisted in order to judge the latter precapitalist or noncap
italistthis way of proceeding conscripts historical analysis to the service of
ahistorical ideal types.21
What if we sought not to measure the extent to which the market or cap
italism had penetrated the culture of cotton, but rather to understand more
concretely and specifically the workings of this marketthis way of employing capitalin this place at this point in time? What, that is to say, if we set
aside prefabricated questions and threadbare tautologies, and simply began
with a bale of cotton?
in october 1852, Alonzo Snyder shipped his second cropthe cotton

that had been picked in the third and fourth weeks of the season. In his record
book, just below the daily and weekly sums of the weight picked, he recorded
the pounds of cotton in each bale: 440, 470, 445, 450, 475, 455, 465, 465, 450,
435, and so ona total of eighty-three bales weighing 35,795 pounds. These
numbers, of course, are representations of real bales of cotton, abstractions
allowing progress (bales per acre per hand; bales sent to market; drayage, insurance, storage, price per pound on same) to be viewed at a distance. They
traveled from Tensas Parish, where Snyder noted the weights in his record
255
book, to New Orleans, where his cotton went on the market, to Liverpool,
where it likely ended up, and then back again. Yet those numbers also told another story. As The Cotton Planters Manual put it, with scarcely concealed exasperation: The commercial standard in the cotton trade is generally the bale.
The weight of the bale, however, is by no means uniform. Indeed, scarcely
any weight, measure, or standard of capacity may be considered less so. That
irregularity carried out into the Atlantic a memory of the eyes and hands that
had picked, sorted, and packed them into bales. As Louis Hughes rememberedwith pride in the narrow range of divergence, rather than chagrin at
the fact it existed at allthere were slaves so accustomed to their work that the
cotton they packed would not vary ten pounds in the bale.22
As the story was commonly told in the antebellum South, an overeager tax
inspector interdicted the first bales of American cotton to reach the market in
Liverpool. Seven bales of cotton were far more than he believed the United
States could ever have produced, and he suspected the shipper of laundering
West Indian cotton through an American port in order to avoid the excise.
Whatever humor was produced by the retelling of this story resided in its
ironic effect: the American cotton which had provided such an infinitesimal
part of the global supply at the end of the eighteenth century, had, by the second quarter of the nineteenth, come to dominate not only the global supply of
cotton, but a large portion of global economic activity.
In 1791, the first year for which such data were kept at all, the United States
produced about 9,000 bales of cotton, exporting about an eighth of the crop to
Great Britainmost of it long-staple cotton, which, in North America, could
be grown only on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The following year
brought the invention of the cotton gin. Although there was (and still is) a
long-running dispute about whether or not Eli Whitney had actually invented
the gin himself or had claimed credit for the invention of another (in some
tellings, from a slave), there was little doubt about its effect. By providing cotton planters with a machine that could remove the seeds entangled in each boll
of short-staple cotton, the mechanical gin made it possible to cultivate cotton
profitably in large portions of the Southern United States. High prices for cotton, especially in the early 1830s, produced the greatest economic boom in the
nations history. The Depression of 1837 destroyed value throughout the Mississippi Valley, but by the 1850s the economy was booming again. In 1821, the
256
states of Mississippi and Louisiana produced about twenty million pounds

of cotton. By 1859, the comparable figure was 864 million pounds.23 And of
course cotton and slavery went together. Throughout the nineteenth century,
prices in the slave market varied directly with those in the cotton marketno
surprise in an economy where planters reckoned the productivity of labor in
cotton rather than in currency. The census of 1820 recorded 69,064 slaves in
Louisiana and 32,814 in Mississippi. Twenty years later, the respective numbers were 168,452 and 195,211. And twenty years after that, there were 331,726
slaves in Louisiana and 436,631 in Mississippi. In the years 18201860, a sevenfold increase in the Valleys slave population produced a fortyfold increase in
its production of cotton. Divided out in aggregate, this was the 600 percent
increase in productivity that slaveholders could so proudly record in their individual copies of Afflecks Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book.
The cotton produced by slaves in the Mississippi Valley made its way to
market through the port of New Orleans. Indeed, as the cotton economy grew,
so too did river traffic on the Mississippi. In 1813, twenty-one steamboats arrived in New Orleans carrying around 70,000 tons of freight. In 1820, 198
steamboats unloaded almost 100,000 tons of freight, valued at almost $12 million. In 1840, the comparable figures were over 1,500 steamboats and a half-
million tons of freight, worth almost $50 million. In 1860: more than 3,500
boats, two million tons, almost $2billion. As the first historian of the system
wrote in a report to Congress in 1884, The South ... began to insist on the
sovereignty of King Cotton, and New Orleans claimed, like Mahomet, to
beits prophet. The commercial rise of the city of New Orleansno city
of the world has ever advanced as a market of commerce with such gigan
tic strides as New Orleans, enthused DeBows Reviewwas as an export-
processing zone mediating between the Cotton Kingdom of the Mississippi
and the Atlantic.
Every year, the citys stevedores, many of them enslaved, unloaded hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton from steamboats and wrestled them onto
carts for transportation into the city, where others weighed, sampled, and sold
them, marked them with the initials of their owner and his agent, carried them
back to the levee, and packed them onto oceangoing vessels for final shipment.
Here was a strange concert of oaths, questions, cries, and savage noises,
wrote one visitor to New Orleans in 1855. While several steamboats heated
257
up for their departure and several draymen passed at a fast pace, shaking the
pavement under the weight of their iron carts, the Negroes and the Irish proceeded to unload other recently arrived boats and rolled to earth bales of cotton ... under the eye of the commissioners.24
Not all of the cotton shipped from the Mississippi Valley to Great Britain,
however, headed directly across the Atlantic. Cotton was generally shipped on
consignment by the firm that would eventually arrange its sale. Depending on
where the firm was based, and to whom they were selling, cotton from New
Orleans might take one of several paths to market. About 15 percent of Southern cotton was annually sold to domestic manufactures, chiefly in New Eng
land; though this was only a small portion of the global cotton trade, it accounted for a large portion of the industrial output of the United States. Of
the remaining 85 percent or so of the crop, some was shipped directly from
New Orleans across the Atlantic to Liverpool (where most of the small portion of the total destined for continental European importers was unloaded,
charged, and reshipped). A great deal of the cotton that eventually made its
way to Liverpool, however, was first shipped to New York, where it was unloaded, (re)inspected, consigned to a European buyer, reloaded, and only then
shipped across the Atlantic. Finding out the exact value of the Southern cottonthat reached Europe by way of New York was something that concerned
Southern economists a great deal in the years 18301860. Contemporary estimates were that the shippers, insurers, bankers, and merchants of New York
received forty cents of every dollar spent in the cotton market.25 The meridian
that carried cotton so far off its apparent courseto New York, while it was
en route from New Orleans to Liverpoolwas capital: millions of bales of
cotton, weighing billions of pounds, chasing after tiny notations recorded in
little books.
The fact that the port of New York had attained superintendence over the
cotton trade was a development that, by the 1850s, had come to concern pro-
slavery analysts of the cotton trade more than any other. For now, it is enough
to note that the commercial spaces of the nineteenth century (like those of the
twenty-first) were made, not given: distance was measured not in miles, but in
dollars. New Yorks highly capitalized banks were able (partly through their
connection to British banks, which were even more highly capitalized) to offer
longer credit on better terms to those interested in buying cotton; the slower
258
rate at which the money paid for cotton degraded could compensate for the
longer distance the cotton would have to travel to market. The result of this,
wrote Thomas Kettel in 1860, is to force all financial currents toward the general center.26 In addition to being the nations leading money market, New
York was its greatest port, a preeminence that historians have attributed to the
citys domination of the packet trade to Liverpool. Whereas most transatlantic
shipping well into the nineteenth century operated on a contingent schedule
when the ships hold was full, it would begin its voyagethe volume of trade
between New York and Liverpool, as well as the fact that the government had
conveniently granted New York a monopoly over the mail service to Great
Britain, enabled regularly scheduled ships between New York and Liverpool
to operate at a profit. Beginning in 1818, regularly scheduled packets connected New York to Liverpool. Because the United States imported a great
deal from Great Britain but exported very little other than cotton, and because
the high fixed capital costs of running a ship across the Atlantic made it worthwhile to fill the hold of a ship with something rather than nothing, it was in the
interest of the packets to ship cotton at lower rates than their competitors
did (even those among their competitors who ran geographically more directroutes). The lower freight charged on outbound cotton was offset by the
higher freights charged on inbound British goods, which were, in turn, covered by the financial benefits that the shipper derived from regular service. By
lowering the per-pound rate for shipping cotton to Liverpool via New York,
the packets effectively shortened the distance cotton traveled to market: mea
sured in dollars, the journey from New Orleans to New York to Liverpool
could be shorter than traveling directly. The packets, wrote the oceanographer
and advocate of slavery Matthew Maury in 1839, had placed New York in
aposition of commercial supremacy over all other ports in the United
States.27
Most of the cotton that was eventually sold in New York and Liverpool
followed capital along these commercial pathways in the sea. Its price was
pledged in advance of its actual salesometimes, indeed, in advance of its
planting. The cotton economy depended on this fictitious capital for liquidity; it provided most of the money that planters and merchants used to do business during the year, before the crop came in. In his book Southern Wealth and
Northern Profits (1860), Thomas Kettel explained the principles of the system:
259
The agriculturalists who create the real wealth of the country are not in daily
receipt of money. Their produce is ready but once in the year, whereas they
buy supplies [on credit] year round. . . . The whole banking system of the
country is based primarily on this bill movement against produce. Kettels assessment echoed (and generalized) what had been the commonsense account
of the cotton markets (over)reliance on advances since at least the Depression
of 1837. Not one in fifteen, I am assured, is free of debt, wrote the traveler
James Stirling of Deep South cotton planters.28 Their debts represented a principal dimension of the spatial and temporal linkages between the Mississippi
Valley and the wider world of Anglo-American Atlantic capital.
Capital entered the Mississippi Valley in the winter months, when cotton
was sold. As the crop came to market in New Orleans, cotton merchants
who were often agents of merchant banks based in New York or Liverpool
(Brown Brothers, Barings, N.M. Rothschild and Sons), or agents for a host of
smaller English and American banksprovided advances against its eventual
sale. In return for lending the factors (and thus the planters) money during
thetime the crop was traveling to market, these cotton merchants and their
merchant-banker backers received the right to sell it on a consignment basis,
thus earning the commission and perhaps, in the case of some of the larger
firms, the right to ship it aboard their own ships. The credit they offered generally took the form of a sight draft typically payable in New York or Liverpool
sixty days after presentation. In order to be redeemed, the original notes
these paper phantoms of a cotton crop yet unsoldhad to make their way
back to the Northern or British houses that had originally issued them. Gen
erally, this occurred when the banker or merchant who bought the original
debtthe banker or merchant who had provided credit to Valley factors in
dollars payable at a local bank, and had received in return a note in pounds
sterling drawn upon an English bank or in dollars payable in New Yorksold
the original note through the interregional or international money market,
thus making the original promise-to-pay available to someone who needed to
spend money in New York or Liverpool. In practice, Northern merchants often used this money to import European goods. In order to limit their risk,
merchant bankers generally tried to limit the amount they advanced to three-
quarters or so of the amount for which they expected the cotton to eventually
sell.29
260
The credit extended by the merchant houses resolved the seasonal and spatial complexity of trade into liquidity. Planters in Louisiana and Mississippi
were able to pay their debts when they delivered their crop; American importers were able to buy sterling debt that they could use to pay for European
imports; and foreign exchange cycled from the Deep South in the fall to the
North in the winter, and finally home by spring. The sterling bills paid in advance on the cotton, and the cotton itself, thus made their way back to metropolitan merchant houses along separate paths. The bills entered a transatlantic
or interregional money market in which they were used to pay for finished
goods imported from Great Britain; and the cotton was shipped, at the planters risk, to a market where it was sampled, graded, and sold to the manufacturer, who would turn it in into a shirt or a sheet. The sale of the cotton was
finally closed out when the note that was given in advance of the purchase was
presented for payment in New York or Liverpool and covered with money
derived from the final sale of the cotton it represented.30
The physical dimensions (tremendous quantities of cotton, multiple markets, long distances) and temporal complexities (advance purchase, termed obligations, multiple currencies) of the cotton economy were integrated through
the work of New Orleans factors and upriver storekeepersthe latter generally serving as middlemen-consolidators between their own urban factors and
neighboring planters who did not have a regular representative in New Orleans. Each year, the factors and merchants recorded in their account books
charges for every conceivable thing a working plantation could need: the
rough-cut shoes worn by the slaves and the salt pork that was meanly rationed
to them during the year; the Cornish hens and French wines for the planters
table, the schoolbooks for his children and the ribbons for his wife s hair, the
sideboard for the familys parlor and the carriage in which they were driven to
church; the seed from which the planters cotton would grow, the mules that
dragged the plow, the blade that would turn the earth, the hoes that would cut
the grass; the bagging and baling wire for packing the cotton; the human beings whose labor would ultimately pay for all of the above.31 As the Financial
Register put it in 1837, planters indebtedness to merchants was a matter of
common sense (if not necessarily a cause for celebration): Everybody knows
that the cotton planters of the Southwestern states procure large supplies of
clothing for their slaves, of every article required for their own consumption,
261
upon credit from neighboring merchants in anticipation of next years crop.32

The factors account books contained a microcosmic account of the Valley
planters commercial and personal lives, an account in which the social relations of the slaveholding South were reduced to ciphers and recorded as debt.
Whether it came in the form of plantation supplies, consumable goods, or
cash advances, the money that factors lent to planters and to the storekeepers
who supplied them was usually not their own. Rather, it was borrowed from
banks in New Orleans, New York, or even Liverpool. This money, the second
stream of fictional capital that yearly flowed into the Mississippi Valley, took
the form of accommodation paper providing a factor with credit that could
be used to pay for goods over the course of the year. The money was made
available to planters in the form of the supplies and services provided them by
their urban factors, or in the form of drafts promising payment at a specified
future date. These drafts, issued by cotton factors, could be discounted
traded for currencyby local bankers and money changers. Such credit allowed for the temporal and spatial unevenness of the cotton market to be
smoothed out by the workings of the money market. A planter who needed
cotton seed in March could have it purchased by a factor in New Orleans, who
could buy it with money he had borrowed from a bank in New York. When
that seed grew into cotton it would be shipped to the factor, who would sell the
cotton and use the proceeds to cover his own debt to the bank before crediting
the planters account with the remainder. Whenever the sale of the cotton
proved insufficient to cover the planters debt, the factor would simply roll the
debt over to the following years crop. Factors generally lent planters money at
8 percent interest, and they charged a 2.5 percent commission on goods they
bought or sold on the planters behalf.33
The network of advances and consignments that structured the cotton trade
had the (intended) effect of shifting risk toward the end of the chain of debt.
By trading cotton on consignment, both the factors and their merchant-banker
backers were able to make money off the cotton tradeinterest on loans,
charges for handling, shipping, sellingwhile absorbing very little risk from
market fluctuations. Consider, by way of example, the largest of the firms
heavily involved in the cotton trade, as well as the one most studied by historians: Brown Brothers. The firms directors attempted to limit their risk by advancing only three-quarters of the value they expected the cotton would even-
262
tually bring, preferring to pay a balance at the end of the season, rather than
having to protest a note and run the risk of legal action in a distant jurisdiction.
Because Brown Brothers very rarely purchased cotton on the companys account, they distributed their risk through the network of factors and cotton
brokers to whom they lent money and from whom they received guaranteed
consignments in return. Merchant bankers further insulated themselves from
risk by requiring those who borrowed money to obtain an endorsement
from a local merchant or planter. These accommodating endorsers (co-
signers) then became liable for the debt if the principal borrower defaulted.
Endorsers effectively lent their creditworthiness to the borrower, easing the
flow of capital into the economy. Distant bankers could thus rely on a network
of unofficial agent-endorsers to hector indebted planters and factors, or to
pursue legal action in far-flung jurisdictions: endorsements allowed foreign
capital to enterthe economy with a familiar face. Endorsement respatialized
(and recapitalized) risk by using local networks of trade and sociability to insulate distant merchant bankers. When such networks broke, Joseph Baldwin
remembered in his memoir of the Flush Times of the 1830s and the Panic of
1837, they broke by neighborhoods.34
planters motivations and their actions, their understanding of the

processes in which they participated and their ability to intervene in those pro
cesses, were all determined at the point where the imperatives of the literal
crop growing in their fields met the fictional capital that had been advanced
them upon its promise. A hard rain or a high wind after the cotton bloomed
could diminish the value of a cotton cropbut those were only the most catastrophic of the environmental risks that planters faced during the course of a
single season. A thumbnail sketch of the 1851 growing season gives some idea
of the superintending natural rhythms that could turn a planters underlying
indebtedness into a gathering threat of bankruptcy. The past season here has
been unfavorable for the growth of cotton; but its disasters, especially in the
West, have not been as severe as in the preceding year. ... The late cold spring,
and the long drought in June and July, left the plants small and the bolls few
and scattering. The severe storm on the 24th of August blew out on the ground
much open cotton, and prostrated and twisted the stalks so much, that there
has been no late crop of forms to mature in October. Too much sun in the
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middle of the season could cause a crop to wither in the field; too much rain
could drown it in the rows; a late spring would mean that a crop bloomed behind, or backward; an early frost meant that the picking season was cut
short.35
And then there were bugs. The horticultural narrowing of the genetic spectrum of Southern cotton also rendered the crop more vulnerable to insects
andparasites. The effects of these pests were as dramatic as they were catastrophic. As T.B. Thorpe recounted in 1854, rust and rot represented the
primary threats to the cotton plant, the former giving the leaves a brown and
deadened tinge, and frequently caus[ing] them to crumble away, while the latter attacked the boll, beginning with a telltale black spot on the rind indicating the presence of voracious worms that would find their way into the roots
[and] ... destroy the staple. Yet these afflictions paled in comparison to the
ravages wrought by the army worm. Thorpe described in near-apocalyptic
terms the sad spectacle unfolding before the eyes of an unfortunate planter:
Day by day you can see the vegetation of vast fields becoming thinner and
thinner, while the worm, constantly increasing in size, assumes at last an unctuous appearance most disgusting to behold. . . . All efforts to arrest their
progress or annihilate them prove unavailing. They seem to spring out of the
ground, and fall from the clouds. What might appear to be the wrath of
theheavens was in fact a clear result of earthly practice. In seeking to revise
the ecological limits of slave-based economic practice through the use of hybridized seed, the agricultural reformers of the Mississippi Valley had created
a biological feedback loop that annually threatened to ruin their crops.
Because planters debts (or those their merchants had assumed on their behalf ) were due at a specific place and time, even a good crop did not protect a
planter if he could not get it to market in time to satisfy his creditors. Thus, we
find deeply indebted Mississippi planter Isaac Lum writing to his New Orleans
factor, I am gathering my crop as fast as possible, and shall ship as fast as I
can [get] it ready. Or William Brandon, also in Mississippi and likewise heavily indebted to his New Orleans factor: I will go on to ship as fast as it is ready
not that I think the present time will be the best of the season. But because I am
now in such a position that I must go on to get out of debt, or give up. And
then two years later, after the factor had refused to furnish him with any more
goods on credit until his crop was sold: You must know that I am forwarding
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it as fast as I possibly can, the bad weather has interrupted all plantation business. ... From what you said when you were up and your last letter I fear you
are losing confidence in me.36 Here we uncover another aspect of the meaning
of the pronoun I as used by planters: in addition to transferring responsibility for the actions being described from the realm of labor to that of supervision, the planters I-language referred to their own commercial responsibility.
Their usage suggests a notion of subjectivity and responsibilitywhat historians have often termed agencydetermined by the structure of the cotton
economy.
Even when the crops had been gathered, ginned, packed, and shipped, cotton planters remained substantially exposed: they directly bore the risks of the
global market. Because their cotton was generally sold on consignment, planters retained legal ownership all the way up to the time it was finally sold, often
thousands of miles from their plantations, and months after it had left their
care. And because they had received advances against that sale, they could find
themselves dunned for money they had already spent, in the event that their
cotton eventually brought less than had been advanced for it. Cotton merchants and the merchant banks they represented competed with one another
for consignments by offering higher and higher percentages of anticipated
sales in advance, thus raising the ratio of fictional capital to expected return in
the economy, compounding the danger of overexposure. When cotton sold for
less than had been advanced against it, the bill that had been given for it worked
its way backward along the chain of debt, seeking the difference. In times
of crisis, when very high advances were followed by very poor sales, cotton
planters (and those who had endorsed for them) could ship their cotton to
market and receive in return a bill for a large balance due upon its sale. If his
first crop proves a bad one, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote of a hypothetical
planter starting out in the Mississippi Valley, he must borrow money of ...
New Orleans to pay his first note; they will sell it to him on the best terms they
canoften at not less than 25 per cent per annum. If three or four bad crops
follow one another, he is ruined.37
The physical properties of cottonits weight in bales, its variable texture,
its vulnerability to fire and watermeant that a crop could go bad after it
was out of the field. Cotton could be skidded across a muddy embankment,
left outside waiting for a ship or train and exposed to the weather and other
265
contingencies, or carefully warehoused directly beneath a leaking roof. It

could be eaten partially by cattle, pilfered by vagabonds on the wharves or
street, or suffer loss and damage in any of the various ways in which such
things are known extensively to occur. It could sit marooned on a levee waiting for water enough in the rivers to float it down.38 Olmsted described the
process by which cotton went to market as truly Western in the direct reckless way. ... A strong gang-plank being placed at right angles to the slide-way,
a bale of cotton was let slide from the top, and, coming down at a fearful velocity, on striking the gang-plank, it would rebound up and out onto the boat,
against a barricade of bales previously arranged to receive it. ... Not infrequently, a bale would not strike fairly on its end, and would rebound off, diagonally, overboard. The first news that John Close heard of the last shipment
of his 1844 crop was that it was missing along with the steamboat Panola; later
he heard that four of his bales had been recovered from the river, and that if
the other sixteen bales made it to market at all, they would be likely to do so in
a damaged state.39
Much of the business of cotton factorage involved encasing bales of cotton
in a protective coating of salability: the physical properties that rendered cotton vulnerable could be largely counteracted through the judicious use of paper. Valley archives are full of seemingly mundane memoranda recording the
charges for insuring (in storage and on ships), sampling, weighing, pressing,and lading that were overseen in New Orleans. Cotton came to market
wrapped in a vast array of receipts for services rendered, guarantees of weight
and quality, partitions of ownership and risk, designations of responsibility
for handling, and promises to pay in case of accident.40 The reliability of a
fully processed shipment of cotton rested less in the sheer physical attributes
50,000 or 60,000 pounds of cotton in bales weighing around 400 pounds
apiecethan it did in a set of notations acquired along the way, which might
be represented in the space of a page: weight by bale, grade by lot, charges for
processing, handling, and insuring.
It is conventional to note that these hieroglyphs were the symbols of commodity fetishismof the process by which the marketability of cotton came
to stand in front of and obscure the process of its production, where money,
valuation, and the commercial fungibility of cotton were rendered as its only
socially relevant features. In his classic work on the fetishism of commodi-
266
ties, Karl Marx attempted to denaturalize the social relations of capitalism

with an image of objects alienated from the circumstances of their production:
tables and chairs set to dancing on their own legs.41 In line with that image,
Koray alkan has argued that cotton went to market on a set of commercial
prosthesestools, actually pieces of paper, that enhanced its physical form
with the added support it needed to become salable. Indeed, in the event of a
commercial misadventure, insured cotton remained salable even in the absence
of its physical presence. Thus, when John Close s cotton expired with the Panola, his underwriters duly resuscitated his capital.42 The extraction of a
shipment of cotton from the temporal limitations of its own physicality also
represented its insertion into a sort of commercial ever-present, where the effect of time could be measured in increments of risk of exposure to water or
fire, assigned a present value according to an aggregate assessment of like
lihood, and stabilized with an insurance policy. Through the labor of factorage, the merchantability of cotton was rendered separable from its physical
form: volatile, degradable cotton was rendered commercially stable. Put another way, the task of factorage was to collapse the dimensionality of time in
the cotton market into timelinessto focus and concentrate risk into a single
speculative proposition: being in the right place at the right time. As an article
in DeBows Review put it in 1852: Time has become an essential element in the
value of merchandise and staple productions.43
stabilized by commercial paper, cotton was rendered a suitable medium

for speculation. The cotton market was characterized by extraordinary vola
tility; prices often varied 10 to 15 percent in the span of a single month, and
might vary as much as 30 or 40 percent over the course of the entire selling
season. In October 1833, for example, short-staple cotton was selling for eigh
teen cents a pound in New Orleans; by February 1834, it had fallen below ten
cents a pound; by August, it was again at eighteen cents. Those were extraordinary yearsbut even in less volatile years, the price of cotton varied 20 to
30 percent over the course of the season.44 The difference between a bad crop
and a good one, between getting ahead or falling further into debt, could be
determined by where the sale of ones cotton fell on a seasonal price curve of
an unknown topography. Planters years were reckoned in values that could
shift in a matter of hours.
267
Timeliness in the cotton market required factors to reckon space against

time. Cotton could be sold in New Orleans, New York, or Liverpool; the
farther along that arc it traveled, the greater the risk that something would
change between the time of decision and that of execution. Both buyers and
sellers in the cotton market began the season by trying to estimate the size of
the years crop, as well as the amount of cotton that might remain on hand
from the previous year. As the crop began to come to market, they counted the
bales and matched them to the statistics gathered from past years. The New
Orleans Price Current included tables that tracked the total receipts, exports,
and stock of cotton at New Orleans over the previous ten years, the previous
year, and the previous three days. On January 19, 1848, for example, there
were 190,694 bales of cotton in New Orleans. Of those, 23,492 had been
onhand from the previous season as of September1, 1847. In the first four
months of the season, 474,427 bales had arrived (25,264 of them in the prior
three days). Reckoned on the other side of the balance sheet were the 307,226
bales that had been exported (12,207 in the previous three days). The comparable totals from the same date the previous year were 374,873 arrived, 205,637
exported, 175,568 on hand. Total receipts and exports from other cotton-
exporting regionsMobile, Savannah, Charleston, Florida, Virginia, North
Carolina, and New Yorkwere also listed for both the current season and the
previous one. And against them, import totals from Great Britain, France,
other foreign ports, and U.States North Ports for the current year and the
prior year.45 These statistics provided a matrix that planters and merchants
used to imagine the future. Would there be a shortage of cotton in the early
months of the season before the entire crop came in, or would demand be absorbed by the prior crop? Would the bulk of the crop come onto the market in
the middle of the season, leading to short supply at the end? Would the crop
come in so slowly that prices would be high throughout most of the season,
and then crash as the bulk of the crop reached market in the last month? Would
a large crop or low demand in one year create a knock-on effect by leaving
cotton on hand for the following year?
Mastery of the cotton trade required factors to imagine the arc of the market in New Orleans, project it into the future, compare the projection to similar ones in New York (adding the two weeks it would take the cotton to move)
or in Liverpool (adding four weeks), and then push cotton onto the market just
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as value crested, and in advance of increasing supply that would dampen the
rising price. Needless to say, the process was utterly subjective, vulnerable to
fits of speculation and depression, characterized by a high degree of mistrust
among participants, and plagued by more than a little commercial chicanery.
Those who mastered it had to have the judgmentthe confidenceto wait
for the moment, and the initiative to seize that moment when it arose.
A crucial aspect of cotton traders speculation was estimating the size of the
total cotton crop. Throughout the year, New Orleans firms sent agents into the
countryside to track the growth of the crop in the field against the one that had
just come to market.46 A summary statement of the reports they received read
something like N.B. Clouds two-page report entitled The Cotton Crop,
dated September7, 1852, which was published in the American Cotton Planter in
January 1853, as the crop came to market. In reference to the growing crop,
wrote Cloud, we may say, that with the exception of the general complaint,
that by the coldness and inclemency of the spring, it was generally a month
more backward than last year, the crop on the first of August looked well, and
without casualty would yield well. He then itemized the factors that would
determine the size of the crop: too much rain in Alabama, rain and rust in
Georgia, the boll worm committing great havoc in Eastern Mississippi; the
army worms in certain localities in Louisiana and Mississippi have been alluded to, but not in a form sufficiently definite upon which to base any opinion. All told, 2,500,000 bales would be a full estimate now. Against that,
Cloud balanced his estimate of global demand.
In the last five years, two very large and two over average crops were
made, while the remaining one was but a little below the average of the
previous figures. The simplest mode of illustrating the immense increase
of consumption, is to say that the enormous stocks held in Great Britain
and the Continent and the United States amounting together to 1,318,000
bales, at the commencement of this period, 1847, and the large cotton
crops raised within it, has all been consumed, the stocks on the 1st August
in Great Britain, the Continent of Europe, and the United States, not exceeding about 950,000 bales.
And not only that: Our accounts are that the progress of building new factories both in Great Britain and the Continent is very animated, which is also the
269
case in portions of our own. A backward crop, little cotton on hand, growing
global demand: It is plainly perceptible we think, prices must rule high in the
present commercial year.47
These stories of the crop in the fields were never just that: in the cotton
market, as in any speculative market, information was currency. In the pages
of the American Cotton Planter, George Henry bemoaned the actions of those
who sold their own cotton and then talked up the size of the crop:
Let me venture a word of advice to my planting friends and country merchants. Now you have sold your cotton and towards this crop you have
no further immediate interest, and hence may be disposed of the receipts
that are yet to come in, or of your ideas about prices. ... Let us be cautious to allow no remark to escape us that is not founded upon probabilities and facts. ... Judging of the past, which is the proper mode to arrive
at the probabilities of the future, the coming crop must be short. ... When
those 3,500,000 bale fellows see how ridiculous they have made themselves and consider how much harm they have done, it is to be hoped
they will not be imprudent enough to trouble any one with their opinions
on this subject.48
The cotton marketthe real place where buyers and sellers haggled over
priceswas daily subject to the pull of the stories told about it: to the techniques of visualization and tools of representation, the published reports and
the enumerations, the tables and the comparisons, the rumors and the gossip.
Of course, what appeared to have been rumor or gossip at the end of
the season entered history as news or intelligence in its midst. Such was
the sensitivity of the market to information, that buyers and sellers marked the
season in terms such as the depression occasioned by the news of the Great
Western or the rise occasioned by the news of the Liverpool or the letters
by the Arabia. Indeed, getting the news before it was printed in a newspaper
afforded a significant advantage in the cotton market. The outcome of Ward v.
Warfield, an 1844 Louisiana Supreme Court case involving a dispute between a
planter and a factor over who held title to a lot of cotton shipped to Liverpool,
hinged on the exact hour at which the steamboat Acadia had reached the city
of Cincinnati early on the morning of April28, 1844, the speed at which the
compositor was able to set the type to publish its news in the papers, and the
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fact that the news of low cotton prices in Liverpool must have been received
in the mail of Sunday morning and have been in the city more than twenty-
four hours before the Gazette was issued.49 In 1825, a group of New York
speculators exploited the gap between news and the newspaper by paying a
postal contractor to transmit their cotton-purchase orders to New Orleans
while holding back the mail containing the news from Europe upon which
their bets were based.50 While the advent of telegraphy in the late 1840s evened
the geographic access to market information within the United States, both the
overall supply in the United Statesthe size of the crop, the amount held over
from the previous year, the amount held back in the country, the amount secretly warehoused while merchants waited for the price to riseand market
conditions in Liverpool (the transatlantic telegraph was not completed until
1860) remained subjects of speculation for those who made their living in the
cotton market.
In the time it took cotton that had been shipped under one set of assumptions to reach the market in New Orleans (or, still more, in New York or Liverpool), almost anything could happen. The letters sent to cotton planter John
Close of Opelousas, Louisiana, by his New Orleans factor who was marketing
his crops in the 1830s and 1840s provide some sense of the hurry-up-and-wait
rhythm of the cotton business. November27, 1835: Our market is very active
at present. December22, 1835: About ten days ago by the steamboat Blackhawk we have received twelve bales of you[r] cotton that we have sampled and
found very good, but unfortunately our market was then and has continued
since to be so dull that we have found it quite impossible to dispose of them.
The news received Saturday and today from every quarter are of a very
gloomy nature. ... It appears impossible to maintain anything like the prices
existing close as twelve days ago. April6, 1836: Our cotton crop is very active since a few days. April16, 1836: We are in receipt of your favor of the
10th announcing shipment of 17 Bales Cotton, which have come to hand. Our
market, in the present moment is so very dull on account of the scarcity of
money that scarcely any operations have taken place lately in the article.51
Safely stowed in the hold of a ship or packed away at the back of a warehouse, a bale of cotton was nevertheless subject to countless commercial hazards. Cotton held back by low water in the country might miss the highest
prices of the season, only to arrive on the market with a glutting flow of bales
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that had been similarly delayed. Cotton could arrive to find the city deserted
by the merchants, who had fled to escape an epidemic, or devoid of credit,
which had been diverted to a more promising market. It could go on the market when there was bad news from Europe or credible intelligence that the
years crop had exceeded all estimations. It could be shipped on to New York
or Liverpool in pursuit of better prices, only to find those markets awash in
bales seeking the same (rapidly declining) values. The opposite could also be
true. Cotton could arrive at market on the crest of a rising tide of prices: news
of a short crop, long credit, expanding worldwide demand.52 If the time was
right, cotton planters could make a killing. When one considers their degree
of exposure to risk on a local, national, and global scale, along with their de
pendence on unpredictable (and degradable) environmental factors and their
reliance upon a resistant workforce, it is not difficult to see why cotton planters
were often compared to gamblers. They turn the farmers life into that of a
gambler and speculator, wrote one Louisiana journalist. They are depen
dent upon chances and an evil turn of the cardsa bad season, a fall in prices
or some such usual calamity. And as every nineteenth-century gambler knew,
the outcome of a game of chance was as likely to turn on legerdemain as it
was upon luckespecially when one player was playing hands on two sides of
the game.53
because planters were legally but not physically present at the sale of
their cotton, the crucial decisionswhen and wherewere usually made by
their factors. One of the few ways that planters could exert control over the
sale of their crop was, paradoxically, by holding it back from the market. Describing the state of the market in 1835, an agent of the New Orleans firm
Burke, Watt, and Company wrote that planters, convinced the crop was going
to be short, have to a large extent held back cotton ... till the Spring when it is
supposed the buyer must submit and pay the planter his price. The pro-
slavery economist C.F. McKay likewise suspected cotton planters of imagining that they could get better prices by false rumors, retaining the crop of the
country until the season is far advanced, [and] publishing in the newspapers
every disaster from frost or flood, and withholding the reports of abundance
and plenty. The possibility that cotton was being held back in the country
in anticipation of higher prices was a significant source of uncertainty in the
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cotton market, and cotton factors seem to have uniformly and consistently
urged planters to send their crops forward for sale. No matter what the condition of the market, the advice was always the same: we would advise you to
send it at the first chance; if your intention is to send us your crop we encourage you to do it as soon as possible; we would take the liberty of advising you to send as soon as possible; prices are very good, we believe you
would do well in hurrying the shipment of the balance of your crop; our
market is very dull ... send your crop to town so as to take advantage of the
best prices. And so on. When the market was active and prices were high, it
was best to ship the cotton to catch the wave; when the market was dull and
prices were low, it was best to ship the cotton so that it was available when
things began to move.54
The factors all-purpose answersand their apparent desire to get the cotton out of the planters hands and under their controlhinted at the structured divergence of interests which characterized every aspect of their relationships with their clients. Because they generally handled multiple crops
and made their money on commission, the factors had much less at stake in
any particular transaction than did the planters. Their income depended more
on maximizing the volume of sales than on maximizing the value of any single
sale. Besides, as Burke, Watt, and Company noted, withholding cotton might
have seemed a useful tactic, but it was limited as a long-term market strategy:
When the buyers see the crop going off in this way, it may have some effect
on them, but so long as it is kept here in the country, they suppose it must be
offered for sale some day or other, and are quite indifferent whether they buy it
in April or January.55 By withholding their cotton, planters could gamble on
the rhythm of the cotton season, but they could not arrest the flow of time.
There was always another crop gathering at their back, pushing their bales to
market.
Once they sent their crop, planters control over it was mediated through
written guidelines attending the shipment of cotton. On the one hand, these
could take the form of legally binding limits, such as an instruction to hold
bales for a specific price and ship directly to Liverpool for sale if it could not be
obtained, or to hold the four-hundred and thirty five bales of cotton until
1April ... for a limit in price of nine cents per pounda directive that the
Mississippi planter Thomas Warfield sent to his New Orleans agent along with
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his cotton in 1844. Under such strict instruction, a factor who sold cotton for
less than the stipulated price could be held legally liable for the difference between the price he eventually obtained and that specified by the planter (or the
highest price of the season). Cotton held for a limit ran the risk of going unsold (as, indeed, Warfields did in 1844), and so planters generally afforded
their factors more discretion in marketing their cotton. At their most open-
ended, these guidelines took the form of prayerslegally meaningless reaffir
mations of the reliance of planters on their factors. Indeed, these letters seem
to oscillate between providing instructions and deferring to the factors judgment in a way that recapitulates in microcosm the vexations of remote ownership and mediated agency: In regard to the crop I send you this year, you can
dispose of it when you think proper. I have held up for two years, but my impression is that the sooner sales are effected the better, but of this you will do
as you think best, having determined to rely on your judgment in the matter.
Or, more simply, The bales are very heavy and I must request you to see that
the weights are sustained relying on your efforts to get for me the best market
prices. In such cases, the legal standard governing the responsibilities of factors was that, when they acted on behalf of the planters with whom they had
contracted, they should behave as a prudent man might behave in seeking a
sale for his own cotton.56 But how would a prudent man behave if someone
elsesay, the man for whom he was selling cottonowed him money? And
how would he behave if he owed that money to someone elsesay, the person
to whom he was selling the cotton?
Planters received news of their cotton in written reports sent by their factors. Even as these reports had the purpose of providing the planters with news
from New Orleans, New York, or Liverpool, their rhetorical form often mirrored the opacity of the planters relationship to the cotton market. Factors
writing to planters often framed market information with phrases like the
general understanding is... or I am informed... or a decline is spoken
of ... or people here are generally of the opinion that... Or they referred
to information that came from every quarter, our market, the present
feelings in the cotton mart, the gentlemen in New Orleans, our friends in
Liverpool, knowing ones from Mississippi, or the arrivals from Europe.
Or they couched their assessments in the passive voice, as in this summary of a
slow market sent by a New Orleans factor to a Mississippi planter in April
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1844: There is no expectation of any material improvement. ... Cotton is

now lower than in November, and it is confidently believed that the crop will
go to 1,900,000 bales.57 These formulations gestured at the daily business of
the cotton marketthe networking, the rumor-mongering, the intelligence
gatheringeven as they drew a curtain over the specifics of the process of
transmissionwho, when, where, whythat determined the news and how it
should be received. Information, of course, often came at a remove of several
steps: the factors who relayed estimates of the total size of the cotton crop had
not seen every bale themselves, had not counted out all 1,900,000 bales, or, still
less, sampled, graded, and priced them out for sale. In framing their accounts
the way they did, however, they made it seem as if they might have. They
shrouded the actions they took in the cotton marketa real place where real
people gossiped, bargained, and betin the authority of the Cotton Market
a depersonalized aggregate formation which could be used to justify their
actions to a planter who encountered the market only at a distance. As one
Mississippi planter put it about the cotton market, Merchants act advisedly
planters in the dark.58
Except, of course, when the planters acted in the clear light of hindsight. In
a market where time was sometimes measured by the minute, the information
received by the planters was usually at least a week out of datethe time one
Central Louisiana planter estimated it took correspondence from New Orleans
to find a place on a steamboat and make its way upriver. Another simply de
scribed the mail service to Bayou Sara as extremely irregular.59 Planters
agency in the cotton market was necessarily retrospective: the result of their
actionsactions legally taken on their behalfwas clear to them only days or
even weeks after they had been taken, long after there was any hope of undoing them. At the end of the season, as planters looked back at the serial account
of the rises and falls in prices, and compared the prices they received with
those received by their neighbors (we are always in the habit of comparing
acct. sales, so that we generally know what each planter obtains for his crop for
many miles around, wrote one), they often held their factors responsible for
having either intemperately rushed the cotton into a market that had yet to
crest, or phlegmatically missed the moment before prices declined. As I could
not have foreseen this, wrote one factor, accounting for a substantial price
rise that occurred the day after he had sold E.B. Lyonss cotton in November
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1850, I trust that I shall not be censured. Lyonss responseThe extremely

low (low for this season) price at which you have just disposed of my fifty-four
bales gives me little promise of realizing much from my cropechoed that
of countless others. Why did you not sell my cotton ... at the 17? ... In the
future I think I shall adopt the plan of never sending cotton till the market will
suit, wrote William Flowers to his commission merchant in May 1839. Some
New Orleans agents were criticized quite bluntly: With what might almost be
characterized as obstinate stupidity they held on with a constantly and gradually declining market, wrote Beniah Magoffinor rather his lawyer, for the
(mis)handling of his crop had become the subject of a lawsuit.60
Often cotton planters doubts had to do less with their factors prescience or
even their competence than it did with their honesty. The cotton planter Henry
Huntington referred to commercial agency as the system of robbery of our
commission houses; Daniel Hundley classed the cotton merchants as Southern Yankees. Indeed, the New Orleans merchant community provided ample
evidence of creative accounting, promiscuous charging, and canny double-
dealing when their books were opened, sometimes under the threat of legal
action. If the planters are to be believed, their agents were often on the take.
They would record sales at a lower rate in their books than they received in the
market; or they would pay an extra quarter-cent on the pound on the first shipment of the season, only to deduct a half-cent on the rest once they had secured its promise. They might launder goods they owned themselves through
third-party sellers, thus adding a commission to their own price, or might
pass on a higher price for supplies to a planter while receiving a kickback from
the grocer. They would add a commission for negotiating loans upon which
they were already charging interest, as if they had been forced to go looking
for the money somewhere outside their own counting rooms. They would sell
their cotton at face value for the deflated paper of banks in which they were
principal investors, and would attempt to distract attention from the maneuver
by sending a good remedy for sniff disease along with the report of the
sale.61
In 1853, the Mississippi planter William Brandon had just about run out of
neighbors who would endorse his notes, and had used up all the self-abasing
forms of address in which to beg for just one more seasons worth of cotton
seed and the mules to make sure that he did not lose another crop to grass. He
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requested a statement of his account from his New Orleans factor. Along with
it, he received a letter noting that the statement had been drawn up without
any reference to correctness. When a new statement was drawn up, this time
with correctness in mind, it turned out that the account he had been trying to
pay off included entries contradicted by [the factors] other books, triple
charges for supplies (once for buying from the grocer, once for selling it to
Brandon, and 8 percent for lending the money that had apparently accomplished both purposes), bills for the payment of debts to merchants in New
Orleans and New York from whom Brandon had never received any goods,
and so on. It turned out that instead of being more than $6,000 in debt to his
agent, Brandon was actually owed almost $6,000.62
But even beyond the risk that factors might be lining their own pockets or
cooking the books, cotton planters suspicions were determined by debt. For if
cotton had to be commercially stable (weighed, sampled, insured, and so on)
in order to enter the market, the money for which it was sold was subject to
rapid devaluation. The factors business was to make a match between a shipment of cotton and an advance paymenta simple two-dimensional transaction, on the face of it. But because they owned the planters debt and paid the
planters obligation up until the time the cotton was finally sold, factors sometimes had an incentive to move the cotton as quickly as possible in order to
have money on hand when a planters notes came due, especially when times
were tight and they had other debts to pay. As the Mississippi planter M.W.
Phillips explained, The greatest drawback upon the cotton planters interest
is the yearly practice of drawing bills upon the coming crop. The planter is
thereby forced to send his cotton forward, and the merchant wants the money
to replace in the bank, so as to get another loan for someone else, and he sells.
Often he is compelled to sell, and very often loses for his patron one or two
cents. Because factors represented multiple planters, when they were lightly
capitalized they sometimes had to short-sell the crop of one planter in order to
cover the debts of anotheror, indeed, to cover their own debts. And because
they had often borrowed money from merchant bankers attached to particular
firms and sometimes stood to gain a kickback from the eventual sale, factors
had strong incentives to direct planters cotton to their own creditor-patrons,
rather than allowing it to follow a willy-nilly course in search of the highest
price the market might bear. The interests of planters might thus be sacri
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ficedsold shortat any juncture along the chain of advance purchase and
promised payment which connected the countryside to New Orleans, New
Orleans to New York, New York to Liverpool, and Liverpool to the rest of
England and the world. As Thomas Kettel noted, when bills were due in the
metropolitan centers of the cotton market the merchandise was generally
sold at the most unfavorable moment and adverse circumstances, and frequently bought in by the acceptor, to be held for his own advantage. Cotton,
he wrote, was regularly slaughtered in tribute to capital.63
When times were good and cotton sold high, when planters own crops
were large, graded out well, and brought a price large enough to cover their
debtswhen real cotton absorbed fictional capitalthe planters credited
themselves. On the experience, observation, and judgment of the planter ...
everything depends, wrote one in an essay included in J.A. Turners Cotton
Planters Manual. In those years, the terms through which planters understood
their workmanagement, skill, diligence, care, supervision, oversightwere reflected back in the image of worldly success. In good times,
the I-language of masterythe I that at once expropriated labor and
pledged its result to a superintending creditormight be balanced out at the
end of the year, along with the books. When the return was low, however, the
services which made the physical cotton they produced salablethe ready
credit to carry them through the season, the processing and merchandising
upon which a buyers trust dependedseemed less like necessary supports to
their eventual success than like arbitrary constraints upon their freedom of action. When times were bad, and even sometimes when they were not so bad,
planters groped for another way to describe their work, to account for the type
of agency they had. Then, they beat their slaves and blamed the merchants.
It is easy to see how this mode of banking affects the price of cotton, and depresses it beyond its true value ... even in prosperous times, wrote Thomas
Kettel. Or, as Frederick Law Olmsted famously wrote of Mississippi Valley
planters, If they had a full crop, probably there would be good crops ev
erywhere, and prices would fall, and then they would whine and complain as if
the merchants were to blame for it.64
In advising one another not to do what they all appear to have anyway done,
planters emphasized their loss of control over their own affairs, occasioned by
their indebtedness. Create no liens on this crop, or necessity for selling. Never
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spend any of the money which it is to produce until it is sold. You are then free
to choose your own market and time of selling; and as cotton is a controlling
article, it will generally regulate the values of all property to be purchased,
except the redemption of an outstanding promise, intoned the American Cotton
Planter. Draw bills! This bill business is the very thing that ruins us. Keep out
of debt, and control your cotton, wrote M.W. Phillips in DeBows Review, before admitting that his debts had once forced him to accept five cents per
pound for his cotton at the very time his neighbor was refusing to accept seven
for his. Referring to the planter whose crop was promised to a commissionmerchant, Kettel compared him to a pawnbroker of a watch pledged for
debt. Hinton Helper claimed that the South, because of its debts, was being rendered tributary to a global network of avaricious merchants. In
aspeech to the Commercial Convention held at New Orleans in 1855, C.G.
Baylor came close to unpacking the image that lay beneath the others. Cotton
planters, he began, were mere hewers of wood... He stopped before completing the quotation (and drawers of waterthe biblical description of the
Sons of Ham) and switched direction: ...overseers of that great estate which
was managed by others.65
though he was exceptional in this regard, Baylor was right to cut the allusion short. Planters were overseers, not slaves. They stood interposed between
the schedule of the money market and that of the cotton trade, between the
demands of their obligation and the natural rhythms of the seasons and the
crops, between hypothetical paper and real cotton, between speculation and
cultivation, between their creditors and their slaves. They translated the imperatives of time-scaled commercial instruments into the astringent temporality of the lash: labor from sunup to sundown; half an hour in the middle of
theday for a meal; water gulped in the brief interval at the end of the row;
pressure to keep up with the rest of the hands and make weight at the end of
the day.
As former slaves looked back upon their time in bondage, they often attri
buted their owners violence to his indebtedness. Isaac Mason, remembering
his owners frantic effort to get out of debt, wrote: I was only the property of
another, working to pay the debt of another, who I suppose thought he ought
to receive interest on his bill; and that interest had to be paid by me in addition
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to the daily labor, by receiving a whipping every day besides losing a meal.
Leonard Black similarly related his owners declining fortunes to the old
mans violence: The cowhide paid the debt.66 As artful as these formulations were, they conveyed the essence of the political economy of the Cotton
Kingdom. Whereas in the conventional political economy the analytical separation of capital and labor is essential, in the Cotton Kingdom slaves served
both purposes.
Slaveholders stored their savings in slaves, and those slaves thus stood security for those who owned them. In the antebellum period, the vast majority of
collateralized loans in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, involved mortgages on
human beings. The mobility and salability of slavesthe fact that there was a
ready spot-market in human beings on the steps of every courthouse in the
Mississippi Valley, that slaves could be moved from place to place to cover distant debts, and that their families and communities could be broken down into
small lots to back specific transactions in a way that land could notrendered
them the most liquid form of capital in the Mississippi Valley.67 Even when
they had not been legally pledgedeven though their name may not have
been recorded on the same piece of paper as their owners promise to pay and
the legal rate of interestslaves served as ultimate guarantors of the loans
that banks made to merchants and that merchants made to planters. They were
the human hosts for the speculative loans that haunted the cotton trade. As
William Wells Brown, who had been hired out for several months and was
brought home only to be sold, described it, the lead-up to such a sale was
framed by his owner as a matter of common sense: I went home to my master
in the country, and the first day after my return, he came to where I was at
work, and spoke to me very politely. ... He told me he was hard pressed for
money, and as he had sold my mother and all her children except me, he
thought it would be better to sell me than any other one. J.W. Longuen recalled that, as a result of indebtedness, his master had been filled with a single-
minded determination to convert his slaves, and even his own flesh and blood,
into money to pay his debts.68 When the sale of real cotton could not absorb
the flow of the fictional capital that had been advanced against it, the difference was reckoned in human flesh.
10
Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade
Thus was a tripartite alliance formed, by which the Western Farmer, the Southern
Planter, and the English Manufacturer, became united in a common bond of interest: the whole giving their support to the doctrine of Free Trade.
David Christy, Cotton Is King
in 1845, matthew Fontaine Maury sat down to write what would be the
first of several articles about the future of the Mississippi Valley. At the time he
wrote, Maury was a captain in the U.S. Navy but had no ship to command. An
1839 stagecoach accident had shattered his right leg and rendered him unfit
forshipboard service. He had been assigned to duty as the superintendent of
the U.S. Naval Observatory, a post he would resign upon the election of Abraham Lincoln in order to accept a commission as Chief of Sea Coast, River, and
Harbor Defenses for the Army of Northern Virginia. Maury is best known as
the Pathfinder of the Seas. Through the careful assemblage of data from the
logs of military and merchant ships, he mapped the winds and currents of the
Gulf Stream, enabling ships to take advantage of them and reducing transatlantic crossing times by days, even weeks. There are rivers in the sea, Maury
famously wrote.
But along with the oceanography for which he is justly remembered, Matthew Maury was an advocate of slavery, an imperialist, and a free trader.1 At
the center of his vision of the political economy of the future was not the Atlantic Ocean but the Mississippi Valley, and beyond that the Pacific. As Maury
put it in his 1845 essay about the Mississippi Valley:
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If we were to calculate the value of this region, or to estimate its growing

and future importance, we shall not be able to assign any limits except
those of demand and supply. When the first handful of cotton arrived in
England, half a century ago, could it have entered into the mind of Adam
Smith, or the most gifted seer, that has ever indulged visions of political
economy to conceive that the fleecy cargo which was then seen coming
over the sea was destined to spread itself, in a little while, like Ahabs
cloud, over the realms of commerce, and to make the broad ocean white
with ships and trade?2
Like many others who wrote about the Mississippi Valley, Matthew Maurys
thinking about the future of slavery and capitalism on a global scale was
framed by the Panic of 1837, which brought the flush times of the 1830s to
an end. It is clear that the Panic originated at the juncture of the markets in
land, cotton, and moneythat is to say, in the Mississippi Valleythough
economic historians disagree about the relative weight to assign to each. By
1836, the sale of Western lands had provided the federal government with
a vast budgetary surplus, which Congress, in the so-called Distribution Bill
passed in June of that year, voted to disburse to the states for spending. In
preparation for this distribution, the United States began to move its specie
deposits to the banks, where they would eventually be paid out to the states,
broadly speaking, from east to west and from north to south. Between September 1836 and May 1837, for example, specie reserves in New York City banks
fell from $7.2 million to $1.5 million as that money was sent westward and
southward to be spent.
Even as Congress was deciding what to do with the vast surplus gained
from the sale of Western lands, President Andrew Jackson was attempting to
reduce speculation in the land market and stem the influx of foreign capital
into the United States by shifting the business of the General Land Office to
a specie-only basis. Like the Distribution Bill, Jacksons Specie Circular
caused specie to flow from east to west and from north to south, even as it undermined confidence in the paper that had funded the expansionary speculation of the early 1830s. Simultaneously, uncertainty about the value of money
in the United States, and concern that too much British specie was being paid
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out in return for American lands, led the Bank of England to increase the rate
at which it discounted commercial paper in the United States, making it more
difficult for American merchants and bankers to obtain payments and loans in
silver. When money got tight and the cotton crop was abundant, prices for the
Mississippi Valleys principal staple began to fall precipitously, and creditors
pressed debtors to cover the money advanced against it along the chain of
debta chain that joined even the most isolated rural planters and country
stores to the factors of New Orleans, the merchants of New York, the brokers
of Liverpool, and even the Bank of England.
The bubble burst. Planters and merchants throughout the Mississippi Valley were ruined. Brown Brothers, Barings, and others found themselves in
possession of large estates throughout the Mississippi Valley. The boomtime
landscape was replanted with signs reading G.T.T. (Gone to Texas). Debtors had left their farms and taken their slaves to the newly independent Republic of Texas, as a shelter from legal action.3 Thus were the science of political
economy, the practicalities of the cotton market, and the exigencies of racial
domination entangled with one anotheraspects of a single problem, call it
slave-racial capitalismas planters and merchants set about trying to reform
first themselves and, failing that, the rest of the world.
The first Southern commercial convention aimed at addressing the present
derangement of the currency and exchanges of the country was held in Augusta in October 1837. And the report of that convention began by quoting
what may have been the single most important statistic in the history of pro-
slavery political economy: The staple growing states, while they produce
two-thirds of the domestic exports of the United States, import scarcely one-
tenth of the foreign merchandise which is received for it. The implication
was that the difference between the Souths aggregate exports and its direct
imports represented a yearly subsidya bounty, in the words of the conventionpaid to the North. Variations of the Statistic were employed by Matthew Maury in his 1845 letter to the Commercial Convention at Memphis; by
William Bedford in his 1849 speech to the Virginia Commercial Convention;
by DeBows Review in anticipation of the 1853 convention, also to meet at
Memphis; by George Trenholm in his speech at Charleston the following year;
by W.W. Boyce and John A. Calhoun at Savannah in 1856; by A.Dudley Mann
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in an open letter to the citizens of the slaveholding states in 1856 and again in
1858; by James Lyons, T.B. Betha, W.M Churchill, and B.C. Yancey to the
Convention at Montgomery in 1859; and again by Maury in his 1861 secessionist apologetic addressed to the people of Great Britain.4 For those who employed it, this statistic held the key to understanding the history of Southern
commercial decline. In the decades after the Revolution, the most historically minded of them noted, the international trade of the United States had
been centered in South Carolina and Virginia, which at one time possess[ed]
almost the entire trade and commerce of the country. But even as the staple of the South had come to dominate the nations exports, its portion of
theimport trade had dwindled: This trade and commerce transferred to the
other portion of the country ... and these have derived the benefit of our decay.5Why?
This worldmaking statistic reflected an essential aspect of the commercial
flows in the Atlantic economy: most of the trade flowed through the port
of New Yorkhuge volumes of cotton traveling coastwise before being reshipped to Liverpool; imported goods landing at New York and being distributed from there; ships traveling in ballast (that is, with their holds empty of
cargo) to pick up the cotton that would be shipped directly from New Orleans
to Liverpool, thus forcing the cotton to pay the freight both ways; and so
on.6 As such, the Statistic was an excellent indicator of some thingsthe degree to which the port of New Orleans was a net exporter and the port of New
York a net importer, for instancebut a very uncertain measure of some other
things, such as the degree to which New Orleans imported goods from Europe
via New York, or aggregate Southern demand for imported goods in general.
It represented many of the factors that concerned those who advocated agricultural reform and economic development within the Southreliance on a
single staple crop, dependence upon outside capital, overinvestment in land
and slaves, absence of a manufacturing sector, limited networks for mercantile distributionas features of the relationship between the South, the
North, and the rest of the world. And it ignoredindeed, it actively obscuredthe fact that Southern demand for goods was low because slaveholders continually pushed downward upon the subsistence levels of their slaves,
with around one-third of the population (closer to one-half in the Mississippi
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Valley) actively reduced to a starveling penury.7 As it was interpreted among

pro-slavery economists, however, the Statistic testified not to the degraded
condition of Southern slaves, but to that of Southern slaveholders.
In the immediate aftermath of the Panic of 1837, according to a time-
honored tradition, planters in the Mississippi Valley blamed their merchants.
What we now know as the Depression of 1837 surfaces in the correspondence
of Louisiana planter John Close as a series of unfortunate eventsa short sale
of his cotton, tight money, mishandled bales, a refusal to endorse a further advancewhich Close addressed by repeatedly transferring his business from
one New Orleans merchant to another.8 Many were the calls in the late 1830s
(and after) for planters to reduce their reliance on advances and commission
houses. The Louisiana planter Henry Huntington blamed the system of robbery of our commission houses for his own economic problems in 1837.9
In assigning responsibility to merchants and commission houses, planters
both drew upon and refined a long-standing genre of Southern panegyric. The
purpose of the Souths pro-slavery political economy was, in the words of the
mission statement of the Commercial Convention that met at Savannah in
1857, to restore what has in part been lost, the commercial independence ...
of that portion of the union which furnishes the means for the whole. And in proslavery political economy, the extraction of surplus was the basis for historical
development. It is calculated that the South lends from year to year a trading
capital to the North amounting to nearly ONE HUNDRED MILLIONS of
dollars, and upon which the North receives the entire profits! wrote one outraged defender of slavery in DeBows Review. In 1852, James D. B. DeBow
himself scolded a convention of cotton planters meeting at Jackson, Mississippi, in similar terms: Can it be wondered at, then, that the North grows
rich, and powerful, and grand, whilst we, at best, are stationary?10 And for the
advocates of slavery (as well as some of its opponents) much of the blame
could be credited to the account of Southern merchantsDaniel Hundleys
Southern Yankees. The racist-abolitionist writer Hinton Helper addressed
them as the avaricious assassinators of your country and the channels
through which more than one hundred and twenty millions of dollars
$120,000,000are annually drained from the South and conveyed North.11
Hundley and Helper characterized the dispute between classes (or, perhapsbetter, fractions of capital)between merchants and plantersin spatial
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terms, as a conflict between Northerners and Southerners. Merchants represented the agency through which Southern wealthSouthern patrimony
was diverted from its proper channel. As Albert Pike put it in an oft-quoted
speech to the Commercial Convention that met at New Orleans in 1855:
From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in
the South to the shroud that covers the cold form of the dead, everything
comes from the North. We rise between sheets made in Northern looms,
and pillows of Northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North,
dry our beard on Northern towels, and dress ourselves in garments woven in Northern looms, our gardens dug with Northern spades and our
bread kneaded in trays of dishes of Northern wood or tin; and the very
wood which feeds our fires is cut with Northern axes, helved with hickory brought from Connecticut and New York.12
Thinking through the goods he received from his merchant outward toward
the broader economy, Pike epitomized the way in which criticism of the economic relations between planters and merchants was formatted by ideas about
space and region. The wealth of the cotton Southparticularly that of the
Mississippi Valleywas daily being diverted to the development of the
North.
In response to this sectionalist reading of the economic crisis, cotton planters in the Mississippi Valley vowed to reform their agricultural and commercial practices in an effort to liberate themselves from dependence on the
North. The recent derangements of the currency, reported the New Orleans
Bulletin in 1837, have taught Mississippi planters . . . to husband their resources by ... growing their corn and meat and all their soil is capable of producing. In the years after the Panic, leading planters and agricultural reformers in the Mississippi Valley emphasized the need for agricultural improvement
and regional self-sufficiency, what in a later era might have been termed import substitution. Epitomized by the Mississippi planter M.W. Phillips, the
planter-reformers urged cotton planters to improve their practice, diversify
their crops, and develop their manufactures. For Phillips, cotton mono-
cropping (he called it the one-crop system), overreliance on imported goods,
and poverty, want, and suffering were of a piece. Taking Mississippi for
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my starting point, Phillips wrote, I will attempt to show that we ought to

vary our labors, and that in so doing we would be more independent, comfortable, happy, and, in the end, richer and wiser. He went on to recommend that
planters grow oats, barley, and corn along with their cotton, and that they raise
their own livestock instead of importing meat. The mere culture of the hog
has more in it than is dreamed of in many mens philosophy, he concluded.13
By reducing the number of acres they had planted in cotton and turning the
labor of a portion of their slaves to other crops and domestic manufactures,
planters could increase the duration of their lands productivity even as they
reduced their dependence upon the world outside their plantationsnot to
mention outside their communities, states, and even the South itselffor
food and basic manufactures. As the Mississippi planter Colin Tarpley remembered it, in 1837 cotton planters received our pay in worthless Bank paper of
the country and paid it out and found ourselves in debt for the crops, pork, and
other necessary supplies that should have been raised upon our own farms.
Hence we were driven to break our intolerable bondage to the grain growing
states, and raise within ourselves what was necessary for our own consumption.14 The sort of economic development that Mississippi Valley agricultural
reformers like Phillips and Tarpley imagined was one that sought to domesticate the economy: to develop self-sufficiency within the Mississippi Valley in
order to lessen their debt-mediated dependence on the outside world. They
emphasized regional independence and internal diversification over commercial interdependence and comparative advantage.
Properly reformed, agriculture would yield a full spectrum of economic
development within the South. The inaugural issue of the American Cotton
Planter described the cotton planters central dilemmathe primary dilemma
the new journal sought to addressas being the need to develop other sectors
of the economy in order to increase local returns on investment.
We give away to others our gold, the produce of our cotton fields, the
substance of our country for grain, meat, and mulesthings perishable,
annuals we might almost say, that we can and should produce ourselves
and in the use of them we are strengthened only to produce more gold
from our cotton fields to barter off in the same way. Now the effect of our
suicidal policy is seen everywhere in the Northwest and grain and stock
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raising Statesvillages of but yesterday are now cities, canals and rail,
and plank roads running in all directions, whilst the eye of the traveler is
greeted on every hand by fine mansions. ... We receive nothing that we
cannot produce and procure at home. We have iron ore and coal fields
inexhaustiblewe can grow our grain and raise our meat and mules
we can and should manufacture our Negro cloth, kerseys [woolens], etc.
and our cotton bagging and rope. ... We should foster and encourage the
introduction of Cotton Manufacturing in the midst of the cotton fields.
What intelligent and patriotic planter, looking forward to the interest and
welfare of his children and the ultimate prosperity and improvement of
our country, that does not perceive in the Manufacturing establishment
and the Machine-shop, that sure and most valuable extension of the area
of labor, that our energy and industry rapidly approximate? ... How
changed and beautiful the scene, at the expiration of ten years?all the
necessaries of successful and improved plantation economy produced at
homeone thousand million of dollars retained at home, and vested in
building up our towns and cities ... and in this way augment the value of
industry of each at least three-fold.15
Agricultural reform and regional (one might even say proto-national) de
velopmentalism were here joined in a vision of a transformation of the politi
cal economy of the cotton South. With import substitution and the diversion
of capital and labor to the development of a manufacturing sector, mono-
cropping would be replaced by industrial development, the outflow of cash by
the enhancement of productivity, and mercantile subservience by regional in
dependence. Such a course of action required the spatial reorientation of the
cotton economy. What had theretofore been an economy based on the export
of staple cropsan outward-looking economy predicated upon commercial
interchange with the outside worldwas to develop crops and manufactures
to meet its own needs. The economy was to be reoriented around the guiding
principle of regional autonomy.
At this point, the line of thought that emphasized commercial indepen
dence, the development of manufacturing within the South, and a regionally
bounded notion of Southern political economy began to converge with another track of pro-slavery political economy. The second strand, like the
288
first,originated in the crisis of 1837, and it shared with the first a set of keywords: independence, development, the South. Indeed, the two strands
of thought often shared the space of a single page, becoming entangled in argumentative pileups that prevented both sides from reaching their logical conclusions. For in spite of starting in the same place and paying the same rhetorical fare, these two lines of thought were freighted with radically different
notions of economy and space. In time, the spatial terms employed by Southern political economists turned a movement that had begun with a crisis of
global capitalism and a critique of merchants into a movement supporting a
thoroughgoing embrace of global trade and merchantsat least merchants of
the proper sort.
This was catalyzed by the shift in the focus of pro-slavery critique from
imports and merchants as such to imports and merchants from the Northfrom
the terms of commerce and chicanery to those of geography and politics. A
system of commerce, to be the most convenient and least expensive to the
whole community, must necessarily have all its import agents or merchants at
their export landings or cities. Any other system is unnatural, inexpedient and
ruinous, opined DeBows Review.16 When the defenders of slavery referred to
the spatial separation of exports from importsto the fact that cotton was
shipped from the South but that the goods its purchase underwrote entered the
country in the Northas unnatural or artificial, they were gesturing toward the power of governance to remake economic space. As the historian
Brian Schoen has recently shown, they were specifically concerned with three
aspects of federal trade regulation, which they believed redistributed wealth
and trade from South to North: federal tariffs that protected Northern manufactures from European competition and thus raised prices for those who purchased manufactured goods; duties on foreign shipping that supported domestic shipping by keeping foreign ships out of the coastal traderegulations
known as the American Navigation Acts; and federal spending on maritime
improvements in the North and bounties paid to New England cod fishermenexpenditures that used tax revenue to support a localized sector of the
economy. As DeBows Review put it (in a characteristically twisted comparison), the protection from the Federal government for the encouragement of
domestic manufactures and tonnage to build up commerce had effected a
transformation in the economic geography of the United States as remarkable as that Hayti produced by the abolition of African slavery.17 Thus it was
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that sectional readings of the Crisis of 1837 led the defenders of slavery to renew their commitment to free tradewhich they, emphasizing the spatial turn
in their thinking, termed direct trade.
That the federal schedule of tariffs had been reduced in the aftermath of the
Nullification Crisis in 1832, and again dramatically in 1842, did not reduce
theimportance of the issue to these pro-slavery free traders. The rhetoric of
the direct-trade movement changed very little between 1832, when South Carolina senator George McDuffie declared that the tariff which by an impious
perversion of language is called Protection ... wages an exterminating war
against the blessings of commerce and the bounties of a merciful Providence,
and 1860, when his successor, James Henry Hammond, declared that the
American Tariff is neither more or less than a system by which the slave states
are plundered for the benefit of those states which do not tolerate slavery. For
the direct traders, federal policy was the first cause of Southern economic decline. It may not be disguised, however, that this extraordinary and unequal
state of our commercial relations, had its origin, more in the fiscal operations
of the Federal Government, than in any supposed deficiency in the industry
and enterprise of our citizens, declared the final report of the Southern Commercial Convention which met in 1837 to consider the causes and remedies of
the crash. In this view, the foundational inequity of trade policy had engendered the history of Southern economic decline that was emblematized by the
import-export statistic. The report of a similar convention held in 1839 summarized this trajectory:
Discouraged by these burdens Southern capital sought more favorable
locations for its employment or engaged in other businessmerchants
or capitalists removing to Northern ports with their funds, or withdrawing from commerce and investing in other employments; while others,
discouraged by their example, were not found to supply their place and
attempt the business they had been forced to abandon. The importing
merchants of the South became an almost extinct race, and the direct
trade, once so great flourishing and rich, dwindled down to insignifi
cance.18
To this way of thinking, the historical differences between the economic
geography of the North and that of the South were not exhausted by the
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difference between wage labor and slave labor. Instead, that foundational difference had been reworked by federal regulation of the relationship between
the economic spaces within the United States and those in the rest of the world.
Internal economic development existed in an unstable dynamic tension with
the global economy. Avoiding mention of the tariff protections bolstering
Louisianas sugar industry, the direct traders argued that the rules governing
global/regional interchange had uniformly favored Northern merchants and
manufacturers over Southern planters. Eventually, this governmental favoritism produced strikingly uneven development: Northern banks that were capable of backing long-term loans to Southern planters and Western farmers
with federal deposits; New York shipping companies that were able to funnel trade to the city along federally protected coastal packet routes; federal
spending that was predicated upon continued revenue from tariffs subsidizing
Northern manufacturers at the expense of Southern planters. On this foundation, New York had built an empire of steam. Railroad and coastal packets had
reoriented the interior spaces of the continent toward its emergent Northern
commercial metropolis, even as the low rates of oceangoing packets channeled
the flow of trade across the Atlantic Ocean into a corridor running from New
York to Liverpool and back again.19
The idea that the economic development of the North was unnatural,
artificial, and even impious invoked a notion of economic geography predating that represented by U.S. federal policya notion based on the blessings of commerce and the bounties of a merciful Providence, as Hammond
had put it. The proper course of Southern economic developmentthe natural course, the providential course, the legitimate channelhad been diverted by sectional politics and commercial artifice.20 Nowhere was this clearer
than in the Mississippi Valley. One after another, pro-slavery political economists pointed to the commercial history of the Mississippi as the emblem of
Southern economic decline. The great cities of the North have severally penetrated the interior with artificial lines, until they have taken from the open and
untaxed current of the Mississippi the commerce produced upon its borders,
declared the report of a Virginia Commercial Convention. Vigorous and sustained efforts has [sic] succeeded in reversing the very laws of nature and of
natures Godrolled back the mighty tide of the Mississippi and its two thousand tributary streams, added DeBows Review. James D.B. DeBow himself
291
wrote: The North has opened innumerable connections with the Valley, and
is draining it of its most valuable products, in return inundating it with the
products of her workshops and her commerce. Or as Matthew Maury put it,
with malign felicity: The enterprise of man has ... placed the mouth of the
Mississippi as much at New York as it is at Balize. [It has] turn[ed] the Mississippi Valley upside down, causing the produce thereof to flow North and enter
the sea under the highlands of Navesink [on the New Jersey coast].21
The direct-trade movement aimed to revitalize the regional economy of the
South through global economic integration. In his influential 1860 book enti
tled Cotton Is King, David Christy approvingly quoted South Carolinian Robert Haynes 1832 statement, Next to the Christian religion, I consider Free
Trade, in its largest sense, as the greatest blessing that can be conferred on any
people. Christy went on to describe the emergence of the Mississippi Valley
economy and the ascension of King Cotton: Thus was a tripartite alliance
formed, by which the Western Farmer, the Southern Planter, and the English
Manufacturer, became united in a common bond of interest: the whole giving
their support to the doctrine of Free Trade.22 For Christy and his co-agitators,
direct tradefree traderepresented the realignment of the principles of po
litical economy with those of natural history. No longer would the cotton trade
be deformed by the tariffs and tonnage rates that had artificially diverted
Southern imports through Northern ports and turned Southern wealth into
Northern profits. As A.Dudley Mann put it in a speech reprinted in DeBows
Review, in a world without trade barriers the articles required for consumption from abroad will thenceforth come directly to their [Southerners] homes
relieved from intermediate agencies and vastly diminished rates. They would
then cease to bend the knee to Baalto do homage to that overpowering
andfiscal fort of Wall Street. Similarly, C.F. McKay wrote in James D.B.
DeBows edited volume entitled The Industrial Resources of the Southern and
Western States: Free trade, unshackled industry, is the motto of the South,
not only in commerce and manufactures, but in agriculture. Capital is best employed when left alone. ... God is wiser than man, and the laws he has imposedrequire no aid from us to adjust and adapt them to the circumstances
around us.23 In the imagery of these pro-slavery free traderstables and
chairs marching home to their proper posts in the South, trade unshackled
from politics, the will of God free from the folly of manthe South was
292
lifted out of its temporal condition of subservience to the North and placed in
a more direct, more independent, more manful, more righteous relationship to
the global economy. Prices would be emancipated that people might remain
enslaved.
the direct traders professed to be sectionalists, rather than secessionists.

As stated in the report of the Southern Commercial Convention that met at
Savannah in December 1856, the emancipation of trade from tariffs was demanded by every consideration of justice, of equality, and of sound policy.
The writer, soldier, and attorney Albert Pike had made much the same point
two years earlier in a much-applauded speech in Charleston: The way to save
the Union, to make ourselves equal to the North in all respects, is to become
independent, not by tearing the national flag asunder and breaking up this glorious union of states, but by commercial freedom.24 There is no reason to
doubt that these defenders of freedom, justice, and equality intended to do
anything other than exactly what they saidno reason to imagine that they
were masking an unstated desire for sectional political division behind high-
minded language about the laws of political economy. It is, however, clear that
the reforms they advocated would supplant the existing territorial organiza
tion of the United States, under which the federal government regulated the
interchange of interior to exterior space with a notion of spaces that was
defined by economicclassinterest. Perhaps the clearest example of this
visionary reorganization of the economy of the South, with respect to that of
the rest of the world, came in the form of a proposal made by Robert Toombs
to the 1856 Commercial Convention at Savannah. Justice might be rendered
the South easily, speedily, and constitutionally if the slaveholding states
placed an ad valorem tax upon all goods, wares, and merchandize offered for
sale within the State, other than those which shall be imported from foreign
countries.25 Far from being the scourge upon Southern economic indepen
dence that the self-provisioners and credit scolds had imagined it to be, depen
dence on imported goodsthough only goods imported from abroadwas
to be the salvation of the South.
If the conceit of the Mississippi River emptying its wealth into New York
harbor served the direct traders as a sort of argument-ending justification
(what reasonable person could fail to be outraged at the image of a river flow-
293
ing backward?), the real river proved more difficult to harness to an actual
program of economic development. By building a critique of political economy around the question of imports, pro-slavery economic reformers were
wittingly or notprobing at the foundations of the Mississippi Valley economy. For the low aggregate demand for imports stemmed directly from the
enslavement and purposeful immiseration of almost one-half of the population, even as the southward current of the river provided a natural subsidy to
exporters and a steady tariff upon importers shipping their goods against its
flow. While many historians have argued that the first factor was ultimately
determinative of Southern economic developmentthat the slave South
never could have generated enough demand for goods in order to support a
robust manufacturing sector, or absorb enough imported goods to make it
worthwhile for merchants to ship them directlythe question of the effect of
slavery on economic development was not something that the economic reformers of the 1850s publicly addressed. Instead, many of the reformers focused their attention on the spatial aspect of the problemon how to transcend the existing commercial geography of the Mississippi Valley, and how to
overcome their reliance on river channels, steamboats, and, perhaps, the city
of New Orleans. They sought a spatial fix for the underlying limitations of the
racial-economic order of the Cotton Kingdom.
For many promoters of Southern economic development, railroad building
was the solution to the problem of commercial dependence, reducing the friction with which imported goods traveled over the land.26 Speaking at a Railroad Convention in New Orleans, the local merchant and leading railroad
promoter James Robb typified these arguments, explaining, One of the chief
drawbacks of New Orleans is the absence of an import trade; and why are we
without imports? Why is it that a city exporting eighty or ninety millions of
dollars annually, is now insignificant in that importing branch of commerce?
Because of the remoteness and uncertainty of our marketour being without
a speedy, rapid, and cheap communication with the interior of the country that
seeks New-Orleans as a market for its agricultural productions. According to
Robb, the problem of Southern underconsumption was not a structural feature
of a slave-based economy, but rather a matter of transportation. With better
information and more reliable distributionwith a railroad-based refiguration of the relationship of space to timeimporting goods to New Orleans
294
would become profitable for merchants. Railroads would transform the relation between interior and exterior economic space, revitalizing the Mississippi Valley by facilitating the penetration of imported goods. New Orleans,
Robb prophesied, will become a city of imports rather than a mere city of
transit commerce.27
Though Robb saw the staple-crop exporting economy of the Mississippi
Valley as old-fashioned and outmoded, he nevertheless preserved its geogra
phy by drawing his map of the economy of the future on a line from the mouth
of the Mississippi River. There were others who doubted that the spatial transformation represented by the railroad could be so easily overlaid on the existing commercial landscape. The failure of New Orleanss mercantile sector
to support agricultural diversification and invest in industrial development, especially the development of railroads, has conventionally been seen as a hallmark of regional economic backwardness.28 But it was merchants, particularly the export-processing merchants of New Orleans, who stood to lose the
most from the reorientation of the economy of the Mississippi Valley around
the railroad. They made their living, after all, by connecting New Orleans to
the rest of the world: by aggregating the meat and grain of the Mississippi Valley on the levee in New Orleans, sorting it into orders, tallying their charges,
and sending it back up the river to the plantations it had already passed on the
way down; by providing a conduit for the foreign and cotton-backed credit
that allowed planters who had all of their money tied up in land and slaves
toget through the year; by grading, sampling, draying, insuring, managing,
marketing that cotton as it was passed from upriver plantations to overseas
manufacturers, and taking a commission on it. All goods paid tribute to New
Orleans.29
The underlying antagonism between the merchants of New Orleans and
the railroad was laid bare at the Southern Commercial Convention held at
New Orleans in 1854. The scheme of the Southern railroad promoters, argued Judge Walker of New Orleans, had long been to circumvent the commission merchants of New Orleans, to treat the Mississippi River as a mere
horse pond, and to view the existence of New Orleans factors as that of
Tyre and Sidon.30 There was ample evidence to support his accusation. In
an1852 DeBows Review article entitled Rail-Road Prospects and Progress
295
(originally presented as a speech to the Southwestern Railroad Convention in

New Orleans), Judah Benjamin wrote:
New Orleans has suffered herself to sleep soundly in the arms of all
theprosperity which the God of nature seemed to have showered upon
her. ... Bewildered in her dreams ... as she contemplated herself at the
very foot and receptacle of all the greatest and most magnificent rivers
upon earth, with fifteen great states of the confederacy claimed to be
inalienably tributary to her, ... New-Orleans, like a pet-child of destiny,laughed the doubter into scorn, and said unto herself. ... We shall
tithe and tax and levy contributions upon the world, as we hold the
keys to so much of its wealth! Shall we delve and spin, who are Natures great custom-house officers, administering her tariffs and her
revenues?
Speaking at the same convention, J.T. Trezevant of Tennessee described the
situation of New Orleans in the following terms: New Orleans is engaged in
a grand game of chess. Her opponents are the important cities on the Atlantic
seaboard, from Boston to Charleston. . . . The pieces with which the game
isplayed, are the great natural avenues of commerce, and the artificial ones
which man is making. The prize is one of such magnitude that it will bring to
the victor the seat of empire. To the loser will surely come commercial depen
dence. The railroad had the power to reorient the economic geography of the
countryto realign the connections between country and city as easily as a
player moved a pawn across a chessboard. For the traditional outlet of the produce of the vast Mississippi Valley, the future hung in the balance. If the
products of the Valley of the Mississippi are carried to Eastern ports, and,
through the same channels, the millions and multiplying millions of that vast
region of the country receive their foreign supplies for domestic consumption,
that fate of New Orleans is sealed, editorialized one New Orleans weekly in
the same period.31
The commercial preeminence of New Orleans depended on its position at
the mouth of the Mississippi River. Reorient that riverine economy around the
coordinates of railroads not yet build, and the city might quickly give way to
296
Mobile or Savannah or Charleston or Richmond as the emporium of the South

and West. Though perhaps inconsequential or even beneficial to cotton planters, the transformation of the economic space of the Cotton Kingdom was
potentially disastrous for the merchants of the city of New Orleans, raising
the yearly positional tension over advances, interest, and charges to a defining
contradiction between contending versions of Southern economic development. Indeed, the question of the railroad rendered the governing premise of
regionalist political economyspecifically that of the Southincoherent:
cross-cut by the competing interests of planters and merchants, riverboats and
railroads, Gulf and seaboard, New Orleans and Charleston. In seeking to
specify the avenues of economic development and direct trade, the promoters
of Southern railroads were forced back into confrontation with the tensions
out of which the direct-trade movement had arisen in the first place.
it was left to Matthew Maury to project those tensions outward in the shape
of commercial imperialism, and thus to outline the expansionist agenda of
pro-slavery political economy for the 1850s.32 Maury began his career in
pro-slavery political economy with an unsigned 1839 article in the Southern
Literary Messenger that described the protectionist regionalism of the self-
provisioners as a set of woefully inadequate resolutions . . . not to buy
Northern goods when they can get Southern, unless the Northern are the
cheapest; and not to freight Northern vessels when they can freight Southern,
unless the Northern freight for less. The conventions reminded him of an
oath taken by sailors when they first crossed the Equator: Never to eat brown
bread when we could get white, unless we preferred the brown; and never to
kiss the maid, if we could kiss the mistress, unless we liked the maid best. It
would take Maury several more years to fulfill this racial-sexual-imperial imagery of the meridional play of white and colored, mistresses and maids with a
genuinely global vision of pro-slavery political economy. His 1839 article focused on the factors undergirding the rise of the port of New York, particularly on the effect of regularly scheduled packets in drawing British trade to
New York and providing an incentive for shippers to offer low rates for shipping goods aboard ships that would depart on time whether or not they had
freight in their holds. Maury went on to recommend that the South attempt
todevelop a steam-powered packet line between some Southern port (he sug-
297
gested Norfolk) and the continent of Europe (he suggested LeHavre) to compete with the Northern lines. Yet if his jocose comparison of Southern re
formers to dissolute sailors hinted at a broader, unspoken set of framing
parameters, so too did the first sentence of the article: The business of commerce presents no law, which forbids the Southern merchant to exchange his
flour in Rio for the coffee of Brazil; or to barter in Valparaiso and Lima, his
produce for the copper of Chili and Peru; and this again for teas and silks in
China. That he should carry on a lucrative trade with the West or East Indies,
with the Brazils, on the coast of South America, or in the Mediterranean, nothing is wanted but the nerve and capital of the South controlled and regulated
by well-regulated energies.33
By 1845, Maury had turned his attention to the Mississippi. In a letter to the
Southern Commercial Convention meeting at Memphis, written under the
pseudonym Henry Bluff (a name that he was also using to write a series of
scathing critiques of patronage and amateurism within the U.S. Navy), Maury
outlined a bold restatementretrenchment might be a better wordof the
centrality of the Mississippi River to the development of the South and West.
He began by noting that the central question facing the producing states ...
which give American commerce the sweep of its wing was the maritime resource and naval strength of the great Mississippi Valley.34 In two long articles, he outlined a visionary program for redeveloping the Valley economy
that included digging a canal which would connect the Mississippi to the Great
Lakes; clearing the sandbar at the mouth of the Mississippi; building a naval
academy at Memphis; rationalizing traffic on the river by providing depth
markers along its entire course; building lighthouses and naval stations on the
Gulf of Mexico; and gaining an exclusive right to send U.S. mail to Oregon
from the Mississippi Valley. Second in importance to no subject, however,
was the development of free-trade zones in Southern port cities, especially the
port of New Orleans.35 Under existing customs laws, Maury argued, those
who landed goods in the United States, though they are to be re-shipped from
the country the next day, were required to post a thirty-day cash bond equivalent to one third the value of their cargo, to ensure that the goods were not
being smuggled into the United States under cover of a promised reexport.
Maury explained, and in the process outlined, a vision of a Southern empire of
commercial flows:
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Take Mexico ... by way of example. A merchant has in store, at Liverpool, a cargo of goods for the Mexican Market, with $300,000. They are
waiting for advices and an advance of prices. He is afraid to risk them in
the Custom-House of Mexico, for the condition of the country is no
guaranty for their safety. ... In New Orleans or Mobile they would be
perfectly safe, near their market place, and in the case of demand might
be the first to offer. ... Here is a vessel going over in ballast for cotton,
and would take them at a very low rate of freight. He therefore examines
the Custom-House regulations, but finds, to his surprise, that before his
cargo could be landed in New Orleans, or Mobile, for this purpose, his
agent there would have to raise $100,000 in cash for the customs, that the
commissions to his agent in this transaction, would be heavythat, as
long as the goods remain in the country, and thirty days longer, he would
be out of the use of the money, and that when he gets his drawback, it
would be further taxed with 2 per cent. in deduction. ... Thus cotton
and produce alone have to pay freight both ways.36
Though Maury never said so directly, his plan for balancing the export of the
cotton wealth of the Mississippi Valley with an equal volume of imports (thus
ensuring that the imports would come directly to the South and pay half the
freight) side-stepped the problem of low aggregate demand that defined the
Cotton Kingdom. Maury, indeed, imagined a global fix for the political economy of slavery: Only 200 millions of consumers are supplied through the
markets of the Atlantic Ocean. But there are in the Pacific, and the countries
bordering upon it not less than 600 millions of people, whose wants have always been meagerly supplied.37
Over the next fifteen years, especially in the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican
War, which extended the territory of the United States to the Pacific coast,
Maury developed his account of a pro-slavery commercial empire centered in
the Mississippi Valley. In a May 1849 article in the Southern Literary Messenger,
Maury advocated investment in a railway joining the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans across the Isthmus of Panama. Maurys advocacy of a railway, however, was less an effort to supersede the maritime geography that defined the
fading commercial advantage of the city of New Orleans than an effort to subordinate rail to river and land to sea. If you stretch a string [between South
299
America and China] on a common terrestrial globe, you will find that it passes
not far from New Orleans. Therefore when that railroad to the Pacific shall be
built, New Orleans will be the thoroughfare of travel between South America,
California, and China. Maury imagined the Pacific coast of South America as
a vast market for the city of New Orleans. It is difficult to rightly estimate the
national advantage of lifting eight millions of people and setting them down,
as it were, within 30 to 40 days of our markets. ... The immediate effect of
this new state of things will be to give activity to the New Orleans markets[,]
to cause the European houses in the South American and Mexican trade to
ship[,] in the vessels coming for your cotton, whole cargoes to be deposited in
the warehouses of New Orleans and distributed thence via Panama to the markets of the Pacific.38
The problem of the differential between the Souths exports and its importsthe problem of Southern underconsumptionmight be resolved
through commercial expansion and realignment. In Maurys vision, space was
not defined by politics, and it was neither national nor regional; the economy
produced space, rather than being bounded by it. Maurys vision of economic
spaces was global and mercantile, defined by connections and flows: the riverine and maritime geography that defined the Mississippi Valley and the cotton
trade was projected globally as empire.39
Excepting the Mississippi, no place figured more prominently in Maurys
re-vision of the globe than the Valley of the Amazon. As he charted the ocean
currents and commercial flows that he hoped would come to define the rise of
the port of New Orleans, Maury returned to his trademark formulation to join
the waters of the hemispheres two greatest rivers. There are literally rivers
in the sea, for they are as constant and almost as well marked as rivers on the
land. In consequence of the Gulf Stream, the mouth of the Mississippi is really
the Florida Pass. The waters of the Amazon flow through the same channel.
... Therefore the Amazon may very properly be regarded as one of the tributaries, and its basin as a part of the backcountry, to this our noble sea. Maury
would later illustrate the first principle of this new global projection by imagining two logsone floated down the Amazon and the other down the Mississippimeeting at the point where the northeasterly current of the South Atlantic met the easterly current of the Gulf of Mexico. And based on his globe,
on the string he stretched across the Isthmus of Panama, and on the logs he
300
floated down the rivers, Maury imagined the 600millions of people who live
on the shores washed by the Pacific Ocean, and the products of the seventy
degrees of latitude drained by the Mississippi and the Amazon, joined together under the dominion of New Orleans: Break it down and this country
is placed mid-way between Europe and Asia; this sea [the Gulf of Mexico] be
comes the center of the world, the focus of the worlds commerce.40 New
Orleans was the zero point of Maurys map of the future. We are struck with
the factand it is a physical factthat the Valley of the Amazon is but a
commercial appendage of the Mississippi, wrote Maury in an 1852 letter addressed to the New Orleans railroad convention and later published in DeBows Review. It is for this convention to say whether these two rivers shall be
united in commerce or not.41
In addition to being an oceanographer, Matthew Maury was a racist, or
what was known in the nineteenth century as an ethnologist.42 For Maury, as
for many of the naturalists of the nineteenth century, the categories of space
and race were indivisible. Can it be so, that climate which with its multitudinous influences so strongly impresses itself upon the vegetation of a country,
upon its beasts, birds, and fishesupon the whole face of organic nature,
should produce no effect either upon the outer or the inner man! His habits
depend in an eminent degree upon climate and soil, and these upon latitude,
Maury wrote in an article entitled The Panama Rail-Way and the Gulf of
Mexico. In the frigid zones of the earth, Maury argued, mere survival occupied man to such a degree that there was no possibility of moral development. The tropics of the earth were the regions most favorable to vegetable
as well as purely animal life, but such bounty was fatal to progress and improvement. Within the tropics he is enervated by the climate. Nature does
not impose the necessity of severe toil there, but invites to luxury and repose;
and in so doing stimulates and excites the animal propensities of moral advancement. Maurys racism was, at once, a theory of labor, of environment,
and of social development. And it found its happy middle in the Temperate
Zones. Here nature is not the severe taskmaster of the polar regions, not the
prodigal host of the tropics. She lures man to labor, and in the wholesome necessities of labor, he finds exercise and incentive to the intellectual being. In
order to develop, however, nations and races constantly had to move forward;
and in Brazil, Matthew Maury would find the destiny of the white race.43
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In 1852, Maury published a revised version of his 1839 essay on direct trade.
He began again with the joke about kissing the maid (though this time the
choice at the bakery was between soft and hard bread, rather than brown
and white) and rehearsed his familiar arguments about packet trade, steam
navigation, and direct trade with Europe. But this time, Maury turned quickly
to the Amazon, the question of racial destiny, and the future of slavery. The
spirit which moved men in the days of knight-errantry, which drove them in
the time of the crusades, and which at a later period, carried them across the
seas and conducted them to the New World in search of adventure and geographical discovery is still as rife in this country as it ever was in the world. ...
It is this spirit, which if once permitted upon the wings of free navigation
to enter the grand river basins of South America, will cause the wilderness
there to blossom. Anglo-Saxonism, free trade, and agricultural development
spelled racial destiny. Or, as Maury put it, There is no colonizer, civilizer, nor
Christianizer like commerce. And there was no labor like that of the African to accomplish the great work that Maury had in mind. That valley is a
slave country, Maury wrote of the Amazon. If ever the vegetation there be
subdued and brought under; if ever the soil be reclaimed from the forest, the
reptile and the wild beast, and subjected to the hoe, it must be done by the African, with the American axe in his hand. In the Valley of the Amazon, God,
in his own wise Providence, will order the destiny of the black and the white
race to be fulfilled, whatever it might be. Maury went on to argue that the
Amazon might serve the United States as a safety valve for its own growing
slave population. What is to become of it? he wrote of slavery. If it is abolished, how are so many people to be got rid of? If retained, how are they to be
controlled? In short, when they have increased and multiplied according to the
capacity of the states to hold them, what is to be done with them, whether they
be bond or free? Send them to Brazil, he answered: The Valley of the Amazon is the way; in this view, it is the safety-valve of the Union. It is a slave territory and a wilderness. One among the many results of this line of steamers is
the entire suppression of the African slave trade with Brazil by a substitution
therefore of a slave emigration from the United States.44
So ended the prophecy of Matthew Mauryin which the premise of the
benefits of free trade was transformed into a global spatial fix for the institution of slavery; in which the interests of planter and merchant were reconciled
302
through the conquest of global market share; in which the Mississippi and the
Amazon were united and the course of history changed; in which the continents were sundered and the oceans joined at the Isthmus of Panama; in which
Anglo-Saxon civilization and African labor transformed wilderness into empire; in which free trade, slavery, and oceanography saved first the Mississippi
Valley, then the Union, and perhaps eventually the world. It seems peculiar
todaythe sort of thing that a man with a couple of pieces of string, a globe,
and an overactive imagination might work out while drawing a paycheck from
the federal government. But in the 1850s and in the Mississippi Valley, this sort
of global-commercial pro-slavery was deadly serious. Indeed, men died for it,
in Cuba, in Nicaragua, and finally on the battlefields of the Civil War.
11
Tales of Mississippian Empire
Shall the Mississippi, while expanding its waters in the wide gulf announce to the
democracy of the world that the advantages and the glory of American institutions will not pass forwardthat the Queen of the Antilles, fertile and great and
capable of presenting similar development of productions and well-being will
stand in the way as a check to the powerful impetus?
Leon Fragua de Calvo, Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the
Annexation of Cuba to the United States, by Don Antonio Saco
As usual Liberty was the watchword and disguise of freebooters, pirates, and
plunderers. . . . Slaveholders, slave-traders, and cold-blooded tyrants of every
grade poured forth their swelling words of sympathy with the oppressed and execration of the oppressors.
Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?
the map that comes to mind today when we read the words the United
States is a map of a very particular kind, one in which the illustration of the
national boundary line is given precedence over all other principles of representation. The rest of the continent disappears from view, as if it had sullenly
retreated from the insistent use of the word American to mean that having
to do with the United States, and the nation-space pushes itself to the front of
the frame, asserting its timeless naturalness even as it obscures the contingent
(because historical) conditions of its own creation. The surrounding space is
filled not with representations of other sovereign nations, all of which have
histories of dispute over boundaries with the United States, but with insets of
compass points, scales, logos, and of course the extracontinental states Alaska
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and Hawaii, their constitutional status here represented as a sort of extraterrestrial spatial proximity. These maps represent the historically determined
parameters of the present day as a sort of common sense: since the ratification
of their statehood, Alaska and Hawaii are in some sense closer to the rest of
the United States than, say, Cuba.1
For white people in the Mississippi Valley in the first half of the nineteenth
century, a map of the United States was not complete without the Gulf of
Mexico.2 Understanding why requires us to try to imagine the relativity of
space, time, and technology by recognizing, in the words of the historian Richard White, that space is not an absolute entity but something constituted by
social processes and eventsprocesses and events that do not so much exist in
space as create and transform space.3 When nineteenth-century Americans
referred to Cuba as Mistress of the Gulf or Sentinel of the Mississippi or
Key of the Gulf or Gibraltar of the Americas, they were encoding a
set of calculations about politics, economy, technology, and geography
calculations so ingrained that they did not actually have to be thought through
in a step-by-step way.4 Indeed, these calculations were so generally accepted
that they were no longer visible as the products of a particular moment in his
tory, but appeared to be facts of nature. In the era before the transcontinental
railroad, there were several routes from the Atlantic to the Pacific and its untold riches: the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the ocean. Given the
vastness of the territory between the East Coast and the West, and the sheer
difficulty of traversing itdifficulty that was both geographic and political in
the era of the contested plains and the Comanche Empireany serious effort
to exploit the commercial potential of California through the bulk shipping of
goods would have to involve water.5 And so it was to coastal routes and isthmian crossings that the merchant capitalists of the mid-nineteenth century
looked when they looked westor, to put it another way, in order to look
west, they first had to look south.6
In 1848, in an abandoned copper mine near Cienfuegos, Cuba, a Venezuelanborn Spanish army officer named Narciso Lpez planned an uprising against
the empire he had theretofore served.7 His scheme was ultimately brought to
the attention of the Spanish authorities through a tangled series of revelations
and betrayals, involving everything from a nervous conspirators confession in
a rural Cuban church to the efforts of Lpezs American-based allies to gain
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the support (or at least acquiescence) of the United States in what they thought
would be a secret meeting with the president. Upon the discovery of the
plot, participants and suspected supporters all over Cuba were hunted down
and summarily executed. Lpez, traveling under a death warrant and with a
price on his head, was smuggled to the coast on a pack mule and escaped to the
United States aboard the steamship Neptune.
First in New York and later in New Orleans, Lpez became a leading figure
in a loosely affiliated network of American expansionists and expatriate Cubans variously known as the Junta Cubano, the Club de la Habana, and the
Junta Promovedora de los Intereses Polticos de Cuba.8 The plot that began in
the copper mine was the first of five in which Lpez would be involved.9 In
August 1849 on Round Island off the coast of Mississippi, and in April 1851 off
Sandy Hook along the coastline of New Jersey, conspiracies involving Lpez
would later be thwarted through the timely intervention of the U.S. government. In May 1850, he would make it as far as the Cuban coast, invading the
town of Crdenas, defeating the Spanish forces that were garrisoned there and
capturing the local colonial governor, before being driven back by the approach of a large body of Spanish troops.10 Finally, in 1851, Lpez embarked
from New Orleans and spent almost two weeks fighting his way across the
Cuban countryside, before being captured and transported to Havana, where
he was spectacularly executed by the Spanish. After his death, Lpez was succeeded by his erstwhile ally (and the former governor of the state of Mississippi), John Quitman, who was said to have raised $2million and 10,000 men
for an invasion of Cuba in the spring of 1855.11
Always, the goal was the same: the overthrow of the Spanish colonial government of Cuba through the coordination of an armed uprising on the island
with the arrival of an army of filibusters from the United States. Historians
have provided various etymologies of the word filibusterbut whatever its
origin, its meaning was clear enough to nineteenth-century Americans: filibusters were nonstate invaders, members of private armies that operated outside
the government-structured realm of international law and diplomacy. Lpez
was deliberately vague about what would happen after he and his filibusters
conquered Cuba. Dependent for support on advocates of Cuban indepen
dence, as well as on those who eagerly favored the islands annexation to the
United States, Lpez himself never really said the same thing to people on the
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opposite sides of the question about what was to be done with Cuba once it
had been conquered.
Lpezs actions were condemned as the actions of pirates, plunderers,
knaves, and speculators by the filibusters opponents. These included,
most notably, the Spanish government in Cuba, but also many in the United
States who either opposed the idea of Cuban annexation entirely or supported
its accomplishment through diplomacy, preferably the purchase of the island
from Spain, rather than through conquest by an army of expatriates and mercenary contractors. Yet for Lpez and many of those who supported him,
fought with him, and died with him, the question of Cuba was the great question of the age, one whose consequences were freighted with life and death
for the South, the United States, and the world.12
When white people in the Mississippi Valley (and elsewhere in the United
States) looked at a map of the Western Hemisphere, they saw a set of possibilities and connections that stretched across and beyond the existing territorial boundaries of the United States. As Alexander Jones put it in his ostensibly
neutral and scientific account entitled Cuba in 1851, Cubas political position,
all concede to be vital to the United States, and especially to the Valley of the
Mississippi. This is apparent from the slightest inspection of the map. While
Joness perspective was very much of the moment in the 1850s (his book included up-to-the-minute-of-publication bulletins from Lpezs last mission),
the importance of Cuba to the interests of the United States had been a central
theme of American geography and diplomacy since the Louisiana Purchase in
1803. In the words of James Monroe in 1823, for example: I consider Cape
Florida and Cuba as forming the mouth of the Mississippi. Or those of John
Quincy Adams in the same year, referring to Cuba and Puerto Rico: These
islands, from their local position, are natural appendages to the North American continenta conceit Jones later elaborated into an alternative version of
natural history when he declared that the arc of Cubas northern shore made it
look as though in some ancient period [it] had formed a part of the American
continent, and had been severed on its north side from the Florida peninsula
by the wearing of the Gulf stream.13
As much as contemporary authors tried to portray Cubas importance as
anatural fact of geographycartographic common sensethe relevance of
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the position of Cuba to the history of the United States and the Mississippi
Valley was in fact a product of a specific moment in time and a particular combination of economic, political, and technological circumstances. The imperial
politics that framed the Cuba question in the 1840s and 1850s pitted the imperial ambitions of Spain, Great Britain, and the United States against one another. The conventional wisdom of the day held that the Spanish Empire had
been in decline since the eighteenth century, and that Spains American possessions were destined to fall into the hands of the other imperial powers of the
Americas. Thus, the fear that shadowed every declaration of the paramount
importance of Cuba to the United States was the fear that the Spanish might be
succeeded in Cuba by the Britishby, that is to say, the United States leading
commercial rival and the Atlantics leading exponent of abolition. In 1823,
with the Monroe Doctrine, it became the official policy of the United States to
oppose, by military force if necessary, the transfer of Cuba from Spain to any
other imperial power. If the Monroe Doctrine is generally treated as a landmark in the history of nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism, from the perspective of actual nineteenth-century imperialists it left things very much in doubt.
For whatever Monroe had declared in the 1820s, by the 1840s the Spanish Empire was more than a century into its decline, and the British were interested in
Cuba. And it was a settled fact among the commercially minded slaveholders
and merchant capitalists of the Mississippi Valley that there was a plan afoot to
leverage the enormous Spanish debt in the hands of British bondholders into a
cut-rate imperial purchase of Cuba.14
For expansion-minded Americans, whatever they thought about the proper
means to the desired end, nagging doubts about the possibility of a British
Cuba became pressing concerns in the late 1840s. The 1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexican War, transferred the territory occupied by the present-day states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and California from Mexico to the United States. The question of
whether or not this territory would enter the Union as slave or free sparked a
national debate over slavery that was only partly resolved by the Compromise
of 1850. The proposed admission of California as a free state was represented by dissatisfied pro-slavery radicals (such as the future filibuster John
Quitman, the governor of Mississippi) as an outright defeat: land for which
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young Mississippians had given their lives was being transformed, by federal
fiat, into an abolition cordon that would hem the slave states into the Southeastern quadrant of the continent.
Though Quitman stood ready in July 1850 to take the Mississippi militia to
SantaFe to fight the federal government, and in September 1850 to call for the
secession of the slave states from the Union, cooler headsnot to mention the
interests of the holders of bonds sold by the Republic of Texas at ten cents on
the dollar and to be redeemed by the federal government at parprevailed,
and California entered the nation as a free state.15 Yet the question hardly
ended there, for the formal incorporation of California into the union as a free
state left unresolved the very real question of how the wealth of the West
would flow. Whose hands would it pass through, and whose pockets would it
fill? By a sort of physics of imperial energy, it was the outward-directed violence of the Mexican War that precipitated the convulsive crisis of 1850, and
the resolution of that crisis, which subsequently turned the attention of the nation, the South, and especially the Mississippi River Valley, to Cuba.
as one of the islands most ardent American admirers put it, Cuba stood
like a warder in the entrance of the Gulf of Mexico ... in a position to overawe the adjacent islands, and watch and defend all outside approaches to the
Isthmus routes to the Pacific, while it guards the portals of the vast inland sea,
the reservoir of the Mississippi and Mexican trade, the rendezvous of the California transit, and, what has not yet been duly heeded, the outlet of immense
though new-born mineral wealth, which is yet to control the metal markets of
Christendom.16 Yet, as complicated as these imperialist reckonings of the ge
ography of ships and markets were, there was more to metaphors like overawe and defend than simply an effort to find the route that would allow
U.S. shippers to move the greatest number of goods with the least possible energy. The optical principles that transformed the island of Cubaa piece of
land in a body of waterinto the key of the Gulf and the leading question
of the time were codified in the nightmare scenarios proposed by any number
of business-and expansion-minded American politicians and propagandists in
the late 1840s and early 1850s.17 Richard Burleigh Kimball, for instance, forecast that half a dozen steamers based in Cuba would enable Britain to execute
the bold threat of her minister to shut up the Gulf of Mexico, cut in twain the
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commerce between it and the Atlantic states, and close the mouth of the Mississippi and its hundred tributaries to the trade and assistance of shipping and
manufacturing states. And not only that: it would put Britain in a position to
control the great highway to Mexico and South America, to Oregon, California, and the Pacific. Would England or France allow the United States dominion over an island that guarded the entrance of the Thames or the Seine?
asked Franklin Pierces secretary of state, Edward Everett, of the British ambassador.18
For those among the epigones of expansion who were slaveholders as well
as capitalists and imperialists, these questions about imperial humiliations and
deranged commercial flows unfolded into a truly apocalyptic vision. For them,
British control of Cuba was the incubus of Free Negroism and race war.
From Cuba, the New Orleans Courier prophesied in 1851, there will shoot
out sparks which will kindle a great conflagration throughout the South.19
Cubaas Mississippi Valley slaveholders were relentlessly reminded by their
newspapers, periodicals, and politicians throughout the 1850swas at the
front door in a sense that went well beyond the figurative.20
These fears, however, were more than balanced by the fantasies that seized
the expansionists minds when they cast their eyes across their maps and read
their magazines. It was apparently a principle of the pro-slavery, pro-
expansionist press that unlocking the Key of the Gulf would lead to a profusion of wonders so singular that it could be described only by an author in
the throes of protracted ecstasy. An article in DeBows Review entitled Destiny of the Slave States began by noting that $200 million in gold was annually being added to the worlds money supply, and that the vast resources of
California, Australia, and China had recently been released from their political
bondage: The Atlantic will be to the world what that Mediterranean was to
the known world under the Antonies in Rome. Seeking its rightful role, the
United States needed only to cross a ninety-mile Rubicon, extending its reach
across the Straits of Florida. In the progress of the next fifty years, the commerce and trade that must concentrate upon the Gulf of Mexico will far exceed
anything that man heretofore dreamed of in his wildest imaginations. The island of Cuba, for its central position and its great port of Havana, is the key to
all this.21 Apparently looking at the same map, Richard Kimball arrived at the
same conclusion: It is sufficient to look over the extensive valley of the Mis-
310
sissippi to understand that the natural direction of its growth, the point of connection of its prodigious European commerce and of its rational defense[,] is
Cuba. Without a change of ownership, Cuba would restrict the Southern
states as a wall that divides and interrupts their manifest growth. Kimball
boldly predicted that the United States would multiply and become more
energetic to obtain her annexation in proportion as their own greatness increases and approaches the extreme South with their settlements, their arts,
their wealth, their wants, and their glory.22
Despite their epic scope, these visions of the hydraulics of wealth and commerce were actually quite restrained in comparison to that put forward by proslavery imperialist Edward Pollard in his book Black Diamonds. Pollard seamlessly integrated the hemisphere: Regarding the magnificent country of
tropical America, which lies in the path of our destiny on this continent, we
may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our
dreams of history. ... It is an empire founded on military ideas; representing
the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization. Predicting the rise of a Southern empire surpassing all empires of the age in the strength of its geographical position to control global commerce and dominate the lucrative sugar and
cotton tradesor perhaps just carried away by the magnificent spectacle of a
passing steamboatPollard could scarcely contain himself. What a splendid
vision of empire! How sublime in its associations!23
If these visions seem a bit unmoored in their flights between past, present,and future, in their comparisons of the incommensurabletime speeding
up and resolving itself into a sublime timelessness of historical inevitability,
the dreams of the ancients compared to those of the moderns, and so onit is
because they are. And yet, evident in their extraordinary overstatements are
the framing assumptions of imperial ambition that fired the minds of mid
century Southern (and Southern-sympathizing) expansionists, who incessantly
reworked themspecifying, refining, amplifying, fancifyingand retailed
them through their newspapers and periodicals to the men who would empty
their pockets, forsake their families, and ultimately die in their pursuit: prog
ress, commerce, slavery, and empire.
It was an axiom of the arguments made by pro-slavery imperialists that time
was on their side. These spatial imaginings of commercial flows and imperial
promise were undergirded by a set of arguments about historyarguments
311
that were less about any specific historical conjuncture than about the character of the historical process itself. These were arguments that, in the style of
the slave market and the tent revival, took outward appearances to be evidence
of inward essences, and thus sought to smoke out the eternal truths buried
within what might appear from another perspective to be contingencies, coincidences, or even accidents. They were arguments framed by the words destiny and providencewords that, in the multiplicity of their usages,
threaded together discussions of race, commerce, and religion and refashioned
them into a potent nostrum that could transform the description of any given
moment in time into an exercise in the divination of its underlying meaning.
One of the conceits of even the most moderate of American expansionists
was that Spanish colonial rule in Cuba had simply run its course. One by one,
the colonial possessions of Spain had either passed over to the control of other
imperial powers (such as Trinidad, Florida, and Louisiana) or been revolutionized and republicanized (as with Peru, the Central American Republics,
and Mexico)events that were seen in the United States less as the vicissitudes of a specific empire under specific historical conditions than as evidence
of the spirit of the age. That spirit was variously identified as liberty, in
dependence, and free commerce, and its invocation served to mark the
Spanish colonial government in Cuba as archaic, the United States commercial empire as emergent, and the succession of the former by the latter as inevitable. As the filibuster John Thrasher put it, at stake in Cuba was the choice
between the pathway of Progress and Liberty and European conservatism
and the defenders of the divine right of kings.24
The framing characterization of Europe as past and the United States as
present was informed by an axiom: the passage from the first to the second had
been demonstrated as inevitable by the course of events. As Richard Kimball
put it, In the view of past history ... considering the advance of the age in
liberal sentiment, and in free institutions, regarding the inevitable progress of
events, it cannot be held an unwise affirmation that Cuba must soon be lost to
Spain. ... There is a sense in which manifest destiny becomes no longer a
byword. Or, according to James D.B. DeBow, The possession of colonies,
whatever might have been the fancies of other times, or even the results, is
never likely again, in the notions of liberty, independence, and free commerce
universally afloat to be of much advantage to the parent company. ... In view
312
of these truths how remarkable and atrocious, then, must appear those arbitrary systems of colonial empire which the nations of the old world have so
arrogantly put up.25
DeBow captured the accession of arguments about historical context
ideas about the situation of things at a given moment, the presentinto a
set of assertions about the character of history itself, the certainties and
truths made evident by the flow of time. These were arguments that put
themselves forward as observations, interventions in the present that masqueraded as descriptions, constructions of the character of time that were derived
from its observable effects. They were, that is, arguments that had the virtue
of portraying the positions they advocated as foregone conclusions as they
sought to compel themselves into existence; fantasies of the future that, by
presenting themselves as descriptions of the present, made it seem as if anyone
who did not assent would be left behind in the past.
What seemed especially propitious about this destiny to its most radical,
most militantly pro-slavery observer-advocates was that they had already traveled its path. They stood at the head of the procession of time, sending out
filibuster adjutants to bring up the rear. For John Thrasher, a single glance at
history was sufficient to demonstrate [the] great truth that it was the mission of the brave and lion-hearted among the American people to aid the
Cubans in their effort to imitate the labors of our fathers. According to the
principles of this account of time and history, invading Cuba and annexing it
to the United States were not so much political actions as they were escha
tological ones. Rather than happening in the present, in which there was a
particular array of relations between Cuba and the United States, they represented a sort of reaching back in time to yank Cuba into the broad light of the
present daywhat Thrasher termed the glorious and holy effort to elevate
the people of Cuba to the plain of human freedom.26
One should not suppose that when a man like Thrasher spoke of human
freedom or liberty and the elevation of the masses, he was talking about
human freedom, liberty, or the elevation of the masses. Nor should one assume that when the supporters of annexation asked What is a Cuban today?
and answered A slave politically, morally, and physically, or when they spoke
of the slavery and sufferings of Cuba, they were talking about slaves or
slavery.27 Nothing of the kind. When it came time to specify what was wrong
313
with Spanish rule in Cuba, what made it a tyranny whose barbarity could
best be conveyed through metaphors of slavery (or, alternatively, metaphors
involving sharp metal objects and the soft tissue of colonial subjects), the proponents of Cuban freedom generally had in mind three things: preserving
slavery, reducing the taxes paid by slaveholders and merchant capitalists, and
promoting free trade between the United States and Cuba. Upon closer inspection, the version of freedom advocated by those who claimed to be its
most ardent defenders turned out to be not some sort of absolute condition
of
human emancipationFreedombut a set of social relations characterized
by the continued enslavement of the labor force, accompanied by a reduction
of the prices of the things they consumed and produced.
It was the contention of many Creole Cubans (and an especial article of
faith among those in favor of Cubas annexation to the United States) that the
scarcely concealed continuation of the African slave trade to Cuba was contrary to the interests of the slaveholding class. According to this line of reasoning, the major financial beneficiary of the slave trade was the Spanish colonial captain general and his minions, who yearly pocketed hundreds of
thousands of dollars in bribes for overlooking the nominally illegal importation of African slaves, since the importation of African slaves to Cuba had
been made officially illegal by a treaty between Spain and Great Britain in 1817.
Whatever may have been the interest of any given slaveholder in purchasing a
slavean issue that was elided by the framing of the question as Spanish governors versus Creole slaveholdersthe continued importation of African
slaves was presented by its pro-slavery, pro-annexation critics as an artificial
weight on the value of plantation holdings and slaves on the islands. A Negro
who could have been purchased for $500 eight years ago is at present time to be
had for $300, reported Kimball.28
Kimball, writing in 1851, did not choose eight years as a random parameter over which to illustrate the decline in the value of property and slaves. For
1843 had marked the beginning of a series of revolts and revolt scares oftencollectively referred to as LaEscalera, a reference to the ladders to which
slaves were strapped while being tortured. In the view of slaveholders, the turmoil had demonstrated the perfidy of the British consul, David Turnbull (an
abolitionist who was thought to have encouraged the slaves), as well as the inadequacy of the islands Spanish government, which had empirically demon-
314
strated that it was not up to the task of maintaining pro-slavery order on the
island.29 In the aftermath of LaEscalera, many Creole planters came to believe
that independence from Spain and annexation to the United States would offer
them the best protection from the threat of slave revolt. Indeed, they becameconvincedand not without reasonthat the islands Spanish governors were using the threat of a revolt among the slaves to restrain their owners aspirations for independence. The government had let it be known among
the planters that in the event of any military effort to gain independence, the
Spanish might emancipate the slaves and arm them against their masters.30 One
Creole supporter of annexation termed the threat of a government-sponsored
slave revolt as the most urgent cause, if not the principal, which compels the
Cubans to shake off the Spanish yoke and place themselves under the protection of the United States, where the Negroes are not an obstacle to the libertyor the political rights of the Americans; where the Negroes are not an instrument in the hands of the government to terrify and subjugate its citizens;
where the Negroes are not an inexhaustible mine of taxes and contributions.31
It took defenders of slavery little energy to connect the dots in the archipelago of fear. If it happened in Haiti, it could happen in Cuba, and if it happened in Cuba, it could happen in the Homeland; they repeated this ad nauseam as they gave hectoring speeches, trying to prod the complacency they
saw all around them into agitated concern.32 In the propaganda of the late
1840s and early 1850s, the idea that Spain was using Cubas slaves to hold her
citizens hostage was generally a minor-key theme in a larger rant about Spanish misrule. It was highlighted as an elementary aspect, but not treated as an
exhaustive account of Spanish misrulethe most urgent, but not the principal dimension of Creole suffering. For, in those years, the argument that
African slaves were the cause of Creole slavery generally was made by way of
a discussion of the balance of payments.
if a certain way of looking at a map of the Americas was characteristic of

annexationism, that way of seeing was elevated to a pure form in the trade table. Indeed, what is interesting about James D. B. DeBows article on the
West Indies, which argued that Spanish rule in the Americas was characterized by rapacity, extortion, and blood, is the fact that it contained very little
gore and no maps at allonly columns and columns of commodities, prices,
315
and taxes. The tabulations had headings such as Commerce of Cuba with all
Nations, Articles of Import, Exports of Cuba, Values of Imports and
ExportsCuba, Tariff of Duties Adopted March1, 1846, Cost and Expenses of Sugar Plantation. They went on and on, at an average of almost
one table per page in the fifteen or so pages DeBow devoted to Cuba.33 These
tables clarify what men like DeBow meant when they talked about Cuban
slavery. They were referring to the fact that a half-million white Cubans annually paid $12million in taxes; that their foreign visitors were required to buy
passports and pay bribes in order to move about the island; that Spanish ships
were guaranteed unfair advantage in the export trade; that American exports
were dutied into oblivion in favor of their inferior Spanish counterparts; that
sugar planters in Cuba were staggering beneath the dual burden of high taxes
and overpriced imports; that, in the words of the summary statement John
Thrasher appended to his own succession of self-evident tables, a moderate calculation demonstrates that the increased value of trade which would accrue to the merchants by a change to a liberal fiscal system in Cuba would not
be less than twenty-five millions of dollars, or nearly one fifth of their present
export trade.34 Cuba, in the optics of annexation, became visible as a set of
forgone opportunities. In the trade tables, that is to say, space was reconstituted as a series of commercial flows.
And it was measured in dollars. Though DeBow included a short disquisition on Spanish coins, weights, and measures, and though he surely knew
that one of the foremost existing U.S. commercial interests in Cuba was the
ownership of merchant banks that managed planters foreign exchange, he
represented everythingfrom the price that a Cuban sugar planter paid for a
bushel of wheat to the duty paid on a ship of 300 tons in the port of Havana
in dollars and in the English imperial weights and measures used by the United
States. This representational homogenization, which was standard practice
among all of the expansionists, assimilated Cuban trade into American terms,
wordlessly forwarding DeBows vision of a Cuba unnaturally and arbitrarily
separated from the U.S. South.35
The rendering of unnatural spatial separation in dollars, bushels, hogsheads, and imperial tons had a temporal correlate. For upon closer inspection,
it becomes clear that the dollar valuation of (lost) trade with Cuba allowed annexationists to do more than simply trace out some recent events in the eco-
316
nomic history of Cuba: it allowed them to represent the economy as a form of

history itself. This remarkable work was accomplished through simple conditional statements that transformed the information provided by the trade table
into a sort of natural history of the economy. In three pages forecasting the effects of the annexation of Cuba to the United States, for example, Richard
Kimball used a dozen or so connective woulds, coulds, and shoulds to illustrate
the distance (usually measured in dollars) between the present condition of
things and the natural course of events (that is, free trade).36 First traveling
forward in time to estimate the business that would be done under a given
set of circumstances, then coming back to the present and translating those
(wholly hypothetical) sums into present liabilities and unemployed workers,
Kimball used dollar values to measure the distance between present conditions
and what he took to be the natural curve of economic development. Every day
that the Spanish imposts remained in place represented a day lived behind the
natural curve of historical development.
As useful as it was in revealing the path of historical progress, the trade
table could also measure the course of historical decline. As DeBow put it
when introducing a table headed Exports from Hayti1789, 18011841:
The following table shows more than all language can the decline and fall of
Hayti. Similar tables illustrated the historical decline of the British and
French West Indies as registered by post-emancipation reductions in the
amount of sugar exported to the world market. The decline of Jamaica since
emancipation was such that, DeBow coyly allowed, he had been given to understand by a correspondent that with a single steamer, carrying one thousand men and one large gun incalculable mischief might be done ere the
Queens troops could be brought under arms, or militia assembled. But with
five thousand men, the island, in spite of the most gallant defense must sur
render.37
As his gimlet-eyed glance at the strategic situation in Jamaica suggests, DeBow saw emancipation as less an accomplished historical fact than an ongoing
experiment, wherever it occurred. It was a human-engineered intervention
in a larger structure of causes and effects that had observable resultscalculable results.38 In Haiti and in the British and French West Indies, DeBow saw
the revealed principles of the natural history of the African under conditions of emancipation. The African, he wrote, has been the same in all ages
317
and all circumstances, with the identical characteristics in the cane fields of
Cuba as four thousand years ago on the streets of Thebes! Under conditions
of slavery, they have flourished ... and become civilized and useful; emancipated, they degenerate back to barbarism. Which was another way of saying, at least in part, that they didnt work hard enough: they simply cul
tivate what they require for present support; their desires are gross and
sensual, satisfy these and [they] will bask in the sun and doze away life in stupid insensibility.39 In the neat, seemingly objective columns of his trade tables,DeBow found a tool that converted the economic effects of a series of
decisions made by freedpeople about how to organize their lives and priorities
after emancipation into a set of assertions about race and history.
In this natural history of emancipation, Haiti served as the organizing metaphor. As DeBow himself put it, Hereafter when we speak of Hayti we shall
refer, with full particulars to all movements on behalf of the AfricanSierra
Leone and Liberia, colonization, and abolition.40 In a formulation that later
came to override all other framings of the questions (at least among pro-
slavery Southerners), DeBow cast Cuba at the juncture of two possible histories. On the one side, there was Haiti, represented through images of Negroes
turned wild beasts and monsters, sugar plantations gone to ruin, and exports declined to nil. On the other, there was the Natural Order of Things,
Negro slaves engaged in raising the peculiar products for which they only
seem to be fitted. For DeBow, the history of slavery provided a map of the
surface features of the progress of a deeper sort of history: I am so fashioned
... as to decide, beyond one question, the propriety of the existence of slavery
from the fact that it has existed in certain people from the remotest periods of
time, not only without resistance but with ready acquiescence.41 Pro-slavery
imperialism, DeBow was arguing, was right on the face of it. Like confidence
in the capacity of money to represent value, or faith in the prescriptive authority of biblical prophecy, belief in DeBows version of pro-slavery imperialism
had the wonderful feature of calling itself into real material being.
Perhaps it was an unspoken fear among annexationists that their prophetic
pro-slavery might turn out to have no more substance than an unbacked bill or
a deathbed conversion that led them to seek a final proof of the revealed truth
of their visionary schemes in the uncontestable materiality of the Mississippi
River itself. In the words of one such exegete, Senator Andrew Butler:
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Shall the great Mississippi, after mingling with its own the waters of the
Missouri, the Ohio, and thousand other tributary streamsafter impelling onward along its majestic course productions of all kinds, wealth,
commerce, and population, so many signs of the mighty approach of
anew, great, and enterprising civilizationshall the Mississippi, I say,
while expanding its waters in the wide gulf, announce to the democracy
of the world that the advantages and the glory of American institutions
will not pass forwardthat the Queen of the Antilles, fertile, and great,
and capable of presenting similar development of productions and well-
being, will stand in the way as a check to the powerful impetus?
The answer to that version of the question was, of course, clear enough:
Why, sir, you might as well attempt to stop the progress of the Mississippi
with a bundle of hay, as to stop the progress of American influence on this
continent. Or, in a formulation with a bit more metaphorical consistency
perhaps drawn from the ongoing effort to use nets to stabilize the banks at the
rivers mouth: As well you might attempt to turn the angry wave of the Mississippi by stretching wickerwork across it.42 For the promoters of annexation, the irresistible force of the Mississippi symbolized the gathered power of
the emergent tendencies of historical developmentwhite mans republicanism, free trade, and institutionalized slaverywhich made it both crucial and
inevitable that Americans, and particularly Southerners, would turn their attention to taking over Cuba.
As useful as it was in providing a seemingly natural figure for the free-trade,
pro-slavery, imperialism-as-history ideology of annexation, the Mississippi of
which these men spoke was not, strictly speaking, a force of nature alone.
Though endlessly proclaimed by the Valleys mercantile boosters, the Mississippis natural advantages were actually produced out of the interface of the
environment with human aspiration and activity. William L. Hodge made that
much clear when he contemplated the marvelous commercial bounty arrivingevery day on the levee in New Orleans. In addition to cotton, sugar, and
molasses, Hodges list included flour, pork, bacon and hams, beef, tobacco,
whisky, corn, oats, wheat, lard, butter, lead, shot, hemp, castor oil, linseed and
lard oil, hides, bagging, bale rope, apples, potatoes, onions, flaxseed, cheese,
coal, hay, lumber, staves, furs and peltries of all kinds, soap, candles, beeswax,
319
beans, peas, beer, ale, feathers, honey, lime, white lead, glass, and so on.
Hodges vision of the domain of New Orleans stretched northward to the
headwaters of the Mississippi, westward along the Missouri, and eastward
along the Ohioa commercial empire of tangled tributaries draining the vast
wealth of the interior of the continent and funneling it toward New Orleans,
where it could be shipped along the coast and exported to Europe. It was an
empire of flatboats, steamboats, and of course immense exchange operations, representing in its enormous sunk costs, inflexible transportation infrastructure, and centralized mouth-of-the-river financial sector an ossified version of the boomtime slavery and cotton economy of the early 1830s.
Even as Hodge forecast that it would be only a few years before New Orleans overtook New York as a commercial center, he realized that the Mississippi system was losing trade to the canals and railroads that joined the West
to the Atlantic board. But these artificial channels could never rival natural ones, he insisted. They would freeze more easily in the winter than waters
which naturally ebbed and flowed, and, besides, they were subject to taxes and
tolls that did not exist on the Mississippi.43 By the early 1850s, opinion among
the mercantile class in New Orleans was not so sanguine. Between the trading
season of 18471848 and that of 18501851, receipts of Western goods in the
port of New Orleans dropped precipitously: bacon by a third, flour and beef
by a quarter, lard by almost a half, corn and pork by almost two-thirds. Wharfage rates along the levee dropped by a third in the same period. And it wasnt
only the Western trade. Cotton from Tennessee and Alabama was going by
rail to Charleston and Savannah. The New Orleans trade to Northern Alabama is almost entirely gone and East Tennessee is rapidly going. But a short
time ago all the cotton in the Tennessee Valley came to New Orleans, lamented the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin in March 1851. The completion
of the Memphis and Charleston railroad will take from the commerce of New
Orleans at least 300,000 bales of cotton, forecast the Daily Delta in June,
within days of the sale of the newspaper to support the venture to Cuba that
was being organized in New Orleans by General Narciso Lpez.44
The reoriented flow of Western goodsand cotton!eastward rather than
southward represented a shift in the nations commercial geography as profound as it was potentially ominous for the mercantile and financial sectors in
New Orleans. Recounted most famously by Mark Twain in his elegiac Life on
320
the Mississippi, this shift has often been represented as a technological one
from the steamboat to the railroadwhich it surely was. But in addition to
being a technological fact, this reorientation of transportation and tradethis
reorganization of the spatial relation of east and west, north and southwas a
financial fact. Taken together, New York banks were capitalized at a level four
times greater than that of their New Orleans counterparts. New York merchants could thus extend credit at lower rates and for longer terms than those
in New Orleansa huge advantage in agricultural economies dependent on
yearly outlays of credit.45 And another relevant fact, known to anyone who has
ever pored over the rate tables in the post office trying to get a certain package
to a certain place for a certain price: the calculation of haulage is always a matter of dollars and cents, as well as of miles and means. In the words of Matthew Maury, The mere statement of distance to be saved does not enable one
to judge correctly as to the relative merits of ... two routes. Time and expense
are the true arguments to consider. In addition to capital solidified in the form
of railroads and canals, it was capital in its liquid formadvances and loans
that was determining the flows of goods and payments which were transforming the commercial space of the United States by bringing the West closer to
the East.46
Seen in this light, the expansionist program of the early 1850s was an effort
to find a revitalizing (spatial) fix for the problems facing an economy that was
overinvested in land, slaves, and steamboats. It would allow the South once
more to assert dominion over the commerce of the West and to revitalize the
Mississippi as a north-to-south axis of trade and prosperity. The New Orleans
Crescent was an enthusiastic supporter: The trade between Cuba and the West
would be increased ten-fold. Just think, when the duty of ten dollars on each
barrel of flour is taken off how much greater will be the consumption. The in
dependence of Cuba will be felt on the threshing floors of Minnesota. And
that was only the beginning of the story. In an article in DeBows Review, Samuel Walker offered a luminous vision of the future: What wealth will float
upon our waters! What a bright gem will The Queen on the Antilles be in the
coronet of the South, and how proudly will she wear it. A splendid prospect of
commercial eminence open to the South! The Gulf of Mexico would be the
centurys Mediterranean: All that and more, too, than the Mediterranean is to
Europe, Africa, and Asia, this sea is to America and the world. And New
321
Orleans:
the Alexandria, as Havana would be the Constantinople of our empirefar mightier and more extensive than the Roman. It is not too much
to say that if we hold Cuba in the next fifty years we will hold the destiny of
the richest and most increased commerce that ever dazzled the cupidity of
man. And with that commerce we can make the public opinion of the world.47
With Cuban markets open to the vast produce of the Mississippi Valley, with
the wealth of the Pacific and the Amazon meeting the markets of the Atlantic
in the Gulf of Mexico, with slavery proven ascendant over abolition, with free
trade triumphant over colonial despotism, with the Queen of the Antilles
rightfully subordinated to King Progress, with Castilians yielding to AngloSaxons, and with New Orleans merchants and factors presiding over it all, the
Mississippi might have another run.
Taken together, these visions of Mississippian empire provide a map to a
future that never came to pass. It envisioned a free Cubadetached from
Spain, protected from Great Britain, possibly annexed by the United States
that would gather in, distribute, and multiply the wealth of Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mississippi, and the Amazon in a vortex of unimaginable riches. Such a
Cuba would ensure the precedence of American destiny over European his
tory on the North American continent. A free Cuba would advance the cause
of slavery in the Americas, sealing its triumph over the threat of British abolition and the counterhistory represented by the revolution in Haiti, thrusting
U.S. slaveholders to the leading edge of progress in the commercial history
of the world and securing its Southern frontier against abolitionist encirclement.48 And a free Cuba would revitalize the Mississippi Valleys great commercial artery and its imperial city, drawing the trade unnaturally diverted to
the north and east by commercial artifice back to its natural pathway toward
the sea. These Mississippi dreamers imagined a wholesale reconfiguration of
commercial and political space, a realignment of the map in the image of the
emergent historical principles of white mans republicanism, free trade, and
pro-slavery values, and the imperium of New Orleans. Cuba was the key to
unlocking it all.
Given the ideologies of space and time that framed the thinking of
nineteenth-century expansionists, it should come as no surprise that the question they posed about Cuba was not if but when. Or, more to the point, how.
John Quincy Adams wrote that Cuba, forcibly disjointed from its own un-
322
natural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only
towards the North America union, which by the same laws of nature cannot
cast her from its bosom. Similarly, John C. Calhoun assured one of the members of the Club de la Havana that as the pear, when ripe, falls by the law of
gravity into the lap of the husbandman, so will Cuba eventually drop into the
lap of the Union. Still, they apparently remained agnostic about the question
of whether anyone should shake the tree, or how hard it should be shaken.49
Even among the broad spectrum of Americans and expatriate Cubans who
agreed that Cuba would (and should) soon be liberated from Spanish rule,
there were serious differences of opinion between those who thought the goal
should be Cuban independence and those who supported Cubas annexation to
the United States. Within the latter group, furthermore, there were deep divisions over what were seen by most as mutually antagonistic paths toward an
agreed-upon endpoint. While some favored acquiring Cuba through purchase
or other diplomatic meansan ide fixe and official policy of almost every
American president from George Washington to Abraham Lincolnothers
favored military action, either by U.S. forces as a logical and necessary response to British military action in the hemisphere or by extranational renegades like Narciso Lpez, who would unsettle politics on the island and invade
it under a free flag. The latter scenario was less a representation of any existing national sovereignty than a hope of conjuring one into being.
Though there were any number of permutations of the politics of annexationism, through the 1840s and 1850s the basic framing of the question pitted
the federal government against the filibusters. In varying degrees, presidents
Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan all tried to maintain stable diplomatic relations with Spain, most of them in the hope that by so doing they
could gain the island by purchasing it for something around the $100 million
proposed by then secretary of state James Buchanan in 1848. What one historian termed the inglorious effort to purchase the island, however, was besetby the tragicomic character of American diplomacy (one American minister to Spain, North Carolinian Romulus Saunders, spoke neither Spanish nor
French; another, Louisianan Pierre Soul, killed the French ambassador in a
duel on the way to his mission, and openly conspired with republican revolutionaries once he had arrived) and by the apparently unbelievable or at least
unacceptable fact that no one in the Spanish government seemed very inter-
323
ested in selling Cuba to the United States. (The possible exception was the
Queen Mother, who had made a lot of bad investments, needed money, and
was rumored by Soul to have a more-than-passing fondness for a certain ...
Soul.)50 All of this was a source of apparently unendurable gall to the coalition of American merchant capitalists, slaveholders, and frustrated Cuban expatriates who, by 1850, had come to focus their hopes on simply doing the job
themselves. While, over the years, there had been a whole history of backstage
collusions, tricks, and betrayals between the federal government and the filibusters (most notably President Polks decision to retail his advance knowledge of Lpezs 1848 conspiracy to the Spanish as a gesture of goodwill in advance of an anticipated purchase), the basic issue framing the question was
this: it was a federal crime to invade Cuba from the United States.
The Neutrality Act of 1818 made it illegal to raise a private army in New
Orleans or New York and then invade Cuba. It represented an effort by
theUnited States government to consolidate its control of the territory over
which it claimed sovereignty. Rather than chasing after the various frontier
land speculators and Indian haters and putting out the fires they had started,
and rather than being dragged into wars with the other imperial powers of the
Americas over causes that were particular to one region or one class of citizens, the government in 1818 had legislated a spatial uniformity of foreign
policy. Thereafter it became a crime within the territory or jurisdiction of
the United States for any person to begin or set on foot, or provide or prepare
the means for, any military expedition or enterprise, to be carried on from
thence against the territory or dominions of any foreign prince or state, or of
any colony, district, or people, with whom the United States are at peace.51
One did not have to agree with the foreign policy of the United States, but to
organize contrary to its dictates within the United States became a crime.
By outlawing the organization of military expeditions against countries
with which the United States was at peace, the U.S. government hoped to make
it possible for the nation to have a foreign policythe latter lending a new sort
of solidity and coherence to the former. The Neutrality Act, that is, asserted
that diplomacy was the arena where nations, rather than ethnic groups or religions or classes, confronted one another. And in maintaining that the nation
was the subject of diplomacy, the act stipulated that the foreign policy of the
United States operated uniformly across the length and breadth of its territo-
324
rial sovereignty. No class or region within the United States could pursue an
independent foreign policy by force of arms. Over the course of the late 1840s
and early 1850s, this homogenization of the national space in the image of international relations was increasingly out of step with the arguments being
putforward by annexationists, who envisioned space (and national greatness)
through the prism of class interest and political economy, rather than national
sovereignty and diplomacy. Thus it was that the filibusters kept finding themselves in court.
In the end, it was the spatial character of the Neutrality Act that provided
the filibusters with an opening to challenge (or evade) it. Their strategy was to
exploit the fact that the act defined allegiance in territorial terms rather than
personal ones, and they would accomplish this by doingor at least pretending to dotheir organizing offshore. Lpezs 1850 attack on the city of Crdenas (the fourth of his five efforts to liberate Cuba from Spanish control)
provided both the consummate expression andwhen the invasion failed and
its organizers were hauled before a federal judge in New Orleansthe legal
precedent for filibuster readings of the Neutrality Act. Though it was an open
secret that the hundreds of Kentuckians who began to gather in New Orleans
in April 1850 were on their way to Cuba, the story they told was that they were
on their way to California, and when they boarded the Georgiana they did so
with tickets stamped for Chagresthe point of debarkation for the Panamanian crossover to the Pacific. The Georgiana then traveled downriver to Balizethe town at the mouth of the Mississippi that marked the outer reach of
the territorial boundary of the United Stateswhere she was loaded with
muskets and ammunition, and from there to an island off the coast of MexicosYucatn Peninsula, where Lpez would finally take command. The Susan
Lord, which carried a regiment of Louisianans, followed a similar course, departing New Orleans for Chagres, and changing course only after the missions proto-commander had theatrically opened a letter from Lpez, upon
which were written directions that it remain sealed until the ship had reached
twenty-six degrees north by eighty-seven degrees west, at which point the men
were given their orders and their arms, and the free flag of Cuba was run up
the mast.52
As with the other missions under Lpezs command, the legalistic precision
325
of the plan was marred in execution by navigational haphazardness and dissension in the ranks. The rendezvous off the coast of Mexico was delayed for
several days because the Georgiana could not fight through the prevailing
winds to the appointed island. Short of provisions, long on time to think, and
disillusioned with the inscrutability of a plan to invade Cuba which was seemingly being sidetracked by the commanders inability to secure a beachhead
onan undefended island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, the crew beganto plot to take the Georgiana by force of arms and sail her back to New
Orleans. Lpezs just-in-time arrival on the scene helped to restore enough of
a sense of purpose and military discipline to get most of the men back into
their ranks, and the mission back on its way to Cuba aboard Lpezs ship, the
Creole, though several dozen deserters remained behind on the island of Contoy. Many of these last had apparently been involved in a too-clever-by-half
double-cross of their filibuster commanders. Knowing that the ship was eventually bound for Cuba, they had nonetheless assumed that she was actually
traveling by way of Chagres, where they had planned to jump ship and continue on to California.
After several days at sea, the Creole ran aground on the way into the harborat Crdenas, spoiling whatever element of surprise remained after several
weeks of seemingly aimless cruising around the Gulf; but the men nonetheless
disembarked. They fought a brief skirmish, took several Spanish officials hostage, retreated in the face of a superior Spanish force arriving to reinforce the
village, and reboarded the Creole, only to run aground again on the way out of
the harbor. They then threw overboard much of their baggage, including arms
and ammunition, in an effort to refloat the boat, and, having done so, promptly
refused Lpezs command to attempt another landing, at Mantua. They voted
instead to head directly for Key West, and the relative safety of the territorial
sovereignty of the United States.53
the crdenas conspiracy trials took place in Federal District Court in

New Orleans during December 1850 and January 1851. In addition to Lpez,
the indictment named fifteen co-conspirators, including Laurent Sigur, the annexationist editor of the Daily Delta; John OSullivan, the tirelessly expansionist editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review and inven-
326
tor of the phrase manifest destiny; John Quitman, the sitting governor of
Mississippi; and John Henderson, Lpezs lawyer and an ardent annexationist
in his own right. Hendersons case was the first tried.
Hendersons defense was a mixture of litigious constitutionalism, tactical
misremembering, and outright extralegal intimidation. The last of these was
perhaps most obvious to the citizens of New Orleans who made up the jury.
They were surely aware that the grand jury proceedings that had led to the
indictments in the case had been accompanied by several days of raucous
street celebrations, enthusiastically received speeches by Lpez about his
cause, receptions with mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of patriotic
men, marches by the Masons and the Sons of Temperance, collective renditions of the Star Spangled Banner, and many, many toasts (except among
the aforementioned Sons, of course). Through their control of the streets, Lpezs supporters asserted that there was something out of place in the federal
prosecution of a man who was increasingly portrayed in local newspapers and
toasted at local saloons as a hero. While few disputed that New Orleans was
formally under the dominion of the United States, the fact that federal sovereignty had to be exercised over an attenuated administrative structure and
through the agency of menespecially jurymen, but also court officers, customs officials, and marshalswho were unsympathetic to the prosecution
threatened to reduce the expansive claims of the Neutrality Act to what the
historian Tom Chaffin has called a paper sovereignty.54
But whatever the seemingly foreordained outcome, a trial was still necessary; indeed, it was perhaps relished by the defendant, who used it as an opportunity to posture, preen, parse, and prevaricate before the assembled and
admiring local and national press. Hendersons case was a set of variations
some brazenly disingenuous, some hairsplittingly preciouson a theme: the
inability of federal sovereignty asserted by the Neutrality Act to assert itself
over the inner recesses of the human head. It was, that is, a refutation of the
Neutrality Acts putative spatial authority from the standpoint of phenomenological psychologythe idea that the question of the independent existence
of anything should be subordinated to considerations of human awareness of
things.
Hazy memories were the first line of defense. The harbormaster at Lafayette, who had seen the Creole loaded, remembered the label on the barrels
327
of pork that were carried on board, but was vague about whether or not he
hadseen any arms (or even any people) coming onto the ship. Laurent Sigur
averred that he could not remember where it was that Lpez was always telling
people he was goingeven in public speeches for which Sigur himself had
served as the translator.55 The mysteries of recollection, however, were a temporary refuge for the participants in an event as richly reported and as es
sentially dependent on publicity as a filibustering expedition to Cuba, and the
facts in question were more or less agreed upon. To wit: that the Creole had
sailed from New Orleans with men, arms, ammunition, and General Lpez on
board; that she had joined the Georgiana and the Susan Lord somewhere in the
Gulf; and that the organization of Lpezs followers for a military expedition to Cuba, there to commence a revolution, had indeed occurredthough
where it had occurred remained in dispute.56
The central element of Hendersons defense was a highly abstract and legalistic parsing of the terms of the Neutrality Acta strategy designed to
complicate the question of what could be said to have occurred when and (crucially under the terms of the act) where. What is a military expedition or enterprise? What is carrying on such an expedition . . . from the United
States? What shall be said to constitute its beginning or setting on foot?
How could four men begin a plan simultaneously? . . . The word begin
means to originate, and the same idea could not originate in four minds at the
same time.57 And so on. The point, of course, was to muddy the issue of the
relationship between the intention and the actuation of the event in question,
to the point that whatever it was that had happened could be supposed to have
happened outside the territory or jurisdiction of the United States.
Put another way, the strategy was to transmogrify the question of action
into one of intention. How could it be said for certain what the men who had
left New Orleans aboard the Creole, the Georgiana, and the Susan Lord thought
about where they were going and what they were doing? How, indeed, could it
be said that even men who had boarded those boats knowing there was a
chance they would be commissioned as officers, organized as soldiers, or invade Cuba had actually been organized as an expedition, rather than simply being a group of loosely affiliated people who might or might not have
been thinking the same things about Cuba at the same time? And how could it
be said for certain that any of the intersubjective headwork that would actually
328
constitute organizing or setting on foot had occurred in New Orleans,

rather than on Contoyespecially given that some aboard those ships had apparently really intended to go to California? How could it be said that money
provided to people who ultimately invaded Cuba was actually a means to
that invasion, rather than to some other end?58 Or, as John Quitman, another
of those indicted as a co-conspirator, asked in a letter to a friend, what was the
problem with lending a little money to some personal friends who might (or
might not) have been planning to invade Cuba at the time? How could a man
be held responsible for what his erstwhile money went on to do in the future?59
While it must have been tedious to listen to this heady admixture of spatial
frame-shifting, pious phenomenology, and financial Pilatism, it was apparently
enough to raise a reasonable doubt of Hendersons guilt, at least in the federal
district of New Orleans. After failing to gain a conviction in three separate trials, the government finally gave up on United States v. John Henderson.
As Henderson was probing the mysteries of consciousness in New Orleans,
several hundred miles north, in Jackson, Mississippi, another of the Crdenas
conspiratorsJohn Quitmanwas working his way through a knotty series
of questions about federal power and states rights. At the time of his indictment in the federal district court, Quitman was the governor of Mississippi.
And he was not just any governor: during the tumultuous debates over the
Compromise of 1850, he had been among the most vociferous proponents of
Southern secession; he had, indeed, considered leading the Mississippi militia
to fight the federal government in SantaFe.60 For Quitman, the order to appear
in court posed a dilemma in the following terms: As a citizen, it was plain and
clear I must yield to the law, however oppressive and unjust in my case, but as
chief magistrate of a sovereign state, I had also in charge her dignity, her
honor, her sovereignty, which I could not permit to be violated in my person.Quitman and his supporters ascribed great meaning to the delivery of
his body to the courthouse in New Orleans: it meant that federal sovereignty,
the uniform jurisdictional space asserted by the Neutrality Act, trumped states
rightsthe idea that the United States was not a single political space, but an
uneven patchwork of sovereign states. Though many of his friends advised
him to resist and thus precipitate a collision between the federal and state authorities, Quitman decided in February 1851 to resign his position as governor of Mississippi and face the court in New Orleans.61
329
Like Lpez, Quitman was treated as a hero in New Orleans: serenaded

inthe streets, invited to fine dinner parties with the citys leading men, surrounded (at least according to his own account) by roguish young ladies at a
masked ball, and summoned for a private audience with Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, who was then performing in the city.62 When, in the aftermath
of the third hung jury in Hendersons case, the U.S. attorney in New Orleans
entered writs of nolle prosequi against all of those charged in connection with
the attack on Crdenas (indicating that the government would not seek to try
the case a fourth time), Quitman promised his supporters an expos of the
entire affair. In the event, however, he was a bit less than forthcoming, failing
to mention what he had known for months: that even as they were standing
trial in New Orleans, Lpez, Henderson, Sigur, and others were planning another assault on Cuba.
12
The Material Limits of
ManifestDestiny
Cuba is already ours. I feel it in my fingers ends.
James Buchanan, Letter to John H. Clayton, April12, 1849
After this, the Expedition cannot be said to have had any military existence.
Colonel Louis Schlesinger, Personal Narrative of Louis Schlesinger
of Adventures in Cuba and Ceuta
on thursday the twenty-first of August 1851, somewhere in the mountains

of western Cuba, during a break in the rain, General Narciso Lpez ate his
horse. Roasted. With some corn and wild plantains. When he had left
New Orleans aboard the steamboat Pampero, three weeks earlier, thousands of
supporters had turned out to cheer him and his small army of American adventurers, Cuban expatriates, and European revolutionaries as they began a
mission that many believed would determine the future of New Orleans, the
Mississippi River Valley, the United States, and even the world. On the first
day of September, thousands more, though not supporters this time, would
watch the general die. On the orders of the Cubas Spanish colonial captain
general, Lpez would be bound to a chair in the middle of a square in Havana
and garroted: an adjustable metal collar would be placed around his neck and
gradually constricted. As it closed, the collar would occlude and perhaps crush
his windpipe, and drive the base of his tongue upward into his throat. The
closing off of his air supply and the rising level of carbon dioxide in his blood
would cause him to experience a sensation of intense anxiety before he lost
The Material Limits of Manifest Destiny
331
consciousness, his heart racing in a desperate effort to reoxygenate his blood.

The blockage of his jugular vein would close off the drainage of blood from
his head, causing his face to turn blue and swell and his eyes to swim forwardout of their sockets. It would take the general several agonizing minutes
to die.1
These things can be taken too far, of course, but if you were looking for a
way to exemplify Marxs famous proposition that history happens twicethe
first time as tragedy, the second as farceit would be hard to find a story more
apt than that of Narciso Lpezs effort to realize the Jeffersonian dream of
aMississippian empire by invading Cuba in 1851. For in the summer of that
year, Americans heard the electrifying news that the Creoles in Puerto Prn
cipe (today Camagey, in the central part of the island) were in revolt. Amid
the din of conflicting accounts from the interior of Cuba which kept the
public mind divided between hope and fear, Lpez turned his energies to collecting enough young men, arms, ammunition, and money to support him on
what would turn out to be his final mission.2
The process by which Lpez and his supporters transformed a set of abstract propositions about the natural course of Cuban history into the terrible
materiality of an expedition aiming to actualize that history by force of arms
began with a bond issue (the great dream-realizing machine of the Revolutionary generation). In contrast to the Spanish government he was planning to
overthrow, Lpez had the distinct disadvantage of lacking a tax base on which
he could rely for funds. And so, to fund his expeditions, his supporters sold the
future in the form of obligations offered on behalf of the people of Cuba, by
whatever designation of nationality, or form of body politic they shall hereafter assume. The bonds were guaranteed (at 6percent interest) by the authority of General Narciso Lpez, Chief of the Patriotic Junta for the Promotion of the Political Interests of Cuba ... and the contemplated head of the
Provisional Government, and were payable in the public lands and public
property of Cuba ... and the fiscal resources of the people and the government of Cuba. The certificates were embossed with an engraving of the coat
of arms of the provisional government, flanked by the flag of the United States
and the free flag of Cuba, and they generally sold at anywhere between ten
and (it was rumored among supporters) forty cents on the dollar.3 Through
the bond issue, belief in the possibility of success was converted into a condi-
332
tion of possibility for the attempt: the ideology of manifest destiny was
transformed into the materiality of a real invasion through the magic of fic
titious capitalmoney paid in advance for a stake in something that did not
yet exist.
All told, Lpez, his supporters, and his successors sold millions of dollars
(face value) of this moonshine, much of it to hardcore supporters like John
Henderson, who had already paid out almost $20,000 at the time of the bungled Crdenas invasion, and who was apparently, as ever, unrepentant. I am
under the extremest burdens from my endeavors on the former occasion. Indeed, I find my cash advance for the first experiment was over half of all cash
advanced to the enterprise, he wrote to John Quitman in the fall of 1850.
Ifeel it incumbent on us who have once failed to retrieve ourselves from so
much opprobrium and reproach as defeat has cast upon us. ... With unabated
zeal, therefore, I present the project to your consideration for further pecuniary assistance.4 Hendersons response to the defeat at Crdenas, which might
(to a lesser mana less confident man) have made the project of filibusterizing
Cuba seem a bit implausible, was to believe even harder, and to challenge his
friends to do the same. Indeed, he suggested that it was not just the lost chance
of a few thousand dollars of clear profit that needed to be redeemed by further
investment, but also the reputations of the men who had been involved in the
enterprise. In a very compressed form and at a very high rate of promised return, Hendersons synthesis of personal credibility and expeditionary creditworthiness forecast the terms of the pitch that would be made to thousands of
would-be filibusters all over the country (but especially in New Orleans) in the
summer of 1851.
The process of building faith in the possibility of successenough faith
toraise an army of young men who would serve under Lpez in another attempt on Cubabegan with the annexationist press. Almost as soon as the revolt in Puerto Prncipe began, hyperbolic stories began to appear in John
OSullivans New York Sun and Laurence Sigurs New Orleans Delta: The
revolution of Cuba has changed its chrysalis for a full grown fly. The first
blood has been spilled. Cuba, some think, has had her Lexington. . . . The
Spanish troops are scattered all over the island and cannot with facility be concentrated. P.S.4p.m.Letters from Principe state that the troops are deserting in squads to the insurgents. Two steamers leave tomorrow with reinforce-
333
ments. A rumor is about town that Trinidad will rise tomorrow. Although
there was plenty of news coming out of Cuba which indicated that the rebellion in Prncipe had been put down almost immediately, these were generally
discounted in the annexationist press as Spanish misinformation was spread in
the hope of discouraging American intervention.5
The process by which information about a rumored conspiracy took material form as a recruiting effort for an actual conspiracy was far murkier. One of
Lpezs filibusters later recalled rumors of a shadowy, well-connected annexationist junta that consisted in part of wealthy exiled Cubans and the remainder of some of our most prominent and influential men, whose names if made
public would startle the public. Secretly funneling millions of dollars into the
conspiracy, this Junta had its secret agents all over the country. ... These
were quietly and industriously engaged in gathering and selecting men of
known strength, courage, and intelligence for the enterprise. Into Southern
cities like New Orleansor was it Jacksonville?men and munitions were
being daily and quietly transferred ... under the command of an experienced
and skillful General who had already acquired a wide and enduring fame in the
revolutionary struggles of Central America and whose very name was a guarantee of success. As it surfaced, news of the expedition contributed to a curious mixture of stagey secrecy and brazen attempts to organize an illegal expedition in plain sight of the federal government. Dark insinuations about spies,
conspiracies, and the hidden purposes of the powerful gradually unfolded into
practical instructions about how to join, hints about who was in charge, and
bold predictions of certain victory.6
The now-you-see-it-now-you-dont tone of the coverage in annexationist
papers like the Delta reflected the particular dilemma faced by expedition or
ganizers: they needed broad-based support for their mission if it was to succeed, but they could not simply go around cold-calling donors and soldiers,
because that was illegal. Mounting a coded recruitment campaign in the news
papers was a risky strategy, leaving the expedition vulnerable to the Spanish
spies who were allegedly tracking its progress and to the federal agents who
were supposed to be guarding the ports. But it was also an extremely effective
way to get the word out that a plan was afoot and that the details were availableto those who would seek them out.7 Indeed, the play of surface and depth
framing these ostensibly informational articles was an important aspect of
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their allure. Continually calling attention to what they were withholding, they
tempted their target readers to try to guess more, hailing them as men resourceful enough, discerning enough, inquiring enoughmanly enoughto
follow the texts riddles into the shadowy world that was apparently so close at
hand. They promised the uninitiated and the disenfranchised a chance to peer
into the hidden workings of thingsthe secret schemes of great men, the
backstory of tomorrows news. To men who worked on the margins of the
cotton economythe leftovers and lower-order functionaries of the great
work of the day like the clerks, bricklayers, druggists, farmers, butchers,
confectioners, and boatmen who eventually joined Lpezs army and went to
Cubathese articles must have seemed like an invitation to help make the his
tory they would otherwise just be reading about.8
So galvanic was the news from Cuba and so titillating the intelligence of the
fitting-out of an expedition, that the annexationist press was able to frame the
terms of debate over the Cuba question, and in the process siphon off for its
own purposes a portion of the energy used in arguing against the invasion. No
matter how frequently and convincingly newspapers like the Louisiana Courier
or the New Orleans Spanish-language daily LaUnion presented the case that
the news of a revolution in Cuba was at best exaggerated and at worst pure
hokum; no matter how passionately and eloquently they argued that invading
Cuba would make the eventual annexation of the island less rather than more
likely, and at the same time make the prospect of a slave revolt there more
rather than less likely; no matter how forcefully they insisted that an invasion
would cause a war with Great Britain which would devastate the commercial
economy of the Mississippi Valley, or that it was against the laws of the nation,
of nature, of God, and so onthey had still been drawn into a public conversation about Cuba. By reporting about it right alongside accounts of the ships
coming and going along the levee in New Orleans, the latest drunken brawl on
St.Louis Street, the falling price of cotton on the Exchange, and the advertisements describing runaway slaves, the newspapers had tacitly acceded to the
proposition that Cuba was a part of the here and now in New Orleans. They
had unwittingly, perhaps even unavoidably, participated in making the idea of
invading Cuba thinkable.9
When the timeless propositions of expansionist thinkers like DeBow and
Kimball were reframed as the issues of the moment by the newspapers, the last
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steps in the process of transforming a set of tendentious arguments about

Cuba (the imagined vessel of the unfolding history of free trade, slaveholding, and white mans republicanism) into an invasion of Cuba (the real place)
was accomplished by word of mouth. Cuba, Cuba, Cuba was the topic of
newspapers, the Exchange, the street corners, and the barrooms, remembered
one of those who was caught up in the excitement.10 Anyone with a modicum
of the blend of curiosity and wit the nineteenth century called enterprise
anyone, that is, among the readers of the Deltawould have been able to pick
up clues from reading and hearing about the articles, and follow them to a
meeting with those who had already been initiated (many of whom were,
after all, parading around town waving the free flag of Cuba, making orations, and firing off cannons).11 Such readers would perhaps have been caught
up in the excitement, and cheered with the rest; as many as 5,000 could have
crowded into the glass-covered atrium at Banks Arcade, just south of the New
Orleans slave market, where the Declaration of Independence of the Island
of Cuba, authored by the Puerto Prncipe rebels, was read.12 Then, if they
could make a show of their sincerity and trustworthiness, they would finally
have been able to encounter firsthand the hidden promisealluded to but
never directly statedthat teased their curiosity in the newspapers and rumors: the pitch.
Although the ritual character of the pitchan unwritten understanding
produced out of a conversation in which the simple broaching of the topic was
a signal that what followed was private, a conversation between an aspirant
and initiate, a meeting of eyes and pressing of hands between menensured
that it left no direct imprint on the historical record, we can get a sense of how
it went from the accounts of some of those who later betrayed its confidence.
Thomas Wilson alleged that the men recruited by Lpez in New Orleans in
the summer of 1851 had been promised $4,000 (in bonds payable by the revolutionary government of Cuba), had been told that two-thirds of the island
was already in arms, and had been assured that, in battle, one American was
equal to ten Spaniards. James St.Levi, who, admittedly, was sitting in a jail in
Havana and writing to the Spanish captain general to appeal for clemency, remembered that the emissaries of N.Lpez had assured him there were fivethousand Cuban patriots ready to take up arms in favor of the cause of liberty; and that if five hundred Americans would go with him as a bodyguard
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to allow him to land in safety they should receive from two to four thousand
dollars each; and that if they did so they would assist an oppressed people.13
A fuller version of the pitch was recorded by Henry Burtnett, who was calling himself Duncan Smith and attempting to penetrate Lpezs organization in
order to sell information about the generals plans to the Spanish. After casting
about for information on Cuba in a way that was neither too subtle to be noticed nor too eager to arouse suspicion, he was introduced to Frederick Freeman, who presented Burtnett with a bargain that, if Burtnett hadnt been the
imposter and Freeman the intended victim, we might say looked like a classic
con: Freeman stated that he had an estate in Trinidad de Cuba, which was
unjustly withheld from him by a gentleman in Cuba ... that in the present state
of excitement in the island he did not wish to expose himself there, and wanted
an active businessman with means to prosecute his claim. After a series of
trust-building conversations in which Freeman alluded to the possibility of
a change of government on the island and in which Burtnett, matching Freeman confidence for confidence, spoke of an anticipated revolution on the island, the ostensible terms of the conversation were laid aside in favor of what
both men had already known was at stake. Freeman admitted to me that
anexpedition was preparing to sail in a few days and that I could materially
assist it.14
That was the bait. And this was the hook: after revealing themselves to
Burtnett, Lpezs organizers drew him further and further into their confi
dence; they familiarized him with their invasion plans, their stores of guns and
ammunition, and told him of 14,000 supporters on the island who were already enrolled and under recognized leaders; they showed him letters from
the island, enjoining upon Lpez not to wait for the expedition but to come if
only attended by a body guard and they would flock to his standard; they told
him the story of a woman in Puerto Prncipe who had sent her jewelry to support the invasion, and the story of five Spanish soldiers who had walked into a
bar in Havana and asked the proprietor (a Catalan) for something as strong as
Genl.Lpez, and who had beaten the barman within an inch of his life when
he handed them a straw; all of this to prove the feeling of the native Cubans.
And, finally, they told Burtnett that several leading and influential men at the
South were engaged with them and had advanced large sums of their money
on their bonds, some of them having sold as high as 40 cents on the dollar.15
337
The pitch came as a series of images that testified to the faith those already
involved in the conspiracy were ready to place in one another and in the prospective recruit to whom they were being revealed. The ritual recitation of all
of that faith, all of that confidence, was at once a promise of the ultimate success of the endeavor and a prompt to join in making success certainin redeeming the belief in the possibility of success that was being freely shared out
among the conspirators. When recruiters revealed the confidence placed in
them by their supporters (whether that confidence was measured in enlisted
soldiers, donated jewels, or discounted notes), they were presenting Burtnett
with supposedly reliable evidence of their own solidly grounded confidence of
success, as a way of enhancing his feeling of confidence in joining themall
of this in confidence, of course. Putting this a bit more directly, one could say
that Burtnett was being asked for his aid in a pyramid scheme whose goal was
to imagine the invasion of Cuba into real, material existence.
The inner mysteries of the human heart are such that the last step in the
process by which the idea of invading Cuba was made materialin the shape
of a human being ready to sacrifice everything in order to become an instrument of warlies just outside the historians optical field. There were plenty
of reasons men might have volunteered to put their lives in jeopardy in the ser
vice of General Narciso Lpez. Many must have believed in the justice of the
republican cause; among the officers and soldiers were Germans and Hungarians who had fought against European monarchy in 1848, and many young
Americans who had come of age hearing legends of the revolutionary generation. Among them, as well, were American veterans of the Mexican War, men
of whom J.D.B. DeBow wrote in 1850, Where are these disbanded soldiers
and chieftans who have won more glories than the Roman legions in Britain
orin Gaul? Is it not to expect much, that the peaceful pursuits of life can content them soon again? How long could they be expected to forgo the intoxicants of battle?16 To these images of soldiers committed to liberty (for white
men, at least) and addicted to glory, contemporary observers added a list of
more sordid considerations, by which they meant the desire for gainthe
dreams of clerks become planters, of foot soldiers made into founding fathers,
of men without connections or prospects invited to the table for a wholesale
looting of a defeated neighbor.17
Yet the motivations that frame the diary of Marion Taylor, who went as a
338
young man with Lpez to Crdenas, seem at once more banal and more profound than the motives suggested by the traditional calculus of interests and
ideals. No doubt Taylor was interested in advancementhe recorded his disappointment at not receiving an officers commissionand interested in furthering the liberty of which he freely spoke. He was a young man in a society awash in titular prefixes and talk of liberty, and those broader cultural
phenomena gave him a way to talk about his own desires. But even more than
concern for rank or republicanism, what comes through in Taylors diary is a
fascination with deathhe had spent a day in New Orleans visiting a graveyard, found it very beautiful, and concluded that one would almost wish to
die that he might be buried thereand a desire to see things he had thus far
merely heard about, particularly the ocean. It was a magnificent night to behold, he wrote on his second day out of New Orleans, the vessels sailing
upon the beautiful waters of the gulf. Our bark ploughed the waters as a thing
of life. Often I had read and heard of the grandness of the ocean, but it must
be apprehended to be appreciated, but I am too sick to write. Or: I took a
stroll along the seashore, and for the first time saw and heard the restless waves
of the sea. It was a glorious moment in my life. How poor and feeble are the
descriptions of the grandeur of the ocean. The sublime emotions that it awakens in ones mind admit of no description.18
These outpourings, these yearnings, were no less preformatted by the standard Romantic themes of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture (the idea of
the cemetery as refuge, and aesthetic theories of the sublime) than talk of
sons of Washington fighting for the liberty of oppressed Cuba. Taylor,
like those with whom he went into battle, was interpellated as a young man and
a soldier by the pat terms through which he understood and gave meaning
to his actions. Even so (or perhaps especially so), his self-construction capturessomething important about what would lead a young man to volunteer to
fight and perhaps die with Lpezmotivations that might otherwise go unnoticed.19 Taylor was eager to see and feel things for himself, to pierce through
the clichs and twice-told tales and to experience the register of the real on his
own body and with his own senses (no matter that this was the greatest clich
of them all). Somewhere in the shadowy gearwork of his mind, it came to
seem to him, as it came to seem to hundreds of others like him, that their own
complicated quests were pointing them along a course toward Cuba. There,
339
hundreds of miles from home, as they waded ashoreshoulder to shoulder in

their blue shirts and gray trousers, steady beneath their packs, eyes narrowed
and fixed forward, wind in their faces, hands firm on their weaponsthey
would make history out of their dreams.
lpez embarked on his final mission at four oclock in the morning on

August3, 1851, a few hours ahead of a party of federal agents, who, the general had been warned, had been sent to impound his ship, the Pampero. Even at
that early hour, thousands of New Orleans residents crowded onto the levee to
watch and cheer the filibusters on their way. Lpez, arriving with his staff, was
greeted with wild cheers by his men and the crowd, and boarded the ship with
(in the words of Louis Schlesinger, his Hungarian aide-de-camp) his accustomed calmness and energy. But as Lpez surely knew, things had already
started to go wrong. The Pampero, which had been purchased for Lpez at the
cost of Laurence Sigurs stake in the Daily Delta, was a comparatively large
ship (four hundred tons), but not large enough to hold all of those who wanted
to accompany the general to Cuba. Hundreds would have to be left behind at
New Orleans to await the purchase of another boat that would enable them
to reinforce the invading army. Perhaps even more troubling to Lpez that
morning was the fact that the Pampero, which had long been plying the packet
trade between New Orleans and Galveston and was known to be one of the
fastest ships in the Gulf, had arrived in New Orleans ailing: her machinery
needed repairs that the general, operating under the threat of federal seizure,
did not have time to make.20 Even before the Pampero left the dock, Lpez confronted the materiality of absolute spacethe irreducible difficulty of using a
boat to move a large load across a long distance.
At Balize, the Pampero was loaded with arms and ammunition that had been
shipped downriver separately in mock deference to the Neutrality Act, and
repairs were attempted. A hundred more men were put off the ship, to clear
space for some of his principal Cuban friends in the country, and also a good
provision of arms, ammunition, rifles, extra arms for the people of Cuba, etc.
Those friends were waiting for the Pampero at the mouth of the St.Johns
River, on the eastern coast of Florida. As the expeditionaries lay by at Balize,
they saw the Cincinnati, which they knew carried news of their departure sent
by the Spanish consul in New Orleans, head out into the Gulf ahead of them.
340
She inspired us with but little uneasiness, Louis Schlesinger later wrote, being a poor and slow old boat, unable at her best without a fair wind, to make
more than five or six miles an hour. And indeed, two days on, the Pampero
overtook the Cincinnati, rendering the news carried by the latter boat obsolete
before it had even been delivered.21 In the battle over intelligencethe contest
to control the flow of information over spaceLpez had won what proved to
be a short-lived first victory.
Though fast enough to overtake the Cincinnati, the Pampero, which had
been known as a fifteen-knot vessel, was, even after a second round of repairs, making only eight or nine knots per hour on its journey to Cuba by way
of the mouth of the St.Johns. And she was running out of coal. The general
had been assured that the Pampero was coaled for sixteen days sailing, but
five days out of New Orleans he was told by his captain that there was coal
enough in the hold for only three more days. Whatever the causea mistake
by an agent entrusted with the purchase, a too-hurried coaling under pressure
to leave at New Orleans, the machinerys inefficiency (Lopezs later defenders
were quick to come up with explanations that lay outside the generals control,
for, as we will see, there were detractors)the plan to go all the way to the
mouth of the St.Johns would have to be abandoned in deference to the news
headed for Cuba aboard the wheezing Cincinnati.22
The general decidedpromptly resolved, in the words of his aide-de-
campto land at Key West, where he hoped to receive news from Cuba and
hire a pilot who knew the coast (Lpezs intended pilot had been captured and
executed by the Spanish before he could reach New Orleans). While at Key
West, the general decided that once the Pampero had landed his forces in Cuba,
it would sail north to Savannah, recoal, pick up the men and heavy armamentswaiting at the mouth of the St.Johns, and then return to Cuba to reinforce the landing party. Among the many well-wishers and admirers who came
aboard the Pampero were some with news from Cuba, reporting that the Spanish troops were mainly in the central part of the countrywhere the uprising
had begun and where Lpez planned to attackand that new insurgencies
were being reported in the west.23
The news from Cuba had an electrifying effect on the Pampero. The initial
enthusiasm of the troopswhich had given way to talk about turning back,
after a stifling week aboard the overcrowded Pamperowas rekindled, and
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some among the officers ordered up champagne to toast the boon companions
who had brought them such good tidings. Lpez, under the influence of the
news (though not the champagne, which he reportedly did not touch), began
to rework his invasion plans. Rather than attacking in the Central District,
where he now believed the Spanish forces were concentrated, he would land at
Bahia Honda, about fifty miles west of Havana. A western landing would, at
best, allow him to join forces with the rebels he had heard about at Key West,
and, at worst, allow him to retreat into the mountains and await reinforcement
from the men he had left on the dock in New Orleans. Though Lpez was unable to find a pilot who knew the coast of Cuba, the Pampero set off for Bahia
Honda at ten oclock on the evening of August10.24
Twelve hours later, the ship arrived in the coastal waters of Cubaand in
plain sight of the harbor at Havana, so close that the men aboard the Pampero
could see the sentinels posted on duty atop the high-walled Castle Morro.
Again, there were various explanations. The stoppage of the engine in the
middle of the night might have allowed the boat to be taken off course by the
currents in the Gulf, or perhaps the captains compass had given false readings, due to the proximity of so many iron weapons.25 Retreating under the
power of anthracite coal brought especially for the purpose of firing the engine without creating a trail of smoke, the Pampero turned once more into the
Gulf. But whatever element of surprise Lpez had carried with him out of
New Orleans was now lost. Imperialist ideology and visionary schemes notwithstanding, he still had to get his men and their weapons from pointA to
pointB if that was where he planned to attack. The intransigent materiality of
absolute space was winnowing his chances of victory.
Still needing a pilot to guide him along the coast of the island he had come
to liberate, Lpez ordered his captain to overhaul a small schooner they spotted along the coast. The captain of the schooner was taken aboard, threatened
with death, given a certificate that would assure the Spanish he had acted under
compulsion, and told to steer the Pampero for Bahia Honda. As it headed west,
the ship suffered a further series of mishapsentering a bay where two Spanish ships were anchored, attempting a landing under cover of darkness at the
site of another Spanish fort. Some aboard the ship attributed this series of
near-disasters to Fortune or Providence. Others, especially after a final
grounding a mile out from the shore at Morrillo, began to suspect the pilot.
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Some of the men proposed shooting him on the spot. The poor fellow was
frightened half out of his wits, Louis Schlesinger recalled, and, indeed, in
the act of landing in the first boat, one of the men in the boat with him jokingly
did fire his pistol over his head with pretended aim at him. This bit of rough
play marked the close of the first act of Lpezs on-the-fly effort to acquire essential informationlocal knowledge sufficient to reshape his memories of
the islands contours into an image that would aid him in crossing the terrain.
And yet, insinuations about the foolishness of his plan and intimations of
his onrushing death aside, it is worth trying, for a moment, to see the general
through the eyes of his devoted aide-de-camp that afternoon on the beach at
Morrillo. As Lpez came ashore in the waning light, he knelt to kiss the soil of
his beloved Cuba. He was dressed in a white jacket and pantaloons, the
former buttoning to his throat, with standing collar embroidered with a single
star. He wore a red Generals sash around his waist, but no arms. Over his
shoulder was slung a spy-glass in a leather case. ... His countenance was all
aglow with subdued enthusiasm. In spite of his gray mustache and beard, he
looked almost a young man again. Lpez gathered his men and prepared to
lead the main body of his troops up the road to Las Pozas to commandeer
some ox carts, which a company of men left behind under the command of
Colonel William Crittenden would use to haul up the expeditions baggage:
powder, cartridges, extra muskets, maps, liberationist proclamations, flags, the
officers suitcases, and the generals personal effectsall critical to the operations success, but, taken together, too much for the small party to carry
across the difficult ground that lay ahead of them. As Lpez and his men
started up the path to Las Pozas the following morning, they could see the
Pampero silhouetted against the sky behind them, refloated and headed for the
United States with the news that the expedition had landed.26
As they trekked inland, the environment began to degrade the already tenuous military discipline of Lpezs men. Tormented by mosquitoes and miserable in the withering heat, the column heading toward Las Pozas was soon
strung out and separated by large stretches of road. Several of the men ac
tually threw away their muskets to lighten their march under the oppressive
heat. A couple of others fell out, thinking to rejoin us in the cool of the evening, and were never seen again. Quite a few picked unripe mangoes they
found along the path anddespite the generals warning that doing so would
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make them illate them as they stumbled along.27 Whereas his men experienced the effects of the environment on their bodies as exhaustion and hunger,
and measured their progress across the landscape in hours between breaks or
good meals, Lpez and his aides saw only the indiscipline and insubordination
of ill-trained soldiers, evident in the distance between the ranks and their slow
progress toward Las Pozas.
Yet as a general whose authority over his men had not even a pretense of
representing some power greater than itself, Lpez had little recourse to the
traditional tools for instilling a sense of purpose in the minds and bodies of his
soldiers. The only motivation he could draw on was their urge to survive.
When Lpezs second-in-command, the Hungarian general Jnos Prgay, ordered a man shot on the spot for breaking into a house along the road (a big
issue for an army of liberators who were insistently being identified as pirates by their Spanish foes), Prgay was forced to defend himself against soldiers under his command, who were incensed that a dd foreigner would
lay hands on an Americanno notice apparently being taken of the fact that
both the Hungarian general and the American foot soldier were foreigners in
Cuba.28 The prospective character of Lpezs authority left him no better option in this case (and many others like it) than to arrange for an apology and its
acceptance. Until he acquired a more solidly territorialized sovereignty, neither Lpez nor his men could be sure that what they currently saw as punishment for misconduct or mutiny might not shortly thereafter be seen as unlawful assault or even murder by a court that actually had jurisdiction.
Lpezs column crested the ridge overlooking Las Pozas at about two
oclock on the afternoon of August12. Before them were about fifty houses
strung along the downward slope of the road from Morrillo, deserted except
for the owners of the villages two stores, and a few Negroes. Far from
showing any willingness to join with the filibusters in overthrowing their
Spanish oppressors, the people of Las Pozas had fled when they heard rumors
of the approach of hundreds of armed American invadersas would most of
the inhabitants along the route traveled by the filibusters over the next two
weeks or so.29 Nevertheless, the general issued a proclamation assuring the
people that we had come only as their friends and auxiliaries against their oppressors. He then requisitioned a few carts, which he sent with a small party
back to Colonel Crittenden with orders to come with his men under cover of
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darkness and in the cool of the night. Within what Lpezs aide-de-camp remembered as about fifteen minutes, however, a peasant coming from the
coast brought the alarming news that a division of Spanish troops under the
command of General Manuel Enna had already landed at Bahia Honda and
were on their way toward Las Pozas by a route which joined the road from
Morrillo about halfway alonga route that would soon place them between
the two elements of Lpezs divided army. Although this was later disputed,
Lpezs aide-de-camp recalled that the general sent Crittenden another order
to come immediately, abandoning whatever ammunition and baggage they
could not carry on their backs. The general intended to march his men into the
mountains and get them into better military order before facing the Spanish in
battle.30
Dawn broke with no sign of Crittenden. Fearing the worst, Lpez began
immediately to drill and exercise his men in the middle of the road, in a desperate attempt to instill some military discipline before they faced the Spanish.
At about eight oclock on the morning of August13, they came under fire.
Lpez at once ordered his Cuban company to attack the Spanish position,
which overlooked the entrance to the village from a hill on the left. Reading
the account of the battle written by Schlesinger, one gets a sense of the landscape at Las Pozas and of the way panic and alarm gradually resolved into the
sharp focus of military strategy: The eminence on the left of the road was occupied by the Cuban company, resting on the house from which they had so
handsomely driven the enemy, and screened from a flank attack by [a] thick
wood. . . . Across the road a cart was overturned, as a slight obstruction;
andbeyond it, on the right, on the other side of [a] fence were the rest of our
men, in companies on the eminences forming the ridge [at the entrance of the
town].31 Schlesinger referred to what followed as, quite simply, carnagea
word whose etymology suggests the rendering of human beings into meat. We
can imagine the rising heat of the August sun, the sulfurous smoke drifting
across the field, the dry, dusty smell of the baked ground, the roar of hundreds
of muskets, the commands of the officers urging their men into order, the
shrieks of the wounded, and the debasement of the dead as they lay on the
field at Las Pozas soiled with the sticky mess of their own blood. In a little over
half an hour, thirty or thirty-five of Lpezs 280 men lay dead or wounded
onthe field; around them were 180 dead Spanish soldiers from a force that had
345
initially numbered close to eight hundred. As his men rifled the coats and
packsof the Spanish dead, searching for cartridges they could beat down to fit
their own smaller-bore weapons, it must have seemed for a moment as if Lpez had won a decisive victory.
Having retreated along the road from Morrillo, the Spanish remained between Lpez and Crittenden, even as the general unsuccessfully urged his men
along that road to rout their foes, rendezvous with Crittenden, and seal their
victory. The word coward which I used rather intemperately, remembered
Schlesinger, came pretty near producing a mutiny and costing me my own
life on the spot. In the absence of a full-scale mission (again according to
Schlesinger), a message containing orders to join Lpez at Las Pozas by midnight was sent along an isolated footpath to the coast. When the five filibusters
sent with the message returned with the news that the woods were thick with
Spanish soldiers and that they had not been able to get through to the coast,
and when a company of men from the coastal party came into Las Pozas from
the woods shortly afterward with the news that they had been separated from
Crittenden in an engagement with a much larger Spanish force, Lpez began
to prepare his men to march into the mountains. There he hoped to join with
the rebels he had heard about in Key West and wait for reinforcements from
the United States. When he left Las Pozas on the morning of August14, Lpez
left behind several of his men who had been wounded the previous day
among them General Prgay, who, Schlesinger later heard, cut his own throat
as the Spanish entered the village that afternoon.32
Because the maps Lpez had brought with him from New Orleans had been
in the baggage left with Crittenden on the coast, and because he did not know
the terrain, he navigated with a compass and the help of Negro guides provided by Creole planters who claimed to support Lpez (at least when he and
his small army were on their doorsteps) but were reluctant to join in the fight
ing themselves. From the same sources, Lpez received the fragments of intelligence which, for several days, he would chase in a series of rapid marches
and forced countermarches which left his troops exhausted and bitterly disillusioneddisanimated, in the words of Schlesinger. One day, they were led
along a narrow footpath leading in the direction of Bahia Honda in search of
an elusive local governor they had hoped to take captive. The next they were
marched back, fleeing a rumor that the Spanish had assembled 1,200 men, 200
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horses, and a battery of cannons in a nearby town. The day after that, they
were urged across torrents, gulleys, and ravines to the top of a mountain in the
middle of the night.
Lpez, at the head of the columnhuddling with his Negro guide and
his officers, trying to find some embodied force of patriot insurgents according to the representations that had been made to him in the United States
began to seem dangerously out of touch to his men, who had barely slept or
eaten for several days. Nearly every day he would assure the men that ere
night-fall we would join the patriots ... whom he said numbered four thousand strong, remembered one. Lpezs men had seen the country people
who were supposedly waiting only for their landing to fly to their aidfly instead into the woods; and they had been attacked by the Spanish soldiers, who
they had been told, would likely break ranks and join them. Now, they were
throwing down their weapons in the heattwenty guns left by the side of the
road one day, fifty the nextopenly questioning the generals leadership, and,
increasingly, disappearing into the woods. It was, Schlesinger later wrote,
the most shocking march for troops that I have ever witnessed or heard of.33
The rumors Lpez was hearing from those he met along the way convinced
him that his best chance lay on the other side of the mountains, at San Cristbal, where he had been told the people were ready to rise, and at Piar del
Ro, where they were said to be already in rebellion. The road he and his men
followed toward Piar del Ro took them past the Cafetal de Fras, a coffee
plantation that had belonged to Lpez before his flight from Cuba in 1849.
Within a very short time of the filibusters arrival at the plantation, it became
clear that the plantation was surrounded by the same Spanish forces from
which Lpez had been running. General Ennas cavalry took up a position in
the field downhill and to the right of the little grove of mango trees where the
filibusters had been preparing to cook their first meal in days. Falling back into
the woods and firing from cover, the filibusters were able to rout Ennas cavalry, which, as Schlesinger remembered it, broke ranks and fled the field, overrunning and dispersing the division of infantrymen the Spanish general had
stationed behind them in reserve.34
Later, even some of Lpezs supporters would wonder if he had by the error or treachery of his guide been led into a trap at Cafetal de Fras. Whatever the actual fact, the possibility that this was the case signals something im
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portant about the generals situation in Cuba. Though he was enormously

effective in his role as expatriate freedom fighter in the United States, and
though he was cheered in the streets, toasted in the barrooms, and lauded in
the newspapers in New Orleans, Lpez was out of place in Cuba: unable to
land except with the aid of a pilot he could not trust; guided on his pro-slavery
crusade by a slave who was the only one who seemed to know the way; reliant
on the eyes and ears of countrymen who fled before his blundering advance;
increasingly desperate in his quest to find the gathering body of patriots whom
even he must have begun to suspect had never existed. Turning his face once
again toward the mountains to try the effect of our presence in calling out the
rising of the people, Lpez, in his dress whites with the red sash and the little
embroidered star on the collar, must have seemed increasingly preposterous to
his weary men. Separated from the maps, the trade tables, and the newspaper
polemics through which he had come to know the country he had fled, Lpez
struggled to gain his bearings on the real terrain where he had landed his men
and gone to war. Yet he once more rallied his troops: Now a shake of the
hand, now a friendly tap on the shoulder, now an encouraging smile or nod,
with occasionally such a word of cheer as his little English (which was next to
none at all) enabled him to use.35
Though neither he nor his men knew it at the time, as Lpez walked among
his men, he was already dead. Crittenden had, as the general suspected, been
engaged by Ennas forces as they retreated from Las Pozas. He and his troops,
according to the accounts they subsequently provided, fought valiantly, but
had been forced by the superior numbers of the Spanish to retreat to the beach
at Morrillo, where they took to the boats in which they had landed and set out
in a desperate attempt to row themselves home to the United States. After two
days at sea, they were overhauled by a Spanish warship and taken to Havana.
They were interrogated, their confessions were taken, and, after being allowed
to write last letters home, they were, to a man, executed by a firing squad on
the beach at Atares on the morning of August16.36
while colonel Crittendens capture was a grievous blow to the filibusters chances in Cuba, Lpez had still managed to face down the Spanish forces
under General Enna at both Las Pozas and Cafetal de Fras without the men or
supplies he had left with Crittenden on the beach at Morrillo. The colonels
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capture did not, in itself, spell the defeat of the generals forces. Rather, their
defeat was ensured by the story of the colonels capture. Even as Lpez and his
men fought their way along the path toward San Cristbal and the rebellion
that the general had assured them was right over the next mountain, news of
Crittendens capture and execution was spreading around them and across the
island. Indeed, the first news that many received of the invasion was the news
of the executions at Ataresa fact that, as Schlesinger later put it, presented
the whole enterprise to the people of Cuba at its very first flush, as a failure, as
a thing crushed and overwhelmed in disaster at its very outset. While Lpez
might have mastered the tactical space of the Cuban landscape in the battles he
had foughtdominating the ridge at the entrance to Las Pozas and the tree
line at Cafetal de Frasthe Spanish remained in control of the larger strategic space. The coastal packets and overland stages, the railroads and the telegraphs, were still in the domain of the Spanish, who thus controlled the flow
of information. While the bodies of hundreds of dead Spanish soldiers which
might have given much-needed credibility to Lpezs mission lay concealed on
remote battlefields, the Spanishwith their greater mastery of space and the
physical flow of information across itwere able to substantiate their claim
that the general was a hopeless interloper.37
The news of Lpezs landing and Crittendens defeat was subject to a similar set of remixings and compressions as it made its way across the Gulf.
Though the events had unfolded over a period of three days, and though much
time had since passed and many men had died, the reports that would frame
the American response to the 1851 expedition did not arrive in New Orleans
until the twentieth of August. That day came the news of Lpezs landing. As
it began to spread through the city, it was quickly overwhelmed by the news of
Crittendens capture and execution. The latter report arrived on the morning
of the twenty-first aboard a steamship that had recently been christened (in
what must have seemed, on that morning, a bitter joke) Empire City.38 Lpezs
partisans in New Orleans responded to the news by gathering in the streets and
destroying Spanish-owned property in the city: the fruit stands, which were
rumored to have raised the price of their medicinal wares during the Yellow
Fever epidemic of 1848; cigar stores and coffeehouses frequented by Spanish
spies; the house of the Spanish consul, whose furniture was dragged into the
street and burned.39
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The greatest fury, however, was reserved for the looting of the offices of
the Spanish-language paper La Union and the anti-annexationist True Delta,
both of which had continually raised questions about the accuracy of annexationist accounts of the situation on the island in the weeks leading up to the
invasion. By disputing the idea that Crittenden and his men had been massacred rather than simply executed, these papers had allegedly dampened any
remaining enthusiasm for a mission to Cuba to reinforce Lpez.40 The condition of possibility for Lpezs mission had, from the outset, been its own believability; and as Lpezs supporters dragged LaUnions presses out into the
street and scattered its printing type in the gutter, they vented their rage on the
machines that had finally ruptured that enabling pretense. No mission to rescue Lpez would be mounted from the Mississippis erstwhile empire city.
It was on the morning of August21, the morning that the news of Crittendens execution arrived in New Orleans, that Lpez and his men roasted the
generals horse and ate what would be the last meal of their mission. As they
had retreated from the field at Cafetal de Fras, a tropical storm had poured
down upon the bedraggled filibusters, many of them, after several days in
the mountains, now walking barefoot, some of them with painful, stinking
wounds that had gone undressed since Las Pozas. The rain continued for days,
increasing in severity, soaking what little powder the men had left to the point
of uselessness, and further demoralizing the beaten little army. Schlesinger de
scribed the ordeal:
The cold during the nights was intense. We had no shelter and but little
clothing against it. The only slight degree of comfort from it we could
get was from standing huddled closely together, like sheep in a storm.
The General had no other clothing than white linen; and who can ever
imagine the thoughts that filled his noble and manly heart through those
long hours in which I stood, for much of the time, pressed up against his
breast for mutual warmth! Under foot the rain poured over the rough
slope in miniature torrents. None could lie down. Some sat on stumps or
stones, but most of us stood.
Shivering and disconsolate, a group of the men and some of the officers approached Lpez on the twenty-second, telling him that their hardships could
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not be endured any longer, and that the people did not rise, and no bodies of
patriots were found in arms, and called on him to take them back to the United
States. Lpez attempted to rally them by once again assuring them the time
could not be far when reinforcements would arrive from the United States and
he still expected to unite with the friendly bands of the people of the Island,
according to the assurances he had received at Key West, but promised to lead
them out of the mountains to search for food the following day.41
As the rain broke and the filibusters began the walk out of the mountains,
they were surprised by a company of Spanish cavalry, who drove them over
the edge of a ravine into the woods below, tracked those they could find
through the underbrush, and killed them one by one. After this, wrote Schlesinger, the Expedition cannot be said to have had any military existence. He
and several survivors stayed out in the woods for several days, subsisting on
the fibrous pulp they cut from inside small palm trees, and subsiding into what
the generals devoted aide-de-camp later termed inanition.42 On August24,
the captain general in Havana issued a proclamation announcing that the pirates had been defeated and declaring that quarter would be given to any of
Lpezs men who surrendered within four days. Copies of this document
were spread like raindrops, wrote one of Lpezs later partisans, and the filibusters began to come out of the hills to surrender. Whatever vain hopes they
might have had of re-forming their army had been destroyed by the image of
Spanish omniscience and spatial mastery conveyed by the sheer density of the
postings. Lpez himself was taken up on August28, in circumstances that were
later the subject of fierce disagreement.43
Lpez was executed at seven in the morning on September1, 1851. An engraving of the event shows him wearing the same white suit in which he had
landed, seated in a chair with a cross in his hands as the iron band was placed
around his neck. Before him, remembered one witness, were assembled those
of his men who had been captured in the preceding days, 2,000 Spanish cavalrymen, 3,000 infantrymen, and as many as 20,000 spectators. Great care had
been taken in arraying the troops around the square: the regiment of Gallica at
the front, with their banner displayed; the artillery on the right, next to the engineers; other forces on the left. The carefully choreographed execution of
Lpez was to provide onlookers (and those who would, in the coming weeks,
gaze through their eyes via accounts in letters and newspaper stories) with a
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visual and spatial metonym of the power of the Spanish regime in Cuba. Lpez attempted unsuccessfully to make a short speech, before the executioner
twisted the screw home and converted the old general into a piece of Spanish
propaganda.44
The executions of Crittenden and Lpezand, still more, the images of
those executions that filtered back to the United Statesposed a substantial
challenge to the ideology of expansion. That ideology had made it seem as if
revolutionizing Cuba and annexing it to the United States would be the easiest
thing in the worldsimply a matter of geography, part of the emergent his
tory of republicanism and free trade, the destiny of the white race, the uncoiling of natural history, the unfolding of Gods will, and so on. The bright
worldmaking promises of Mississippi imperialism had made it seem as if space
and time themselves demanded an invasion of Cuba; they sought to bring
themselves into being through insistently proclaiming their own believability.
In the end, however, for these promises to be realized, they had to be given
material form in real human bodies, deployed on unfamiliar ground, and engaged in a contest of wounding and exhibiting. Lpezs inglorious surrenderindeed, his entire failed filibuster careermarked a rupture in the received history of the United States, the South, and the Mississippi Valley:
arupture in the idea of manifest destiny that was no less difficult for the philosophers of filibusterism to repair for being the bungled work of a quixotic
old fool.
Repairing the expansionist script required reenlisting those bodies to their
original cause by writing (and disseminating) a history of Lpezs last mission
that somehow explained its failure without calling into question the inevitable
achievement of the larger purpose of which he was a part. Believers needed
toreassert, against all available evidence, that the general had spoken justly
when, with his last breath, he reportedly addressed the thousands of Cubans
assembled for his execution with the words, My fate will not change your destinies.45
Much of the heavy lifting involved in that projectrefashioning the expansionist account of what was supposed to happen out of the splintered remains
of what had actually happenedwas done by the aide-de-camp, Louis Schlesinger, in a series of articles published in the Democratic Review over the course
of 1852. Schlesingers strategya time-honored one among defeated military
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menwas to emphasize the contingency of what had gone wrong, assign the
blame to others, assess what should have been done instead, and conclude that,
but for a few key mistakes made along the way and some very bad luck, the
venture would surely have been a success. According to Schlesinger, blame for
the failure of the mission lay, variously, with the U.S. government, which had
forced the Pampero to leave New Orleans in a hurry without coaling properly
and thus bollixed the rendezvous at the mouth of the St.Johns; with Crittenden, who had dallied at a roadhouse along the road to Las Pozas rather than
following Lpezs direct order to come immediately, and who, by getting himself killed, had compromised the image of the mission in the eyes of the Creole forces so critical to its success; with the untrained soldiers, who had shown
none of the discipline necessary to military success as they had ragtagged
across the countryside, leaving a trail of abandoned weapons and exhausted
deserters strung out along the road behind them (for every wavering Creole
Cuban and Spanish soldier to see); with the cowards who had failed to cap
italize on their victories at Las Pozas and Cafetal de Fras by mounting a final
charge against the defeated Spanish army; with the Cuban patriots, who never
rose and were nowhere to be found when Lpez went looking for them; with
the bad intelligence received at Key West, which caused Lpez to misjudge the
position of the Spanish army and overestimate the degree of support there
would be for a landing in the western part of the island; and, finally, with the
rain. At various moments in his narrative, Schlesinger assigned to each of
these factors unique responsibility for the failure of the mission, andremarkably, even brazenly under the circumstancessuggested that in their absence the mission would infallibly have succeeded.46
But rather than following this litany of factors through to the seemingly
obvious conclusion that the missions failure was overdetermined by catastrophic shortcomings in virtually every area of military scienceleadership,
tactics, intelligence, operations, supply, and so onSchlesinger repeatedly
emphasized how close, at any given moment, the mission had been to success.
In remarkable run-on sentences full of logic-herniating conditional imponderables (who can say what would have happened if ...), Schlesinger emphasized the contingency of everything that had happened, while nevertheless
maintaining the likelihood of what would have happened if what actually happened had not and what should have happened had. A relatively mild version
353
of his effort went something like this (a moral drawn from the battle of Las
Pozas): If any one of these ifs had occurred, as they all ought to have occurred,
how different might, how different probably would have been the turn and
result of the whole enterprise! A fuller sense of the framing logic of Schlesingers narrative is conveyed by a sampling of his account of the unrealized
victory at Cafetal de Fras: Oh that we had fifty horses and willing riders to
pursue them with! Oh that, without horses, our own men could but have been
made to pursue! Yet Schlesinger did not simply view this hypothetical troop
of cavalry as the key to victory at Cafetal de Fras; he saw them as the key to
everything. Who knows how many of the enemy would have laid down their
arms, then to have assuredly joined us? All the fatal effect before produced by
the capture and massacre of Crittenden would have been counteracted and
compensated. Many of the countrypeople ... would have been encouraged
and enabled to rise and join us. Creoles ... would have been released from the
coercion and fear which forced them to dissemble their real desires and intentions. . . . Desertion from the [Spanish] troops, too, would have been in all
probability rapid and abundant.47 Well, yeah, I guess, probably maybe so. In
fairness, though, Schlesinger had a difficult job to do: in addition to trying to
mend the story of inevitable conquest with a few threads of manifest probability, he was trying to defend the reputation of his dearly departed but still furiously embattled chief.
in the United States, the passage of Lpez the soldier into the afterlife of
Lpez the symbol was framed by letters written by Colonel Crittendens men
as they sat aboard the warship Esperanza in Havana harbor waiting to die.
Deceived by false visions, I embarked in the expedition for Cuba, wrote a
soldier named Honor Vienne. Lpez, the Scoundrel, has deceived us, wrote
another of Crittendens men, Gilman Cook. I was deceived by Lpez. He as
well as the public press assured me that the island was in a state of prosperous
revolution, wrote Crittenden himself.48 Even as Lpez thrashed through the
last days of his search for the patriots in the mountainous jungles of central
Cuba, a searching postmortem had begun. To the charges made by Crittendens men, widely reprinted and circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, were
soon added others. Lpez, according to C. N. Horwell, who had been with
him up until the very end, was a cheat and a base fraud who had coldly left
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the disabled of [his] army to care for themselves after the battle at Las Pozas.
He was a soidisant general who had deceived his men and fought only
tremblingly at Las Pozas, before abandoning Crittenden in headlong retreat.49
Taking a page from Crittenden, those who questioned the generals bravery
and probity quickly homed in on the intelligence from Cuba that had been
used to whip up fervor for the invasion in July. New Orleans papers, there is
your work! There is the result of your divagations, of your iniquitous falsehoods, of your placards with large black letters, and your detestable extras.
There you have scattered the blood that will be scattered against you in the future. ... This blood must flow, drop by drop, upon your headsthis blood
will torment you in your sleep, for they have lost their lives when you were in
security in your houses. And according to Lpezs critics, the misleading reports of imminent revolution on the island that led several hundred credulous
young men to untimely ends were not simply the result of faulty intelligence.
They were instead part of a deliberate effort to deceive the American public
a cruel artifice practiced by the unseen heads of the scheme, according to the
True Deltas obituary for Crittenden.50
These accusations of shadowy conspiracies and dark purposes soon coalesced into a story that told of cynicism and greed behind the headlines. According to Thomas Wilsons pamphlet entitled An Authentic Narrative of
the Piratical Descents upon Cuba, the motive behind the entire expedition
was the recovery of losses sustained by the investors in Cuban bonds in the fiasco at Crdenas. The silly purchasers of Cuban bonds could not put up with
their first loss, Wilson wrote in 1851, and the want of money on the part of
the chiefs of the plot instead of keeping them back urged them on. In order
tosustain their speculation, Wilson alleged, the masterminds behind the in
vasion sent emissaries to Cuba to provide accounts of events on the islands
of a nature to excite the plebeians to the utmosta purpose they achieved
through a series of fabricated stories about events at Prncipe, which made
a pitiful got-up-for-the-occasion outbreak brought off by a handful
of fools seem like a reenactment of the American Revolution. The invasionin the words of one of its soldiers, whose epistolary expos was reprinted as anappendix to one of the many pamphlets issued in its aftermath
had been a great humbug.51 The accusations that the 1851 invasion had been,
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at bottom, a put-up job engineered by a hidden party of speculators drew credence from the actual fact that the leaders of the scheme had spent a lot of
other peoples money on their bungled invasion; from the association of Lpezs earlier invasions with a cabal of fraudulent bankrupts and speculators who had supposedly made millions by purchasing worthless Mexican
land grants in the 1840s and having them registered as proper titles after 1848;
and, perhaps most interestingly, from a set of insistently repeated images of
the general as an adept in the dark arts practiced on the edges of the commercial economy.52
Lpez, as a young man, had been a gamblerthough according to his posthumous nemesis Wilson, not a very good one. Lpez, the story went, had
married a rich and beautiful Cuban lady, whose fortune he dissipated at the
gambling table before her beauty was the least impaired. In later years, the
gambling reduced him to a very low shift of borrowing from everybody of his
acquaintance who would make him a loan, and his last years in Cuba witnessed
him an associate of the lowest characters in society. The legend of Lpezs
gaming was elevated to a sort of common sense when crowds in Havana celebrated the generals capture by marching through the city with effigies of Lpez in his dress-white uniform with a game-cock under his left arm and a
package of cards in his right hand. Lpez, said his detractors, had rolled together hundreds of thousands of dollars of bad debt, along with the brave
dreams of a hundred young men who had made the error of confiding in
hispromises, in a reckless, speculative, fraudulent scheme to invade Cuba.53
As the president of the United States, Millard Fillmore, put it in one of the
many paragraphs he devoted to the invasion in his December 1851 State of the
Union address: Money was advanced by individuals, probably in considerable amounts, to purchase Cuban bonds ... sold, doubtless, at a very large
discount. ... Payment, it is evident, was only to be obtained by a process of
bloodshed, war, and revolution. ... These originators of the invasion of Cuba
seem to have determined with coolness and system upon an undertaking which
should disgrace their country, violate its laws, and put to hazard the lives of
ill-informed and deluded men.54 Lpez and his supporters, that is, worked a
confidence game in which the lives of the young men under his command became the stakes in the biggest (and ultimately, when he lost, deadliest) bet of
his life.
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These images of Lpez as a retailer of false confidences and speculator in

human lives were countered by the generals defenders in a set of articles and
pamphlets that emphasized Lpezs probity in business and overall good judgment. Schlesinger itemized several of the requisitions that Lpez had made on
Cuban farmers and shopkeepers, and pointedly noted that he had given receipts (payable by the provisional government) for the food he took.55 Writing
under the eccentrically spelled pseudonym AFlibustiero, another of Lpezs
supporters framed the entire mission as an effort to redeem long-talked-of
promises.56 By far the most persistent in this regard was Ambrosio Gonzales,
a leading figure among annexationist exiles, who likewise noted that Lpez had
paid for every meal he ate on the island (except for the horsehe already
owned that). But in the account he published in 1852, entitled Manifesto
on Cuban Affairs Addressed to the People of the United States, Gonzales
framed his narrative around the larger question of speculation.57
Gonzales, by a logic that might in another context be labeled the fallacy of
financial origins, argued that those who had invested in the Lpez mission had
earned their money in honorable pursuits and therefore could not have been
employing that same money to speculate. John Henderson, who had invested the earnings of a life of usefulness and integrity, was a case in point.
From the west, where he was born, Henderson had rowed his passage to
New Orleans in a flat-boat and by dint of his industry and perseverance, rose
to eminence at the bar, and to the honorable distinction of Senator from Congress from his adopted state of Mississippi. Of such materials speculators cannot be made. The money invested in the mission and the men it represented,
Gonzales was saying, were as good as gold: true in their origins and not readily
convertible to a baser coin. And in any case, he argued, if these men really had
been intending to speculate, they never would have paid thirty or forty cents
on the dollar for the long-shot bonds they bought. They would have paid ten
cents on the dollar, at best, if they had been speculating.58
Gonzales, however, did not deny that a great confidence game had been
played in the Gulfhe denied only that Lpez and his supporters were to
blame for it. Indeed, his argument agreed with that of virtually all of the generals other defenders: it was Lpez who had been misleddeceived by exaggerated reports from the island, by the misinformed correspondents of the
American newspapers, and, above all, by emissaries of the Spanish govern-
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ment, among whom are said to be some infamous Cubans. Deceived especially by the letter he had received at Key West which gave him a false sense of
the state of things on the island and caused him to rush headlong into a Spanish trapa letter that was, in the words of the pseudonymous Flibustiero, the
work of a well-known speculator.59 It was, Gonzales concluded, palpable
that General Lpez had been foully decoyed. Too great a confidence in others,
the result of his generous nature, was alike fatal to him and to the success
of hisexpedition.60 Lpez, in this exculpatory tale, was not the con man, but
the mark.
If these arguments over who had scammed whom were a way of engagingwith the complex and ultimately unanswerable question of the balance of
commercial interest and political commitment behind the invasion, by refracting it through a much-simplified morality tale about the character of its leader,
the legend of Lpezs capture served as a similar vehicle for a set of arguments
about the vexed triangular relationship of the general, his men, and the erstwhile patriots of the island of Cuba. Lpez, as the various versions had it, had
been undone in one of several possible ways: (1)he had been betrayed by the
Creole owner of a house in which he and several of his men had stopped to
rest and had been captured, unarmed and asleep, by a Spanish scout named
Jose Antonio Castaeda, who was leading a party of peasants; (2)he had been
discovered, disconsolate and alone, though well-armed with a brace of pistols,
sitting on a roadside rock, by a Cuban countryman named Jose Antonio
Castaeda; (3)he had surrendered, along with some of his men, to a band of
Catalans or Spaniards motivated by the reward offered by the government for
his capture; or (4)he had surrendered in similar circumstances not to a Cuban, thank God, as has been falsely reported, but to Castaneda, a native of
Palma, one of the Canary Islands.61
This puzzle of conflicting stories not only beckoned toward a potentially
infinite regression into the Castaeda question; it also reflected a deadly serious argument about what moral was to be drawn from the failure of the 1851
expedition by those who might, in 1852, be planning another one. If Lpez had
maintained the loyalty of his men to the very end and, indeed, marched himself into the arms of a search party, sacrificing himself to ensure that his men
would qualify for the proffered amnesty, should not another mission be arranged beneath his standard? If he had been abandoned by his men and had
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proven, though armed, too cowardly to blow his brains out, what was the
use of his legacy? If he had been betrayed and bound over to the Spanish by
his own countrymen, what did this say about the integrity of the islands erstwhile patriots? But what if he had been captured not by a Cuban, but by a
Canarianby a man, in fact, whom the general was said to have once generously saved from the galleys ... and who repaid the kindness by hunting him
down with bloodhounds?62 What then?
It was, of course, the future as much as the past that was at stake in the
ceaseless working over of the old generals legacy. On the one hand, there was
the effort to close the breach between the historical purpose that had been
vested in him and the ignominy of his defeat; those who took this approach
tried to make Lpezs failure seem merely adventitiousthe misfortune of a
single man on a single mission. On the other hand, there was the effort to turn
the dead general into an emblem of the difficulty of his mission and any other
like it, and thus to compromise the credibility of any hypothetical further mission. Though the generals detractors surely had evidence and logic on their
side, when they entered the field of arguments over Lpezwhat he had done,
not done, should have done, and so onthey ended up playing a game they
could not possibly win. Their arguments depended on historical specifics that
were ill-suited to doing battle with the counterfactual probabilities mobilized
by the generals defenders. They could never really say once and for all that
the invasion would not have turned out differently if it had been prosecuted
differently. And what was more important, they had chosen the wrong ground
on which to fight. No matter how they defamed the old generals reputation
and deconstructed his failures, they had been drawn into a contest over defin
ing the specific failures of the 1851 mission, rather than taking the opportunity
to assert a broader set of arguments about what would be wrong about any invasion of Cuba. Outside the circle of Lpezs supporters, his reputation did
not long survive his execution. His cause, however, continued under the standard of another manthe man, in fact, whose allegations had started the devastating run on the generals reputation: Colonel William Crittenden.
the apotheosis of Colonel Crittenden began with the first letters describing his execution. These were, of course, the letters that transmitted discouraging reports of dead Americanssome of the first information about
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the invasion to come back from Cubathus forecasting (and, some would say,
ensuring) the failure of the mission. But embedded within them was a set of
fragmentary morals which annexationist propagandists in the United States
quickly set about reworking into a usable legend of the 1851 invasion. As with
the abortive legend of Lpez, the Crittenden story had at its heart the brave
last words spoken by a man facing deathwords that were somehow, amid the
roll of the surf, the frenzy of the assembled crowd, and the successive volleys
of the firing squad, audible even to those who stood at a distance. The fifty or
so men executed with Crittenden were to be shot in groups of six, kneeling,
with their backs to the firing squad. But when the moment of execution came,
many, Colonel Crittenden and Captain Victor Kerr among them, refused to
kneel with their backs to the executioners. NO, said the chivalrous Crittenden, in a speech that was uniformly rendered in boldface as it was endlessly
reprinted and circulated by American newspapermen and annexationist pamphleteers, AN AMERICAN KNEELS ONLY TO HIS GOD AND ALWAYS FACES HIS ENEMY.63
Crittendens claim to be an American as he stood there on the beach at
Atares was, of course, a contested one. Under the Neutrality Actwhich
Crittenden, as a federal customs commissioner in the Port of New Orleans
(who also happened to be the nephew of U.S. attorney general John J. Crittenden), had repeatedly helped the filibusters evadethe 1851 invasion had no
claim to being an American expedition. Indeed, in an April 1851 proclamation, the president of the United States, Millard Fillmore, had declared that
filibusters were adventurers for plunder and robbery who had forfeit[ed]
their claim to the protection of this Government or any interference on their
behalf, no matter to what extremities they may be reduced in consequence of
their illegal conduct. By that proclamation, and by the Spanish law under
which they were sentenced to death, Crittenden and his men were not Americans. They were piratesmen without recourse to the diplomatic conventions and international treaties that governed the trial and execution of the
subjects of one state by the government of another. In a bit of diplomatic symbolism that was widely reviled by expansionists, the American consul in Havana refused to intercede on the filibusters behalf or even to make an application to Cubas captain general to be allowed to see them.64
In contrast to the argument that Crittenden had placed himself beyond the
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protection of the U.S. government by participating in an illegal invasion of

Cuba, the account of the colonels execution that was circulated through the
annexationist press treated his Americanism as a property of his bodyevident on the (brave) face of it. This was the view expressed in one of the first
letters to reach the United States: They marched down the ships gangway,
one by one, stripped to trowsers and shirt, some without the latter covering,
bare headed, hands tightly bound behind their backs. ... I saw their pale faces
and firm steps as they descended from their trial to death. Many were very
young, and some had the forms as they no doubt had the souls, of heroes.
The most widely reproduced account was similarly admiring: I never saw
menand could scarcely have supposed it possibleconduct themselves at
such an awful moment with the fortitude these men displayed under such trying circumstances. ... They died bravely, those gallant and unfortunate young
men. ... A finer looking set of young men I never saw; they made not a single
complaint, not a murmur, against their sentence. ... Not a muscle was seen to
move. The Americanness of these men, the annexationists were arguing, was
unquestionableinalienable. It was a sort of moral fiber and self-control evident in their every bodily action, which stood in bold contrast to the way the
Cubans danced, raved, shouted, and capered about like so many idiots in
celebrating their capture. It quickly became almost impossibleeven for those
who, like Schlesinger, blamed Crittenden for the missions failureto refer to
the memory of the colonel without first using some combination of the words
brave, gallant, and noble.65
The sad fact, according to the promoters of the posthumous legend of Crittenden, was that the colonel and his soldiers had not only been abandoned by
their government in life; they had also been desecrated by their captors in
death, their mutilated remains dragged by a savage populace. Though the
first accounts back from the island differed about whether the mob had been
composed of the outpouring of Spain, the mule of Europe, or the very vilest rabble and Negroes, it was the latter description that soon came to prevail.
The troops were ordered to retire; and some hundreds of the very vilest rabble and Negroes, hired for the purposes, commenced stripping the dead bodies, mutilating their limbs, tearing out their eyes, cutting of their noses and
fingers, and some of the poor fellows (privates) these wretches brought to the
city on sticks, and paraded them under the very walls of the palace.66 That
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image cast a spell over all subsequent discussion of the Cuba question among
American expansionists. Henceforth when they spoke of the blood of Crittenden or of a band of our gallant countrymen ... murdered under the circumstances of so much ruthlessness and barbaritywhose blood cried out
aloud from the ground, even now, for vengeance, it was understood that they
were invoking an image of the conflict in Cuba which counterpoised the pale
(white) bravery of Americans to the black-hearted brutality of the Spanish
soldiers, the black instincts of their troops, and, above all, the bestial barbarity of their black slaves.67 They wereas Crittenden replaced Lpez as the
struggles emblematic hero, and the furtherance of the history of slavery
replaced that of liberty as its dominant principletalking about Haiti.
It was a significant element of the legend that the Negroes who smeared
the bodies of those beautiful white boys all over the beach at Atares did not
acton their own account. They were hired for the purposeagents of a his
tory that was not their own. That history, it became increasingly clear to pro-
slavery annexationists in the mid-1850s, was the history of Atlantic anti-
slavery, particularly as represented by the new captain general of Cuba, the
Marqus Juan de la Pezuela. Pezuela, who became captain general in the fall
of 1853, was a well-known abolitionist, and his appointment was seen in the
United States as red-letter evidence that it was the policy of Spanish government that if Cuba was not to be Spanish, it would be African. Incendiary
rumors that the Spanish had made plans to emancipate and arm the slaves in
case of an American invasion were mixed with and made credible by news
reports from the island. In December 1853, Pezuela promulgated a series
of liberal reforms which, taken together, seemed to pro-slavery observers in
the United States to portend something close to an anti-slavery apocalypse in
CubaAfricanization, they called it.68
Though the African trade to Cuba had been legally closed in 1817, hundredsof thousands of Africans had been imported in the meantime, an open
secret on which the slave and sugar economy in Cuba depended for its survival.69 Pezuela set about resolving the peculiar situation of these legally nonexistent slaves by actually enforcing the law, gaining the previously absent legal authority to go onto the planters estates and take a census of their slaves to
determine who had been imported when; he emancipated those who were legally free and allowed them to remain on the island. Pezuela further decreed
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that he would encourage the ex-slaves assimilation into the rest of the islands
population by allowing black women to marry white men, and black men
toarm themselves and join the militia. As if this were not enough, it was rumored that Pezuela was actually importing thousands more Africans, not as
slaves, but as apprenticeswho would have the status of any other term-
bonded laborer as soon as they were landed in Cuba.70
The response among the expatriates and expansionists was, in a word, anaphylactic. Sensitized by prior contact with the idea of black rule in Cuba, they
went into a sputtering, hyperventilating, eyes-rolled-back-in-the-head sort of
rage, choking out article after article which might as well have been composed
solely out of seven or eight words: emancipation, ferocious, savage,
barbarian, incendiary, wilderness, Haiti, Jamaica. As in: Witness
the miserable experiment made by the English and French in the West Indies.
Twenty-five years ago where we saw cultivation bringing forth wealth and re
finement with all the elegance of polished life, we see vagrant labor stalkingthough a desolate land with hungry and brutal ferocity. This experiment
of West Indian emancipation is worth a thousand theories. Or: Shall [the
United States] consent to have under the sway of England, obedient to her
whisper, at sixty miles from her Southern border, on the path of her coasting
trade, across the isthmian routes that commanded her Pacific and her eastern
commerce a colony ... of wild, untutored, and ferocious Africansthe rallying tribes for Jamaica and Santo Domingo? Or: The phrase Africanization
... plainly conveys ... without periphrasis, the complex ideas of emancipation, confiscation, pillage, murder, devastation, and barbarism.71
These outpourings were framed by much the same version of pro-slavery-
as-history that had characterized earlier discussions of the Cuba question.
Cuba was seen as posed between Southern civilization and sickly philanthropy, the wisdom of the first proved by the evident course of historical development, the fallacy of the second registered through a set of images of time
running backwardslaves returning to unchecked savagery, the fruitful landscape to an uncultivated wilderness. Indeed, it is hard not to see in these statements a reflection of the anxiety that characterized the daily lives of Mississippi Valley slaveholders (as well as those elsewhere in the hemisphere). Their
terrible world-historical fear of the repetition of the Haitian Revolutionof
the idea that maybe they were grievously mistaken about the course of his
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torywas daily rekindled by their direct experience of the resistant behavior

of their slaves and the fearful darkness of the caliginous swamps and dusky
forests which lay at the margins of their fields and farms.
In the lives of the slaveholders, these everyday exposures to the possibility
of resistance and revolt among their slaves were local and continual, but they
were perhaps fearful enough to require displacement into another form so as
to be properly managed (in a psychological if not always a practical sense).
For as Valley slaveholders foamed on about Africanization and black revolt,
they refused to believe, or at least to say that they believed, that slavesslaves
like their slavescould plan something like the Haitian Revolution.72 Rather,
they projected an apparently more comfortable history of imperial rivalry
onto the hemispheric history of black revolt. It was not so much the slaves
own ideas of right and revolution that were at stake in the events called slave
revolts, as the ideas and actions of the (white, European) rivals of the United
States: the virulent democratizing revolutionizing of the misguided French;
the cynical, incendiary slave importing and free-person arming of the puny
Spanish; and especially the abolitionist philanthropy of the sickly, feminized
English. As they surfaced, the fears and anxieties of life under the threat of
black revolt were reworked into a historical narrative in which the motive force
of changewhether for better or for worsewas always white.
Whatever the etiology of these fears, in 1854 they resurfaced in the Mississippi Valley in a rash of annexationism and filibusterizing. The Louisiana legislature, acting on a message from the governor, passed a resolution condemning Spanish policy in Cuba, the manifest object and effect of which must be
the abolition of slavery in the colony, and the sacrifice of the white race, with
its arts, commerce, and civilization to a barbarous and inferior race, and declaring that the time has arrived when the federal government should adopt
the most decisive and energetic measures to thwart and defeat a policy conceived in hatred to this republic and calculated to retard her progress and prosperity. This resolution was presented to the U.S. Senate by Louisianas John
Slidell, along with a resolution calling for the suspension of the Neutrality Act.
Meanwhile, Mississippis former governor John Quitman was selling bonds
and enlisting men at a furious rate for what promised to be the biggest, best-
financed, and best-armed filibuster mission yet. By the end of 1854, Quitman
was said to have raised $1million and secured the promises of 50,000 young
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men for his invasionthe marvelous promise of which was to be announced

on the island through the distribution of Apuntes biogrficos del Mayor General
Juan Antonio Quitman, a fawning biography published in New Orleans in 1855,
and designed to introduce the people of Cuba to their would-be liberator and
governor.73
The fearsome final struggle between slavery and freedom in the Americas
seemed set to commence in Cuba. At stake, according to pro-slavery expansionists, was whether the South would be allowed to achieve the safety ...
found only in the extension of its peculiar institutions ... towards the equator, or whether it would be belted into stasis by abolitionizedAfricanized
Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba.74 These questions about space were also questions about time: slavery, among the expansionists, was seen as a progressive
force, the one true path of social development. Yet the path of right was embattled by those who would drag the world back into the past: theorists of human equality, who despite the experimental verification that slaveholders ev
erywhere saw around them (slaves were slaves, so they must have been meant
to be slaves and therefore should stay slaves), were unwilling to cede the future
to slavery.
But the battle was never rejoinednot in Cuba at least. Historians have
provided various explanations for the passing of the Africanization scare
explanations that, taken together, make its ending seem a foregone conclusion.
Pezuela was recalled to Spain, and the reforms he had proposed were never
implemented. Quitman was called to the White House for a private meeting
with President Franklin Pierce, after which his commitment to the invasion
plan seemed to waver. (Apparently, his sense of obligation to those who had
bought the millions of dollars of bonds he had sold wavered as well: no final
accounting of the money he raised was ever made.) The Ostend Manifesto
which made it clear that the official policy of the United States was no longer
to purchase but henceforth to detach Cuba from Spain, via U.S. military
intervention, if necessarywas leaked to the press. While the possibility of a
U.S. invasion may have diminished some of the panic animating Quitmans
plan, it outraged not only those who opposed expansion, but even expansionists who were dedicated to a more subtle solution. And the nation was convulsed by the conflict over slavery in Kansas. Whatever the relative weight of
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these various factors, among Mississippi Valley slaveholders the problem of

Cuba went from acute to chronic, at least for a time.
As long as there were slaveholders in the South, of course, imperializing
Cuba remained an active possibility, active enough that Abraham Lincoln rejected a last-minute proposal to avoid secession and Civil War (made, ironically, by filibuster Crittendens uncle, John J. Crittenden) on the grounds that
a year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition on which
they will stay in the union.75 By that time, however, the Southern dream of
Caribbean empire had changed its shape. By the eve of the Civil War, the
ambition of advancing the cause of slaveholding, white mans republicanism,
and free trade by invading Cuba would come to seem a fairly modest one, even
quaint. What about Nicaragua? the slaveholding imperialists of the Mississippi
Valley would ask. What about Mexico? Underlying this spatial shift inthe imperialist imaginary was a corresponding shift in the sort of history that imperialists hope to makea shift spurred by a crisis within the politicaleconomy of
slavery, race, and sex in the United States, a crisis which madeopen Caribbean
lands rather than open Caribbean markets seem like its properfix.
13
The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny
The filibuster is the true philanthropist.
George Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principle; or, Social Evils and
TheirRemedies
on november 10, 1857, the president of Nicaragua was arrested on the

street in New Orleans. Or at least that was who he claimed to be. In reality, he
was thirty-three-year-old William Walker, a shape-shifter who had been a
doctor in Nashville, a newspaper editor in New Orleans, a lawyer in San Francisco, a filibuster in Sonoraand a president in Nicaragua. As recently as 1855,
at the end of his failed effort to liberate Sonora from Mexico, he had been
the owner of but one boot, a piece of another, and, as Marx might have put
it, his own white skin.1 But by 1857 he had gained a reputation throughout the
Americas as a soldier of fortune. He had conquered Nicaragua, and been deposed by force of arms. Now, having faced a predictably farcical set of legal
proceedings in relation to his repeated violation of the Neutrality Law, he was
preparing to return to Nicaragua, reclaim his presidency, and, incidentally, advance the cause of slavery, the white race, and world history as a whole.
Walker had first arrived in Nicaragua as a soldier of fortune in June 1855.
Though his 1854 mission to Sonora had been nothing less than a total orga
nizational and operational failurehence the one bootit had apparently
gained Walker a reputation for bravery, not to say brutality. On that basis, he
was invited by a representative of one side in the ongoing civil war in Nicaragua to raise a group of men to join the fight in Central America, for pay and
for the promise of land grants at the end of the battle. In June 1855, Walker
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sailed for Nicaragua along with fifty-eight men (destined to be forever known,
at least by themselves and their supporters, as the Fifty-six Immortalsone
of them having been court-martialed for cowardice and another apparently
just gone missing by the time they got around to choosing a name). In Nicaragua, Walker proved himself to be a military leader of extraordinary savagery:
willing, by his own account, to execute prisoners of war in retaliation for the
actions of his adversaries; driving his own unpaid and ill-prepared men into
battle under threat of death; and, most famously, ordering, upon his retreat
from the great city of Granada, that it be razed and that a standard bearing the
words Here stood Granada be placed at its gate.
The civil war that Walker joined was part of a larger struggle throughout
all of Central America to determine the character of the postcolonial politi
caleconomy. The struggle pitted Liberalswho had brought Walker and his
mercenaries to Nicaragua, and who favored the secularization of law and education, the privatization of the corporate landholdings of the Catholic Church
and various Indian tribes, and the imposition of a market in land and labor
against a Conservative alliance of landholding oligarchs, powerful clerics, and
Indians, whose way of life was threatened by the onrushing privatization of
their lands and the turn toward commercial agriculture.2 Seen in light of the
hemispheric history of the expropriation of native lands, privatization of the
land market, and promotion of commercial agriculture for an international
market, the struggle that Walker joined in Nicaragua was not unlike the cap
italist transformation of the Mississippi Valley, which he had witnessed in the
1840s. Indeed, the similarities were great enough to convince Walker and his
supporters that taking over Nicaragua was simply an extension of the historical missionthe historical progressof the white race.
At the strategic center of the war in Nicaragua was Lake Nicaragua, the
enormous lake in the center of the country, twelve miles inland from the Pa
cific on the western side and connected by river to the Atlantic on the eastan
isthmus that goods and people might one day be able to cross without having
to be taken off ships and conveyed across dry land.3 It was the isthmus that
made it possible for whoever controlled Nicaragua to make money off the seas
on either side. For it was there that international maritime traffic had to cross
through sovereign space, where it would be subject to tolls and taxes. Controlling the land between the seas gave whoever governed Nicaragua a primary
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stake in the global economy of the nineteenth century. Under the Clayton-
Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which effectively abrogated the Monroe Doctrine in
deference to British power in the Caribbean, the United States and Great Britain had agreed that the development of any transit routes across Nicaragua
would be a joint project, and the Nicaraguan government had granted a canal-
building concession to the Accessory Transit Company, headed by American
Cornelius Vanderbilt and backed by British capital.4 Very quickly the Nicaraguan transit began to compete with the Panamanian crossing as the busiest
route across the isthmus. By 1853, 20,000 people a year were passing through
Nicaragua on their way between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
There was, that is to say, a lot at stake in determining who controlled the
transit. Controlling Lake Nicaragua would give one side or the other in the
civil war the ability to move east-west across the country and resupply an army
on either side, and, perhaps just as important, the ability to collect taxes on the
business of the Accessory Transit Company. Between the two imperial powers
contending for dominance in Central America, the stakes were similar; and
throughout the war in Nicaragua, the United States and Great Britain maintained a naval presence at the eastern inlet to the transit. The British claimed
they were there to protect the Musquito Indians sovereign rights over the settlement of Greytown, which lay at the mouth of the San Juan River on the
Atlantic coast and thus provided a potentially lucrative site for collecting duties that were otherwise being claimed by Nicaragua. The Americans claimed
they were there to ensure the ability of American citizens and goods to cross
the isthmus without being molested by, say, Musquito Indians or the British.
And between the companies headed by Vanderbilt and rival steamboat magnate George Law, the contest was over who could move as much revenue as
possible out of Nicaragua by gaining concessions on favorable terms from
whatever combination of governments held power along the length of the
transit.5
Though Walker had joined the battle on the side of the Liberals, his
400-page memoir entitled The War in Nicaragua betrays no hint whatsoever of
what made a Liberal different from a Conservative, nor any real knowledge of
the prior history of the struggle in which he was engaged.6 Indeed, Walker,
again by his own account, seems to have viewed himself as the military occupier of the territory controlled by his erstwhile Liberal allies, whose purposes
369
he distrusted, whose orders he countermanded, whose correspondence he

spied on, and whose leaders he undermined and, in one case, executed. He
fought at the head of what he called the falange, a unit composed of American and European mercenaries, which was periodically reinforced from San
Francisco with the help of the Accessory Transit Companys Western agents,
Charles Morgan and Cornelius Garrison. Indeed, when Vanderbilt indulged in
an extended holiday in Europe, Morgan and Garrison managed to buy enough
shares of the company to gain control of it; for a time, it appeared that the
agent of manifest destiny and the commercial secretaries of the steamboat
magnate had combined to pull off one of the greatest land grabs of all time.
Victorious in the field, Walker formed a unification government with his Conservative rival Patricio Rivas; and when he was able to draw the latter into
conspiring against him (by, well, conspiring against him), he declared Rivas a
traitor and called for an election. In June 1856, eighteen months after his bootless surrender to the U.S. Army in California, William Walker was elected
president of Nicaragua.7
In the brief time he was president, Walker effectively internationalized the
land market in Nicaragua by expanding the Liberal policy of breaking up large
holdings; the set of policies he instituted were unabashedly designed to transfer property from the inhabitants of Nicaragua to immigrants from the United
States. He promised large grants of state-held property (including the confis
cated properties of Walkers enemies) to immigrants from the United States; a
wholesale re-registration of land titles under procedures published in English
as well as Spanish; and the recognition of contracts made in English as legally
binding. The general tendency of these several decrees was the same, he
later explained. They were intended to place a large proportion of the land of
the country in the hands of the white race. Walker, that is to say, intended to
expand the Liberal program of regionally based expropriation and capitalist
transformation into a hemispheric (read: U.S.) looting of Nicaragua. Finally,
Walker (re)legalized slavery in Nicaragua and reopened the African slave
trade, opening an international market in flesh, sinew, and bone to underwrite
markets in Nicaraguan lands and exportable commodities (gold, silver, bananas, coffee, indigo, and cochineal)markets that he hoped to create.8
Practically and ideologically dependent on immigration from the United
States to underwrite his reforms, Walker did little to conceal his disdain for
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Nicaraguanswhite and Indian alike. A typical official pronouncement from

the Walker government went something like: You will have no stability in
any of the Central American States until you have infused a large amount of
North American blood into their veins.9 Statements like that were profoundly
disconcerting to the neighboring Conservative governments of ElSalvador,
Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, all of which were soon either indirectly supporting or actually conducting military operations against Walkers
Nicaragua.10
Walkers other great goal in Nicaragua was to get money out of the transit.Indeed, it might be said that by internationalizing (that is, whitening and
Americanizing) the land market, Walker was hoping to recruit to Nicaragua a
group of white landholders who would support him as he sought to consolidate control over the transita money-producing bottleneck in the global
economy. Upon his return from Europe, Vanderbilt discovered that he had
been bilked out of control of the Accessory Transit Company, and reportedly
wrote to Morgan and Garrison threatening his revenge in the following terms:
The law is too slow, gentlemen, I will ruin you. This he attempted to do by
dumping the stock he held in the company onto the market all at once, and,
when the bottom dropped out of the price, buying it all back again. Walker
and his commercial co-conspirators responded by ordering an audit of the
companys books; and on discovering that the company had been remiss in
its contractual obligation to Nicaragua, they declared it in default, and nationalized its assets under the control of Morgan and Garrison.
Vanderbilt retaliated with a concerted campaign on Wall Street that made it
impossible for the so-called government of Nicaragua to borrow money in
New York. He attempted to shut down all maritime traffic to and from Nicaragua, in one instance by convincing the British Navy to guide a ship of filibusters fired up for battle in Nicaragua to what must have been a somewhat anti-
climactic landing on the coast of Panama; and he supplied a private army,
which he then offered to Costa Rica for use against Walker. Walkers gambit
of internationalizing the land market in order to nationalize the transit met
what seems a fitting end: it was snuffed out by a private army paid for by Cornelius Vanderbilt, captained by a British mercenary, and fighting under the flag
of Costa Rica. Having lost control of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River,
Walker surrendered on May1, 1857, to a U.S. Navy ship waiting just off the
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western coast of Nicaragua. He was taken from there to Panama, across the
isthmus, and thence to New Orleans, where he landed on May27.11
He received a heros welcome. Walker was borne from the gangplank of his
ship to a carriage that conveyed him to the St.Charles Hotel. There, beneath a
rotunda better known for slave auctions than for visits by deposed heads of
state, he gave a long speech, and then, when the crowd clamored for it, another. Two nights later he spoke for two hours at the base of Canal Street,
where a platform festooned with Nicaraguan and American flags had been
erected.12 Walkers star quickly waned outside the hard core of his Deep-South
circle of supporters. His image was undermined by stories of his cruelty and
his indifference to his own men, whom he had left behind in Nicaragua and
who had begun to wash up in Northern ports in the most pitiable condition;
and by his continual jousting with the federal government, to which he had
developed a bad habit of surrendering in moments of extremity. But he remained a hero in the Mississippi Valley. After 1857 he was based in New Orleans, where he lived between trips around the South to raise money for his
next (and after that, his last) mission to Nicaragua.
beyond the fact of the citys geographic proximity and maritime position,
it made sense for Walker to go to New Orleans. Walker was aware of the citys
support for Lpezs 1851 invasion of Cuba. Indeed, Walker had a Mass said
for the soul of Lpez on the eve of the Battle of Granada.13 Nicaragua, however, was not Cuba, and Walkers project was different from Lpezs in several
crucial respects. For slaveholders and their allies in the Mississippi Valley, Lpezs project represented a way of reconciling the often-contradictory interests of planters and merchants. The conquest of Cuba would, on the one
hand,rejuvenate the mercantile economy of the Mississippi Valley, restoring
to New Orleanss merchants and shippers the global commercial position they
thought God had foreordained in the downward flow of the river. And on the
other hand, it would provide Valley planters with a firewall against the contagion of what you or I might call Emancipation, but they called barbarism
and race war.
For someone accustomed to this way of thinking, supporting Walker might
make perfect sense: controlling the isthmus would deliver the trade of the Pa
cific to the port of New Orleans; and reestablishing slavery in Central America
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would provide the South with a bulwark against the progress of hemispheric
abolition. Walkers game, however, was deeper than that, as were the sources
of his attraction to his supporters. For in addition to appealing to Valley merchants and slaveholders, Walker directed his appeal to the Mississippi Valleys
large (and ever-increasing) population of nonslaveholding white men. And in
so doing, he promised to both elevate these men to a social station befitting
their precious skin, and to cleanse the South of a nonwhite population (40 percent of the population, actually) whose very existence raised troubling questions about the relationship between the Southern social order and its principal
ideological justificationbetween slavery and white supremacy.
It has become a habit of mind to identify the South with slavery and white
supremacy, as if the three terms mapped the same territory and might be used
interchangeably. This habit has a long history and much to do with the fact
that under the U.S. Constitution, which apportioned political representation
by population and by state, struggles over slavery, freedom, and economy
within the United States took the form of struggles for control of various
states. Thus, countless nineteenth-century political commentators could refer
to the slaveholding states and be understood, even though the majority of
the whites in the slave states did not own slaves and even though nearly half
the people in those states were, in fact, slaves.14 The emergence of sectionalism
as the dominant idiom for contesting the slavery question reorganized, insistently though almost invisibly, discussions of political economy (slavery versus free labor) and constitutionalism (states rights versus federal powers) into
a rigid biregionalism.
From the very beginning, this state-by-state spatialization of the politics of
slavery went hand in hand with a certain version of the racialization of the
politics of slavery: the argument that slavery and white supremacy were two
sides of the same cointhat white supremacy was either the ideological jus
tification for slavery or, in the alternative formulation, that white supremacy
was the underlying cause of slavery. And no doubt there is much truth to the
identification of slavery with white supremacy; white-supremacist ideologies
provided powerful idioms of identification between nonslaveholding whites
and their slaveholding neighbors. Nonslaveholders were members of the ruling race. They were invited to share in the leadership of society by voting
and serving on juries, entitled to a share of the privileges of enjoying their so-
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cietys stock of slaves through rituals of humiliation and violation (intimidating the men, degrading the women, patronizing the elders, soliciting the children, and so on). As long as they did not go so far as to diminish the value held
by actual slaveholders, nonslaveholding white men were baited by a hope that
they might one day accede to a full share in slaverythat they might one day
be men in full.15 Indeed, as the historian Stephanie McCurry has argued, it was
the stake that these men had in patriarchy and household order that, finally,
enabled society to think of them as being masters of their own households,
just as slaveholders were masters of theirs.16
Yet the very identification of these men by the term nonslaveholders
marked them as somehow incompletemen defined by what they were not,
rather than what they were. They were certainly not slaveholders, and perhaps
not proper Southerners ... or proper men. As at other moments of crisis
particularly the South Carolina Nullification crisis of 1831 (the refusal of the
state of South Carolina to enforce the federal tariff, a problem that was eventually resolved only with Andrew Jacksons threat to use the United States
Army to invade the Palmetto State) and the Virginia slave emancipation debates of 1832by the late 1850s several strains of thought that fed the ideological identification of the South with slavery and slaveholding were beginning to produce rogue strains that threatened to metastasize into a real
threat to slaveholding power. If the geographic dimensions of politics of slavery in the 1850s (the fight over the West, which culminated in the state-for-
state Compromise of 1850; the fight over Kansas and the doctrine of popular
sovereignty for territories becoming states; the Kansas-Nebraska Act) made
it inevitable that the defenders of slavery would come to think of their struggle in increasingly sectional terms, it also provided a frame that called attention to variation within the supposedly uniform space of the slaveholding
South. Indeed, the late 1850s, the high point of sectional thinking, produced
an acute awareness of differences within the Southof regional differences,
class differences, and an emergent contradiction between the privileges of race
and those of slavery, a contradiction that could not be solved within the con
fines of the existing political economy of slavery. This unevenness within the
South led slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike to seek solutions outside
theboundaries of their region and of the United States (and thus outside the
boundaries of standard historical accounts). They looked first to Nicaragua
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and the filibuster government established there by William Walker in 1856, and
then to Africa and the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade.
one of the things that struck visitors to the South was the fact that white
men were always talking about slaves and cotton. Joseph Ingraham termed the
two together the ever harped upon, never worn out subject of conversation.
The conversations about slaves and the products of their labor were a powerful medium of slaveholding sociability in the antebellum South. Talking about
slaves and cotton, white men made and remade connections to one another,
shared out and acquired practically useful knowledge, sorted themselves into
hierarchies of insight and expertise, and tracked their own progress through
time. In addition to being a vehicle of sociability, however, the cotton-and-
slaves conversation was a way of imagining and tracking the social history of
the South. When the Scottish traveler James Stirling suggested in 1857 that
cotton and Negroes were the law and the prophets to the men of the South,
he was suggesting that the foundational commodities on which the Southern
social order was based were both the limiting condition and the leading indi
cators of the course of Southern historythe law and the prophets. This
never-ending, ever-changing conversation was a way for white men to mea
sure the progress of their political economy. Their sense of economic time
of proper and improper development, of beckoning possibility and cautionary
warningwas indexed through the comparison of the prices of cotton and
slaves.17
The central proposition around which these ritualized reckonings of the
state of the South were framed was that the price of slaves should be roughly
10,000 times the price per pound of cotton. But in the late 1850s, the price of
slaves seemed to cut loose from all other prices in a cycle of speculation that
observers termed the Negro fever. Newspaper articles entitled HIGH
PRICES FOR NEGROES or BIGGEST SALE YET codified the slaveholders commonplace high-priced slaves and low-priced cotton into news,
and recirculated them as material to be incorporated in a still-wider set of conversations about the slave market. Slave prices were raging far above their
legitimate level, wrote one moralist of the market. The very Negro who, as
a prime laborer would have brought $400 in 1828 would now, with thirty years
on him, sell for $800, declared South Carolina senator James Henry Ham-
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mond. The price of slaves in relation to the prices of other goods was said to
have doubled since the 1840s and quadrupled since the closing of the African
trade. Slave prices were 25 percent higher with cotton at ten and one-half
cents than they were two or three years ago, when it was worth fifteen or sixteen cents.18
Though generally indexed in the Southern press through reference to the
prices paid for slaves at estate sales, the Negro fever was understood by
alltobe inseparable from the interstate slave trade, which tied Lower-South
cotton planters interested in expanding their stake in the boomtime economy
to Upper-South planters who were increasingly referred to simply as slave
farmers. And the slave market of the late 1850s was particularly overheated.
The combination of relatively high cotton prices and fears about the future
of the institution (particularly in the Upper South) combined to convince
Deep-South planters that they needed to get their hands on as many slaves as
they could in order to insulate themselves from whatever political misfortunes
might befall the institution as a whole.19 While prices for all sorts of slaves
were rising in the late 1850s, the prices slaveholders were willing to pay for
women and children seemed particularly high to nineteenth-century observers. Deep-South slaveholders were hedging their bets on the future of the
slave trade by buying people whose youth and generative capacity could help
them lessen their dependence on the slave market.
But if the Negro fever resulted from the efforts of Deep-South slaveholders to insulate themselves from any misfortune that might befall the slave
market, theirs was a solution that had embedded within it another set of prob
lems. High slave prices posed substantial barriers for nonslaveholders hoping
to make their way upward in Southern society, further increasing class stratifi
cation between whites in an already stratified society. In the late 1850s, Deep-
South slaveholders were riding the slaves-cotton-slaves-cotton cycle to new
levels of prosperitysuccess that was visible everywhere one looked in the
Mississippi Valley: in the shops filled with vain fancies, in the gargantuan mansions being built along the banks of the river, in the open-secret concubines
slaveholders bought to provide for their own comforts. But at the very same
moment, nonslaveholders were finding it harder and harder to gain a full stake
in Southern society. Given the increasing political tension over slavery at a
national level, this narrowing of the institutions material base of support in
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the South was seen as dangerous by many defenders of slavery. A Louisiana

newspaper editor declared in 1859 that the minute you put it out of the power
of the common farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman to help him in his
farm or his wife in the house you make him an abolitionist at once.20 The efforts of Deep-South slaveholders to insulate their own class privilegeby
buying ever more slaves to plant ever more cotton and, crucially, bear ever
more slave children who would do the same on and on into an indefinite futurethreatened the social reproduction of the system as a whole.
Thus it was that nonslaveholders came to be seen as a problem in the era
of the Negro Fever.21 Among slaveholders, this problem was often alluded
to with the utmost delicacy. A reference to a weakening of the strength of the
foundation of the social order, or to a want of entire integrity in the social
constitution at the South, was all that was needed in order to summon up a
whole host of anxieties. As the pro-slavery sentimentalist Edward Pollard
wrote in 1859, The cause of the poor white population cries to Heaven for
justice. We see a people who are devoted to their country, who must be intrusted with the defense of the institution of slavery if ever it be assailed by
violence. ... We see, I say, such a people treated with the most ungrateful and
insulting consideration by their country, debarred from its social system, deprived of all share in the benefits of slavery, condemned to poverty, and even
forced to bear the airs of superiority in black and beastly slaves!22 Although
few slaveholders had the bad judgment to come right out and say so, there
were grave doubts circulating through the South about the loyalty of nonslaveholders to the existing order, especially after 1857, the year that marked
the publication of what the slave trade reopener Leonidas Spratt referred to as
Helpers infamous book.
the reference was to Hinton Rowan Helpers tract The Impending Crisis
of the South, which, simply put, was a racist abolitionist colonizationist industrialist regionalist call to arms addressed to the nonslaveholding white men of
the South. Helpers method, in keeping with a long tradition of Adam Smith
inspired critiques of slavery, was to use statistical analysis of land prices, trade
statistics, population and mortality, book publishing, and so on to index what
Helper saw as the systematic underachievement of the Southern economy in
relation to that of the North, and thus to provide a detailed accounting (almost
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$4 billion, he figured) of the costs of slavery to the people of the South.23

Helper proposed that the slaveholders of the South pay reparations for the historical damage they had done to the Southern economy, and that the money
beused, in part, to send their erstwhile slaves to Africa (back to Africa, he
would have said). Helper, that is, sought to take control of the term the
South by detaching it from its insistent identification with the institution of
slavery and the interests of slaveholders, and to return it to its rightful exclusive owners: nonslaveholding white men.24
That alone might have been enough to alarm pro-slavery Southerners, but
Helper went much further. Reversing the pro-slavery argument that black
slavery was the predicate of white freedom, he insinuated, suggested, and fi
nally came right out and said that nonslaveholding whites were themselves in
danger of being enslaved by slaveholders. He referred to nonslaveholders as
being held in a second degree of slavery, deluded by a freedom that was
infact only nominal. He said that the slaveholders design was to enslave
all working classes irrespective of color, and demanded of nonslaveholders:
Will you be freemen or will you be slaves?25 The South, Helper argued,
could be a society defined by slaveholding or a society defined by white supremacy; it could be a society where rich whites held dominion over poor
whites even to the point of enslaving them, or a society from which the source
of white inequalityblack slaveswas forcibly excised. It could not be both.
And then he started to talk to nonslaveholders about their wives and daughters, about white women working outdoors in the fields. That any respectable
manany man with a heart or soul in his compositioncan look upon these
poor toiling white women without feeling indignant at the accursed system of
slavery which has entailed upon them the miseries of poverty, ignorance and
degradation, we shall not do ourselves the violence to believe. ... In their behalf, chiefly, we have written and compiled this book.26 For Helper, the debasement of these white women to the condition of slaves was a singularly
disturbing image that held the key to understanding the condition of the South
as a whole. A region so great and glorious by her nature had sunk into infamy and degradation; it was a region exploited, defiled, and prostituted by
slaveholders, whom Helper elsewhere referred to as abandoned wretches,
who, on many occasions during infancy, sucked in the corrupt milk of slavery
from the breasts of their fathers sable concubines.27 At moments like these,
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Helper laid aside the tone of engaged sociological analysis that characterized
so much of his work, and produced instead a bestiary of Southern society:
nonslaveholding white womanhood degraded; slaveholding power corrupted
by the infantile profligacy of unchecked mastery; and, at the center of the
story, nonslaveholding white men, impotent and bewilderedunmanned by
their poverty, their ignorance, and their blind allegiance to the degenerate rule
of slaveholders. The problem of nonslaveholders in a slaveholding society,
it turned out, was at once a problem of what it meant to be white, to be a master, and to be a man.
Hinton Helper was far from the only Southerner to characterize the impending crisis of the South as the problem of white men unmade by slavery.
Slaveholding moralists like Edward Pollarda slave trade reopener and pro-
slavery imperialist widely read throughout the Southalso professed great
concern. They, however, did not perceive the problem as a contradiction between the reality of the class character of the slaveholding regime and the capacious promises white supremacy used to justify its existence; rather, in their
view it was a temporary unevenness in the distribution of privileges of whiteness that might be redressed through reforming the system of slavery. As Pollard (and many others) saw it, the problem of underprivileged whites was
really, at bottom, a problem of overprivileged slaves. Indeed, it was a commonplace within one strain of pro-slavery political economy that skilled slaves
were taking jobs away from nonslaveholding white men.28
As a way to illustrate this proposition, Pollard provided a set of images of
racial disorder: slaves living careless, lazy, and impudent lives, treating white
freemen with superciliousness and speaking insultingly of them; a very
gentlemanly dining-room servant walking around with his head held too
high; some poor cracker dressed in striped cotton, and going through the
streets ... gazing at the shop windows with scared curiosity, made sport of by
the sleek dandified Negroes who lounge on the street ... who parade their superiority, rub their well-stuffed black skin, and thank God they are not as he.
These overheated fantasies about overbearing black men did singular work
for Pollard. They thematized what was actually a feature of the triangular
classrelationships that defined the antebellum social structureslaveholders,
nonslaveholders, and slavesas a problem of social order, of overprivileged
slaves acting out. They presented, that is to say, Helpers conflict between
379
slaveholders and nonslaveholders as a conflict between nonslaveholders and

slaves, thus covering over the breach in the idea that slavery was the guarantor
of white equality.29
Having thus framed the problem, Pollard framed its resolution with a story,
which, though it was characteristic of the man in the way it couched poisonous
stereotypes in the idiom of jocose paternalism, was remarkable (even for Pollard) for the way it worked together images of sexual and racial disorder and
of their resolution through violence. Though he detested the spectacle of
a black man talking down to a white one, it apparently served Pollard well
enough as a literary device. By framing his comments as the story of Pompey
(a Guinea Negro), Pollard used the figure of the faithful slave to forward his
own views of the proper way for white men to respond to the overinflated
slaves who were supposedly lounging around all over the South. Pollards
story, in its entirety, went like this:
Pompey had married a genteel slavewoman, a maid to an old lady of
one of the first families of Carolina, and lived very unhappily with his
fine mate, because she could not understand black folkss ways. It appears that Pompey frequently had recourse to the black art to inspire his
wife with more affection for him; and having in his hearing dropped the
remark, jokingly, one day, that a good whipping made a mistress love her
lord the more, I was surprised to hear Pompey speak up suddenly, and
with solemn emphasis, Massr Edrd, I bleve dar is sumthin in dat.
When de ooman get ambitioushe meant high-notioned and passionatede debble is sot up against you, and no use to honey dat chile; you
just beat him out, and he bound to come out fore the breath come out,
anyhow. I am inclined to recommend Pompeys treatment for all ambitious Negroes, male or female.30
This twisted tale proposes a theory of the benefits of patriarchal rage (black
and white). Pollards Old-World joke about lordship and bondage provides
the occasion for African Pompeys story of the benefits of beating his wife to
within an inch of her life; and then the two stories are analogically connected
through the comparison of violence within slaveholding households to violence within enslaved households to violence between whites and blacks. It
380
poses the problem of social and sexual disorder as interlocking problems to be

addressed through the violent assertion of white male authority.
Pollard framed his defense of nonslaveholding whiteness as a sort of missionary philanthropy (blanco-philia), yet his distaste for the nonslaveholders
looking longingly at his possessions seems obvious from the way he wrote
about them. Why, then, did he mount such a full-mouthed defense of people
with whom he evidently had so little in common beyond the shared color of
their skin? Although this was clearly a question that haunted slaveholders
who were so parsimonious with their nonslaveholding neighbors when it came
time to apportion representation or taxation, or to define the public goodit
was not one that was generally posed as clearly as in Pollards admission that
he felt he had to defend whiteness from his slaves and his slaves from whiteness, because if he did not his slaves might be inoculated with white notions.31 By being able to act just a little bit white, that is, they might demystify
whiteness, becoming immune to the chimera of color and, by implication, the
power of men like Pollard himself. Behind the bombastic defender of nonslaveholding white men from preening gentleman slaves, we can glimpse a
slaveholder who was, for all his sentimentality and complacent sense of the
divine ordination of his leading role in the Great Scheme of Things, scared of
his own slavesof their abilities, of their courage, and of their resistance.
Pollards anxiety reflected a deeper set of contradictions facing the political
economy of slavery in the 1850s. At a moment when nonslaveholders were
finding it increasingly difficult to move into the master class, they were also
finding themselves in competition for work with skilled slaves, who were increasingly being employed as lower-order functionaries in the cotton economyas gin wrights, draymen, stevedores, and so on. Indeed, like the commonplace image of an Irish laborer put out in the summer sun to do work that
was deemed too dangerous for any (valuable) slave to do (such as digging canals and laying rails), the boomtime development of the Southern economy
was blurring distinctions between white and black even as it was intensifying
class difference among erstwhile members of the master race. Faced with this
situation, the defenders of slaveryfor whom it was an article of faith that
wage labor was simply a subset (particularly degraded) of the larger category
of labordid not have recourse to the fiction that signing a contract made a
man free. They had no available intellectual apparatus for distinguishing be-
381
tween the commodification of labor power and the commodification of the laborer, for to do so would have been to countenance the idea that the relation
between master and slave and that between capitalist and laborer represented
differences of kind rather than simply of degree.
In his book Black Diamonds, Pollard proposed two ways to forestall the
social disorder he saw prefigured in the degraded condition of poor whites:
the first entailed supporting William Walker, who had, at the time Pollard
wrote, installed himself as the president of Nicaragua; and the second consisted of reopening the Atlantic slave trade to the United States. Each in its
way was a large-scale analogy of his argument that the violent assertion of
white-male authority was the solution to almost any problem. Thus, for Pollard and many others, each policy suggested a solution to the problem of reconciling the class distinction between slaveholders and slaves with the broad,
leveling promise of white-supremacist sloganeeringthe promise on which
that society depended for justification. Neither of these movements has fig
ured very prominently in accounts of the politics of slavery on the eve of secession; and it is true that neither was a movement that unified the entire South.
Both were seen as somewhat extreme even within the pro-slavery South, and
were most popular in the Deep South (especially Mississippi and Louisiana,
but also Alabama and South Carolina); and neither was ultimately pursued by
the Confederacy, for which maintaining good relations with Great Britain was
of paramount concern. But for a time in the late 1850s, in the Mississippi Valley, these were seen as the two most important issues in pro-slavery politics.
by any standard other than that of Freudian analysis, William Walker was
an unlikely standard bearer for the Mississippi Valleys pro-slavery crusade,
or, really, for any crusade at all. As a child, he had been effeminate and unpopular, called honey and missy by the other boys at school. He was,
moreover, morbidly attached to his invalid mother, at whose bedside he spent
hours reading aloud from the romances of Sir Walter Scott. As an adult, he
stood scarcely over five feet four inches tall and was thought to weigh only a
bit more than a hundred pounds. He was beardless and had a complexion so
fair as to seem unhealthy, in an age in which energy and vigor were thought to
be evident on the face of things. He had only one love in his short life, a young
woman named Helen Martin, whom he courted in New Orleans while he was
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editing the Crescent. She was esteemed by many to be a very great beauty, but
had been a deaf-mute from birth. Walker learned sign language to press his
case, but was deprived of ever consummating his love by the young womans
untimely death. He was withdrawn to the point of shyness, uncomfortable in
any company other than that of a few close friends, one of whom Walker memorialized in the following terms: A boy in appearance, with a slight figure,
and a face almost feminine in its delicacy and beauty, he had the heart of a lion.
... To Walker he was invaluable; for they had been together in many a tryinghour, and the fellowship of danger and difficulty had established a sort of
freemasonry between them.32 Walker (so the legend went) was like his best
frienda beautiful boy making his way through a mans world, with the heart
of a lion concealed in his breast.
Walkers life was a sort of white-supremacist fairy tale. His early life of incomplete, ineffectual masculinity offered a parable of whiteness overcoming
the limitations inherent in its unlikely vessel, of a boy made man through imperialism and slavery, of manifest destinys homunculus become a dictator in
Central America. As the historian Amy Greenberg has pointed out, Walkers
unprepossessing appearance and his withdrawn ways in the company of men
were continually alluded to when observers discussed the improbability of his
emergence as a decisive military leader and tyrannical ruler. Walker was an
unconvincing man who somehow managed to become an exemplar of a particularly carnivorous strain of white manhood.33 The narrative arc of the story
of William Walker, that is to say, was the tale of an incomplete mangirlish
as a child, shy and slight as a man, delicate in features, small in stature, virginal
in love, and retiring in companybeing made complete through imperialism.
Indeed, when he searched for a way to convey his relationship to the war in
Nicaragua, the metaphor that Walker seized upon was a metaphor of sexual
consummation. Just as the fine cells and traits of character which define the
offspring have their origins in the moment of conception, Walker noted, the
character of his revolution might be best understood by those who did not
despise the small events with which it commenced.34
In addition to being notable for the way it framed the barely veiled sexual
imagery which filled his narrative of the war in Nicaragua, this metaphor contained a remarkable play on the character of fatherhood. For Walkers comparison of his own halting first steps in making war to what we can only imag-
383
ine was a fumbling acquaintance with the business of conception (the small
event he apparently worked so hard not to despise) was ultimately worked out
in the idea that William Walker was the father who had brought himself into
the worldthe child who was the father of the man, the overeager initiate
who sired a dictator. The wars in Sonora and Nicaragua were scenes of this
self-birthing, and their bloody story was told in Walkers book The War in
Nicaragua, in which he addressed his own history through a third-person narrative of the experiences of his literary and historical avatar, Walker.35 The
War in Nicaragua, then, represented a self-conscious act of literary self-
creation, one that brought into being a new character, Walker, and then used
his story to further the cause of both his creator, William Walker, and the war
in which he had made his name. Indeed, it was by selling (in both a commercial
and a dramatic sense) the story of this man Walker that William Walker
hoped to revitalize his own base of support in the United States, as he planned
what would turn out to be his last mission to reclaim his presidency. The War
in Nicaragua was a piece of agitprop designed to convince Southerners that
the solutions to their problems lay in Nicaragua, and that they might, like
Walker, be made whole by going there to find them.
As involuted as Walkers imagery of fatherhood was, the use of sexual metaphors to describe the business of filibustering, warmaking, and imperial subordination was so overdetermined as to make any direct assignment of literary
paternity impossible. In the literary culture of antebellum America, as Greenberg and others have argued, the imagery of sexual conquest provided a primary register for the propagation of ideas about the necessity (and the ease) of
invading other states. The association of sexual and imperial conquest was, for
instance, suggested by the bare act of referring to Cuba as the Queen of the
Antilles, and further outlined by the description of her beautiful limbs in
chains, or of such a pure and lovely bride forcibly wed to the old man
Spain, or the admonition to lash her to the United States. It was fully exposed in statements like the following: Cuba admires Uncle Sam and he loves
her. Who shall forbid these bans? Matches are made in heaven, and why not
this? Who can object if he throws his arms around the Queen of the Antilles,
as she sits, like Cleopatras burning throne, upon the silver waves, breathing
her spicy, tropic breath, and pouting her rosy sugared lips? Who can object?
None. She is of agetake her, Uncle Sam!36 And as the chains, ropes, and
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dual-use verb to take itself suggested, lurking behind the construction of the
imperial encounter as a romance there was always a hint (and often much more
than a hint) of sexual violence.
In a context where filibustering was so relentlessly connected with sexual
self-assertion, the failure to filibuster was easily associated with a whole array
of masculine shortcomings. The Louisianan Pierre Soul described calls for an
invasion of Cuba as the throbbings of Americans, and doubted that these
urges could be for very long encircled within the narrow limits of the Republic. Called upon, in his role as minister of the United States to Spain, to
contain his expansionism, Soul described himself as trapped in a state of
languid impotence and striving in vain to discharge his duty to himself
and the annexationist cause. Souls partner in crime (literally), the Mississippian John Henderson, described the Pierce administrations enforcement of
the Neutrality Act as an element of governments eternal tendency to augmentation. The captivating bauble, he continued, is ever being fondled
and nursed into extension, and under pleas of necessity, the public good, or
the bolder warrant of undisguised usurpation, its dimensions are enlarged,
till,like the frog in the fable, its end is explosion. ... Vigilance and integrity
may do much to postpone the catastrophe, but the cantankerous evil is never
cured.37 Coitus reservatus, impotence, infantile and immature sexuality: among
the believers, opposition to filibustering was seen as a sort of masculine inadequacy; a lack of self-control, unready when the moment called for action,
overeager when it called for restraint; an incomplete mastery of the primary
technology of masculine self-assertion and social reproduction.
These were failings that Walker saw everywhere around him in Nicaragua. The military leaders of the Liberal Party, for instance, turned out to provide a sort of exemplary rank of various masculine failings. Of Francisco
Castelln, the man who had invited him to Nicaragua, Walker wrote: It did
not require many minutes to see that he was not the man to control a revolutionary movement or to conduct it to a successful issue. There was a certain
indecision, not merely in his words and features, but even in his walk and the
general motions of his body. Of Trinidad Muoz, a general in the Liberal
army: [He] began to talk in a most ridiculous manner ... exposing his ignorance in every sentence, and showing the weakness of his character. Of a
certain Espinosa, a tax commissioner in the Liberals provisional government:
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an old man ... with a Don Quixote cast of features and the dark lusterless
eye, full of melancholy, so characteristic of his race. And so on: Walkers de
scription of Nicaraguan men is a catalog of enfeebled wills, uncontrolled passions, and ridiculous hats.38 Nothing good or enduring could be expected from
the issue of their actions.
The mincing, overcompensating unmanliness that Walker detected in his
counterparts in the Nicaraguan army was a symptom of what antebellum expansionists generally termed a broader racial incapacity. Among the expansionists, the Central American republics in particular were seen as fractious,
undisciplined, and unsuccessful.39 This apparent degeneracy of the form of
governanceFederal, Republicanthat was so lustily proclaimed elsewhere
as being providentially ordained and universally desirable required explanation, which was readily available in the form of racial theory. The Central
American republics were inhabited by Indians and Negroes and governed by
the mongrel offspring of the union of European and Indian. They were,
that is to say, racially degenerate, incapable of self-government in both the
sexual and political sense, enfeebled and semi-barbarous. The effete and
decadent descendents of the early Spanish colonists was the way that one of
Walkers admirers described them, before concluding that they were impotent to slow the strides of the blue-eyed race toward dominance in Central
America. Indeed, the war itself was seen by these soldiers of fortune as itself
being dispositive evidence of the savage inability of these people to govern
themselves.40
Warmaking, according to Walker and his supporters, was the particular
province of Anglo-Saxons. Filibustering, one wrote, is the moral necessity
of all the Anglo-Norman breed. It is the necessity of all progressive races.41
To this way of thinking, the number of dead bodies that could be produced by
a group of American mercenaries armed with Mini rifles, when they faced an
army of Nicaraguans equipped with smooth-bore weapons that had approximately one-sixth the effective range of the weapons on the other side, was
aprimary metric of historical progress. The numbers of dead on the field afterWalkers first battle, wrote his embedded publicist William Wells, evoked
dread and respect among the opposing soldiers whose previous battles had
been so bloodless as to become a by-word and laughingstock among militarymen.
386
What made Walkers army better, in his own telling, was its energy and discipline, its vigor and self-control, each element broken down further into a
thousand synonyms and then recomposed into its metaphorical master trope.
What made his army superior was its confidence. It could be seen from the
looks of these men that they bore with firmness the blows of adverse fate.
There was no hesitation in their march or their movements. And Walker at
their head, cool, firm, and self-possessed, his conduct marked by the steady
perseverance and patience characteristic of success in all great enterprises.
Over and over again, Walker and his army were described as acting in a
manner that was at once decisive and deliberate, focused and relentless, their
inner purpose manifest in their outward action.42
In the fantasy life of nineteenth-century white supremacy and imperialism,
every story that contrasted American vigor and self-determination to Latin
enervation and loss of self-control was also a story about smoldering sexual
possibility. As Walker and his men landed in ElRealejo and passed up the
streets to the quarters assigned them, the women, with their best dresses and
most pleasing smiles, stood at the doors and windows saluting with much natural grace the strangers who had come to find a home in their midst. Not too
far up the path from this suggestive tableau of Nicaraguan women displayed in
the windows like goods in a shop, the young American men had the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the native women. Every now and then the
market-women with fruit baskets on their heads would gayly greet the soldiers
... and [there was] much wondering at the strange figures of the men from
California. Nor were the Americans less amused at the new faces and forms
they met on the road; and such of them as spoke any Spanish, would waste all
the terms of endearment they could muster on the girls, who seemed pleased
with the compliments of the men from the land of gold. Soon, however, one
vision drove all other thoughts from their minds, as they topped a hill and
looked out upon a scene so beautiful, so magnificent, so ecstatic that the column seemed to halt for a moment, involuntarily, and though the order was to
march in silence an exclamation of surprise and pleasure escaped the lips of
all. Before them was the tall graceful cone of the island volcano Ometepe,
in the middle of Lake Nicaragua. As Walker put it, the form of the volcano
told of history as if written in a book. ... The appearance of the volcano was
so much that of a person enjoying a siesta the beholder would not have been
387
surprised to see it waken at any moment and throw the lava from its burning
sides.43
That Walker would close out a story of roadside seduction with an ecstatic
experience of the landscape made a certain amount of sense, for the most pervasive sign of the necessity of an infusion of Anglo-Saxon vigor was not
masculine fecklessness or feminine concupiscence; it was the condition of agriculture. Like every other portion of the Americas that U.S. expansionists
wanted to take over, Nicaragua was one of the earths most beautiful gardens, which had gone undeveloped by its ineffectual stewards. The discussion
of the failings of Nicaraguan agriculturalists, which could go on for page afteroutraged page, was, of course, a way of talking about raceabout Anglo-
Saxon energy and Latin lassitude.44 But it was also a way of talking about the
proper relation of a society to the marketplace, as it was registered in the landscape. For it was declining trade statistics, as much as images of weed-tangled
fields and moldering haciendas, which imperialist Americans used to representthe inadequacythe unworthinessof Nicaraguans to inhabit their own
country.45 And it was only with the energy and vigor of white leadershipand
the labor of black slavesthat all of this tropical luxuriance could be brought
to fruition.
The traffic between images of available women and fertile lands was as continual as it was inevitable. The hero of Industry was here, wrote one propagandist, and the rich earth, in generous recompense for his toil, gave back a
thousand-fold the seed which he had sown in her genial bosom.46 Working
back and forth between agricultural, sexual, and commercial metaphors, this
single sentence proposed an account in which American imperialism in Nicaragua was defined by vigorous husbandry, grateful consent, and unimaginable
returns. As all the able-bodied Nicaraguan men were rhetorically shunted offstage, their American replacements took up the husbandry of the land and
protection of the womenor was it the other way around?
All of this imagery of inadequate men and available women, of Anglo-
Saxon men assuming the prerogative of Latin ones, and of sticky, honeyed
fertility in the air might be laughable if Walker and his cronies had not been so
deadly serious about itif it had not been included in books and articles that
were part of a concerted campaign to bring war once again to Nicaragua. But
with the insistent consciousness-raising of a late-night infomercial, the prag-
388
matic intentions of these metaphor-encrusted images were decoded in the sales

pitch that lay behind them: Inducements are now offered, such as are seldom
held out; Now what can you do?; It behooves you to secure your portion
of the prize; What is now needed and solicited by General Walker is peaceful emigrants to avail themselves of the mineral and agricultural resources of
the State. ... Farmers, mechanics, artisans, tradesmen, and all engaged in industrial pursuits will be jealously fostered and protected by the Government;
It is then to this new country that the attention of the world is invited.47
These mixed and matched metaphors of martial confidence, sexual con
tinence, and agricultural competence, which forwarded the proposition that
each in its own way was a question of vigor and self-control, that there was a
proper wayan Anglo-Saxon wayto kill a man, make love to a woman, or
plant a field, culminated in a very concrete proposition designed to appeal to a
very specific portion of the population of the United States. Walker needed
white bodies. He needed them to pay the Accessory Transit Company for their
passage; he needed them to vote for him in the elections he would require if his
government was ever to be recognized by the United States; he needed them to
help him fight his wars and fill his coffers; he needed them if he was ever going
to get Costa Rica and Honduras and Guatemala and ElSalvador and Cornelius Vanderbilt out of Nicaragua, if he was ever going to be able to complete
whatever grand scheme it was that had taken him to Nicaragua in the first
place. He needed taxpayers, voters, and soldiers, and he was prepared to pay
for them: 250 acres per settler; 100 extra for families; full title after six months
possession and improvement; no selling out to any foreign government
(present company excepted); liberty from public service except when the
public safety shall otherwise demand.48 In Nicaragua under Walker, the
Southern dream of an empire of commercial flows, which had been dominant
in the propaganda surrounding the invasion of Cuba, blossomed into a full-
fledged program of territorial aggrandizement.
walkers pitch was made in his newspaper, El Nicaragense, a paper

printed in Nicaragua. It provided detailed accounts of Walkers battles, and
close analysis of the evidence of his extraordinary character and capacities
(the paper was responsible for the sobriquet the Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny
and the legend that Walkers invasion fulfilled some sort of Indian prophecy of
389
deliverance by a grey-eyed man). Published in English as well as Spanish,

articles from El Nicaragense made their way into the press in the United States
in a series of endlessly reproduced excerpts which, in addition to providing a
ready-made English-language account of Walkers progress, catalogued in extraordinary detail the agricultural and mineral wealth waiting to be tapped by
those who followed him to Nicaragua. Entire columns of the newspapers were
devoted to lists of plants that grew in Nicaragua and to unsparing criticism of
the prevailing practice of Central American miners, who, if El Nicaragense
was to be believed, had barely begun using their primitive tools to mine the
countrys rich reserves. One issue included an accounting of the business of a
(fictional) coffee plantation that suggested that a Central American planter of
even modest accomplishment could clear a forest and plant a crop that in three
years would provide a princely annual fortune which endures for a lifetime
here estimated at $600,000 per annum.49 This was the American dream as
packaged and sold by William Walker: transplanted to Nicaragua, translated
into Spanish and then back again into English, packaged in an ostensibly neutral newspaper article, and shipped home to an audience eager to subscribe to a
simulacrum of its own most outrageous fantasies (thought to be a god, living
like a prince...).
Walker pitched his revolution to those for whom the promise of a grant of
250 acres of unimproved land and a dream of bigger things was sufficient to
get them to risk their lives. They were, according to one who traveled among
them, mostly of the class found about the wharves of Southern cities, with
here and there a Northern bank cashier who had suddenly changed his vocation. The type of man drawn to Walker, wrote another, was much like his
leader: some individual who has speculated through half a dozen different
professions, and failed in them all...; has become strongly convinced of the
injustice of the world towards him; is strongly impressed with the idea that
theworld owes him a fat living.50 These were men who had been circulated
through the commercial economy of the 1850s and been washed up on its hard
shoals without anything but their own sense of having been done wrong
their own sense that they deserved something better. They were incomplete
and aggrieved white men in search of a stake in the future, for which they
could exchange their own race-and-sex-based sense of entitlement. This is not
to say that all the business about the need for the regeneration of the worn-
390
society of Central America at the hands of the robust children of the

out
North, and the necessity, the inevitability, of American dominion in Nicaragua, of William Walkers dominion in Nicaragua, was insincere or merely
strategic.51 It is, rather, to say that regeneration through whiteness had a material aspect that made its progress visible on the landscape. Regeneration
through whiteness, it turned out, looked a lot like one of those formerly marginal white men who had recently come into some land driving black slaves
out into the field to clear it of trees and plant it in cotton. Walkers hoped-for
harvest of whiteness was to be germinated in slavery: the permanent presence of the white race in the region depended on African slavery.52
Though the association of the filibuster president with the cause of slaveryof manifest destiny and slaveholding societyseems so natural as to require no further explanation, in this case it was actually a marriage of conve
nience. Indeed, it could be argued (if never really proven beyond the shadow
of a doubt) that it was a marriage arranged and paid for by Pierre Soul. The
U.S. senator from Louisiana and one-time filibuster foreign minister to Spain,
Soul traveled to Nicaragua to meet with Walker a month before the decree
legalizing slavery and reopening the slave trade, and subsequently arranged to
float a $500,000 bond for Walker, serviced by the Bank of Louisiana and secured by a million dollars worth of the public lands of Nicaragua.53 For William Walker had not started out as a defender of slavery; in fact, he had a long
and well-documented history of what historians have invariably referred to as
moderate opposition to slavery (meaning that he was much more worried
about the effects of slavery on white laborers forced to work next to slaves
than about the effects on enslaved people themselves). And so it is hard to see
the William Walker who traveled from San Francisco to Nicaragua in 1855 as
anything other than someone who was trying to do what every other U.S. entrepreneur in Nicaragua was trying to do: control the transit by controlling
Nicaragua.
In the light of Walkers own history and the bailout organized by Soul, his
legalization of slavery and the reopening of the slave trade seem almost wholly
adventitiousmaneuvers calculated to extract support for his flagging operation from the only group of Americans desperate enough to gamble on the
chance of his success: pro-slavery Southerners. As one of his supporters put it
in a hortatory article in DeBows Review, This magnificent country, General
391
Walker has taken possession of in the name of the white race and now offers to
you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the
earth. What will you do for him?54 Indeed, it could be said that many of the
400 or so pages of Walkers book The War in Nicaragua were devoted to taking
his career as an opportunistic filibuster, a soldier of fortune, and reworking it
into the story of a committed defender of slaverya man of destiny.
Walker had a lot of material to work with as he reverse-engineered his own
chaotic career into a destiny that was written in black and white. As easy as it
was for American expansionists to imagine the dominion of the white race
over the tropics, it was very difficult for them to imagine all of those energetic
and vigorous white men trailing out into the fields to redress, with the sweat of
their own brows, the developmental lags evident in the trade tables. No matter
how luxuriant the landscape, they argued, the climate renders Negro labor,
alone, absolutely necessary for its cultivationand the development of its
rich agricultural resources.55 Or as Walker himself put it, The introduction
of Negro slavery constitutes the speediest and most efficient means for enabling the white race to establish itself permanently in Central America.56
Step by step, this dependency of white people on the supposedly unique
capacity of Negroes to do what whites did not want to do themselvesthis
racism that was at once comfortable, providential, scientific, and desperately
focused on the exigencies of production and the bottom linewas unfolded
into a theory of history as racial destiny. For Walker, the prevailing racial system in the one-time Spanish colonies was legible only in terms of black and
white. All the imaginary parsings of black blood and white blood, all the racial
blendings of sixteenths and thirty-seconds, were for Walker evidence only
of mongrelismracial degeneracyin contrast to the (also wholly imaginary but nevertheless ideologically salient) purity of the races in the United
States. With the Negro-slave as his companion, Walker wrote, the white
man would become fixed to the soil; and they together would destroy the
power of the mixed race which is the bane of the country.57
According to this version of history, the energy and vigor of pure white
was more a condition of the mind than the body, the ability to organize the
undisciplined physical capacities of otherslesser othersin concerted response to the exigencies of a given situation. Explaining the racial aspect of his
theory of the proper organization of labor, Walker drew upon his racial theory
392
of martial masculinity. No avocation of life requires so much intelligence, so

much knowledge of the laws of life, and so much resolution and self-denial in
adhering to them as that of the soldier. The great difference between a veteran
and a raw recruit is that one knows how to take care of himself and the others
do not. But you can never make a veteran of the Negro.58
Walkers characterization of individual Africans as incapable of intellectual
development, as perpetual novitiates to the ways of civilization and development, was echoed in his time-locked notion of the (non)history of the continent of Africa: If we look at Africa in the light of universal history, we see
her for more than five thousand years a mere waif on the waters of the world,
fulfilling no part in its destinies and aiding in no manner the progress of general civilization. Sunk in the depravities of fetichism and reeking with the
blood of human sacrifices, she seemed a satire on man. ... But America was
discovered and the European found the African as a useful auxiliary in subduing the new continent to the uses and purposes of civilization.59 For Walker,
the history of imperial conquest and that of economic development were part
of the same universal history and divine economy. The military and economic history he was making in Nicaragua represented a set of objective correlatesmaterial realities implanted in Nicaragua by force of armsalong
the pathway of the epochal course of the races, their respective capacities, and
the proper array in society: the unfolding history of white racial dominance
and black slavery.
And the measure of the progress of this history was the condition of the
landscape, or at least the trade statistics which stood for it in the minds of
Walkers American audience: the fee-simple landholding, the cleared forests,
the plowed fields, and a devotion to staple-crop production for an international
export economy. For Walker, slavery was that system which allowed the intellect of society (read: the white men whose capacities were hemmed in by
the character of slaveholding power in the United States) to push boldly forward in the pursuit of new forms of civilization (see your trade tables).60
Without slavery, the landscape would decline into a desert or a ruin, and
timehere indexed by the supposed progress of the subject races under
conditions of forced laborwould begin to run backward.61
What is interesting about Walkers story of the commingled destinies of
three continents is that he coupled his parable of white imperialism and black
393
slavery with a set of not-so-subtle warnings about the risk of white degeneracy without slavery:
A strong, haughty race, bred to liberty in its northern island home, is
sent forth with the mission to place America under the rule of free laws;
but whence are these men, imbued with love of liberty and equality, to
derive the counterpoise which shall prevent their liberty from degenerating into license and their equality into anarchy or despotism? How are
they, when transplanted from the rugged climate where freedom thrives
to retain their precious birthright in the soft, tropical air which woos to
luxury and repose? Is it not for this that the African was reserved? And is
it not thus that one race secures for itself liberty with order, while it bestows on the other comfort and Christianity?62
In order to tailor his story for sale in the Southsomething, incidentally,
hewas quite open about trying to doWalker drew upon the idea, current
in pro-slavery conservatism, that in a society without slaves, white men, in
their guises as capital and labor, would be drawn into a polarizing conflict that
would result in the subordination of one class of the white race to the other
capital to labor (anarchy) or labor to capital (despotism, also known as white
slavery). But he reframed this familiar story by carrying it to the tropics.
Rather than simply mounting a critique of the North from the vantage point
of the South, or of free labor from the standpoint of slavery, Walker was also
mounting a critique of degenerate whiteness from the standpoint of regenerate whiteness.
According to Walker, the war in Nicaragua was not simply a fight over the
spatial extent of New World slavery in which the shifting boundary between
slavery and freedom might be moved back and forth across a map (he referred to the struggle over the Kansas-Nebraska Act as contest for abstractions and a fight for shadows). It was a fight that was internal to the South
and to whiteness itself. It involves, Walker wrote in DeBows Review in 1857,
the question whether you will permit yourselves to be hemmed in on the
South as you already are on the North and on the Westwhether you will remain quiet and idle while impassible barriers are being built on the only side
left open for your superabundant energy and enterprise. If there be yet vigor
394
in the South, he wrote in The War in Nicaragua, let her cast off the lethargy
which enthralls her and prepare anew for the conflict.63
For Walker, the fight for slavery in Nicaragua was a conflict between white
languor and indifference on the one hand, and white exertion and
courage on the other.64 Nicaragua was a place where wounded white men
might, in victory, repair themselves and become once again whole, their personal and racial destiny completed by the addition of a black slave; or where,
in defeat, they might sink back into the somnolent condition of the lesser races.
The question, wrote one of Walkers supporters, was simply whether the
scores of underemployed white men in the South, wasting their lives in
idleness and without a prospect for the future, would rise to the opportunity
to come into their own, or whether they would shrink from the challenge due
to sheer niggardlinessa phrase that must have been carefully chosen to
incite as much indignation as possible. The question was whether these degenerate white men would have slaves or become slaves.
14
The Ignominious Effort to
Reopen the Slave Trade
Every slave that comes ... may be said to bring his master with him.
Leonidas Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade
on the morning of May 11, 1858, William Walker, who happened to be

in Montgomery, Alabama, was invited to attend the Southern Commercial
Convention that was meeting in the city. Walker entered the hall, where he was
introduced as a distinguished foreigner ... General William Walker of Nicaragua. He was welcomed by the delegates and took his seat among them, to
listen to a much-anticipated debate on the reopening of the Atlantic slave
trade.1 If Walker, who was himself a supporter of reopening the slave trade,
represented the vanguard of pro-slavery imperialisms insatiable quest for new
territory, the slave trade movement represented the rearguard action aimed at
making sure that territory would be transformed in the image of the plantation
social order of the Deep South: staple-crop agriculture for the global market;
the equivalence of white manhood and mastery; and household patriarchy.
The idea of reopening the Atlantic trade had been around for quite a while
before it was debated in Montgomery; as early as 1839, it had been suggested in
the Louisiana Courier. By the late 1850s, support for the idea was especially pronounced in the Mississippi Valley and South Carolina, the latter state being
home to Leonidas Spratt, who had rekindled the discussion with a set of news
paper articles in the Charleston Mercury and had earned the dubious moniker
the philosopher of the African slave trade from Horace Greeley.2 Though
the idea of reopening the trade never made it to the floor of a Southern con-
396
vention before 1858, delegates attempted to introduce it every year from 1855
on.3 In 1859, after the majority of those at the Vicksburg convention judged
any final decision on the slave trade inexpedient as long as the Southern
states remained in the Union, Louisianas James D. B. DeBow (the editor
of DeBows Review, which served the reopeners as a sort of official organ
throughout the late 1850s) joined forces with many of the self-declared most
respectable citizens of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana to form the African Labor Supply Association, an organization whose euphemistic title could
hardly conceal its malignant purpose.
As the question took shape over the course of the 1850s, supporters of the
trade took a variety of positions regarding the legality of the action they proposed. Some hoped to work through the U.S. Congress to repeal the acts that
had closed the African trade in 1808. Many others concluded that the laws outlawing the trade were themselves unconstitutional, basing their view on a set
of preciously legalistic arguments dealing with the vague constitutional directives to Congress governing authority to outlaw the slave trade, and with the
difficulties of defining as piracy the practice of legally buying and selling
slaves in foreign countries that had yet to ban trafficking. Some of these supporters proposed trying to convince the Supreme Court of these propositions
(not as farfetched an idea as it sounds, when the Supreme Court in question
was the one which had decided the Dred Scott case); others proposed simply
nullifying the unconstitutional laws by starting to import slaves, selling
them in Southern markets, and relying on Southern juries to refuse to countenance any charges of piracy. Finally, a fourth group proposed the idea of
bringing Africans to the United States as apprentices, thus using a fiction of
the forms of consent that defined the contract freedom of the wage labor
economy of the North to get Africans across the borders of the United States.
These apprentices would then be put to work doing exactly the same things
that slaves had always done. The proposal was thus a strangely mirrored image of the filibuster fiction that the soldiers of fortune who departed from U.S.
ports had not yet decided where they were going or what they were going to
do when they left the territorial sovereignty of the United States.4
The complexity of the arguments about the legality of the slave trade re
flected the complicated relationship of the idea to sectional politics. Many of
The Ignominious Effort to Reopen the Slave Trade
397
those who supported the reopening of the trade did so as part of a larger commitment to pro-slavery disunionism, and used the issue as a sectional wedge to
push the politics of secession forward. But many others saw reopening as an
issue which was related to but not subordinate to the larger set of sectional issues; quite a few, indeed, professed to believe that reopening the trade offered
the best chance to put the South on a par with the North and thus make it possible to keep the Union together. A rough division on these grounds might be
made between reopeners in South Carolinawhere the idea of nullification
was particularly popular (and, indeed, where several boatloads of Africans
were openly landed in the late 1850s, making judicial nullification an active
politics on the eve of the Civil War)and those in the Mississippi Valley,
where the idea of apprenticeship emerged at the center of the debate.5 In
August 1857, the New Orleans Daily Delta had urged the Louisiana legislature
to import apprentices from Africa for terms of up to twenty years. These
apprentices would be paid $3.50 per month, from which the costs of their
transportation from Africa and living expenses would be deducted, and at the
end of their term they would be provided $500 to pay for their own return to
Africa. The state legislatures in Mississippi and Louisiana considered bills to
authorize New Orleans slave dealer James Brigham to import 2,500 of these
apprentices from Africa in 1857 and 1858, employing their own versions of
similar bills that were introduced and defeated in those years, though only
very narrowly in states like South Carolina and Texas. It was in Louisiana that
the reopeners came the closest in 1858, as the apprenticeship bill easily
gained a majority in the lower house, only to be defeated in the Senate when
those opposed to the measure repeatedly undermined the necessary quorum
by running out of the hall until they had time to organize enough votes to defeat the measure.6 Indeed, in the late 1850s, the merchant capitalists of New
Orleans were already (notoriously, as the British ambassador put it) involved in the slave trade. In 1857 and 1858, somewhere between fifteen and
twenty-eight ships either owned or outfitted in New Orleans were identified or
interdicted as they attempted to carry slaves from West Africa to the Americas,
principally to Cuba, but also to Brazil. An untold (and presumably larger)
number made the voyage unobserved and unimpeded. The apprenticeship
proposal was designed to extend the benefits of the ongoing trade in African
398
people beyond the city, its merchants, its bankers, and its shippersto the
slaveholders and nonslaveholding whites of the state of Louisiana and the
Mississippi Valley in general.7
Most of those who have written about the reopening movement have, understandably, tried to locate its history within the larger history of disunion
ismthe story of North and South. Some have argued that the movement was
not integral to Southern politics, because it did not galvanize supporters of
slavery across the South in the same way that the election of Abraham Lincoln
ultimately did; others have argued that a straight line of historical development can be drawn between the reopening movement and the subsequent politics of secession.8 They have retrofitted the wide array of arguments made by
the reopeners to tell a single anachronistic story: they have made the reopening movement into the prehistory of the division between North and South. In
the process, they have overwritten the history of Southern political economy
with that of sectional politics, and left largely unconsidered the question of
what supporters of the slave trade made of the category of the Southits internal economy and social relations, its imagined geography, its relation to the
rest of world historybeyond the question of its relation to the North. As
comforting as it may be to imagine that the politics of the slave trade question
were ultimately framed by the choice between union and disunion, and were
thus always somehow reducible to a part of the national storyeven if only in
negationthe reopening movement had at its heart a vision of the importance
of the slave trade to pro-slavery empire which was both smaller and larger
than the sectional question. Smaller because it was fundamentally concerned
with Southern households, class relations, and the intraregional economies of
the South; larger because it opened out into a consideration of the role of slavery and white supremacy (pro-slavery empire) in world history.
The premise of all the arguments made by the reopeners was that slavery
could not be separated from the slave tradenot by national boundaries, not
by legal categories, not by philosophical niceties. To support the one was to
support the other; to condemn one was to condemn the other. If the trade is
wrong so be the condition which results from it, declared Leonidas Spratt at
the Montgomery convention.9 With all the acuity of a man who has poked out
one of his eyes with a stick in order to see more clearly, Spratt then characterized the trade as only one among a number of methods of transporting popu-
399
lation or labor and especially cheap labor to the United States. Or as

William Yancey put it with willfully obtuse phenomenology, in a speech which
followed Spratts, the difference between the labor supply of the South and
that of the North was simply that one comes under the head of importation,
the other under the head of immigration.10 The bogus use of the category of
labor to blur the distinction between slave labor and wage laborbetween
importation and immigrationhad a long history in pro-slavery ideology. By
the late 1850s, the assertion that workers in the U.S. North or in Great Britain
were wage slaves or white slaves, and comparison of their wretched living conditions to the (supposedly) easy lives lived by black slaves in the Americas, was a standard way to show up industrial capitalist notions of freedom,
abolitionist hypocrisy, the inevitable degradation of whites without slaves, and
so on. But when it was combined with the idea of reopening the slave trade,
this relatively static version of historical timethe essence of slavery compared to the essence of free laborunfolded into a dynamic reworking of
time and space: a millennial vision of a pro-slavery future.
after passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the prevailing doctrine of

popular sovereignty turned the contest for control over the U.S. Congress
into a contest over the distribution of bodies in space. Under the constitutional
provision allowing for the closing of the trade, the reopeners argued, this contest was being waged on unequal terms. The law against the African trade, argued reopening supporter Thomas Walton (to give only a single instance),
was holding down the energies of the South and preventing their onward
march to the establishment of more slave states; every day while this state of
things is made to cramp the development of the Southern people, there is a
system of things prevailing that tends to promote the development of the
North. The immigration from Europe, not being able to find a corresponding
immigration from Africa, is forced to organize the new States which the emigrants establish as Free States, and these emigrants are compelled to array
themselves on the side of the Northern people.11 Again and again the reopeners used the category of labor for making comparisons between the immigration of Europeans to the North and the importation of Africans to the
South: each group was subjected to a Middle Passage, though the sufferings
of the Europeans (in whom no one but themselves had a fiduciary interest)
400
were adjudged more severe; immigration agents were portrayed as white

slave traders (by the erstwhile proponent of white slavery, George Fitzhugh,
no less); each system needed labor as a foundation for its geographic expansion and future prosperity, but only the North was being allowed to import
enough people to spread west.12
The reopeners imagined the contest over the future of slavery as one that
would be decided by the distribution of black and white bodies (or perhaps
more accurately, African and European bodies) over space. Politics, in this formulation, was the vehicle by which economy might finally constitute space in
its own image. By controlling the terms of economic growththe growth of
slave or free statesone could control the inflow of pro- or anti-slavery
whites. By controlling the inflow of whites, one could control the terms of
economic growth, and so on, until a territory finally reached a sort of tipping
point where its political economy would become forever slave or free.
But, according to the reopeners, slavery was being constrained in its spread by
the artificial conditions imposed on its growth by the closing of the African
trade in 1808. As Spratt put it, Ten thousand Southern masters have made a
noble effort to rescue Kansas, and have failed, but so would not have failed ten
thousand slaves. Ten thousand of the rudest Africans that have ever set their
feet upon our shores ... would have swept the free soil party from that land.
There is not an abolition emissary there, he continued, who would not have
purchased a slave if offered at$150. And if Kansas could have been colonized
by the slave market, why not Arizona, New Mexico, and California? Why not
Nebraska, Utah, and Oregon? Why not, Spratt concluded, New England?
Spratt was surely working the crowd for a laugh by the time he got to the end
of his list, but he was also drawing a very clear link between the future of slavery and the future of the slave trade. The African slave trade had the power to
make even abolitioniststo say nothing of nonslaveholdersinto supporters
of slavery, and to turn even the most distant territories of the United States
into regions of the South. The future of slavery, he was arguing, would be
made in the slave market.
Behind these expansive designs, a substitution was taking place: the notion
of the South as a region defined by its relation to the world economy, with
its people governed by the laws of supply and demand, was supplanting the
401
notion of the South as a region within the United States of America, and
governed by the laws made by the United States Congress. That is, the spatial
parameters of political economy were supplanting those of national sovereignty. As William Yancey put it at the Montgomery convention, If it is right
to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to
buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there? He did not want
to be compelled to go to Virginia to buy slaves for $1500 each when he could
get them in Cuba for $600 each or upon the coast of Guinea for one-sixth of
that sum.13 In addition to dramatizing the deleterious effect of federal governance on the natural course of Southern developmentthat is, using the fig
ure of the slave trade to make an argument about sectionalismYancey was
making an argument that situated the South in a geography that was defined
by race and political economy, rather than by national sovereignty. He was re
imagining space and time as they would be reconstituted by a free market in
slaves.
Not all slaveholders were as convinced as Yancey of the desirability of a
slave market without limits. They decried the reopeners proposals as unconstitutional, un-Christian, and unwise. Speaking on the morning that Walker
visited the Montgomery convention, Henry Pryor of Virginia argued that as
long as the South was still in the Union, it was bound to abide by the laws of
the United Stateslaws that outlawed the importation of foreign slaves. To
do otherwise would shock the moral sentiments of Christendom. Lest his
listeners (a set defined by their fervid support of slavery and sectionalism)
think he was going soft on the slave question, Pryor leavened his stated concern about the opinions of those outside the South with a good deal of Negrophobia, using the figure of African barbarism as a way to imply the barbarism
of an undertaking its proponents insisted on associating with the course of
civilization. Just imagine what an absurd figure your field hand would make
in your parlor or kitchen when displaced in the field by a horde of barbarians from Africa. He was not, he declared, willing to assert the rights of the
South upon the proposition to kidnap cannibals from Africa, or buy slaves of
the King of Dahomey.14 With his imagery of upwardly mobile slaves borne
into Southern homes on a tide of African imports, and of Southern slaveholders lowering themselves to the level of Africans (whether cannibals or kings),
402
Pryor was reversing the polarity of the white-supremacist arguments in favor

of reopening the trade. Far from elevating white men, he was saying, reopening the trade would further degrade them.
Much of this debate took the form of a discussion of the slave market. At
question was not whether buying and selling human beings was moral or wise
(as had been the case at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even among
many supporters of slavery), for the domestic slave trade was taken as a given
on both sides of the debate. The question, rather, was about the role of the
slave market in shaping the future of the Southabout buying and selling
people as a way of controlling and constituting time and space. Most simply,
this took the shape of a discussion of slave prices. Those in favor of reopening
the trade argued that by importing Africans and thus lowering the price of
slaves, nonslaveholding white men would be able to realize their proper position as members in full standing of the master class. As Edward Pollard urged
the resumption of the trade and tried to convey its existential importance to
Southern society, he returned to the story of the degraded nonslaveholder he
had supposedly seen being mocked by his neighbors supercilious slaves, but
he changed the ending: He would no longer be a miserable, non-descript
cumberer of the soil, scratching from the land here and there for a subsistence,
living from hand to mouth, or trespassing along the borders of the possessions
of the large proprietors. He would be a proprietor himself, and in the great
work of developing the riches of the soil of the South, from which he had
been heretofore excluded, vistas of enterprise and wealth would open to him
that would enliven his heart and transform him into another man.15 These
newly minted men and the black slaves who had made them would provide the
energy and the laborthe former being mostly of the intellectual sort, and the
latter being somehow associated with lassitude in spite of its manifestly strenuous characterthat would settle, improve, and plant the immense tracts of
uncultivated land which lacked only African slaves to bring them up to their
proper stage of, well, for want of a better word, civilization. As the Louisiana
apprenticeship proposal put it: With a vast quantity of wilderness land in
the cotton States yet to settle, subdue, and improve; with its numerous swamps
to drain, and poor uplands to improve and enrich, it places the cotton-growing
industry, enterprise and interest of the South in an unequal, unjust, and unnatural position, to prohibit the importation of Negro laborers adapted to the
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work of such a climate.16 Reopening the African slave trade would allow for
the material transformation of Southern space in the image of the natural
course of progress.
Those who opposed reopening the trade likewise saw an outline of the future in the prices of slaves, only they thought high prices, not low, pointed the
path to progress. As Mississippi senator Henry Foote argued in a speech made
at the Vicksburg convention in 1859a speech that was so wildly unpopular it
resulted in repeated interruptions, numerous threats of violence, and eventually the senators untimely withdrawal from the conventionlow slave prices
would do little to deepen the roots of slaveholding power, because rich slaveholders would simply use their superior resources to buy up all the imported
Africans. Furthermore, he argued, lower prices in the slave market would not
change the course of history, at least not for the better: Would you be willing, he asked the convention, to shoulder your musket in vindication of
slaveholding rightswould you be willing to fight for them and risk your domestic peace and happiness if your slaves were only worth five dollars apiece?
Why every man sees that that is an absurdity. Therefore the system depends on
keeping the prices high.17
Just as conversations about the price of cotton were always conversations
about the price of slaves, conversations about the price of slaves were always
conversations about the internal slave trade. Indeed, among opponents of reopening the trade as well as supporters, trade in slaves was integral to their
understanding of the South and the relation of its regions to one another.
Emblematized by William Yanceys tacit suggestion that nothing could be
more normal than selling a slave from Virginia to New Orleans, the massive
movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Lower had been a defining
feature of the political economy of slavery from at least the 1820s. More than
two-thirds of a million people were traded through the interstate slave trade in
the four decades before the Civil War (a million and a half more were sold locally in the same period). The interstate slave trade had been one of the things
that lent validity to the idea of a political economy of slavery which bound
the South together with a set of shared interests. By the late 1850s, however,
there was a senseespecially acute in the Mississippi Valleythat the slave
market was in crisis.18
As much as they liked to talk about prices in the slave market and the
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South, slaveholders knew that just as the Negro fever had intensified class
stratification among Southern whites, it had exacerbated the divergence in the
fortunes and interests of the regions of the South. High boomtime prices in
the Mississippi Valley vastly outstripped the returns that Virginia and other
Upper-South slaveholders could expect to get from agriculture during most of
the antebellum period, and tens of thousands of slaves a year were being sold
through the internal trade every year. The South, that is to say, was increasingly seen as being composed of two interlocked economies: a Deep-South
economy that imported slaves and produced a staple crop, and an Upper-South
economy that produced and exported slavesthe two being joined together
by the internal trade. As with any market-structured transaction, there was a
double-faced character to the political economy of the slave trade. On the one
hand, it knit the divergent economies of the Upper and Lower South into a
system of mutual dependence; on the other, it counterpoised them as adversaries in a competition over the price of slaves. The very trade that made it possible to speak of a political economy of slavery that stretched from Maryland
and Virginia to Mississippi and Louisiana had, concealed within it, a mechanism of economic differentiation that pitted the interests of the sections against
one another, once the question of the African trade had been raised. For several years the State Revenue of the country has been paid by the sale of her
slaves, wrote one central Virginia editor. Open the Slave Trade and what
will our Negroes be worth?19 Thus it was that Henry Pryorasserting a vision of interregional solidarity based on a shared mode of production, and
uncomplicated by the complexities of the differential effects of the thriving
slave market at the center of the Southlabeled the reopening of the slave
trade divisive to the interests of the region.20
From the perspective of slaveholders in the Deep South, the question
of comparative disadvantage in the slave market posed a still more troubling
problem: the fear that their own seemingly insatiable dependence on Upper-
South slaves to sate the endless cycle of consumption and productiona cycle
represented by the commonplace that their only goal in life was to buy Negroes to raise cotton and raise cotton to buy Negroeswas attenuating the
hold of slavery in the Upper South. In a way, the role played by the slave trade
in Southern pro-slavery political economy came full circle in the era of the
Negro Fever. The Jeffersonian idea that the internal trade would spread
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slaves so widely across the landscape as to make their emancipation possible

(as ludicrous as it had seemed in the 1820s and 1830s, when the slave trade was
producing fear of rebellion in the Lower South) reemerged in the work of
pro-slavery writers as the major challenge facing the political economy of
slavery: the fear that the Upper South was being drained of slaves. The aggregate demand of Mississippi Valley cotton planters, according to the reckoning
of Virginian Edmund Ruffin, was vastly greater than the rate of natural increase of Virginia slaves. Any expansionary visionany visionary expansionof the domain of slavery toward the west (Texas, Arkansas, Kansas) or
south (Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua) might have the paradoxical result of
allowing a corresponding advance of free labor into the South.21
For Mississippi Valley supporters of reopening the trade (and their co-
religionists elsewhere in the Deep South), the solution to the problem of the
slave drain was simple enough: import slaves from Africa. With slaves from
Africa flowing into the Valley, concerns about the declining slave population
of Virginia would cease to be a limiting factor in slaverys expansion. The
course of slaverys expansion would be freed from any dependence on the natural increase of slaves currently residing in the United States. With slaves
sufficient for the work of pioneer advancement, we will open the institution of
domestic slavery to the whole broad plain from the Mississippi to the Pacific,
enthused Leonidas Spratt.22 For Louisianas Edward Deloney, the reopening
of the slave trade was the first step on the path to hemispheric dominance.
Soon would follow the acquisition of Cuba and the regeneration of Haiti;
then the great eye of the South would fix its attention upon Central America, a vast extent of territory yet in the luxuriance of its native growtha soil
yet untilled, as fertile as Gods earth can be, that will yield in abundance all the
tropical and staple productions that can add wealth and luxury to mankind, but
with a climate that renders Negro labor, alone, absolutely necessary for its
cultivation.23 Reopening the slave trade would be the first cause in a chain
of events that would transform untamed territory into productive land, redeem time with improvement, and thus trace out the natural course over space
and time of the history of slavery (or, perhaps more accurately, history as
slavery).
There is much to be said about this pro-slavery version of time. Perhaps the
most obvious point is that those on either side of the debate over the reopening
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of the trade conceived of the future of slavery and the shape of the South
the time and the space of pro-slavery historyin terms that were rooted in
the slave market. Opponents of reopening the trade, particularly in the Upper
South, were quite open about their fear that the importation of African slaves
would lower the value of their slavesa value that depended largely on the
prices that buyers in the Lower South were willing to pay for them. Proponents of the trade argued that the internal slave trade was draining the Upper
South of slaves, and that an infusion of African slaves was the only way to ensure that the natural course of slaverys expansion could continue. But whichever course was being advocatedthe transatlantic trade that the free traders
supported or the interstate trade that protectionists defendedeach side in the
debate treated the slave market as the factory of slaverys future. These were,
that is to say, resolutely forward-looking and unabashedly commercial visions
of the history and future of slavery: they relied on the slave market as their
prime engine of spatial and temporal transformation.
embedded within this vision of the slave market as the first cause of the
future of the South was a remarkable set of arguments about the social reproduction of the slaveholding regime. It was axiomatic among defenders of slavery that the promotion of black bondage was the bestperhaps the only
defense of white patriarchy. As Mississippian Henry Hughes, who would
become a leader in the reopening movement in the late 1850s, put it in his 1854
pro-slavery Treatise on Sociology, if the racial and social orders in society were
not isomorphic, if those who thought and led were not all of one race and
those who toiled and followed were not of another, then the sexual order was
bound to be threatened: Political amalgamation is sexual amalgamation: one
is a cause of the other. There must be either caste or co-sovereignty: this is the
alternative to that. For power to rule is power to marry, and the power to repeal or annul discriminating laws. Or, later, on the same theme: Economic
amalgamation is sexual amalgamation. One makes the other.24 Among the reopeners, a fuller elaboration of the relationship between the reopening of the
slave trade and the advancement of white patriarchy went something like this:
This supply will spread over [the cotton] states incalculable wealth, and afford every poor and industrious citizen the best chance for making a fortune.
The African labor supply will take from the wash-tub, bake-oven, and scrub-
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broom, thousands of our tired and toiling wives, sisters, and daughters, and
advance into their workplaces stout and willing Negro wenches, to whom a
civilized kitchen would be a Christian school, and the pone they bake a foretaste of a better bread.25 The slave trade was the vehicle for a full-spectrum
fantasy of slaveholding dominance, the promise of white patriarchy and pro-
slavery empire embodied in African slaves. All white men might become masters; all white womentheir white womenmight become ladies; Africans
might be civilized; and the South would fracture the seemingly fixed limits
of pro-slavery geography and rework them into an empire of unimaginable
riches. This pro-slavery vision of empire and expansion, that is to say, was
rooted in the capacity of slaves to bring white patriarchy into being one household at atime. As Leonidas Spratt put it with remarkable clarity, Every slave
that comes, therefore, may be said to bring his master with him.26
For the reopeners, the natural increase of the slaveholding population in
the United States was not sufficient to fund their expansive vision of pro-
slavery empire; Leonidas Spratt, remember, referred to the condition of slavery as one which resulted from the slave trade, rather than, say, birth.27 Slaves
could not reproduce themselves fast enough to do all the things that white people needed them to do: clear millions of uncultivated acres of land in the Deep
South and plant it with cotton; underwrite with their labor and their low prices
the spread of Southern social institutions, from the Mississippi Valley to the
Pacific Ocean and the Mason-Dixon Line to the Equator; transform every
nonslaveholding white man into a master and every white woman into a lady.
Reopening the slave trade was a way to detach the imperatives of the social
reproduction of this vision of pro-slavery empire from its messy reliance on
enslaved peoples biological reproduction. As James D. B. DeBow put it,
slaveholders could continue to await with folded arms that coming of population and labor which will be the result of natural increase. Or they could
reopen the slave trade. The image of a slaveholder standing around with his
arms crossed waiting for his people to reproduce a legacy for his children
redolent of slaveholders everyday experience of prurient and frustrated de
pendence as it must have beensuggests that the reopening movement was
addressing a set of core anxieties among slaveholders about their ability to
oversee the reproduction of their social privilege. It was a way to liberate
white men from their dependence on black women by extracting the process
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of social reproduction from its embeddedness within black families and put
ting it directly under the control of white slaveholders.28
Seen in this light, reopening the trade was a reworking of the privileges of
white patriarchy, a globalization of the Salic privilege which allowed slaveholders to claim other mens offspring as their own (and, just as important, for
their own). It was likewise an elaboration of slaveholding misogyny which allowed slaveholders to imagine a world without black women by locating the
first cause of white privilege in Africathat continent which would make
black women unnecessary in the Americas.29 Just as William Walker offered
dispossessed white men a chance to make their way upward without being
borninto the right family, married to the right woman, working in the right
profession, or making the right move at the right time, the slave trade offered
slaveholders a chance to reproduce themselves over time, free of any apparentdependence on the root mechanism of social reproduction. Each method
of increase was, in its own way, a technology by which white men could re
produce themselves, a machine by which the physical potentialland and laborof another society could be extracted and grafted onto underemployed
white men to produce a particularly durable strain of imperial whiteness.
Among the most important of the physical processes by which black slaves
produced white slaveholders were, of course, planting, tending, picking, packing, and shipping cotton. Proponents of the slave trade often represented the
exigency of their cause by making a connection between the reopening of the
slave trade and continued domination of the world market in cotton. The reopeners estimated that the South in the 1850s was supplying about four-fifths
of the worlds cottonthe bulk (about five-sixths) of its crop being shipped
every year to Great Britain.30 Reopeners like Louisianas Edward Deloney
went to great lengths to estimate the vulnerability of the cotton market to
penetration by other producers; they did so by projecting the world demand
for cotton, and then subtracting the estimated crop produced in the United
States and the rest of the world. The result was a staggering shortfall:
1,320,000 bales of cotton gone unplanted, unpicked, unpacked, unshipped, and
unsold for want of the slaves to do it. Deloney then divided the unknowable
by the unknownthe number of bales of shortfall by the number of bales
he had calculated each slave could produce, itself conjectured by dividing the
number of bales known to be produced by the number of slaves estimated to
be working in cottonto show that the South needed at least 350,000 more
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slaves, at a rate of 3 bales of cotton per head, to meet the world demand for
cotton. The number of slaves needed to meet the world demand for cotton, he
concluded, could be found only in Africa.31
The importance of the slave trade, however, was not simply to be measured
in fictional cotton and fractional slaves. In the minds of the reopeners, the
trade was the key to global domination. The argument followed the course
of the cotton economy, extracting an implication of Southern influence wherever capitalists outside the South extracted a profit. The cotton that imported
slaves would produce was the very same cotton that would be paid for by notes
drawn on Northern and British bankers, shipped on Northern and British
ships, unloaded by workers in Northern and British port cities, drayed to mills
by Northern and British horses, milled by Northern and British workingmen
in factories owned by Northern and British industrialists, and, finally, sold by
Northern and British merchants to Northern and British consumers.32 This
was a profoundly patriarchal and anti-democratic movement, but it was not an
anti-commercial one. Indeed, it saw marketsespecially those in slaves and
cottonas the mechanism of historical change. For George Fitzhugh, routinely identified as one of the most conservative thinkers in the history of the
United States, the slave trade was a tool which could connect the destinies of
Africa, Europe, and the United States in a circuit of human bodies, staple
crops, and cheap consumer goods that was almost endless in its self-amplifying
cycle of beneficial consequences:
Extend and increase the institution by renewing the foreign slave trade,
and the price of slave products, of all of the necessaries, and many of the
comforts and luxuries of life would decline rapidly. The market for
Northern products would be increased and extended, and their prices
would rise. The mercantile interest, the shipping interest, the manufacturing interest, nay, every interest at the North, would feel its revivifying
influence. But the white laborers of the North would benefit the most.
They would have constant employment at high wages, because the labor
market would not be overcrowded; and they would find the expenses of
living continually diminishing.
The reopeners, as well as many other Southerners, believed that cotton gave
slaveholders power over free men. If the supply of cotton dried up and the
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looms had to be shut down, opponents of slavery from Massachusetts to Manchester would reap the discontent they had sown among Southern slaves in a
harvest of white starvation and working-class revolt.33
It was a settled fact among the reopeners that British opposition to the reopening of the slave trade was a clever front for a plot to emancipate British
industrialists from their reliance on American cotton. If the high (projected)
demand for cotton was not met by American sources, then the fledgling cotton
economies of India and Egypt would be allowed time to develop into genuine
competitors to American cotton, and the power of the South in the world
would be correspondingly diminished. Indeed, the reopeners arguedwith
some justificationthat even as the British opposed American slavery, they
were actively introducing other sorts of bonded labor to the culture of cotton
in their colonies in India and Africa.34 This construction of the slave trade
question as the determining question for the future of slavery depended on a
set of totally unproven (and mostly fallacious) assertions about the character
of the cotton market: the idea that demand was so high that increased supply
would not result in lower prices, the idea that Southern monopoly could be
maintained into an indefinite future, the idea that the South could actually add
acres to cotton production rather than being obliged to replace those already
exhausted by cotton mono-cropping. Nevertheless, the argument was enough
to convince many that the South stood at a momentous juncture as it considered the reopening of the slave trade. Reopening the trade would consolidate
its control over both the cotton economy and the future of slavery; failing to
do so would compromise its monopoly position, reduce the value of its primary export, and make its political position in the nation and the world even
more precarious than it already was.
As the reopeners sought to map the terrain of this epochal battle between
slavery and freedom over the future of civilization, they used a set of terms
that were almost schizophrenic in their metaphorical inconsistency and in their
oscillation between assertions of overweening self-confidence and desperate
self-loathing. On the one hand, the reopeners expressed the brash conviction
that the South could use its control of cotton to lead the world around by the
nose, to further the course of civilization by reopening the trade and by using
its fruits to hide the nakedness of the savages; they also uttered smug assertions about the propensity of misguided philanthropy to drag the garden
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spots of the world backward to a state of untamed barbarism. On the other

hand, they deployed a set of more disquieting imagesof Southern vulnerability and backwardness.35
Perhaps most predictable was the discourse of Southern economic underperformance. The theme of economic underperformance was an old one in
Southern political economy and, over time, had been ascribed to various
causes: the cavalier mentality of planters who cared more for good living than
good husbandry, the ecological restriction of cotton and sugar culture to particular latitudes, the single-minded obsession with cotton culture to the detriment of all other forms of industry. In the discussion of reopening the trade,
however, these points were laid aside in favor of arguments and evidence
that suggested the South was ripe for a sort of internal colonization (by imported African slaves). Most simply, there were the trade tables that magically
transformed Southern cotton production into underperformance by comparing it to a wholly hypothetical account of the projected worldwide demand for
cotton. But in order to make the case that the solution to inadequate cotton
production was importing more slaves (when, in fact, a plausible case could be
made that the problem was that Southern cotton planters had too many slaves
in relation to the fertility of their soilhence the mania for geographic expansion), the reopeners had to argue that there was additional land suitable for
cotton cultivation within the existing limits of the South, and that it was not being properly employed. Millions of acres of land in Louisiana alone, Edward
Deloney argued, a vast extent of Southern soil of the highest fertility and
most admiringly adapted to the production of every valuable species of agricultural commodity, yet remains ... an useless waste for want of that kind of
labor which alone can be useful for its cultivation. Three million bales had
gone unplanted and unpicked, for want of the labor to till land that the order
of Providence had set aside as the most perfect land on earth for the cultivation of cotton. This was good land, Gods landland that, without slaves from
Africa, Edmund Ruffin argued, had no future but that of a desert and a ruin
... a desolate waste subject to colonizing by a laboring class of foreigners
and Yankees.36
The emphasis on the Souths wasted fertility unfolded almost naturally into
a set of images of social and sexual disorder. Slaveholders employed virtually
every available metaphor of weakness and vulnerability to convey the exi-
412
gency of their situation in the late 1850s. Slavery was sleeping: It must start
[awake] from its repose, declared Spratt at Vicksburg, and take the moral
strength of an aggressive attitude; it was slumbering, the Mississippi reopener Thomas Walton argued, too long the passive subject of foreign sentiment, its energies held down, clogged, cramped, and prevented from
their onward march; we should leave off our siestas and post-meridian naps,
and employ ourselves in profitable vocations, wrote Hinton Helper, employing the metaphorical register of pro-slavery imperialism to criticize slaveholders. But it was not simply that slaveholders had been caught napping like some
enervated African or Latin awaiting an infusion of Anglo-Saxon energy; their
lassitude had made them childish and womanish. The South was supine,
dependent, and helpless as a sick babe, wrote James D.B. DeBow. She
must determine that she will no longer be the prey of rogues in ruffles and rascals in palaces. We have not had the manliness to throw off our dependence.
The South had been turned out and dishonored like a common strumpet,
wrote Edward Pollard; had been made the miserable mistress of the North,
rather than taking her rightful place as bride of the world, wrote Leonidas
Spratt100,000 African slaves presumably being the dowry he imagined for
his Southern bride. This South, indeed, this lazy, dependent, lascivious, sold-
out South, had become slavish: slaveholders, wrote DeBow, had declined into
a state of vassalage to the North; they were servants, hewers of wood
and drawers of water. Slavery had been embarrassed and objectified, but it
had never spoken for itself until finally emboldened to call for the slave trade:
Slavery never yet has spoken and it is time it should speak. When it does its
first utterance will be: We must be freefree to expand according to our own
naturefree of the touch of any hostile hand upon us.37 Or in the words
of DeBows Review, which brazenlyoutrageouslycompared the supposed
plight of cotton planters to the enslaved wet nurses whose own children were
taken from their breast so that their masters children might be comforted:
The South thus stands in the attitude of feeding from her own bosom a vast
population of merchants, shop owners, capitalists, and others, who without
the claims of her progeny, drink up the life-blood of her trade.38
Much of this assemblage of metaphors of enervated, childish, womanish,
slavish, slave-womanish planters would have been familiar to anyone who had
even a glancing acquaintance with the imperialist propaganda of manifest
413
destiny. The tools developed to measure the exigency of the projection of

Southern power into Latin Americathe trade table that converted foreign
demand into domestic shortcoming, the land survey that converted unimproved land into evidence of barbarism, the notion of history that equated the
absence of slaves with the absence of civilization, the notion of social and sexual order that organized all of the above into a characterization of rightly
white manhoodall of these worked well enough when they were applied to
Nicaragua or Mexico or Cuba. But the reopeners were being drawn, by the
metaphorical gravity of the terms of the discussion of pro-slavery imperialism, into characterizing the course of Southern history as a process of self-
colonization. And when applied to the South, these imagesthese metrics of
historical development and providential destinytook on an almost millennial exigency.
as the reopeners saw it, their cause was to write a history of the future
to make manifest in the world the destiny whose course they had derived from
their study of the past. Human societies, wrote George Fitzhugh in a long, digressive essay in support of the reopening of the trade, are at all times and
places, regulated by laws as universal and as similar as those which control the
affairs of bees. Slavery was a divinely ordained institution, which had been
present in every great civilization since the beginning of time; it was natural, normal, necessary, inevitable. And it required a slave tradea
trade, again in the words of Fitzhugh, which is as old, as natural, and irresistible as the tides of the ocean. The epochal history of slavery attained its
nineteenth-century manifestation in the institution of African slavery, which
had produced innumerable benefits for mankind as a whole, introducing heathen Africans to Christianity and slave labor in the Americasa regime that,
through its discipline, was uniquely suited for channeling their feral energy
into a productive contribution to civilization. Indeed, the labor of slaves in the
cotton fields of the South had produced the raw material of white freedom,
clothing the naked in fustian and employing the wretched in mills.39
But the workings of pro-slavery eschatology were complicated by the
counterhistory proposed by abolition. In the view of slaveholders, abolitionist
history had destroyed the whole worth and value of the garden spots of the
earth in Haiti and Jamaica, rendering land that had once been turned to the
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good of civilization and the advancement of mankind back into a wilderness

dominated by barbarians. They feared it as a history that looks forward to
the social and political equality of the Negro with the white man, at whatever
the sacrifice of life and the industrial interests of the world, amidst rape, rapine, conflagration, robbery, and murder. The fight over slavery, wrote the
pseudonymous Python in DeBows Review, was a fight between two opposed
sets of values: on the one hand, a social order founded on the basis of the altar, home, family circle, the Bible, and the preservation of the white race
unadulterated; on the other, concubinage, race mixing, and the bloody anarchy of a democracy that ignored the natural order of slaveholding society.40
For the reopeners, the fight over the slave trade took place on the edge of
historys end times. It was a fight waged between history as God had intended
to beslavery, hierarchy, orderand history based on the counterfeit philosophy of anti-slavery and democracy. As Leonidas Spratt described it to the
1859 Southern Commercial Convention at Vicksburg, This land seem[s] destined to become a battle-ground not only of the sections but the field of final
contest for the great contending social systems of the world.41 And at stake
was nothing less than the constitution of the entire social order. For the reopeners, the idea that every white man should be a master was not simply a
response to doubts about the loyalty of nonslaveholders or an element in a
larger struggle between the regionally bounded economies of the North and
South, although there was surely an element of each in their vision. George
Fitzhugh put it this way: As new fetters were imposed on the now idle, savage, cannibal Negro, the white laborer would find his chain less galling, and
gradually dropping from his limbs. The reverse action, under the lead of abolition, is now going forward. They are removing the fetters from the Negro to
impose them on the white man.42 For whites, Fitzhugh suggested, the debate
over the slave trade was a struggle between alternative versions of social order: freedom (what you or I would call slavery) and slavery (what you or I
would call freedom). Every member of the ruling race a slaveholder, ev
ery African a slave, every laborer the master of his own destiny: for Fitzhugh
and the reopeners, the tradethe global extension of the American slave marketpromised a set of benefits which asymptotically approached that end-of-
strife, end-of-disorder, end-of-time condition they called Freedom.
415
Indeed, among the reopeners, the slave trade question organized and colonized their accounts of other social relationsbetween blacks and whites certainly, but also between men and women, between parents and children, and so
on. Leonidas Spratt saw the struggle over the slave trade as part of a larger
struggle between a slave-based social order and social and sexual anarchy, a
fight that remained no less exigent in its immediate manifestation for his certainty that the forces of slavery would prevail:
And I have perfect confidence that when France shall reel again into the
delirium of libertywhen the peerage of England shall have yielded to
the masseswhen Democracy at the North shall hold its carnival
when all that is pure and noble shall be dragged downwhen all that is
ignoble and vile shall have been mounted to the surfacewhen women
shall have taken the place and habilments of men, and men shall have
taken the place and habilments of womenwhen free love unions and
phalansteries shall pervade the landwhen the sexes shall consort without the restraints of marriage, and when youths and maidens, drunk at
noon day and half naked shall reel about the marketplacethe South
will stand secure and erect as she stands nowthe slave will be restrained
by power; the master by the trusts of a superior position; she will move
with a measured dignity of power and progress as conspicuous as it is
now. . . . Why, then, shall we not demand the repeal of these restrictions?43
According to this vision, slavery (and hence the slave trade) was a sort of axial
rod that ensured social order and historical progress. Remove it and society
and history would collapse into a nightmare of social and sexual overturnings.
Indeed, the sexual and social imagery of this statement is so conflated as to be
indistinguishable: racial, social, and sexual order, for the reopeners, were of a
piece. Without slaveswithout slaves from Africamany white men would
remain incompletely realized vessels for the historical purpose that was vested
in them; without slaves, their sacred whiteness, their destined power, their
phallic privilege would remain vulnerable to the most perverted notion of social and sexual order. The slave trade, the reopeners were arguing, was the
416
guarantee of slaveholding household order as a principle of historical development: white supremacy, slavery, and patriarchy. History was hanging in the
balance.
Slaveholders lived in a world defined by contradictory extremes: by the millennial combat of Christ and Antichrist, made material in the daily choices
planters made between the paths of salvation and damnation; by the boom-
and-bust cycle of the cotton economy (yearly recapitulated in their struggle to
get their cotton sold at the right time for the right price), on which their magniloquent account of their own historical importance depended; by their daily
struggles with slaves whom they had been taught to see as servile and yet to
fear as savage; by the objective reliance of their own fantasies of the dominion
of the ruling race on its unreliable subjectswomen, children, and slaves. The
millennial terms of the slave trade debate reflected the existential desperation
of slaveholding lives locked into a never-ending oscillation of dominance and
dependences.
If the galling presence of these contradictory images of destiny and declinethe unfolded implications of a social order premised on using people as
things to produce other thingswas a slaveholding perennial, the idea of reopening the slave trade was a dynamic response to the concrete forms such
images took in the late 1850s: to the slave drain through which slaveholders
traded the long-term political safety of their institution for the more immediate promises of profit in the markets for slaves and cotton; to the Negro fever that was making it impossible for white men to turn themselves into
proper masters and undermining the foundational identification of slavery and
white supremacy; to the separate relations to slave and free laborto Africa
and Europeout of which the very idea of an internal slave trade had
grown up along the sovereign frontier of the United States. Reopening the
Atlantic trade was a working-out on a global scale of the contradictions of the
era of the interstate slave tradea spatial reordering of the relationship of
Southern slaveholders to the world market that would allow them to once
moredefine every man as a master, to extend over space without compromising their future, to reconstitute space in the image of political economy rather
than contested sovereignty. It represented slaveholders effort to liberate themselves from their own historythe social relations that had produced their
power but that also defined its limitationsand to re-create the world in the
417
image of an illusory promise of dominance without dependence: pro-slavery

freedom.
though they had many adherents in common, William Walker and the
reopeners proposed versions of pro-slavery empire that were not identical.
Walkers vision of pro-slavery empire was more immediately expansionary
than that of the reopeners. Whereas they argued that there were millions
of acres of undeveloped land within the boundaries of the South, Walker
looked to Central America for land upon which to plant his mushroom aristocracy of self-made masters. Whereas the reopeners looked to import slaves
from Africa to spur the regeneration of the nonslaveholding white men of the
South, he looked to export those same nonslaveholding white men in order to
spur the regeneration of Central America. Some of Walkers most vigorous
supporters in the Mississippi Valley, such as senators Albert Gallatin Brown
and Henry Foote of Mississippi, were opponents of the idea of reopening the
slave trade. Brown believed it would simply augment the power of the planter
class to push poor white people off their land; Foote thought the idea of reopening the trade treasonable and utopian, and the prospect of importing
100,000 or 200,000 Negroes-demi-savages to the Mississippi Valley simply
terrifying.44 Likewise, though both movements had deep roots in the Mississippi Valley, each had its own network of supporters outside the Valley. Walker
was popular throughout the South, and, at least until his dispute with Vanderbilt and his turn toward pro-slavery, was especially popular with merchant
capitalists in San Francisco and New York, who had much to gain from the
Americanization of the Nicaraguan isthmus. The reopening movement was
popular across the Deep South, but much less so in the Upper South (to say
nothing of the North, Great Britain, or Africa).
But to most people, the two movements seemed to imply and reinforce each
other. Many of those who took an active role in one were connected, as well,
to the other.45 More than that, the ideas seemed naturally to unfold into each
other. George Fitzhugh might start out talking about the slave trade, only to
end up declaring that the filibuster is the true philanthropist and citing Moses, Joshua, Hercules, Saint Patrick, Caesar, and Alexander the Great as the
filibustering forebears of William Walker.46 For their part, the filibusters knew
that proposing to open new territory to slavery without solving the slave
418
drain problem would compromise their support throughout the South;

and so, pro-slavery supporters of Walkeras well as organizations like the
Knights of the Golden Circle, which proposed a circum-Caribbean Southern
empirewere almost automatically drawn into supporting the reopening of
the slave trade.47 But more than their practical symbiosis, these projects shared
a common vision of race, sex, slavery, space, and timea vision that outlines
what the world and the future looked like to slaveholders and other white men
in the Mississippi Valley on the eve of the Civil War.
Both the invasion of Nicaragua and the effort to reopen the slave trade represented an imperial vision of the future of slavery, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Each in its own way proposed a reorientation of space through a
global projection of the South, and characterized its vision as one of white
male regeneration. It was a vision in which the subject races of the world were
made useful through their subordination to the energy and foresight of white
slaveholders; in which class relations were made concomitant with the natural
division of the races; in which the patriarchal authority of white men was vitalized through the linkage of their households to the larger global political
economy of slavery; in which the plantation served as the vehicle for converting territory to land and time into progress; in which the global network of
mercantile capitalism served as a sort of gear-work that would enable slaveholders to project political power over enemies who sought to stymie them by
controlling their access to land and labor; in which white men could make
themselves into masters by invading other countries and stealing their land and
peopleimperial parthenogenesis.
Taken together, the expansionist movement and the effort to reopen the
slave trade outlined a sort of global whitemanism, a leviathan vision of white
men at the head of a social body whose labor and reproduction were fed upward through interlocking circulatory networks that extracted life and energy
from its blood-stained conquest of the rest of the world: the networks of
domestic patriarchy, racial slavery, American empire. Both were movements
shaped by the existing political economy of slaveryits increasing class strati
fication among whites, its slave-draining internal trade, its self-consuming devotion to cotton mono-cropping, its dependence on unwilling slaves. But they
represented themselves as radical breaks with the constraints of history. As
destiny.
419
In the end, however, it never came to that. William Walker set out from
New Orleans for his last mission in June 1860. His plan was to invade Ruatan,
a small island off the coast of Honduras, whose inhabitants were rumored to
be on the verge of insurrection over a planned transfer of the island from British to Honduran sovereignty. From there, he would mount another attack on
Nicaragua. Knowing that Walker was lying in wait, however, the British and
Hondurans conspired to delay the transfer of power. Walker was caught in a
paradox: he could not invade an island held by the British in order to demand
continued British rule on the island. Short of supplies, he remained adrift in
the Gulf. The filibuster president finally hit upon the idea of invading Honduras instead of Ruatan (or Nicaragua, for that matter). After establishing a
beachhead in the town of Truxillo, he was persuaded to surrender to the British Navy rather than to the Honduran forces, which refused to recognize a
right to invade Honduras based uponas Walker put itthe moral claims of
a people desirous of living in Central America under the ancient laws and
customs of the realm, claiming with them common interests under institutions
derived from the code of Alfred. He was, to his surprise, immediately turned
over to the government of Honduras, and executed on the morning of September12, 1860.48
The slave trade proposal came to a similar end. At the Democratic convention held in Charleston in 1860, supporters of the slave trade effectively demolished the Democratic Party. They thus ensured the election of Abraham
Lincoln, and the secession of slaveholding states, when the delegations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida walked out over the partys
refusal to include a statement guaranteeing the rights of citizens to hold all
descriptions of property recognized by the states and supporting the protection of those rights upon the high seas. The politics of the Confederacy,
however, shunted the program of the reopeners to the side: the war put a strategic premium both on the support of Upper-South states like Virginia for the
Confederacy and on the hope of gaining diplomatic recognition from Britain
and France, which were thought to be susceptible to a pro-cotton, antislave
trade pitch from the Confederacy (and were thought, in the case of the British,
to be ready to join the war on the side of the Union in the event of a reopening
of the African trade). In April 1861, the Confederate States of America adopted
a constitution that outlawed the importation of African Negroes from any
420
foreign country other than the slaveholding states of the United States of
America.49 Most of those who had supported reopening cast their lot with the
Confederacy, although a hard core of reopeners remained convinced that, in
the words of Leonidas Spratt, the Confederate constitution had diverted slaverys global and historical destiny from its proper course.50
The victory of the United States of America over the Confederate States of
America began the reconstruction of the history of the Civil War as a national
story, one whose temporal and spatial parameters were contained within the
limits of the United States. Filibustering Nicaraguanot to mention Cuba or
Mexico or the rest of Central Americaand reopening the slave trade both
came to seem distractions from the True Course of History: the secession of
the eleven states that became the South by fighting a Civil War in the regions name. But to many of those who did not know the course that events
would takeespecially those in the Lower Mississippi Valley, where Walker
and the reopeners found their deepest and most enduring supporterspro-
slavery imperialism, whether focused on the forcible acquisition of land or that
of labor (or both), represented a powerful way of thinking about space and
time. Their vision was one of pushing time forward by controlling the flow of
people over space: landless white men made masters of a pro-slavery empire in
Nicaragua; uncivilized Africans transformed into instruments of civilization
through free trade in their bodies and the cotton that was extracted from them;
white family and white freedom made sacrosanct in commercial human sacri
fice; a bright-white future pulled from the bloody entrails of the global slave
market, the imperial plantation, and the Atlantic cotton trade. It should perhaps give us a moment of pause that the vision of political economy espoused
by the filibusters and the reopenerswith its foursquare acceptance of the notion that freedom was a quantity to be forcibly extracted from the suffering
bodies of those who entered its economy from the positions of greatest vulnerability, that freedom was a social relation bearing the vicious stamp of
slavery on its underbellyseems to describe our own world better than the
notion to which it was opposed: the idea that freedom is the natural and inevitable condition of mankind.
notes
acknowledgments
index
Notes
Introduction
1. James T. Lloyd, Lloyds Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters
(Cincinnati: James T. Lloyd, 1856), 189191. See also The Explosion of the Anglo-
Norman, Journal of the Franklin Institute, 3rd ser., 21:1 (January, 1851), 5054.
2. Lloyd, Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 193.
3. E.W. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi; or, Goulds History of River Navigation
(St.Louis, 1889), 462, 464465.
4. The image is drawn from Walter Benjamin, Theses on History, in Benjamin,
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books,
1968), 255: Historical materialism wishes to retain the image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man singled out at a moment of danger.
5. Thomas Jefferson used a version of this phrase several times: We shall divert
through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought
worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms
which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into
valuable friends (Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780). We should
have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: &I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire &
self government (Jefferson to James Madison, April27, 1809). I have chosen the second
usage because the preposition for seems to convey a more active sense of the role of imperialism in fostering liberty. The book that began my own journey to the phrase (and
424
Notes to Pages 39
this book) is the brilliant study by Wai-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the
Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also the recent
summary statement in Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: AHistory of the Early Republic,
17891815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
6. Andrew Kennedy, Speech of Mr. Kennedy, of Indiana, on the Oregon Question,
Delivered in the House of Representatives, January10, 1846 (Washington: Union Office,
1846),7.
7. See, generally, Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late
Jacksonian America (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
8. Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles, in Early Western Travels,
17481846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904; orig. pub.
1818), vol.8, 257.
9. Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological
History (New York: Dover, 1993; orig. pub. 1949), 3334; Adam I. Kane, The Western River
Steamboat (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 131132; Paul F. Paskoff,
Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy,
18011860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 29; Gould, Fifty Years
on the Mississippi, 71, 140143; J.S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London:
Fisher and Sons, 1842), vol.1, 314315.
10. An average steamboat ran on 1,000 horsepower; the five-mile canal complex at
Lowell produced about 10,000 horsepower. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 651.
See also J.W. Sprague, Obstruction to the Navigation of Rivers Caused by the Piers of
Rivers, Scientific American 2:1 (1860), 262.
11. The Commercial Growth and Greatness of the West, Hunts Merchants Magazine
17 (1847), 502.
12. Ibid., 501.
13. Buckingham, The Slave States of America, vol.1, 343.
14. This usage follows Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-
Consciousness (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
15. Williamson v. Norton (1852), Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2427, plaintiff s brief
to the Supreme Court, in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.
16. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 218.
17. Quoted ibid., 357.
18. My analysis of the falling rate of profit and the possibilities of spatial and temporal fixes to that rate is derived from David Harvey, Limits to Capital (London: Verso,
2006).
19. See William Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Walter Johnson, On Agency,
Notes to Page 9
425
Journal of Social History 37:1 (Fall 2003), 113124; Walter Johnson, Agency: A Ghost
Story, in Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson, Slaverys Ghost: The Problem of
Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011),
830.
20. My point of departure for much of what follows is the once flourishing but now
sterile field of Southern agricultural history. See Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the
Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929); Lewis Cecil Gray, assisted by Esther Katherine
Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2vols. (Washington,DC: Carnegie Institution, 1933); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage, 1967); John
Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Octagon Books, 1971;
orig. pub. 1958); John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old
Southwest: Mississippi, 17701860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988);
and especially Mart A. Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe: Life, Labor, and Landscape
on the Georgia Coast, 16801920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). The presentday barrenness of this particular field is due in large measure to the combination of dry
indifference (Gray) and alkaline racism (Phillips) that sometimes characterized its practi
tioners views of enslaved people. Important examples suggesting that agricultural his
toryand the history of enslaved people might be more suitably hybridized can be found in
Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: ADesign for Mastery (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Deborah Gray White, Arnt I a Woman?
Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985); Ira Berlin and
Philip D. Morgan, Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); Stephen Stoll, Larding the Lean
Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002);
and Susan Eva ODonovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge,MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007). See also Ari Kelman, ARiver and Its City: The Nature of Landscape
in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
21. Extraregional sources for replanting the oldfield of Southern agricultural history
can be found in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of
New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant:
Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1986);
Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Allen Feldman,
Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged:
Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991); John Bellamy Foster, Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2000); Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science
on the Anglo-American Frontier, 15001676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
426
Notes to Pages 1116
2001); Jason W. Moore, The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology

and the Rise of Capitalism, Theory and Society 32 (2003), 307377; and Patrick Joyce, The
Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003).
22. James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857),
172.
23. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London,
1776), bk.2, ch.5, para.14.
24. Edward Russell, Journal, January31 and February4, 1854, Historic New Orleans
Collection, New Orleans,LA. See, generally, Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of
Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage, 1965).
25. Speech by J.D.B. DeBow, DeBows Review 2:5 (May 1852), 556; Cotton and Its
Prospects, American Cotton Planter 1:8 (August 1853), 227; Railroad Prospects and Prog
ress, DeBows Review 2:5 (May 1852), 504505. See also Excessive Slave Population: The
Remedy, DeBows Review 12:2 (February 1852), 182185. Many of the articles in DeBows
were unsigned.
26. My interpretation of the pro-slavery imperialism of the 1850s amplifies an account
first given by W.E.B. DuBois in his book The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the
United States of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; orig. pub. 1896),
108.
27. On early American imperial interest in Cuba, see Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made
with Blood: The Conspiracy of LaEscalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in
Cuba (Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 183205. On the Narciso Lpez
raid in 1851, see Robert May, Manifest Destinys Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 2035. See also Tom
Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso Lpez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); and Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest
Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1980).
28. For an early effort to open up the boundaries of the conversation in the way I am
trying to do here, see David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 18481861 (New York: Harper
and Row, 1976). Though Potter is in many ways the most internationally minded of the
historians who study the coming of the Civil War, he nevertheless treats the politics of
pro-slavery imperialism in Cuba and Nicaragua as residual forms of an earlier politics of
Manifest Destiny, rather than as emergent visions of pro-slavery futurity. Similarly, he
treats the effort to reopen the trade as a maneuver on the eve of conflicti.e., as being
essentially defined in relation to something that happened afterward, a gesture of prolepsis
that is similarly present in the title of his book.
29. Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, DeBows Review 25:6 (June 1858),
574606; The Late Southern Convention, DeBows Review 27:1 (July 1859), 94102;
Southern Convention at Vicksburg, DeBows Review 27:2 (August 1859), 205220. See
Notes to Pages 1619
427
also Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 18371859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930).
30. On the internal politics of secession and Confederate aftermath, see Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997); and McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
31. Elizabeth Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 17891859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), traces the development of the concept
of disunionfrom a political slur levied against opponents, to a political position in and
of itself.
32. See, for example, the best existing account of the Civil War era: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
which treats pro-slavery globalism in a series of narrative sidebars set alongside the conventionally continental narrative markers: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of
1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, etc.
33. For the perspective offered here, see W.E. Burghardt DuBois, The Suppression of
the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 16381870 (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1965), esp. 188191. See also Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000), 125186. Sinha treats pro-slavery expansionism as a forward-looking (not to
say visionary) movement, although she makes less of its relations to the tensions within
the South than I am attempting to do here.
1. Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana

1. There is a large literature on the untold story of the 1811 revolt. Most recent is
Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of Americas Largest Slave Revolt
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2012). The first book published on the subject was Albert
Thrasher, On to New Orleans: Louisianas Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt (San Francisco: Cypress
Press, 1996). See also Junius P. Rodriguez, Rebellion on the River Road: The Ideology
and Influence of Louisianas German Coast Slave Insurrection of 1811, in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); as well as Junius P. Rodriguez, Ripe for Revolt: Louisiana and the Tradition of Slave Insurrection,
18031865 (Ph.D. diss., Department of History, Auburn University, 1992). Also see Lacy
K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009); and Nathan A. Buman, To Kill Whites: The 1811 Louisiana
Slave Insurrection (Masters thesis, Louisiana State University, 2008).
2. The description of flags and drums is reminiscent of the Stono Rebellion of 1739.
428
Notes to Pages 1921
They were less than exhausted and more than a ragged band of enslaved men, some exhausted but exhilarated from their nights labors, two drummers announcing their progres
sion and a flag bearer at their head. See Peter Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River
Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103.
3. Louisiana Gazette and New Orleans Daily Advertiser, January17, 1811, reprinted in
the Richmond Enquirer, February22, 1811.
4. Letter from Z., Louisiana Gazette, January 17, 1811. Deslondes has often been
identified as a Haitian slave, but appears in the records of his owner, Madame Deslondes,
as having been in Louisiana before 1793, suggesting that he was most likely Creole. He was
a hired driver on the Andry plantation.
5. Letter from Z., Louisiana Gazette, January17, 1811.
6. Ibid.; Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Historical Association, 1963), 212.
7. Letter from Charles Perret to M. Fontaine, Moniteur de la Louisiane, January 17,
1811. A translated version also appears in the primary source compilation Slavery, ed. Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 324326.
8. Letter of Manuel Andry to Governor William C.C. Claiborne, January11, 1811.
Andry also argued, We must make a GREAT EXAMPLE. Reprinted in the primary-
source compilation C.E. Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States, Vol.9: The
Territory of Orleans (Washington,DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940), 915916.
Another description of events can be found in Letter of Wade Hampton to the Secretary of
War, January16, 1811, reprinted in Territorial Papers, Vol.9, 917919.
9. David J. Kastor, The Nations Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 130. One observer wrote that four
convicted slaves were hung for the sake of their heads, which decorate our leveeThey
look like crows sitting on long poles. Kastor addresses the rebellion on pages 127131.
10. Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, January24, 1811, reported that sixty-six slaves had been
killed or executed upriver, seventeen were missing, and sixteen had been conveyed to New
Orleans to be tried there. The city court archive, however, contains the records of (according to my search) twenty-nine slaves in connection with the insurrection. Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public Library.
11. Territory v. Raimond, City Court Case 235, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Theodore, City Court Case 192, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans
Public Library; Territory v. Andr, City Court Case 207, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Jean, City Court Case 187, Louisiana Collection, New
Orleans Public Library.
12. The phrase insignia of the regime is drawn from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain:
The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19.
Notes to Pages 2224
429
There is a rural road in Southampton County, Virginia, called Blackhead Signpost Road to
this day, site of a decapitated slaves head in the aftermath of Nat Turners revolt.
13. Territory v. Caesar, City Court Case 194, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public
Library; Territory v. Jessamin, City Court Case 191, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans
Public Library; Territory v. Hector, City Court Case 195, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Lindor, City Court Case 233, Louisiana Collection, New
Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Louis, City Court Case 190, Louisiana Collection, New
Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Daniel Garret, City Court Case 188, Louisiana Collection, New Orleans Public Library; Territory v. Gilbert, City Court Case 193, Louisiana
Collection, New Orleans Public Library.
14. Quoted in Robert L. Paquette, Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of
Territorial Louisiana, in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Carib
bean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997), 218.
15. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingan
Revolution, rev. 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 4546. Also see the emergent
standard account: Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
16. Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingstone, April 18, 1802, The Thomas Jefferson
Papers, Series1: General Correspondence, 16511827, online at hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj
.mtjbib011277.
17. Sonthonax had already freed slaves in the North Province in August 1793, with de
facto emancipation spreading for the rest of the year. The French National Convention
pronounced abolition across the colonies in February 1794 (although Napoleon reinstated
slavery in 1802).
18. W. E. B. DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States
of America, 16381870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007; orig. pub. 1896), 50;
Henry Adams, A History of the United States during the First Administration of Thomas
Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986; orig. pub. 1899), 311. Also see Michael
Zuckerman, The Power of Blackness: Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution on
St.Domingue, in Zuckerman, Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American
Grain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
19. See Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1992), passim.
20. Jefferson to Madison, April 27, 1809, Jefferson Writings, 12:277, quoted in James E.
Lewis, The Louisiana Purchase: Jeffersons Noble Bargain? (Chapel Hill: Thomas Jefferson
Foundation, 2003), 84.
21. Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 139, has an interesting treat-
430
Notes to Pages 2428
ment of Jeffersons racial ideology. The third chapter (81111) looks at the psychological
effects of the Haitian Revolution.
22. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 164165.
23. Thomas Jefferson to John Lithgow, January4, 1805, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Association of the United States, 19031904), 11:5556.
24. Madison to Lafayette, March20, 1785, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. William
T. Hutchinson et al., 17vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19621977; Char
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 19771991), 8:250251.
25. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, December13, 1814, reprinted in The Papers of
Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser etal., 39microfilm reels (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources, 1986), Reel5.
26. Recent work on the Burr conspiracy includes Buckner F. Melton, Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason (New York: Wiley, 2002); David O. Stewart, American Emperor: Aaron
Burrs Challenge to Jeffersons America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); Joseph
Wheelan, Jeffersons Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004); R.Kent Newmyer, The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics, and
the Character Wars of the New Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For
an older secondary account, see Walter Flavius McCaleb, The Aaron Burr Conspiracy: A
History Largely from Original and Hitherto Unused Sources (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903).
27. Bayou Sara Planter, Louisiana Gazette, January31, 1811. On the Patriot War, see
Robert A. Taylor, Prelude to Manifest Destiny: The United States and West Florida,
18101811, Gulf Coast Historical Review, Spring 1992, 2035; and Andrew McMichael,
The Kemper Rebellion: Filibustering and Resident Anglo-American Loyalty in Spanish
West Florida, Louisiana History 43:2 (2002), 133165; James G. Cusick, The Other War of
1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). See also Gregory A. Waselkov, A Conquering Spirit: Fort
Mims and the Redstick War of 18131814 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006);
Frank L. Owsley, Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands: The Creek War and the Battle of New
Orleans, 18121815 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1981); Claudio Saunt, A New
Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 17331816
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish
Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). For a survey of Spain in North America, see David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
28. See Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and Americas First
Military Victory (New York: Viking, 1999); Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, The Nationalist Ferment: The Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, 17891812 (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 2004); Winston Groom, Patriotic Fire: Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte at the Battle of
Notes to Pages 2931
431
New Orleans (New York: Vintage, 2007); Benton Rain Patterson, The Generals: Andrew
Jackson, Sir Edward Pakenham, and the Road to the Battle of New Orleans (New York: New
York University Press, 2005). The recent work by Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812:
American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2010), exclusively concerns the northern frontier. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 17891815 (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), touches on the battle on pages 695696.
29. Spain received, in return, a declaration that Spanish Texas was thenceforth not to be
considered part of the territory acquired by the United States in 1803, a matter that had
been in dispute from the time of the Louisiana Purchase. This provision of the treaty was
called into questionor, really, ignoredby those who supported the annexation of Texas
to the United States in the 1840s. They referred to the matter of Texas as a matter of re-
annexation, or restoring what they believed the original terms of the Louisiana Purchase
to have been. This movement culminated in the U.S.-Mexico War (18461848).
30. Treaty with the Chickasaw, avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/nt006.asp.
31. Shelby to Andrew Jackson, June 27, 1818, Jackson Papers, Library of Congress,
quoted in Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York: Penguin,
2002), 169.
32. Andrew Jackson, Talk of the President of the United States, Through the secretary of war and General Coffee to the Chickasaw delegation at Franklin, Ten. On the 23rd
August, 1830, Niles Weekly Register, September18, 1830, 68.
33. Amanda Paige, Chickasaw Removal (Ada, OK: Chickasaw Press, 2010), 121. See
also James R. Atkinson, Splendid Land, Splendid People: The Chickasaw Indians to Removal
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).
34. Address of Andrew Jackson to the Chiefs and Warriors of the Choctaw Nation,
October 10, 1820, American State Papers: Indian Affairs (New York: Gales and Seaton,
1834), 235236, quoted in Frederick E. Hoxie, What Was Taney Thinking: American Indian Citizenship in the Era of Dred Scott, Chicago-Kent Law Review (2007), 337.
35. Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848,
ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1875), vol.7, 90. See also Richard White, Its Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 102.
36. Donna L. Akers, Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation, 18301860 (East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004), 91.
37. George W. Harkins, To the American People (December 1831). anpa.ualr.edu/
trailOfTears/letters/1831DecemberGeorgeWHarkinstotheAmericanPeople.htm.
38. See Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep
South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
39. Quoted in Paquette, Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial
Louisiana, 212.
432
Notes to Pages 3133
40. Memorial to Congress by Permanent Committee of the Natchez District, October23, 1797, reprinted in Carter, Territorial Papers of the United States, vol.5, 1011.
41. Everett S. Brown, ed., Documents: The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill for
the Government of Louisiana, 1804, American Historical Review 22:2 (January 1917), 354.
42. On all this, see Rothman, Slave Country.
43. U.S. Census, 1820, 1840, 1860.
44. Thomas Jefferson to St. George Tucker, August 28, 1797, reprinted in Julian P.
Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 29 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 19502011), 519. Jeffersons formulation of a slave revolt as an act of child murder
was rendered even more complicated by the fact that, in his case, he was imagining that
some of his enslaved children would be the vehicles by which he murdered his slaveholding children.
45. See James Dormon, The Persistent Specter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana, Louisiana History 18 (1977), 389402; Junius Rodriguez, Always En Garde: The
Effects of Slave Insurrection upon the Louisiana Mentality, 18111815, Louisiana History
33 (1992), 399416; Alfred N. Hunt, Haitis Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering
Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Edward
Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil
War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2009).
46. Brown, ed., Documents: The Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill, 345.
47. It is indicative of the complexity of that revolutionary moment that it is difficult to
know what to call them. They have often been referred to as refugees, because they had
left Haiti for Cuba during the Haitian Revolution, only to be expelled from Cuba in 1809
when Napoleons invasion of Spain made their supposed Frenchness suspect to that islands colonial government. Refugee, however, seems an inapposite term for (at the very
least) the 3,000 of these travelers who had been legally emancipated in Haiti, but would be
enslaved in Louisiana. Indeed, as Rebecca Scott has recently pointed out, using the word
slaves to describe this group of people overwrites their Haitian emancipation with their
subsequent (re)enslavement in Cuba and Louisiana. Rebecca J. Scott, Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution, Law and History
Review, 29 (November 2011). See also Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New
Orleans: Migrations and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); and
Paul A. LaChance, The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans:
Reception, Integration, and Impact, in The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History: New Orleans and Urban Louisiana, ed. Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr., vol.14, pt.A
(Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2005), 349376.
48. Letter of Claiborne to Madison, July12, 1804, in Official Letter Books of W.C.C.
Claiborne, 18011816, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson: Mississippi State Department of Archives and History, 1917), vol.2, 244246.
49. Rothman, Slave Country, 210.
Notes to Pages 3441
433
50. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, December 13, 1814, in The Papers of Andrew
Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser etal., 39microfilm reels (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1986), Reel5.
51. The word fulfilled is taken from Adam Rothmans Slave Country, specifically the
chapter entitled Fulfilling the Slave Country, 165216.
52. On this point see Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement
and Administration of American Public Lands, 17891837 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1968), 57.
53. State of the Union Address, delivered December4, 1832. Reprinted many places
and a staple of nineteenth-century agricultural journals. See Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States (Washington,DC: Duff Green, 1832), 1617.
54. Gideon Fitz to Commissioner of Public Lands, August16, 1834. E509Correspondence, Letters from Surveyor General of Public Lands South of Tennessee, 18311842,
Records of the General Land Office, National Archives, Washington,DC.
55. Gideon Fitz to Commissioner of Public Lands, August16, 1834. E509Correspondence, Letters from Surveyor General of Public Lands South of Tennessee, 18311842,
Records of the General Land Office, National Archives, Washington,DC.
56. Gideon Fitz to Benjamin Griffin, October11, 1831. E509Correspondence, Letters
from Surveyor General of Public Lands South of Tennessee, 18311842, Records of the
General Land Office, National Archives, Washington,DC.
57. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 58, 9697.
58. Edward Tiffin to Josiah Meigs, October9, 1817, quoted in Rohrbough, The Land
Office Business, 101.
59. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 260261, 258.
60. On surveys and governance, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998).
61. Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times in Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of
Sketches, 7th ed. (New York: D.Appleton, 1854), 83.
62. Ibid., 84.
63. Gideon Fitz to George Graham, July5, 1830, quoted in Rohrbough, The Land Office
Business, 212.
64. Arthur Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic (London, 1851), 105.
65. Levi Woodbury to Commissioner, December1, 1835, quoted in Rohrbough, The
Land Office Business, 218.
66. Letter of Gideon Fitz to Elijah Hayward, January16, 1831, reprinted in House Executive Documents, 24th Congress, 1stSession, vol.5, doc. no. 211, 5254.
67. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business, 93.
68. Ibid., 126, 230.
69. On the history of the domestic slave trade generally, see Frederic Bancroft, Slave-
434
Notes to Pages 4245
Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1931); Michael Tadman, Speculators and
Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Stephen Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert H.
Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
70. The categories are from a circular issued by the Richmond firm of Dickinson
andHill, August25, 1850, in the William A.J. Finney Papers at Duke University, Durham,NC.
71. For family members trading in shares of an intact estate, see bill of sale dated
June28, 1851, Hickman-Bryan Papers, Western Historical Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia. A more common way of abstracting the value from an enslaved persons
body without moving it, and one practiced throughout the period of American slavery,
was mortgage; see Richard H. Kilbourne, Debt, Investment and Slaves: Credit Relations in
East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 18251885 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1995), 5873; Thomas Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 16191860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 122127.
72. On money and the antebellum economy generally, see Bray Hammond, Banks and
Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957); Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969); and
Naomi Lamoreaux, Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Edward
J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Stephen Mihm, A Nation of
Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy
inthe Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
On the South, see Harold Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 18001925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1968); Larry Schweikart, Banking the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987); and Kilbourne, Debt, Investment, and Slaves.
73. For a cotton-boom-era celebration of specie, see William M. Gouge, A History of
Paper Money and Banking in the United States (Philadelphia: T.W. Ustick, 1833).
74. On banknotes (and their failings), see Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters.
75. On questions about the legal negotiability of promissory notes in various state
courts (notably those in Mississippi and Alabama), which were eventually resolved in favor
of negotiability by the United States Supreme Court in Swift v. Tyson (1842), and on the
drama of A, B, C, andD, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law,
Notes to Pages 4549
435
17801860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 212226. On the practice of
note trading in general, see Balleisen, Navigating Failure, 2632.
76. See Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social
Change among the Choctaw, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1988), 1146; Daniel Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy:
The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992); James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaw from
Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
2. The Panic of 1835

1. In 1830 there were 2,169 slaves in Madison County, and by 1835 there were 4,904.
Exactly comparable figures for the white population are not available, but in 1830 there
were 2,781 whites in the county and in 1840 there were 3,986. See Laurence Shore, Making Mississippi Safe for Slavery: The Insurrectionary Panic of 1835, in Class, Conflict, and
Consensus: Antebellum Southern Community Studies, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Robert
C. McMath, Jr. (Westport,CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 100, 122. The events in Madison
County are also considered in Clement Eaton, Freedom of Thought in the Old South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1940), 95117; Davidson Burns McKibben, Negro
Slave Insurrections in Mississippi, 18001865, Journal of Negro History 34:2 (1949), 7394;
Edwin A. Miles, The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835, Journal of Negro His
tory 42:2 (1957), 4860; James Lal Penick, Jr., The Great Western Land Pirate: John A. Murrell in Legend and History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981), 106157; and
Christopher Morris, An Event in Community Organization: The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835, Journal of Social History 22:1 (1988), 98113. Also see the chapter
Insurrectionary Scares in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in
the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). On the insurrection and the
broader climate of fear in the South, see Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery
Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 481504. On the effects of the scare elsewhere in the South, see Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton
Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 18001840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1997), 224237. See also Joshua Rothman, The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of Americas Market Revolution, Journal of American History 95:3 (December 2008), 651677.
2. Thomas Shackelford, ed., Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County, Mississippi,
at Livingston, in July 1835, in Relation to the Trial and Punishment of Several Individuals
Implicated in a Contemplated Insurrection in this State (Jackson, 1836), reprinted in H.R.
Howard, AHistory of Virgil A. Stewart and His Adventure (New York: Harper Brothers,
1836).
3. Shackelford, ed., Proceedings, 223224.
436
Notes to Pages 5057
4. Ibid., 225226.
5. Ibid., 229230.
6. Ibid., 231.
7. On fence laws and grazing rights, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism:
Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 18501890 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 6063. The word skulking is loaded with sinister racial
connotations and was used specifically to describe Indians in colonial America, particularly
with regard to their practice of a stigmatized skulking way of war. See Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians
(New York: Madison Books, 2000); and John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War
Making on the Frontier, 16071814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See
also Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 3971; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philips War and
the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998), 7196.
8. Shackelford, ed., Proceedings, 240241.
9. Ibid., 244245.
10. Ibid., 246248.
11. Ibid., 248252.
12. Ibid., 252255.
13. On the notion of marginal, see Shore, Making Mississippi Safe for Slavery,
96127; for outside of social networks, see Morris, An Event in Community Organiza
tion, 93113. Morriss smart, useful article makes the argument that those who were condemned to death lived outside the immediate neighborhood of those who first accused
them; for example, Cotton, who lived in Livingston, was questioned there and let go before
he was accused at Beaties Bluff in the series of events which led him to the gallows. Id
argue that it was less what they did not know about those whom they accused, than what
they thought they did know, that animated the committees. We need a more supple under
standing of space than that provided by the register of where people had their residence, if
we are to understand how these men first came to the attention of those who eventually put
them to death.
14. This formulation raises the possibility (not fully worked out here) that enslaved
people were co-creators of notions of marginality which defined certain white men as outsiders.
15. There were, of course, a good many white men in Mississippi who apparently preferred the company of their slaves to that of their wives, but those who were slaveholders
had the money (and consequently the space) to make sure that no one saw them sneaking
into the slave quarters.
16. Henry S. Foote, Casket of Reminiscences (Washington, DC, 1874), 253255. Foote
later claimed that he had thought the proceedings to be a sham and had been trying to
save Donovans lifebut that because he was too scared to say so openly, he framed his
Notes to Pages 5764
437
question in a way that would not tip his hand. If this was indeed the case, Foote stayed
scared for quite some time, for in 1836 he was one of the main sponsors of a dinner commemorating the events of the previous year.
17. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 70108; Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano:
American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997); and Walter Johnson, Time and Revolution in African
America: Temporality and the History of Atlantic Slavery, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3:3 (2001), 96; and Walter Johnson, White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery Aboard the Slave Ship Creole, Atlantic Studies 5:2 (August 2008), 237264.
18. Augustus Q. Walton, A History of the Detection, Conviction, and Designs of John A.
Murrell, the Great Western Land Pirate (Athens,TN: George White, 1835), Rare Books and
Manuscripts, New York Public Library.
19. Penick, The Great Western Land Pirate.
20. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, historians are divided about this question.
21. Howard, A History of Virgil A. Stewart.
22. Penick, The Great Western Land Pirate, 26; Walton, A History of the Detection,9.
23. Walton, A History of the Detection, 18. Randolph, which no longer exists, was notorious as a criminal hideout.
24. Walton, A History of the Detection, 3237, 14.
25. Ibid., 37, 18.
26. Ibid., 4344.
27. Ibid., 17.
28. On capitalist accumulation as the circuit Money-Commodity-Money (where the
object of purchasing something is to sell it rather than to use it), see the fourth chapter of
Karl Marxs Capital, vol.1, entitled General Formula for Capital. Stewart compared selling and counterfeiting when he restated Murrells ethics of political economy in the following terms: It is just as honorable for them to gain property by their superior powers as it is
for a long-faced hypocrite to take advantage of the necessities of his fellow beings. Walton, A History of the Detection, 10.
29. Roquet v. Richardson, Case 2252 (1832), 8, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection,
Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO).
30. Ibid., 810.
31. Roquet v. Richardson, in Louisiana Reports (old series), vol.3, 452453.
32. Owen v. Brown, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4927, 13, 3637, 4748, 4950, 52,
68, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO).
33. Harbor v. Steamboat Chieftan, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 5837, 1, 9, 4954;
Reynolds v. Batson, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4291, 93; Hurst v. Wallace, Louisiana
438
Notes to Pages 6471
Supreme Court Case 2402,7; Marciaq v. Clark and H.M. Wright, Louisiana Supreme
Court Case 4645, 2526, 4547. See also Eliza Burk (f.w.c) v. Clark and Lock, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 3111; and Beverly v. Captain Markin and Steamboat Empire, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 6323. All of the above cases are in the Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
34. Quoted in Judith K. Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and
Enslavement in New Orleans, 18461862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2003), 90; see also 9195.
36. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: ANarrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape
of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F.N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991),
4345.
37. Walton, A History of the Detection, 13.
38. The characterization of Murrell as a trickster is from Penick, The Great Western
Land Pirate, 4248.
40. Ibid., 33, 1.
41. On the importance of West Indian Emancipation to the subsequent history of slavery in the United States, see Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The
Caribbean Roots of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
42. Penick, The Great Western Land Pirate, 147149; Howard, The History of Virgil A.
Stewart, 166.
43. On the turbulence of the period and the broader fallout of the insurrection scare,
see David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 18281861: Toward the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 332; John Findlay, People of Chance: Gambling in American
Society, from Jamestown to Las Vegas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6470;
Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York: Routledge, 1999), 2638; Joshua Rothman, The Hazards of the Flush Times: Gambling, Mob Violence, and the Anxieties of Americas Market Revolution, Journal of American History 95:3 (December 2008), 651677.
44. These are all included in Howard, The History of Virgil A. Stewart, 94214.
45. Herbert Quick and Edward Quick, Mississippi Steamboatin: A History of Steam
boating on the Mississippi and Its Tributaries (New York: Henry Holt, 1926), 64. See
alsoMark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Bantam Books, 1988; orig. pub. 1883),
143144.
46. Mrs. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos; or, Travels in the West (London: J.W.
Parker, 1850), 3132.
47. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Kelley,
1968; orig. pub. 1838), vol.2, 187188; Mrs. Houstoun, Hesperos, 49; Mrs. Frances Milton
Notes to Pages 7374
439
Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Dodd and Mead, 1901; orig. pub.
1832), 28.
3. The Steamboat Sublime

1. See Thompson Westcott, The Life of John Fitch, the Inventor of the Steamboat (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857). See also Andrea Sutcliffe, Steam: The Untold Story of Americas
First Great Invention (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Additional recent secondary
sources on steamboats include Robert Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton
Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Carl A. Brasseaux and
Keith P. Fontenot, Steamboats on Louisianas Bayous: A History and Directory (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Thomas C. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael Gillespie, Come Hell or High Water: A Lively History
of Steamboating on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (Stoddard,WI: Heritage Press, 2001);
Adam I. Kane, The Western River Steamboat (College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 2004); Paul F. Paskoff, Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements,
and American Public Policy, 18211860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2007); Jacques D. Bagur, A History of Navigation on Cypress Bayou and the Lakes (Denton:
University of North Texas Press, 2001).
History (New York: Dover Publications, 1993; orig. pub. 1949), 514. See Maurice G. Baxter, The Steamboat Monopoly: Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824 (New York: Knopf, 1972); Thomas
H. Cox, Gibbons v. Ogden, Law, and Society in the Early Republic (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2009); Herbert Alan Johnson, Gibbons v. Ogden: John Marshall, Steamboats, and the
Commerce Clause (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010). See also Ari Kelman, A
River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006).
3. Late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century German philosophy was instrumental in the development of the aesthetics of the sublime, notably Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and Critique of Judgment (1790);
as well as Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818). Also see
G.W.F. Hegels lectures on the aesthetics of fine art, compiled in Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol.1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Aninteresting description of the aesthetics of the sublime in an American context can be
found in Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York: Hill and Wang,
2003), 79125. See also John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the
Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Terry Eagleton, The
Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1990).
440
Notes to Pages 7477
4. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), 449.
5. Edmund Flagg, The Far West; or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains (1838), in Travels in
the Far West, 18361841, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906),
vol.1, 47.
6. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Bantam Books, 1988; orig. pub.
1883),1.
7. Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi; or, The Emigrants and Travellers
Guide to the West (Philadelphia: H.S. Tanner, 1832), 267.
8. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Kelley,
1968; orig. pub. 1838), vol.2, 233, 194 (see also 184); J.S. Buckingham, The Slave States of
America (London: Fisher and Sons, 1842), vol.1, 326, 407.
(St.Louis, 1889), 70, 71 (Ihave transposed the sentences of the quotation about canoes and
causes). See also Mrs. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos; or, Travels in the West (London: J.W. Parker, 1850), 4, 31, 66. See, generally, Wai-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty:
Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and
Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2008).
10. Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 7879; Thomas Barnett, relaying the experience
of Dave Barnett, in Indian Pioneer History Collection, vol. 13, ed. Grant Foreman (Al
exandria, VA: U.S. Works Progress Administration and Alexander Street Press, 2005),
453455.
11. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 430. See also Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, vol.2, 232.
12. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 9; Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 50;
George Armroyd, A Connected View of the Whole Internal Navigation of the United States
(1830), quoted in Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 14.
13. Flagg, The Far West, vol. 1, 64; on time speeding up, see also Arthur Cunynghame,
A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic (London, 1851), 176. See also Hunter, Steamboats
on the Western Rivers, 22, 27.
14. James H. Lanman, American Steam Navigation, Hunts Merchants Magazine and
Commercial Review 4 (1841), quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 27.
15. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 532.
16. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 21; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway
Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),9. If you have not read The Railway Journey, run
dont walkto your library or bookstore, get it, and read it; it is an amazing, brilliant
book. After that, read Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1962; orig. pub. 1934).
Notes to Pages 7881
441
17. Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 48. See also Hunter, Steamboats on the
Western Rivers, 21.
18. St. Louis Republican, May 9, 1844, quoted in Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi,
532.
19. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 541.
20. Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 48, 321.
21. Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 121. See also The Commercial Growth and
Greatness of the West, Hunts Merchants Magazine 17 (New York: Freeman Hunt, 1847),
500: The application of steam power to navigation forms the brightest era in the history
of the country. It is that which has contributed more than any other event or cause to
therapid growth of our population, and the almost miraculous development of our resources.
22. Baptiste Dureau, Les Etats-Unis en 1850: Notes et Souvenirs (Paris, 1899), quoted in
Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 29.
23. Progress of the West, published in May 1827, reprinted in Timothy Flint, Western
Monthly Review, 3vols. (Cincinnati: E.H. Flint, 1828), vol.1, 26. See also Gould, Fifty
Years on the Mississippi, 71: The introduction of the steamboat on the western waters ...
contributed more than any single cause, perhaps more than all other causes which have
grown out of human skill combined, to advance the prosperity of the West. ... The amount
of produce raised for consumption, and for export is great; and the people are therefore not
only able but liberally disposed to purchase foreign products. They do, in fact, live more
freely and purchase more amply than the farmers of any other country.
24. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol. 1, 430.
25. Peirce Lewis calls New Orleans the impossible but inevitable city; see Lewis, New
Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 19. See also Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in
New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Lawrence N. Powell,
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,
2012).
26. Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 279281.
27. Ibid., 264265. See also Dell Upton, The Master Street of the World: The Levee,
in Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, ed. Zeynep elik, Diane Favro, and Richard
Ingersoll, 277288 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
29. Ibid., 266.
30. See Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of New World Society, 17271834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2007); Judith Kelleher Schafer, Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women: Illegal Sex in
Antebellum New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011); Jennifer
Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
442
Notes to Pages 8286
versity Press, 2009); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New
World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Monique Gillory,
Some Enchanted Evening on the Auction Block: The Cultural Legacy of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1999).
31. See Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence
in American Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review 28:1 (Winter 1989), 134.
32. Flagg, The Far West, vol. 1, 64.
33. Mrs. Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Dodd
and Mead, 1901; orig. pub. 1832),8. See also Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America;
or, Sketches of a Tour in the United States and Canada, 18571858 (New York: Harper,
1859),171. On black river workers in particular, see Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi.
34. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 7.
36. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol. 1, 471472. Buckingham, in this passage,
wrote of a landing at night along the Alabama River, not the Mississippi.
37. Along these lines, also see Mrs. Trollopes statement that, along the Mississippi,
the lurid glare of a burning forest was almost constantly visible after sunset, and when the
wind so willed the smoke arising from it floated in heavy vapors overhead. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 30.
38. Houstoun, Hesperos, 91.
39. Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, vol. 2, 205; Houstoun, Hesperos, 66; Lewis,
New Orleans, 175177; Lawrence H. Larsen, New Orleans and the River Trade: Reinterpreting the Role of the Business Community, in The Louisiana Purchase Bicentennial Series in Louisiana History: New Orleans and Urban Louisiana, ed. Samuel C. Shepherd, Jr.,
vol.14, pt. A (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2005), 438451; see also
Thomas Ruys Smith, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (New York:
Continuum, 2011).
40. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 220. New Orleans and Yellow Fever are as inseparably connected as ham and chicken, wrote Hamilton in Men and
Manners in America, vol. 2, 212.
41. George D. Green, Finance and Economic Development in the Old South: Louisiana
Banking, 18041861 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 14.
42. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 331 (see also 352358); Cunynghame, A
Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 220; Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, vol.2,
201216; Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 262268; Charles Lyell, ASecond Visit
to the United States of North America (London: J.Murray, 1849), vol.2, 159164.
43. Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J. H. Furst, 1931);
Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside
Notes to Pages 8690
443
the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Robert H.
Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The
Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Calvin
Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper
South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See also David L. Lightner,
Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to
the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
44. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 23, passim.
45. Richard H. Kilbourne, Jr., Debt, Investment, and Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995).
46. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 216218; Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 10, 2426.
47. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 222225, 255.
48. Ibid., 227228.
49. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 209210; Gould, Fifty Years
on the Mississippi, 324; Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 228229; Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 27.
50. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 2; see also 169. See also Kelman, A River and Its City.
52. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 92.
54. On the Red River Raft, see Carl N. Tyson, The Red River in Southwestern History
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981). See also Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 323330; Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States, vol.2, 171; Buckingham, Slave
States of America, vol.1, 318322. As the historian Paul Paskoff has shown, the issue of
federal funding of river works was one of the defining features of the larger debate over
internal improvements, particularly during the 1840s. What is striking about these debates is that they initially pitted Southern Democratic opponents of federally funded internal improvements against western partisans of the internal waterways: in 1846, both William Yancey of Alabama and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi threatened secession if the
federal government used U.S. Treasury funds to support snag removal on the Western rivers. I fear not the West. ... Let empire take its way there, said Yancey in 1846. By then,
however, Yanceys position was a residual one. The emergent pro-Southern, pro-slavery,
pro-commerce, pro-expansion, pro-steamboat position was closer to the one expressed by
John C. Calhoun in a speech supporting federal funding for the improvement of internal
waterways at the first Southern Commercial Convention in 1845: The invention of Fulton
has ... converted the Mississippi, with all its great tributaries, into an inland sea. ... It is
manifest that it is far beyond the power of individual or separate states to supervise it.
As we will see, the political geography of the Mississippi River was shifting: from an east-
444
Notes to Pages 9093
west axis to one that ran north to south. As far as the proponents of direct federal funding
were concerned, however, the imagined alignment of South and West was a geography of
frustration: no direct federal funding of improvements on the Western rivers was made
between 1844 and 1866.
Much of the work on the lower Mississippi was done under the auspices of the Louisiana Board of Public Works, which was founded in 1833. Partly funded by the federal donation of swampland within the borders of the state (which could then be cleared, drained,
and sold to the credit of the state), the board dredged the river channel, cleared snags,
andbuilt levees along the length of the river. At its height, around 1856, the board had a
yearly budget of close to a half-million dollars a year, employed three snag boats and two
dredge boats, and owned as many as 100 slaves. Additionally, at various points in its his
tory, the board made prison-labor contracts with the state penitentiary (for the labor of
allblack prisoners) and the parish prison in Baton Rouge (for year-long indentures of all
those taken up as suspected runaways). See Paskoff, Troubled Waters.
55. Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002). See also Ari Kelman, Forests and Other River Perils, in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig E. Colten
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 4563; Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural
City: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2005); and David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of
Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006).
57. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 210. See also Ranson v.
Labranche, 16 La. Ann 121. Twain, Life on the Mississippi,1.
58. James Hall, The West: Its Commerce and Navigation (Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1848),
1011.
59. Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 6163. See also Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 6365.
60. Quoted in Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 128.
61. See Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 93.
62. Ibid., 5153, 59, 61, 6364, 9394, 97. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers,
7282.
63. Archer B. Hulbert, The Paths of Inland Commerce (Teddington, UK: Echo Library,
2009; orig. pub. 1920), 73.
64. Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 9093. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 648.
65. See Joan W. Gandy and Thomas H. Gandy, The Mississippi Steamboat Era in Historic Photographs: Natchez to New Orleans, 18701920 (New York: Dover, 1987), 3947.
66. George Fitch, quoted in Frederick Way, Jr., The Log of the Betsy Ann (New York:
Robert McBride, 1933), 26; Steam Engines: Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, Trans-
Notes to Pages 9499
445
mitting, in Obedience to a Resolution of the House, of the 29th of June Last, Information in Relation to Steam Engines,&c. (Washington: Thomas Allen, 1838); Hunter, Steamboats on the
Western Rivers, 121133. Hunter suggests the empirical process by which the changeover to
high-pressure occurred: engineers looking for more power gradually began to disconnect
their condensers and simply run their low-pressure engines hotter and harder. See also
Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 4450, 6871.
67. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 121133. Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 6871.
68. J.V. Merrick, On the Steamboats of the Western Waters of the United States,
Journal of the Franklin Institute 53:5 (May 1852), 344.
69. Kane, The Western River Steamboat, 70. See also Hunter, Steamboats on the Western
Rivers, 264266.
70. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 4755; Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 241242. See also George Byron Merrick, Old Times on the Mississippi: The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot, from 1854 to 1863 (Cleveland: A.H. Clark, 1909).
4. Limits to Capital
1. Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles (1818), in Early Western
Travels, 17481846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1904), vol.8,
257.
2. The Commercial Growth and Greatness of the West, Hunts Merchants Magazine
17 (1847), 502.
3. Ibid., 501.
History (New York: Dover, 1993; orig. pub. 1949), 218.
5. U.S. Senate, Executive Document 42, 32nd Congress, 1st Session, p.114.
6. My analysis of the falling rate of profit, the possibilities of spatial and temporal
fixes to this decline, and the title of this chapter are all derived from David Harvey, Limits to Capital, new ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
7. Quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 307, 310, 354, 363.
8. James Hall, The West: Its Commerce and Navigation (Cincinnati: H.W. Derby, 1848),
135. See also Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi; or, The Emigrants and
Travellers Guide to the West (Philadelphia: H.S. Tanner, 1832), 267.
(St. Louis, 1889), 5253; Arthur Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic
(London, 1851), 173.
10. Beverly v. Captain Markin and Owners of Steamboat Empire, Louisiana Supreme
Court Case 6323, 17, 1920, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO).
446
Notes to Pages 99103
11. Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America (London, 1848),
vol.2, 190191.
12. Mrs. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos; or, Travels in the West (London: J.W.
Parker, 1850), 22.
13. Hall, The West, 135.
14. Lobdell v. Steamboat James Monroe, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3316, 1,
Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long
Library, UNO.
15. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 167, 180; Houstoun, Hes
peros, 1213.
16. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 335. On postal service in the nineteenth
century, see David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in
Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Richard R.
John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System, from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). On steamboats and mail in particular, see
Robert Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 20.
17. Lyell, A Second Visit, vol.2, 156. See also Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New
York: Bantam Books, 1988; orig. pub. 1883), 2024, where he describes days in the river
towns as divided around the arrival and departure of the packets.
18. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 176.
19. Spalding v. Captain Tyler and Steamboat Missouri, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
5628, 3,7,9, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections,
Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
20. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (New York, 1838), vol.2,5.
22. Ibid., 189. Compare that to John Lobdells description of the James Madison: She
had the appearance of an old crazy boat. Lobdell v. Steamboat James Monroe, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 3316,1, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO. See also Hunter, Steamboats on the Western
Rivers, 396399.
23. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 8687. See also Hunter, Steamboats on the Western
Rivers, 405407.
24. St. Louis Republican, May9, 1844, quoted in Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi,
51, 48. See also Great Steamboat Race, Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and Gazette, June11,
1847; The Steamboat Race, Worcester, MA, National Aegis, October 31, 1849; The
Steamboat Race, Cleveland Plain Dealer, August25, 1849; Steamboat Race, Middletown,CT, The Constitution, June9, 1847.
447
27. Fulton (pseud.), What Constitutes an Engineer? Journal of the Franklin Institute 21 (3rd ser.),1 (January 1851), 56.
28. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 31, 174179. See also Baird,
View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 318; Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America
(New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968; orig. pub. 1838), vol.2, 181.
29. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 272; Paul F. Paskoff, Troubled Waters:
Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy, 18011860 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007),1.
30. Houstoun, Hesperos, 2, 2627.
31. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the Western Waters (Cincinnati: James
T. Lloyd, 1856), vvi, 233, 281295. In a couple of cases where the temptation was too
great to resist (e.g., the collision of the Rainbow and the American Eagle, or the burning,
subsequent resurrection, and explosion of the Phoenix), I have recorded the name of a
steamboat listed in the section on minor disasters alongside the names of those treated,
and indexed, in greater detail.
32. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 229230. See also Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi,
431482.
33. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 83, 201 (see also 105); Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 397.
34. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 91, 228.
35. See, generally, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization
of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986).
36. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 213.
37. Ibid., 226229.
38. Ibid., 193, 252 (see also 75, 9091).
39. Ibid., 5758 (see also 61).
40. Ibid., 74.
41. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 368. Exceptions to shippers liability were
made in the case of acts of God and the actions of public enemies.
42. Ibid.
43. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 99, 201, 252, 261.
44. Ibid., 99, 243, 252.
45. Lobdell v. Steamboat James Monroe and Owners, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
3316; Livaudais v. Steamboat America, Case 1754; Morgan v. Fiveash, Case 17002. See
also St.Lue Ricard v. Owners of Steamboat John Linton, Case 4717; Pousange v. Natchez,
Case 6250. All in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
46. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 87, 67, 103 (see also 107, 199, 228).
448
48. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 178. On the explosion of the
Sultana, see Alan Huffman, Sultana: Surviving Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime
Disaster in American History (New York: Collins, 2009); Chester D. Berry, ed., Loss of the
Sultana and Reminiscences of the Survivors (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
2005); Gene Eric Salecker, Disaster on the Mississippi: The Sultana Explosion, April27,
1865 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996).
49. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 122. Cunynghame continued: This reminds me of the story of an Irishman, who heard that a steam-boat upon
which he proposed taking a passage, was anything but safe; having however ascertained
that she was insured, Ah! exclaimed he, sure then she is safe enough! and went on board
with the utmost confidence.
50. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 9697, 102.
51. Charles Mackay, Life and Liberty in America; or, Sketches of a Tour in the United
States and Canada, 18571858 (New York: Harper, 1859), 241.
52. This sentence, as well as this section generally and the chapter as a whole, owe a
great deal to Nan Goodman, Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents
in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
53. Quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 297. See also Cunynghame, A
Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 172; Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 69.
55. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 126127.
56. See Brand v. Towne and Beckwith, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2927, 18, 26;
St.Lue Ricard v. Owners of Steamboat John Linton, Case 4717, 26, 28, 29, 39, 41, 47, 54, 56.
Both in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO.
57. Lyell, A Second Visit, vol. 2, 153154. See also the proposal made by Arthur Cunynghame that pilot boats be stationed at each sandbar on the river. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of
the Great Western Republic, 178179.
59. Lloyds Steamboat Directory, 189, 69, 74, 225.
60. Ibid., 9597, 102, 197.
61. Edmund Flagg, The Far West; or, A Tour Beyond the Mountains (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1838), vol.1, 70. See also R.John Brockman, Twisted Tails, Sunken Ships:
The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Steamboat and Railroad Accident Investigation Reports,
18331879 (Amityville,NY: Baywood, 2005).
62. Brand v. Towne and Beckwith, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2927, 1617; Saun v.
Rown and Beckwith, Case 2832,5. Both in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
63. A prior law had been passed in 1838, but no provision was ever made for its enforcement. See Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 532535; and R.John Brockman, Ex-
449
ploding Steamboats, Senate Debates, and Technical Reports: The Convergences of Technology,
Politics, and Rhetoric in the Steamboat Bill of 1838 (Amityville,NY: Baywood, 2002).
64. U.S. Congress, An Act to Provide for the Better Security of the Lives of Passengers on Board of Vessels Propelled in Whole or in Part by Steam, 32nd Congress, 1st Session, 211.
65. Ibid., 2324.
66. Ibid., 47.
68. Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 176. I have transposed the
two sentences in this quotation.
69. Mrs. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos, 22; Hunter, Steamboats on the Western
Rivers, 253255 (injuries were inevitable), 648, 651. Morgan v. Fiveash, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 1700-2, in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
70. Captain Wilson Daniels, Steamboating on the Ohio and Mississippi before the
Civil War (1915), quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 299.
72. Ibid., 2223. Cabin passengers were entitled to receive food for the duration of the
journey, which meant that running faster lowered the amount the boat owners had to pay
to provision them.
73. Paskoff, Troubled Waters, 155.
74. Hall, The West, 135. See also Joel R. Poinsett, quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the
Western Rivers, 103.
75. Steamboating on Western Waters: Causes of Failure to Become Profitable, in
Gould, Fifty Years on the Mississippi, 580.
76. Hall, The West, 135.
77. Cincinnati Commercial, February4, 1854, quoted in Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 503.
78. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 503. See also Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The
Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 91107.
5. The Runaways River

1. See John Bryant, The Confidence-Man: Melvilles Problem Novel, in John Bryant,
ed., A Companion to Melville Studies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 315350; Peter J.
Bellis, Melville s The Confidence-Man: An Uncharitable Interpretation, American Literature 59 (December 1987), 548569; Helen P. Trimpi, Melvilles Confidence Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Hamden,CT: Archon Books, 1987); Gary Lindberg, The Confi
dence-Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 347; Susan
450
Kuhlman, Knave, Fool, Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century

American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 38, 104129;
Gustaaf Van Cromphout, The Confidence-Man and the Problem of Others, Studies in
American Fiction 21 (Spring 1993), 3750.
2. On character, trust, and transactions, see Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003); Sarah M.S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Late Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 149178; Stephen Mihm, A Nation of
Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge,MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009).
History (New York: Dover, 1993; orig. pub. 1949), 391, 403, 390, 417. Hunters description
of the passengers aboard the boat occurs in two different sections of his book, which I have
brought together. Mrs. Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New
York: Dodd, Mead, 1901; orig. pub. 1832), 18.
4. Mrs. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos; or, Travels in the West (London, 1850),
19, 2526, 4344. See also J.S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London: Fisher
and Sons, 1842), vol.1, 396; Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travels (New York:
Saunders and Otley, sold by Harper and Brothers, 1838), vol.2,7.
5. Houstoun, Hesperos, 19, 32, 33, 35.
6. Ibid., 19, 26; Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travels, vol.2,9. Stevenson is quoted
in Adam I. Kane, The Western River Steamboat (College Station: Texas A&M University
Press, 2004), 67; Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi; or, The Emigrants and
Travellers Guide to the West (Philadelphia: H.S. Tanner, 1832), 326.
8. Arthur Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic (London, 1851), 188;
Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968;
orig. pub. 1838), vol.2, 466. See Patricia Cline Cohen, Safety and Danger: Women on
American Public Transportation, 17501850, in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and
Private in Womens History, ed. Dorothy O. Helley and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992); and Patricia Cline Cohen, Women at Large: Travel in Antebellum America, History Today 44 (December 1994).
10. Ibid., 12.
11. George H. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi: The Best Gambling Book
Ever Published in America (Cincinnati: Devol and Haines, 1887), 38, 46, 5657, 59, 62, 75,
82. See also S.W. Erdnase, Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table: A Treatise on the
Science and Art of Manipulating Cards (Chicago: F. J. Crake, 1902); and Thomas Ruys
Smith, ed., Blacklegs, Cardsharps, and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi Gambling Stories (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010). The most famous card
451
manipulator of the period was a Frenchman named Jean-Eugne Robert-Houdin, a magician who wrote multiple books on card sharping. If the name looks familiar, its because
Harry Houdini (n Erik Weisz) took the name as an homage to Houdin. Houdins famous
book on card sharping, LArt de gagner tous les jeux: Tricheries des Grecs dvoiles (Paris:
Librairie Nouvelle, 1861). The book soon appeared in both English and Spanish translations, as The Card Sharper Detected and Exposed (London: Chapman and Hall, 1863) and
Secretos de los garitos: Arte de ganar todos los juegos (Valencia: P.Aguilar, 1879). For other
nineteenth-century literature on the subject, see John Nevil Maskelyne, Sharps and Flats: A
Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating at Games of Chance and Skill (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1894); J.H. Green, Gamblers Tricks with Cards Exposed and Explained
(New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1859); R.Kunard, The Book of Card Tricks, for Drawing-
Room and Stage Entertainments: With an Exposure of Tricks as Practised by Cardsharpers and
Swindlers (New York: Scribners, 1888); Gerrit M. Evans, How Gamblers Win; or, The Secrets of Advantage Playing Exposed (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1868). As a cottage
industry, publishing books about cheats dates back almost as far as the printing press. For
example, see Theophilus Lucas, The Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures
of the Most Famous Gamesters and Celebrated Sharpers (London: Jonas Brown, 1714); Gilbert Walker, Mihil Mumchance: His Discouerie of the Art of Cheating in False Dyce Play, and
Other Vnlawfull Games with a Discourse of the Figging Craft (London: John Danter, 1597).
For a more recent take on the subject, see Penn Gillette and Mickey D. Lynn, How to Cheat
Your Friends at Poker: The Wisdom of Dickie Richard (New York: St.Martins Press, 2005);
and Alan Zola Kronzek, Fifty-Two Ways to Cheat at Poker: How to Spot Them, Foil Them,
and Defend Yourself (New York: Penguin, 2008).
13. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler, 7981; Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi,
325.
14. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler, passim; Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western
Republic, 205. See also Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America
(London, 1848), vol.2, 223224.
15. It is interesting, in this connection, that Devols book concluded with an invocation
of Thomas Hobbes. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler, 296.
16. Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, vol.2, 176. See also Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 326; Devol, Forty Years a Gambler, passim.
18. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 449; Houstoun, Hesperos, 64. See also
Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 206.
19. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 350351.
20. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler, 35, 5253, 59, 66, 76, 78.
21. Ibid., 294, 296.
22. Ibid., 295.
452
23. Houstoun, Hesperos, 154164, 92; Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 399
404; Cunynghame, A Glimpse of the Great Western Republic, 144145, 192194; Lyell, A
Second Visit, vol.2, 160, 174.
24. Buckingham, Slave States of America, vol.1, 480.
25. Lyell, A Second Visit, vol.2, 217.
27. Lyell, A Second Visit, vol.2, 160. Historians have come to regard the idea of the
social construction of race as something of a truism. What makes these accounts in particular stand out is that they happened while people were eating, at a moment in which the
idea of the separation of one body from the rest of the world was rendered incoherent by
the passage of food into the mouth. It is perhaps for this reason that mealtimes are so dense
with fears of racial contamination, and consequent regulation.
28. Williamson v. Norton, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2427, testimony of Rufus
Blanchard, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl
K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO).
29. Ibid., testimony of Lyman Cole, William B. Phillips, and Charles Deming.
30. Ibid., testimony of Rufus Blanchard.
31. Ibid., testimony of Alexander Martin.
32. Ibid., testimony of George Duval.
33. Ibid., testimony of George Duval, judgment of the Supreme Court.
34. Ibid., testimony of Charles Deming, William Phillips, plaintiff s brief to the
Supreme Court.
35. Spalding v. Captain Tyler, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 5628, testimony of
Thomas Labaune and Daniel Beasly, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives
and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
36. Ibid., testimony of Stephen Herrill.
37. Ibid., testimony of Andrew Murphy.
38. Ibid., testimony of Thomas Labaune and Stephen Herrill.
39. Ibid., testimony of Daniel Beasly.
40. Williamson v. Norton, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2427, plaintiff s brief to the
Supreme Court, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
41. Thomas C. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the
Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10.
43. Quoted ibid., 447.
44. Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1970); Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 18201860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1972); and, especially, Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi,
453
121, passim. See also Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground:
Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
45. Daret v. Gray, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4681, plaintiff s brief to the Supreme
Court, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO.
46. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi, 121.
47. Daret v. Gray, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4681, testimony of Captain M.
Wilder, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO.
48. Emmerling v. Beebe, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3642, testimony of John Eaton
and Thomas Boyles, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
49. On free papers, see Rebecca J. Scott, Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-enslavement
in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution, Law and History Review 29 (November 2011).
50. Emmerling v. Beebe, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3642, testimony of John Eaton,
Library, UNO.
51. Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4619, testimony of John Eaton, Supreme Court of
Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
52. Emmerling v. Beebe, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3642, testimony of John Eaton,
Library, UNO.
53. Marciaq v. Clark, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4645, testimony of M.H. Waters,
Library, UNO.
54. Strawbridge v. Turner and Woodruff, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2803, testimony
of George Swaney; and Goldenbow v. Wright, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3108, decision of the Supreme Court. Both from Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives
55. Buel v. New York and Captain Burge, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3689, testimony of James M. Pedes, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
56. McMaster v. Beckwith, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2017, testimony of Solomon
Lynethart (f.m.c) and James W. Behar, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives
57. Daret v. Gray, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4681, testimony of Captain M.
Wilder, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO. See also Lyell, A Second Visit, vol.2, 267; Martineau, Retrospect of
Western Travels, vol.2,6; Spalding v. Captain Tyler, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 5628,
454
testimony of Langdon Logan, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
58. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American
Slave: Written by Himself (1845), in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New
York: Harper and Row, 1969), 149150.
59. John Parker, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave
and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 36, 40.
60. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave: Written by Himself (1847), in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper
and Row, 1969), 216.
61. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 53.
62. Parker, His Promised Land, 39.
63. Marciaq v. Clark, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4645, testimony of M.H. Waters;
Strawbridge v. Turner and Woodruff, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2803, testimony of
George Swaney; Goldenbow v. Wright, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3108, decision of
the Supreme Court. All in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
64. Parker, His Promised Land, 36, 38.
65. Captain J.C. Swon to James Lusk, September11, 1847, in Lusk v. Swon, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 2852, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO. On this topic generally, see Buchanan, Black Life
on the Mississippi.
66. Daret v. Gray, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4681, plaintiff s brief to the Supreme
Court, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO.
67. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1213, 130131. See also Judith K. Schafer,
Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 18461862
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
68. P.H. Harbor v. Steamboat Chieftan, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 5827, Act of
Sale dated January3, 1844, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special
69. Daret v. Gray, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4681, testimony of Dr.Martin; Spalding v. Captain Tyler, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 5628, Defendants response and testimony of G.S. Chouteau; McMaster v. Beckwith, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2017, testimony of Solomon Lynethart (f.m.c) and James W. Behar. See also Marciaq v. Clark,
Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4645; Emmerling v. Beebe, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
3642; Buel v. New York and Captain Burge, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3689. All in
455
Library, UNO.
70. Ariela Gross, Like Master, Like Man: Constructing Whiteness through the Commercial Law of Slavery, 18001861, in Symposium: Bondage, Freedom, and the Constitution, Cardozo Law Review, 18:2 (1996).
6. Dominion
Although this is a book about the Mississippi Valley, I have relied on the first-person
narratives of people who were enslaved elsewhere in the United States to tell some aspects
of the story. Where there were substantial differences (in the case of cotton culture versus
sugar culture, for example, or the distance to a nonslaveholding state from Louisiana when
compared with the distance to Kentucky), of course, I have interpreted the origin of the
sources very strictly. But in the case of the similarities in the condition of enslavement
(hunger, labor, sexual vulnerability, etc.) and between the enslaved spaces of the South
(the fields, the forests, and the interior spaces of slaveholding households), I have been
guided by a notion of the geography of slavery that is separate from, indeed prior to, the
state-by-state geography of slaveholding rule.
2. John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Octagon
Books, 1971; orig. pub. 1958), 3335; John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton
Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 17701860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 1213; J.A. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual: Being a Compilation
of Facts from the Best Authorities on the Culture of Cotton (New York: C.M. Saxton, 1857),
95. On the history of cotton more generally, see C.Wayne Smith and J.Tom Cothren,
eds., Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production (New York: J.Wiley, 1999); Joseph Bardwell, Cotton Culture (New York: Orange Judd, 1868); H.B. Brown, Cotton: His
tory, Species, Morphology, Breeding, Culture, Diseases, Marketing, and Uses (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1927); Charles William Burkett and Clarence Hamilton Poe, Cotton: Its Culture, Marketing, Manufacture, and the Problems of the Cotton World (New York: Doubleday,
1906); L.C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington,DC: Carnegie Institute, 1933).
3. For a more thorough discussion of the significance of improved cotton seed, as well
as a compendium of additional strainsDean, Silk (also known as McBride), 100Seed,
Sugar-Loaf, Cluster, Banana, Boyds Prolific, Jethro, Lintopia, Diamond, Original Stock,
8Locks of the Small Diamond, Belle Creole, Sub Ingri, Santa Maria, and so onalong
with their various advantages, see M. W. Phillips, The Different Varieties of Cotton
Seed, American Cotton Planter 3:6 (June 1855), 184185. Hereafter cited as ACP.
456
4. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 103117, 181, quotation on 105.

5. Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 1213.
6. Ibid., 12 (quotation), 85.
7. On pickability see Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 105, 108, 124, passim.
8. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (Detroit: Negro
University Press, 1969; orig. pub. 1859), 68; Juriah Harris, What Constitutes Unsoundness
in the Negro, Savannah Journal of Medicine 2 (1858), 220; Stackhouse v. Kendall, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 1851, 7La.Ann. 670 (1851), testimony of William S. Clark, A.Settle,
H.Stackhouse, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO); Banks v. Botts, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2905, 10La.Ann. 42
(1836), testimony of Oscar Kibble and David B. Morgan, ibid.
9. Anonymous, The American Cotton Planter, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 20; James
M. Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, ACP 1:7 (July 1853), 203;
Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 1984; orig. pub. 1860), 417, 498; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 131132; Steven
Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2002), 103; W.G.G. to Henry Marston, February26, 1850, Henry Marston
Papers/Letterbook, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. See also An Overseer, Plantation Management, ACP 2:5 (May
1854), 151; and An Overseer, Statement of Crop and Manuring, ACP 3:7 (July 1855),
216.
10. On measuring the fertility of the soil, see Anonymous, Cotton: Its Improved and
True Culture, ACP 1:2 (February 1853), 52; S.,Policy of the Planting States, ACP 1:5
(May 1853), 152; Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 1516, 36, 76; Stoll, Larding the Lean
Earth, 133; on ratings by hands, see Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to
Freedom (Milwaukee: Southside Printing, 1897), 40; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 9, 186,
431; James Henry Hammond, Report of the Committee of the Barnwell Agricultural Society, on the Culture of Cotton, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 26; Moore, The
Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 127; Steven F. Miller, Plantation
Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The Alabama Mississippi Black
Belt, 18151840, in Cultivation and Culture, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Char
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 158.
11. John Parker, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave
and Conductor on the Underground Railroad, ed. Stuart Seely Sprague (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1996), 30; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 116; Miller, Plantation Labor Organi
zation and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier, 158; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 75; Hughes,
Thirty Years a Slave, 3637; J.W. Longuen, The Rev. J.W. Longuen, as a Slave, and as a
Freeman: ANarrative of Real Life (New York: Negro University Press, 1968; orig. pub.
1859), 8182. See also John Hebron Moore, Andrew Brown and Cypress Lumbering in the Old
Southwest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967).
457
12. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 69, 116; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 183; Hughes,
Thirty Years a Slave, 59; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 150; Anonymous, Bagasse for
Fuel in the Manufacture of Sugar, DeBows Review 8:4 (April 1850), 401402. On wood in
the Mississippi economy, see Moore, Andrew Brown and Cypress Lumbering in the Old South.
On the era of wood (and water) in human history (at least among humans in the West), see
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 107150.
13. Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-west, by a Yankee (New York: Harper, 1835),
vol. 2, 86; Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (New York: Little,
Brown, 1963), 63, 10; Ari Kelman, ARiver and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New
Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 158.
14. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United
States of America, in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford
Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 178.
15. Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 139; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 17, 22; T.J. Sumner,
Analyses of the Cotton Plant and Seed, ACP 1:3 (March 1853), 71.
16. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 29.
17. Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, 201; R.S. Hardwick,
Hill-Side Ditching, No.1, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 1418; R.S. Hardwick, Hill-Side
Ditching, No.2, ACP 1:2 (February 1853), 4145; Anonymous, Cotton: Its Improved
Culture, No.2, ACP 1:4 (April 1853), 116; Daniel Woffard, Horizontal Culture, ACP
4:5 (May 1856), 210214. See also N.B. Cloud, System and Rotation in Cotton Culture,
in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 79; Moore, Agriculture in Antebellum Mississippi,
44; Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 16.
18. A.W. Dillard, Thoughts on the Culture of Cotton, ACP 2:5 (May 1854), 143.
19. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 14, 24, 3435, 54; Anonymous, Planting and
Cultivating Cotton, ACP 1:8 (August 1853), 235.
20. Anonymous, Work for the Month, ACP 3:4 (April 1855), 114.
21. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 1618, 2526; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave,
123124; Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol.2, 701702;
Moore, Agriculture in Antebellum Mississippi, vol.2, 43; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton
Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 38.
22. Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, 204; Ball, Fifty Years in
Chains,5; Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol.2, 702.
23. Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, 204; Turner, The Cotton
Planters Manual, 26.
24. Laurence Kotlikoff, The Structure of Slave Prices in New Orleans, 18041862,
Economic Inquiry 17 (1979), 496517; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters,
Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 25
31; John Knight to William Beall, January27, 1844, John Knight Papers, Records of Ante-
458
bellum Southern Plantations on Microfilm, ed. Kenneth M. Stampp, Perkins Library, Duke
University (hereafter cited as RASP). See also Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the
Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 138144.
25. Dr. John Stainback Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes, ACP 4:12
(December 1856), 559560.
26. William Hamilton to Kitty Hamilton, November27, 1856, William Hamilton Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University; William Connor to Lemuel Connor, October23, 1849, Lemuel Connor Papers, Lower
Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, LSU; Folse v. Kitteridge, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 6580, 15La.Ann. 222 (1860), testimony of F.A. Williamson, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO; John Knight to William Beall, February7, 1844, John Knight Papers, RASP.
See also Samuel Cartwright, The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,
Southern Medical Reports 2 (1850), 427; and Samuel Cartwright, Report on the Diseases
and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race, New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7
(1851), 697. See also Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 358.
27. Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes, ACP 4:12 (December 1856),
558.
28. Phillip Thomas to William Finney, January24, 1859, William A.J. Finney Papers,
RASP; White v. Slatter, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 943, 5La.Ann. 27 (1849), testimony of James Blakeny, Francis H. Jump, and Hope H. Slatter, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO; Olmsted,
The Cotton Kingdom, 184. See also Johnson, Soul by Soul, 150155.
29. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 37; Susan E. ODonovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton
South (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3437.
30. Hardwick, Hill-Side Ditching, No.1, 16; Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the
South, PartI (Salem,MA: Salem Press, 1879), 25; J.D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D.
Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky, Containing an Account of His Three Escapes in 1839,
1846, and 1848 (Huddersfield,UK, 1864),5; Peter Bruner, ASlaves Adventures toward Freedom, Not Fiction, but the True Story of a Struggle (Oxford,OH, n.d.), 14; Hughes, Thirty
Years a Slave, 31, 2223; William Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a
Faithful Account of His Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst a Slave in the South (Cincinnati, 1846), 23; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: ANarrative of the Life, Sufferings, and
Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F.N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia,
1991), 21.
31. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 45; Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 30, 14, 26; Hardwick, Hill-Side Ditching, No.1, 16; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 184. See also Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, 203. See also Anonymous, Work
for the Month, ACP 3:9 (September 1855), 276.
32. W. Hustace Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market (New York: D.Appleton, 1927),
459
63; T. B. Thorpe, Cotton and Its Cultivation, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, 8:45
(February 1854), quoted in Stuart Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 17901860: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 171
172.
33. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 126, 134135. See also Kate E.R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife
Vinaafter Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse: William T. Hamilton, 1856), 77 (cotton picking as diligence).
34. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 2633; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 125126.
35. Slave narratives are full of detailed descriptions of the labor process. See, e.g.,
Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 7778, 102103; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia,
14, 2326, 43, 56, 62, 109110, 143, 145147, 149, 151152, 160161; Northup, Twelve Years
a Slave, 69, 123126, 134140; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 75, 89, 96; William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green (Formerly a Slave) (Springfield,MA, 1853),8;
Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 15. See also, generally, many issues of the American Cotton Planter; and J.A. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual.
36. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 159, Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 215; Hughes, Thirty
Years a Slave, 70, 3334. Hughes continued, emphasizing his knowledge of both material
and means: Wagons, plows, harrows, grubbing hoes, hames, collars, baskets, bridle bits
and hoe handles were all made on the farm from material which it produced, except iron.
The timber used in such implements was generally white or red oak, and was cut and thoroughly seasoned long before it was needed. ... Horse collars were made from corn husks
and from poplar bark which was stripped from the tree, in the spring, when the sap was
upand it was soft and pliable, and separated into narrow strips and plaited together. ...
The baskets were made from oak timber, grown in the home forests and prepared by the
slaves. See also Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, 24, 29, 38; Isaac Mason, Life of
Isaac Mason as a Slave (Worcester,MA, 1893), 21; Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses
Grandy, 160; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 24.
The reader who tracks these citations will find that they outline an unwritten history of
slaves attitudes to work. They are full of layered and disorienting contradictions: images
of the pride associated with free labor, used to describe the experience of slavery and
surely intended on some level to reassure a white readership that emancipated slaves would
keep working; images which reinforce dominant notions of race, skill, and exploitation;
images of the slaves trying to improve their material livesclothing and food, especially
through their labor, and even judging their labor by the standard of provision; images
of the pride that these male slaves took in being placed in positions of authority over other
men; images of pride in doing slave work, used by men who on other occasions raised their
hands against their masters and faced death in order to resist and escape.
37. The argument is a bit eclectically shaped in Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts:
Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 80
460
119; Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Prince
ton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp.4796.
38. M.W. Phillips, Cotton Seed, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 102; Moore,
Agriculture in Antebellum Mississippi, 153; James Henry Hammond, Governor Hammonds Report, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 26. See also Turner, The Cotton
Planters Manual, 135136; Hardwick, Hill-Side Ditching, No.1, 17.
39. Ingraham, The South-west: By a Yankee, vol.2, 249; Chambers, On the Treatment
and Cultivation of Cotton, 203. A further example of synecdochic dismemberment can
be seen in a passage where G.D.S., a contributor to American Cotton Planter (ACP), discusses the implementation of an experiment in manuring: In early December, I started
four ploughs, two large ones drawn by oxen, to turn over the sod, and two subsoilers,
(manufactured by Ruggles, Nourse and Mason, after the style of the Deanston plough,)
drawn by mules, and to follow in the furrow made by the turning ploughs. Here the writer
sees fit to mention both farm animals and brands of equipment, rather than the actual human laborers performing the task. The only time G.D.S. mentions these individuals is
when he relays the frustrations of his overseer, saying, The overseer complained that the
hands and teams were wanted elsewhere. G.D.S., Fogeism in Farming: An Experiment
in Subsoiling, ACP 2:4 (April 1854), 116117.
40. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995; orig. pub. 1975), especially his notion of
docile bodies.
41. R. S. Hardwick, Hill-Side Ditching, No. 1, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 16; Hardwick, Hill-Side Ditching, No. 2, ACP 1:2 (February 1853), 43; Olmsted, The Cotton
Kingdom, 184 (see also 370).
42. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 88.
43. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 172 (see also 196, 222); Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 61
(see also 141). See also Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest,
7782; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 50.
44. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 184.
45. Ibid., 162; Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 10; R.D. Powell,Sr., to General
J.H. Cooke, August14, 1857, in Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in
North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 255. See also Stroyer, Sketches
of My Life in the South, 23.
46. Willie Lee Rose, ed., A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976), 254.
47. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 135136; Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses
Grandy, 160; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 2728. See also Green, Narrative of the Life of
J.D. Green, 1011.
48. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 27, 30; Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William
461
Green, 13; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 41, 86; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and
Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), in Puttin on
Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 65.
49. Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 25; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 9697.
See also Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 49.
50. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 135 (see also 198); Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 35,
37; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 99 (see also 97); William Wells Brown, Narrative of
William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), in Puttin on Ole
Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 181 (see also 201); Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 455. See also Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 70; Leonard Black, The
Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery (New Bedford,MA: Benjamin
Lindsey, 1847), 20; see also A.K. Farrar to H.W. Drake, September5, 1857, Alexander
Farrar Papers, folder71, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University (Mr.McAllin was standing there by a window looking out toward
the quarter listening to a noise there occasioned by Skinners whipping some Negroes).
On sounds and slavery, see Mark Michael Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Shane White and Graham
White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discover African American History through Songs, Sermons,
and Speech (New York: Beacon Press, 2005).
51. For slaves memories of owners who expressed satisfaction at hearing the sounds of
slaves being beaten, see Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 179; and Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 121.
52. See, e.g., Alan Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Polit
ical Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
53. Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes, ACP 4:6 (June 1856), 270.
54. Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 122; Hughes, Thirty
Years a Slave, 65 (see also 40, 75); Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 161
162. See also Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 15.
55. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 143, 145, 146147, 151, 160, 149 (I have transposed the
clauses in the quotations about pricked fingers and chronic stooping). See also Northup,
Twelve Years a Slave, 223 (see also 171); Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black,9;
Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, 8. See also Ball, Fifty Years in
Chains, 15; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 23.
56. Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, 67, 13; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason,
29; Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 2223 (see also13); Longuen, The Rev.
J.W. Longuen, as a Slave, and as a Freeman, 96 (see also 4647); Brown, Slave Life inGeorgia, 152; Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, in
Andrews, ed., North Carolina Slave Narratives, 57. See also Grandy, Narrative of the Life
of Moses Grandy, 161162; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 310, 383; Stroyer, Sketches of
My Life in the South, 17; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 65.
462
57. My intellectual engagement here is with Elaine Scarrys brilliant book The Body in
Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), in which the use of everyday objects in torture is analyzed as an aspect of the unmaking of the world, the process by which the victim of torture is separated from all
meaningful prior relations and associations through pain. For Scarry, work is an aspect
by which the unmade world might be remade: it is the antithesis of torture, the occasion for
the (re)assertion of the dominions of humanity over the material world. The examples in
this paragraph (and in the history of slavery and labor generally) suggest to me that the
sorts of hierarchical exploitation and disciplinary violence which have always attended
work render Scarrys opposition of work to torture problematic in the extreme. This
was all pointed out to me by Dawn Peterson, then a graduate student in the American Studies Program at New York University.
58. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 25; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 17; Roper,
A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, 46, 44, 57; Pickard, The
Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 358360; Andrew Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew
Jackson of Kentucky (Syracuse: Daily and Weekly Star Office, 1847), 1920; Simon v. State,
Mississippi Supreme Court Case 8900, 37 Miss. 288 (1858), testimony of Warren Ellis,
George Hartley, Benjamin King, and Henry Hartley, Mississippi Department of Archives
and History. See also Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 79.
7. The Empire of the White Mans Will

1. John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest:
Mississippi, 17701860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 146147;
Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (1859; Detroit: Negro
University Press, 1969), 208, 215 (quotation); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed.
Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968),
130131. See also Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (Worcester,MA, 1893), 24;
Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas
H. Jones, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);
and Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United
States of America, in Andrews, ed., North Carolina Slave Narratives, 48, 178.
2. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of
John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F.N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991), 108;
John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (1958; New York: Octagon
Books, 1971), 56, 109110; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 22 (quotation); L.C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860
(Washington,DC: Carnegie Institute, 1933), vol.2, 811816; Frederick Law Olmsted, The
Cotton Kingdom, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (1860; New York: Random House, 1984), 440;
463
J.A. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual: Being a Compilation of Facts from the Best Authorities on the Culture of Cotton (New York: C.M. Saxton, 1857), 76; Anonymous, Salt as
Manure, American Cotton Planter 1:2 (February 1853), 5455 (hereafter cited as ACP),
quoted in Guy Stevens Callender, The Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises of
the States in Relation to the Growth of Corporations, in Cotton and the Growth of the
American Economy, 17901860: Sources and Readings, ed. Stuart Bruchey (Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1967), 96. David Christy, Cotton Is King; or, Slavery in the Light of Political
Economy, in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliot (Augusta,GA:
Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860), 126127. See also James Henry Hammond, quoted
in Richard Royal Russell, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 18401862, University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 11:1 (1923), 36: Immense sums ... are annually drawn from us in exchange for mules, horses, cattle, hogs sheep, and even poultry.
For a full accounting of the foodstuffs (corn, pork, flour, potatoes) imported by one Louisiana plantation, see Byre, Vance & Co. v. Grayson, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 625,
15Ogden (La.) 457 (1860), 25, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO). For an argument minimizing
the dependence of Lower-Mississippi cotton plantations on food imported from the West
(though not necessarily on food imported from regions of the South outside the cotton
belt), see Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum
Economy (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 275288.
3. Quoted in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 148; Ball,
Fifty Years in Chains,2.
4. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 134 (referring to the South Carolina Low
Country).
6. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 127; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 20, 188 (penultimate
quotation, referring to arrival in South Carolina); Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures
and Escapes of Moses Roper, 58; Kate E.R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed:
Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife Vina after Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse,NY: William T. Hamilton, 1856), 119; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 427;
Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive from Slavery (New
Bedford,MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1847),8; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 14. Turner, The
Cotton Planters Manual, 134 (referring to the South Carolina Low Country).
7. Some rudimentary caloric calculations based on typical rations: three and a half
pounds of bacon (approximately 2,100 calories per pound of cured bacon 3.5 pounds)
represents about 7,350 calories if consumed whole, while a peck (measuring 8 quarts, or 32
cups) of cornmeal (around 450 calories per cup) represents just over 14,000 calories, again
under the assumption that it was comestible in its entirety. All told, were looking at about
21,350 calories per week, which is just over 3,000 calories per day. This would seem fairly
generous at first glance, given modern dietary guidelines, but looking a bit deeper at ex-
464
pected caloric output strongly suggests the exact opposite. An average-sized man in his
twenties requires about 1,900 calories per day simply to cover basic metabolic functions.
Heavy manual labor consumes 250 to 350 calories per hour above basal consumption; so if
we assume an average of 300 calories per hour (probably a low estimate, considering labor
rates under threat of the lash), the supplied diet essentially was enough to cover about four
hours of heavy manual labor before the individual would go into caloric deficit. If we assume the enslaved man in question worked a ten-hour day, he would finish the workday almost 2,000 calories in debt, let alone whatever caloric expenditures were necessitated by
other activities such as raising children, cleaning, dancing, and so on.
Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 109115, argue that this
allotment of corn and pork was heavily supplemented by other produce and estimate that
the average slave diet provided 4,185 calories daily. Even if we assume that slaves diets
were supplemented at this level, an active man working long days would still almost inevitably finish the day nearly 1,000 calories to the negative, even on the basis of my conser
vative numbers: 1,900 basal rate+10 hours (at 300 calories/hour)=4,900 calories expended. To reach equilibrium, this hypothetical enslaved man would have to consume 4,185
calories, do less than eight hours of manual labor daily, and expend no additional calories
above basal metabolic rate for the remainder of the day.
These are very rudimentary calculations, but the implications seem fairly clear: slaves
had considerable dietary deficiencies from a caloric standpoint, to say nothing of the fact
that the overwhelming number of calories supplied by bacon (up to 90 percent) come from
fat. No matter how you parse or change the numbers, the sheer scale of the daily deficit is
so large that it is almost impossible to imagine a scenario in which most field hands did not
suffer from some level of malnutrition. I am grateful to Andrew Baker for working all of
this through for me. For more on malnutrition in general, see the chapter Malnutrition,
Ecological Risks, and Slave Mortality, in Wilma A. Dunaway, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Kenneth
F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), also addresses the subject of malnutrition, with regard to Caribbean slaves.
8. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 21; Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventure of
Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1847), in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed.
Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 115, 119; James Burn Wallace, Diary (1836), 69, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana
State University.
9. Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom (Milwaukee: Southside Printing, 1897), 47; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 164; Turner, The Cotton Planters
Manual, 134; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 190 (see also 254).
10. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 131.
11. Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America
465
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 151152; John Bellamy Foster, Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 141177. See also Alain
Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge,MA:
Harvard University Press, 1986).
12. The American Cotton Planter introduced a translated synopsis of Liebigs work in
the following terms: We beg our readers to study it line by line, and when they comprehend it all ... they will find that they have a grammar of their art, a foundation on which
every agriculturalist may build a rationale which will accord with practical truth. J. J.
Mapes, Chemistry and Agriculture, with Liebigs Statement, ACP 1:4 (April 1853), 123,
together with Liebigs Synopsis on pages 123125; both pieces were reproduced in toto
from the New York Tribune.
13. Anonymous, The American Cotton Planter, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 2021.
Anonymous, CompostStock-Yards, ACP 3:1 (January 1855), 21.
14. S., Policy of the Planting States, ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 153; Turner, The Cotton
Planters Manual, 87 (see also 57, which cites a yield of 1500 bushels to the hand). On
manure yields by pound per cow, see Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, 52. On hauling manure,
see Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 21.
15. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 57, 200; Anonymous, Analysis of the Cotton
Plant and Seed, ACP 1:3 (March 1853), 72, passim; Francis Bulkely, Manure Is Wealth,
ACP 1:3 (March 1853), 85, passim (article reprinted from Southern Agriculturalist); Stoll,
Larding the Lean Earth, 51, 152.
16. Bulkely, Manure Is Wealth, 85.
17. Ibid., 8687. See also Anonymous, Urine and Bones for Manure, ACP 3:3 (March
1855), 82; Anonymous, Bones in the Soils, ACP 3:9 (September 1855), 266267; W.S.
King, How To Make Farming Pay, ACP 2:6 (June 1854), 167; Anonymous, Classifica
tion of Manures, ACP 4:3 (March 1856), 118.
18. M.W. Phillips, The Cultivation of the Crop, in Turner, ed., The Cotton Planters
Manual, 41; Daniel Pratt to N.B. Cloud, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 27. On the association of
manuring with social development (and soil exhaustion with migration), see also Anonymous, CottonIts Improved and True Culture, ACP 1:4 (April 1853), 115; J.J. Mapes,
Power of the Soil to Retain Manure, ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 141; M.W. Phillips to N.B.
Cloud, ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 147; and Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth, esp.1925, 156160.
See also Reverend John Bachman, Essay on the Connexion of the Natural Sciences with
Agriculture, ACP 3:2 (February 1855), 36; Hortensio (pseud.), Taste in Rural Homes
Its Influence, ACP 3:9 (September 1855), 267269.
19. Daniel Pratt to N.B. Cloud, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 27.
20. Regarding smell and slavery, see Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). On the
broader social significance of odor, see Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant. On antebellum
theories of odor, miasma, and disease, see Conevery Bolton Valenius, The Health of the
466
Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic
Books, 2002).
21. Anonymous, Farm EmbellishmentsBuildingsFences, ACP 1:1 (January
1853), 30. For other examples of the fear of miasma in the nineteenth-century Mississippi Valley, see Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 498499; Views of Louisiana, Niles
Weekly Register 13 (September13, 1817), quoted in Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the
American Economy, 132.
22. Dr. John Stainback Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes, ACP 4:4
(April 1856), 175176.
23. On toileting and narcissism, see Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant; on the same and
liberalism, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 6575. See also Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of
Cleanliness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Todd L. Savitt, Race and Medicine
in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century America (Kent, OH: Kent State University
Press, 2007); Niklas Thode Jensen, For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and
Power in the Danish West Indies, 18031848 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press,
University of Copenhagen, 2012); Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early
America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
24. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 21; Anonymous, Analysis of the Cotton Plant and
Seed, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 199; Anonymous, A Mississippi Planter,
from J. D. B. Debow, Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States (Washington,DC, and New Orleans: J.D.B Debow, 1852), quoted in Bruchey, Cotton and American
Economic Development, 184 (italics in the original); James Henry Hammond, Governor
Hammonds Report, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 27. See also John Stainback
Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes, ACP 4:5 (May 1856), 222.
25. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 34; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 184; Instructions
byAlexander Telfair, reprinted in Ulrich B. Phillips, Plantation and Frontier Documents,
16491863, vol.1 (New York: A.H. Clark, 1909); and Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of
a Southern Planter (Baltimore: Cushing and Bailey, 1887), quoted in Bruchey, Cotton and
American Economic Development, 182, 212. Smedess point in telling the story was to record
that one of her relatives likewise decided to do without meat during this period. The narrative emphasis here accords with some of her later assertionse.g., some slaves got so interested and excited in their work picking cotton that they wished to sleep at the end of
their rows, that they might be up and at work in the morning earlier than their rivals; and
the enslaved women on her fathers plantation wore silk dresses made by white mantua-
makers.
26. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 220221; Peter Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom: Not Fiction but the True Story of a Struggle (Oxford,OH, 1918).
27. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Cambridge,MA: Blackwell, 1994).
28. Anonymous, Will Peas Kill Hogs? ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 145; Thomas Affleck,
467
quoted in Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 53; Brown,
Slave Life in Georgia, 147.
29. Andrew Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky (Syracuse:
Daily and Weekly Star Office, 1847), 25; Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford
Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. (1842), in Andrews, ed., North Carolina Slave Narratives, 108.
30. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 50; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 3738; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 109.
31. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 25.
32. Ibid., 2628.
33. Ibid., 2829.
34. On the way that social bonds between slaveholding families were articulated in gifts
of meat, see Mrs. Isaac Hilliard, Diary, January3, 5, 9, 23, and April12, 1850, Lower
Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
35. William Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Account of His
Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst a Slave in the South (Cincinnati, 1846), 57; William
Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself
(1847), in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky, 192; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and
Adventures of Henry Bibb, 89; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 16; Tyre to Thomas Glen,
January9, 1837, Tyre Glen Papers, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations on Microfilm, ed. Kenneth M. Stampp, Perkins Library, Duke University (hereafter cited as
RASP). See also Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 355.
36. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 192; Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, 58; Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South,
PartI (Salem,MA: Salem Press, 1879), 41; Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It
Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Antislavery Society, 1839),
passim; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 54.
37. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 16. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown,
192193, 184; Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 41; Hughes, Thirty Years a
Slave, 99.
38. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 138, 68; for sixteen examples of enslaved people being
burned alive, mostly drawn from Southern newspapers, see Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon;
or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York, 1861), 5459. See also Roper, A
Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, 57; Black, The Life and Suf
ferings of Leonard Black, 12; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 4546, where a section entitled
Methods of Punishment, which focuses on a naked slave being beaten by a circle of others in a bull ring, gives way directly to a section entitled Forth of July Barbecue.
39. M.W. Phillips, Plantation Economy, ACP 3:12 (December 1853), 377387.
41. See Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisianas Cane
468
World, 18201860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 78; Follett estimates that some Louisiana sugar plantations had a 55 percent mortality rate among slave
children within the first year of life. The noted agricultural reformer Thomas Affleck provided a similar estimate:
The mortality rate of negro children is as two to one when compared with the whites,
depending solely upon locality and care. Quarters are badly located; children are allowed
to be filthy; are suckled hurriedly, whilst the mother is over-heated; are laid on their backs
when mere infants, on a hard mattress, or a blanket only, and rocked and bumped in badly-
made cradles; not a few are over-laid by the wearied mother, who sleeps so dead a sleep so
as not to be aware of the injury to her infant; a vast proportion die under nine or ten days.
... Of those born, one half die under one year; of the other half, say one-tenth die under
five years; and of the remainder, a large proportion are raised.
The numbers used by Affleck support 55 percent as being a relevant number for childhood mortality from birth to age five in Mississippi. From Thomas Affleck, On the Hygiene of Cotton Plantations and the Management of Negro Slaves, in Southern Medical
Reports, ed. E.D. Fenner, vol.2 (New Orleans: D.Davies Son, 1851), 435.
42. S.F. Patterson to R.S. Patterson, January10, 1854, Samuel Patterson Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University; Isaac Jarratt to Cousin Betty, undated, Jarratt/Puryear
Papers, RASP; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 213214 (see also30). See also Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 168; William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of
William Green, Formerly a Slave (Springfield,MA, 1853),4; Edward Stewart to John Gurley, December19 and23, 1858, John Gurley papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection,
Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University; D.W. Breozeale to John Close, December12, 1822, John Close Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial
Library, Louisiana State University; J.F. Smith to James Tutt, April19, 1845, James Tutt
Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Perkins Memorial Library, Duke University;
A.G. Alsworth to Joseph Slemmons Copes, November18 and December13, 1856, Joseph
Slemmons Copes Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University; Jefferson McKinney to Jeptha McKinney, April21, 1856, Jeptha
McKinney Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana
State University. See, generally, Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum
Slave Market (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 89102.
43. M.W. Phillips, Plantation Economy, ACP 1:3 (March 1853), 83.
44. J.D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky,
Containing an Account of His Three Escapes in 1839, 1846, and 1848 (Huddersfield, UK,
1864), 22; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 94; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson
of Kentucky, 8; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 119 (see also
79). See also Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 214.
45. A. G. Alsworth to Joseph Copes, November 18 and December 13, 1856, Joseph
469
Slemmons Copes Papers, Archives and Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University.
46. The strongest statement to this effect remains Deborah Gray White, Arnt I a
Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985). See also
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the
Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Kathleen M. Brown,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial
Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Edward E. Baptist,
Cuffy, Fancy Maids, and One-Eyed Men: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic
Slave Trade in the United States, in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the
Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 165202; Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Jennifer M. Morgan,
Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Follett, The Sugar Masters, 4689; Sharon Block, Rape and
Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
47. Negro children may fan about in their shirt tails during the warm weather of mid-
summer; or they may even go without clothing at all, as we frequently see, and all this
without injury. Dr.John Stainback Wilson, The Peculiarities and Diseases of Negroes,
ACP 4:12 (December 1856), 557.
48. Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black,8; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 85;
Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 164; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 42; Johnson, Soul by
Soul, passim; Jefferson McKinney to Jeptha McKinney, April12, 1856, Jeptha McKinney
Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
49. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 173; Picquet, Octoroon, 1115; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge,MA:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 2730. See also Brown, Narrative of William Wells
Brown, 195.
50. Picquet, Octoroon, 7, 15; Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, 34.
See also Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 220.
51. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 23, 31, 37; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South,
25;Bruner, A Slaves Adventures Toward Freedom, 14; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 186,
431; Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 26; Coulter v. Cresswell, Louisiana Supreme
Court Case 2734, 7La. Ann. 367 (1852), testimony of J.W. Boazman, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO; Brown, Narrative of William Wells
Brown, 49.
52. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 4344; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 122
(see also 346347); Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green,9; Ball, Fifty
470
Years in Chains, 90; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 121;
Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 166. See also Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 186, 248.
53. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 176; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 94
99; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 123.
54. On the use of human remains as fertilizer, see Anonymous, Lasting Effect of
Bones and Animal Matter, ACP 3:5 (May 1855), 142: We know of a field in an adjoining
county that has been cropped for years, and is now in a state of high fertility. The surrounding fields are nothing like it, and with similar cultivation would by this time have
been utterly impoverished. The former is the site of an old Indian burying ground, and
when the country was first settled, was indented with graves within six feet of each other,
all over its surface. ... The half-decayed bones of the aborigines are to this day to be seen
mingled with the soil, and, sad as it may seem, furnish food to successive crops of grain
and grass. See also Foster, Marxs Ecology, 150.
55. Along these lines, see Mrs. Isaac Hilliard, Diary, January 29February 8,
March 29, 1850, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana
State University. The menu is suggested by her diary entries of April3, 4, and22, 1850. On
the material life of slaveholders generally, see Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation
Epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
56. Samuel A. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology, in Cotton Is King, and
Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E. N. Elliot (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbott, and Loomis,
1860), 693, 694; Samuel A. Cartwright, Natural History of the Prognathous Species of
Mankind, in Elliot, ed., Cotton Is King, 710, 714. On sensory racial stereotypes, see Mark
M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted
Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 18301870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Elizabeth B. Clark, The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy,
and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America, Journal of American His
tory82:2 (September 1995), 463493; Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Cartwrights emphasis on the
olfactory extremity of the erotic lives of the enslaved recapitulates the nineteenth-century
history by which the upper classes of the Atlantic world were coming to redefine themselves in relation to the delicacy of their olfaction, and in particular the association of sexuality with delicate and floral scents, rather than with animal scents such as musk and ambergris. See Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 7188.
57. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology, 695, 698, 699, 704; Samuel A.
Cartwright, On the Caucasians and the Africans, in Elliot, ed., Cotton Is King, 720721.
58. Cartwright, On the Caucasians and the Africans, 719, 720721.
59. Cartwright, Slavery in the Light of Ethnology, 702, 697 (I have transposed the
elements of the last quotationthe material following the second set of ellipses appears
471
just before the rest in the original; see also 701); Cartwright, On the Caucasians and the
Africans, 717 (see also 723727).
60. Chancellor Harper, Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics, in Elliot, ed., Cotton Is
King, 551552.
61. See Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sarah Knott, A Cultural History of Sensibility
in the Era of the American Revolution (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1999).
62. Harper, Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics, 594, 595, 562.
63. Ibid., 583584.
64. Ibid., 606, 561.
65. Ibid., 573574, 589, 595, 614.
66. Ibid., 575. See, similarly and ad nauseam, Negro-Mania, DeBows Review 12:5
(May 1852), 507524, in which humanity, both black and white (page 514), is acknowledged even in the course of repeated analogies between Negroes and donkeys (the
comparative terms being whites and horses).
67. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
8. The Carceral Landscape

1. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Countrymarks: The Transformation of African
Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998), 117120. See also Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black
Folktales (New York: Knopf, 2000).
3. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United
States of America, in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford
Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 171; Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue
Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 35;
Chancellor Harper, Slavery in Light of Social Ethics, in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery
Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliot (Augusta,GA: Pritchard, Abbott, and Loomis, 1860), 609. See
also Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb an American Slave,
Written by Himself (1845), in Puttin on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb,
William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and
Row, 1969), 99; Andrew Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky
(Syracuse: Daily and Weekly Star Office, 1847), 16, 58.
4. Alonzo Snyder, Plantation Record, 28 (LSU), Lower Mississippi Valley Collection,
Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. My analysis throughout what follows is
472
indebted to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4796; Emma Rothschild,
The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
5. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (1859; Detroit:
Negro University Press, 1969), 90, 130; Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage
to Freedom (Milwaukee: Southside Printing, 1897), 42, 4445, 52; Frederick Law Olmsted,
The Cotton Kingdom, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 1984; orig.
pub. 1860), 190, 296, 432; Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 166. See also
Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, PartI (Salem,MA: Salem Press, 1879), 39.
See also Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Marie Jenkins Schwartz,
Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
6. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003).
7. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 55, 117, 118; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 32.
See also Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 8081; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 26.
9. Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom: Not Fiction but the True Story of a
Struggle (Oxford,OH, n.d.), 12; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry
Bibb, 119; John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape
of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F.N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991), 20
(see also13). See also Kate E.R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being a Personal Recollection of Peter Still and His Wife Vina after Forty Years of Slavery (Syracuse:
Wm.T. Hamilton, 1856), 199; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 262.
10. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 83; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 28; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 166. See
also Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 190191.
11. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 20; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of
Henry Bibb, 166.
12. See Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York:
Vintage, 1976), 608609.
13. See Walter Johnson, On Agency, Journal of Social History 37:1 (Fall 2003), 113
124.
14. Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson, 28.
15. That the limits of the prevailing order did exhaust the meaningfulness of enslaved
resistance in the antebellum South is the argument made by Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll,
473
most notably on 597598, where he argues that day-to-day forms of resistance ultimately
reinforced slaveholding power because they failed to challenge the system of slavery as a
system; and most untenably on 608609 in the section entitled Roast Pig Is a Wonderful
Delicacy, Especially When Stolen, where he argues on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that stealing food cost slaves their self-respect.
16. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 187188; Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave
(Worcester,MA, 1893), 27; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 188; A.K. Farrar to
H.W. Drake, September5, 1857, Farrar Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill
Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. See also Grandy, Narrative of the Life of
Moses Grandy, 175; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 450.
17. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 165; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of
Henry Bibb, 103104; Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, a Fugitive
from Slavery (New Bedford,MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 22.
18. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 70; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 28; Grandy, Narrativeof the Life of Moses Grandy, 170. See also Martin R. Delany, Blake; or, The Huts
of America, ed. Floyd J. Miller (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970; orig. pub. 18611862), 40;
Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 24; J.D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky, Containing an Account of His Three Escapes in 1839, 1846, and
1848 (Huddersfield,UK, 1864), 11.
19. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 182, 188 (see also 90, 112, 187).
20. See, e.g., Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 48, 136; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 101113;
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: A Revised Perspective,
in Herbert G. Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira
Berlin (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 364; Vincent Brown, The Reapers Garden: Death and
Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
21. See Phillip D. Morgan and Ira Berlin, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the
Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993);
Phillip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and
Low Country (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); David Eltis, The
Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
John Womack, Doing Labor History: Feelings, Work, Material Power, Journal of the
Historical Society 5 (September 2005), 255296.
22. Exemplary of this materialist turn in the study of slavery are Stephanie M.H. Camp,
Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave
Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009);
Brown, The Reapers Garden. For more on the same, see Walter Johnson, Agency: A Ghost
Story, in Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson, Slaverys Ghost: The Problem of
Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
474
23. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 141, 89 (see also 17, 6467); Ball, Fifty Years in Chains,
22; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 74; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 23; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 67; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 2829.
24. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 3941; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 63. See also S.W.
Todd deposition, quoted in J.Winston Coleman, Lexingtons Slave Dealers and Their
Southern Trade, Filson Club Historical Quarterly 12 (1938), 7; Richard Puryear to Isaac
Jarratt, March3, 1834, Jarratt/Puryear Papers, Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations on Microfilm, ed. Kenneth M. Stampp, Perkins Library, Duke University (hereafter
cited as RASP); Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 29; Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. (1842), in Andrews, ed., North Carolina
Slave Narratives, 102. For the incompleteness (indeed, the inversion) of this disciplinary
mechanism, as well as some of the conceptual background to the argument I am making,
see Phillip Troutman, Grapevine in the Slave Market: African-American Geopolitical
Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt, in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the
Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 203233.
25. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: Anti-Slavery
Office, 1845), 27; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 16, 19;
Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 39. See also William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 205. See also Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D.
Green, 24; William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, Formerly a Slave
(Springfield,MA, 1853), 19.
26. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 205, 217; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason,
30; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 101.
27. John P. Parker, His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former
Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad, ed. Stuart Seely Sprague (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1996), 138; John Knight to William Beall, May7 and May22, 1845, RASP;
Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 206; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 88;
Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 37. See also Jackson, Narrative and Writings
of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 115116; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 117118; Ball, Fifty
Years in Chains, 206.
28. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 83; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 23.
29. Parker, His Promised Land, 137.
30. Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 145; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 1516. See also Parker, His Promised Land,
95.
32. Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 23, 4344, 4952, 85. See also Peter Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York:
475
Knopf, 1975), 271284; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in
the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
33. Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 17401790 (New York: W.W. Norton,
1988; orig. pub. 1982), 5257. See also Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 162, passim.
34. See, for example, Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 180182; Jackson, Narrative and
Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 9; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 288; Bibb, Narrative
of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 136; Brown, Narrative of William Wells
Brown, 206.
35. Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, 54; Olmsted,
The Cotton Kingdom, 310; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb,
107.
37. See Lathan E. Windlay, Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from
the 1730s to 1790, vols. 14 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1983).
38. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 128; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 24;
Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 133134. See also Olmsted,
The Cotton Kingdom, 223.
39. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 223; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 24.
See Christian Pareti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 1332.
40. Bruner, A Slaves Adventures toward Freedom, 36 (see also 2728); see also Parker,
His Promised Land, 49; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 66; Green, Narrative of the Life of
J.D. Green, 26.
41. Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 11.
42. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 138, 194 (see also 59, 85, 87); Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 88 (see also 18); Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper,
49. See also Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 8283, 216, 234; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life
in the South, 38; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 241; Parker, His Promised
Land,51.
43. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 138; Stroyer, Sketches of My Life in the South, 15;
Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 3233.
44. William Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, Containing a Faithful Account of His
Travels for a Number of Years, Whilst a Slave in the South (Cincinnati, 1846), 19; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 66; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of
Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 17; Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of
Moses Roper, 50. See also Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 23; Brown, Slave Life
in Georgia, 119. On slaves who pretended to be porters in order to slip aboard steamboats,
see Parker, His Promised Land, 35, 37.
45. Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 125, 145147; Mason,
Life of Isaac Mason, 37; Green, Narrative of the Life of J. D. Green, 11, 26, 34. See also
476
E.Sparrow to W.J. Minor, January29, 1840, William Minor Papers, Lower Mississippi
Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. (I must decline accepting the filly you propose giving me in the place of mine found dead on your place. I
decline because I have not and never had a disposition to make an owner responsible for
such acts of his Negroes.)
46. Camp, Closer to Freedom; Kaye, Joining Places; Susan E. ODonovan, Becoming Free
in the Cotton South (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
47. Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 16; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 80; Bibb, Narrative
of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 124; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 194; Mason,
Life of Isaac Mason, 29. See also State v. Isham, Case 646, 6How. Miss. 35 (1841), testimony
of Jesse Riggs and Philip Hoggat, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, hereafter cited as MDAH; Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, 175.
48. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 32; Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, 58. See also
Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 208; Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, 22.
49. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 190; Hayden, Narrative of William
Hayden, 25; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 19; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 22;
Parker, His Promised Land, 30; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 448; John Hebron Moore,
The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 17701860 (Baton
50. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 138, 142, 183197, 220225.
51. On slaves selling game, see Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 448; and Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, 25.
52. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 188189, 192193. See also Moore, The Emergence of the
Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 155.
53. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 208; Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, 22;
A. K. Farrar to H. W. Drake, September 5, 1857, Alexander Farrar Papers, Folder 71,
Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
See also Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 100; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 3940 (Joe
Brown ... told us to meet him that night at Prices Woods. ... The place was well known
to me and could be easily found).
54. Parker, His Promised Land, 59 (see also 46); Green, Narrative of the Life of J. D.
Green, 19, 24; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 1314; Roper,
A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper, 63; Grandy, Narrative of
the Life of Moses Grandy, 176, 182; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 40; Ball, Fifty Years in
Chains, 275; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 419, 437.
55. It has been said that slaveholders manipulated fears of apparitions and the supernatural so as to prevent slaves from escaping when the sun went down. See Gladys-Marie
Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), esp.
3881.
56. Parker, His Promised Land, 101, 106, 138139 (Parkers description of housebreak-
477
ingthe way he hid beneath an eave, soundlessly opened a door, crossed a creaking
wooden floorin search of a stolen baby is equally remarkable for the tactility of his account of landscape and resistance; see pp.112115); Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 250. See also
Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 142; Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of
Kentucky, 11, 18.
57. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 254, 292293 (see also 269, 288).
58. Ibid., 6, 44; Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 9; Hughes, Thirty Years a
Slave, 7778, 80, 85, 106; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 192; Pickard, The Kidnapped and
the Ransomed, 161, 207; Hayden, Narrative of William Hayden, 57 (see also 55, 7778, 80).
59. Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 18; Ball, Fifty Years
in Chains, 254, 250 (see also 266). See also letter to Hetty ca.1857, in Alexander K. Farrar
Papers, Folder71, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana
State University.
60. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 39; Parker, His Promised Land, 96.
61. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 387 (see also 431432, 437); Ball, Fifty Years in
Chains, 156.
62. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 101102 (see also 90, 180182); Hughes, Thirty Years
a Slave, 143; Parker, His Promised Land, 47. See also Jackson, Narrative and Writings of
Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 11; Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry
Bibb, 128; Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 188190; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 74.
63. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, 23; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 184,
102103.
64. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 387, 389390.
65. Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 116117. For accounts of other fleeing slaves who were run down and killed by dogs, see Green, Narrative
of the Life of J.D. Green, 15, 23; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 186.
66. Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 259260; Green, The Life of J.D. Green, 25.
67. Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 16; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 33; Green, Narrative of
the Life of J.D. Green, 9; Parker, His Promised Land, 33.
68. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 80. See also Jackson, Narrative and Writings of Andrew Jackson of Kentucky, 1314. Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 33; Olmsted, The Cotton
Kingdom, 453.
69. Parker, His Promised Land, 6970 (see also 109110).
70. Ibid., 70.
71. See Loic Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
72. Simon v. State, Case 8900, 37 Miss. 288 (1858), testimony of Warren Ellis, George
Hartley, Benjamin King, and Henry Hartley, MDAH.
73. On antebellum justice in the South, see especially Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison
478
and Plantation: Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 17671878 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
74. Peter v. State, unreported Mississippi Supreme Court Cases 616 and 834 (1838), testimony of Nicholas Lazarres and George, MDAH; Dick, Henry, Peter, Alec, and Wright v.
State, unreported Mississippi Supreme Court Case 7640 (1854), testimony of Julius Johnson, MDAH; John v. State, Case 3031, 24 Miss. 569 (1852), testimony of Robert Halton and
William Miles, MDAH; State v. Isham, Case 646, 6How. Miss. 35 (1841), testimony of Jesse
Riggs and Philip Hoggat, MDAH. See also A.K. Farrar to H.W. Drake, September5,
1857, Alexander Farrar Papers, Folder71, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University.
75. See Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 16191860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 233240.
76. On torture and testimony, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Saidiya V. Hartman,
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Wild zone is from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge,MA: MIT
Press, 2000), though she uses the phrase to refer to state violence, not extralegal violence.
9. The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton

1. John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest:
Mississippi, 17701860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988),i. See also
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth
in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); Franklee Gilbert Whartenby,
Land and Labor Productivity in United States Cotton Production, 18001840 (Ph.D.
diss., University of North Carolina, 1963).
2. For a planters use of Afflecks Record, see Pleasant Hill Plantation Record Book
(Amite County, Mississippi), E.J. Capell Papers, Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill
Memorial Library, Louisiana State University; Wendell Holmes Stephenson, A Quarter-
Century of a Mississippi Plantation: Eli J. Capell of Pleasant Hill, Mississippi Valley
Historical Review 23:3 (December 1939), 355374.
3. John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of
John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, ed. F.N. Boney (Savannah: Library of Georgia, 1991), 20;
William Green, Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, Formerly a Slave (Spring
field,MA, 1853),7; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 1984; orig. pub. 1860), 216. For the emphasis on increasing productivity on Louisiana sugar plantations, see Richard Follett, The Sugar
Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisianas Cane World, 18201860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005), 4, 13, 31, 95, 110116.
479
4. J.A. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual: Being a Compilation of Facts from the Best
Authorities on the Culture of Cotton (New York: C.M. Saxton, 1858), 3536.
5. Anonymous, Cotton and Its Prospects, American Cotton Planter 1:8 (August 1853),
226 (hereafter cited as ACP). See also John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 46; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest,9. Historians have often interpreted statements like that one as if
they refer to the inherent limits of the slave mode of production, especially its resistance to
the sorts of mechanization that created productivity gains in other sectors of the antebellum economy. And perhaps slavery was inimical to mechanization, although one might
point to the inherent difficulties of mechanizing an action as delicate as cotton picking
orthe successful mechanization of slave-based sugar plantations, facts that clearly compli
cate the case. In either event, it seems clear that cotton planters were thinking about
increasing the returns on their investment in slaves and landon their capitalin terms
that had as much to do with productivity as with profitability.
6. Thomas Prentice Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, as Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures (New York: GeorgeW. and John A. Wood, 1860), 23 (it
should be noted that Kettel was a pro-slavery unionist, whose goal was to emphasize the
economic importance of slave labor, and especially cotton, to the well-being of the United
States as a whole); David Christy, Cotton Is King; Or, Slavery in the Light of Political
Economy, in Cotton Is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliot (Augusta,GA:
Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860), 125.
7. Alonzo Snyder, Plantation Record,3. Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University (hereafter cited as LSU). See also Palfrey Plantation Diary, Palfrey Papers; Joseph Mather Diary, John Jenkins Diary, John Jenkins Papers; James Monette Diary; Cotton Record Book, 18341836, John H. Randolph Papers;
Plantation Diary, 18391840, Lidell (Moses and St. John R.) Family Papers; Leonidas
Spyker Plantation Diary. All in Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, LSU.
8. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 284. For another plantation where daily totals were
posted on a blackboard, see Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter
(1887), in Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 17901860: Sources and Readings,
ed. Stuart Bruchey (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967), 215.
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 124, 126 (see also 75, 130, 134); Charles
Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (Detroit: Negro University
Press, 1969; orig. pub. 1859), 130; Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black,
a Fugitive from Slavery (New Bedford, MA: Benjamin Lindsey, 1847), 17; Brown, Slave
Life in Georgia, 165 (see also 143, 146, 148, 160, 162).
10. J.D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky,
Containing an Account of His Three Escapes in 1839, 1846, and 1848 (Huddersfield, UK,
480
1864), 10; Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (Worcester,MA, 1893), 23; Jacob
Stroyer, My Life in the South, PartI (Salem,MA: Salem Press, 1879), 11, 21; William Wells
Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, in Puttin on Ole Massa, ed.
Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 185, 187; Louis Hughes, Thirty Years
a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom (Milwaukee: Southside Printing, 1897), 21; Black, The
Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black, 11; Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 59; Henry Bibb,
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, in Puttin on
Ole Massa, ed. Osofsky, 129.
11. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 18 (quotation), 6162, 102, 135; Brown, Slave
Life in Georgia, 143, 146; W.Hustace Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market (New York:
D.Appleton, 1927), 6061, 8081, 101; H.H. Willis, Gaston Gage, and Vernette B. Moore,
Cotton Classing Manual (Clemson,SC: Textile Foundation, 1938), 1921.
13. Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 2629; see also Hubbard, Cotton and
the Cotton Market, 8990.
14. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 26, 135136.
15. For more on the Liverpool connection, see J.F. Entz, Exchange and Cotton Trade
between England and the United States (New York: E.B. Clayton, 1840); Thomas Ellison,
The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: E.Wilson, 1886); Henry Smithers, Liverpool,Its
Commerce, Statistics, and Institutions: With a History of the Cotton Trade (London: T.Kaye,
1825), esp. 116158.
16. Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 101, 103, 113. See also James Chambers,
On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, ACP 1:7 (July 1853), 204.
17. R. Abbey (of Mississippi), Cotton and the Cotton Planters, DeBows Review
3:1 (January 1847), quoted in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy,197; Regulations for Cotton Packing, Hunts Merchants Magazine 36 (March 1857),
quoted in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 204205. See also
Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 113; Willis, Gage, and Moore, Cotton Classing Manual, 2526.
18. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1944); Robert Brenner, Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development and The Agrarian
Roots of European Capitalism, in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T.H. Ashton and C.H. Philipin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1063, 213327; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and
Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Barbara Jeanne
Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985).
19. Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical
Studies of Cuba and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Fernand Braudel,
481
The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); Immanuel Wallerstein, The
Modern World System, vol. 3: 1730s1840s (New York: Academic Press, 1989); James
Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Vintage, 1982);
Laurence Shore, Southern Capitalists: The Ideological Leadership of an Elite, 18321885
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); James Oakes, The Peculiar Fate
of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery, in Slavery and the American South, ed. Winthrop D.
Jordan (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press), 2955.
20. Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso, 1979); Walter
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington,DC: Howard University Press,
1974); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd
ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000; orig. pub. 1983), 1184; Andre
Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), 133; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Kenneth
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also the essays by David Waldstreicher, Amy Dru Stanley, Stephanie Smallwood, and Walter Johnson collected under the
rubric Commodification of People, in Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future
of the Field, ed. John Lauritz and Michael A. Morrison (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 117158.
21. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985), 100102.
22. Alonzo Snyder, Plantation Record, 5 (LSU); Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual,
273; Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, 33.
23. Anonymous, Cotton Production and Trade of the United States, in Bruchey, ed.,
Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 1619.
24. Marie Fontenay, LAutre Monde, quoted in Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New
Orleans: 18501860 (New Orleans: Pelican Press, 1964), 33.
25. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 18151860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1984; orig. pub. 1939), 9596.
26. Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 90; Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton
and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop, 18001925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 159161.
27. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 3854; Matthew Maury [unsigned], A Scheme
for Rebuilding Southern Commerce: Direct Trade and the South, Southern Literary Messenger 5:1 (January 1839),3. See also Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City
and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Philip S. Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible
Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941).
28. Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 8991; James Stirling, Letters from the
482
Slave States (1857), quoted in Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 135. See also M.W.
Phillips, Duty of Cotton PlantersCrops of Alabama and Mississippi, DeBows Review
7:5 (1849), 412; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 250251, 330331, 417; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 232.
29. John Killick, Risk, Speculation, and Profit in the Mercantile Sector of the
Nineteenth-Century Cotton Trade: Alexander Brown and Sons, 18201880, Business His
tory 16:1 (January 1974), 116; John Killick, The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown
and Sons in the Deep South, Journal of Southern History 43:2 (May 1977), 169194; Edwin
J. Perkins, Financing Anglo-American Trade: The House of Brown, 18001880 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 515.
30. Killick, Risk, Speculation, and Profit, 116; Killick, The Cotton Operations of
Alexander Brown and Sons, 169194; Perkins, Financing Anglo-American Trade, 515.
31. For full accounts of all the goods a factor might provide for a planter, see Keane v.
Brandon, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4047 (1856), 95169, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of
New Orleans (hereafter cited as UNO). See also Bruchey, Cotton and the Growth of the
American Economy, 221270; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 1978; George D.
Green, Finance and Economic Development in the Old South: Louisiana Banking, 18041861
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972), 1012.
32. Financial Register, quoted in Norman Sidney Buck, The Development of the Organisation of Anglo-American Trade, 18001850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), 74.
33. See Keane v. Brandon and Semple, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4047, N.O. (1856),
passim, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K.
Long Library, UNO.
34. Joseph Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches
(New York: D.Appleton, 1853), 94; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 115125;
Green, Finance and Economic Development in the Old South, 30, 107; Richard Holcombe
Kilbourne, Jr., Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, 18251885
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 1828. For examples of planters forced
to obtain accommodating endorsers, see Byrne, Vance, &Co. v. Grayson, 15 Ogden (La.)
457 (1850), Louisiana Supreme Court Case 625 (Monroe), 126; Keane v. Brandon and Semple, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4047, N.O. (1856), passim. Both cases in Supreme
Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library,
UNO.
35. Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 213; George G. Henry, Cotton, Prospect
of Prices, etc., ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 160; Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 24, 33
36, 80.
36. William Brandon to Henry Keane, March27, 1850, and January17, 1852, in Keane v.
Brandon and Semple, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4047, N.O. (1856), 24, 3132. See also
483
letter of November12, 1852, ibid., 4243; Isaac Lum to Branden, Williams, &Co., September12, 1848, Williams v. Lum, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 1548, N.O. (1856), 2930
(UNO). See also Isaac Lum to Branden, Williams, &Co., January12, 1848, ibid., 24. See
also Magoffin v. Cowan, Dykes, &Spalding, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3548 (1856),2
(UNO); Isaac Grayson to Byrne, Vance &Co., November29, 1855, Byrne, Vance, &Co. v.
Grayson, 15 Ogden (La.) 457 (1850), Louisiana Supreme Court case 625 (Monroe), 126
(UNO). All Louisiana Supreme Court cases in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection,
Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
37. Ward v. Warfield, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 742, N.O. (18481861), Supreme
UNO; Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 250; Perkins, Financing Anglo-American Trade, 13,
89; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 106108; Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton
Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 232; Killick, Risk, Speculation, and Profit, 116; Killick,
The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons, 169194.
38. Clinton and Port Hudson Railroad, Circular, 1850, Henry Marston Papers, LSU;
Abbey, Cotton and Cotton Planters, 198; Beal v. McKiernan, Louisiana Supreme Court
Case 2506, N.O., 18131846, 19, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and
Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO (a great deal of the cotton at that time
was exposed, and a great deal under cover); Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 100
103. See also Walter Hockayne to Charles Leverich, September17, 1840 (cotton already
purchased by a merchant was lost in a warehouse fire), Charles Leverich Papers, LSU.
39. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 214215; Follain and Belloq to John Close, February3, 1845, Taylor (for Toledano) to John Close, March14, 1845, John Close Papers, LSU.
40. For lists of charges see Magoffin v. Cowan, Dykes, and Spalding, Louisiana Supreme
Court Case 3548, N.O. (1856), 2021; Ward v. Warfield, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
742, N.O. (18461861), 23. Both in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and
Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
41. The locus classicus for the idea of the fetishism of commodities is, of course,
Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1, ch.1, sec.4. Marx, interestingly, chose to convey his argument
through the example of a bolt of linen rather than a bolt of cotton, a choice that symbolizes
a larger silence about slavery in Capital. See Walter Johnson, The Pedestal and the Veil:
Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question, Journal of the Early Republic 24:2 (Summer
2004), 299308.
42. Koray alkan, Market Threads: How Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Katherine Ott, David H. Serlin, and Stephen Mihm, eds., Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New
York:New York University Press, 2002); Follain and Belloq to John Close, February3,
1845, John Close Papers, UNO. See also Beal v. McKiernan, Louisiana Supreme Court
Case 2506, N.O. 18131846, 23; Byrne, Vance &Co. v. Grayson, Louisiana Supreme Court
484
Case 625 (Monroe), 15 Ogden (La.) 457 (1860), 1415, 129, 167. Both cases in Supreme
UNO.
43. Virginia Commercial Convention, DeBows Review 12:1 (January 1852), 36.
44. Anonymous, Weighted Yearly Averages and Monthly Prices of Short-Staple Cotton at New Orleans, 18081860, in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American
Economy, 30 (see also32).
45. New Orleans Price Current, Commercial Intelligencer and Merchants Transcript, January19, 1849. For fairly thorough statistics regarding annual cotton production, see J.L.
Watkins, King Cotton: A Historical and Statistical Review, 17901908 (New York: James L.
Watkins and Sons, 1908).
46. J.H. Leverich &Co. to Charles Leverich, March26, 1844, Leverich Papers, LSU;
Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 27; Perkins, Financing Anglo-American Trade,
105; Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, 24.
47. N.B. Cloud, The Cotton Crop, ACP 1:1 (January 1853), 3132; George G. Henry,
Cotton, Prospect of Prices, etc., ACP 1:5 (May 1853), 159160; C.F. McKay, The Cotton Trade, from 1825 to 1850, in Turner, The Cotton Planters Manual, 231246.
48. George G. Henry, Review of the Cotton Market, ACP 1:3 (March 1853), 9495;
Henry, Cotton, Prospect of Prices, etc., 159160.
49. Ward v. Warfield, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 742, N.O. (18461861), 3234;
Flowers v. Downs, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2280, N.O. (1851), 2324. Both cases in
Library, UNO. See also Burke, Watt &Co. to Jacob Bieller, December18, 1835, Alonzo
Snyder Papers, LSU; Anonymous, Brief Review of the Cotton Market, ACP 1:2 (February 1853), 63; Taylor (for Toledano) to John Close, November20, 1839, John Close Papers, LSU.
50. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 8384.
51. Lastraps and Bingime to John Close, November27, December22, 1835, April6, and
April16, 1836, John Close Papers, LSU.
52. John Taylor for C.Toledano to John Close, October30, 1837, April12, October1,
1838, October 17, 1839, June 20, 1840, John Close Papers, LSU; Burke, Watt & Co. to
Alonzo Snyder, December18, 1835, Alonzo Snyder Papers, LSU; Killick, Risk, Speculation, and Profit, 116; Flowers v. Downs, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2280, N.O. (1851),
2, 23, 24, 26, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections,
Earl K. Long Library, UNO; Williams v. Lum, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 1548 (1856),
29, ibid.; Killick, The Cotton Operations of Alexander Brown and Sons, 169194; Perkins, Financing Anglo-American Trade, 2324, 98.
53. Plaquemine Southern Sentinel, June22, 1850, quoted in Richard Follett, The Sugar
485
Masters, 3637 (see also 28); Scott P. Marler, Merchants and the Political Economy of
Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: New Orleans and Its Hinterlands (Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 2007), 65, 122; George H. Devol, Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi: The Best
Gambling Book Ever Published in America (Cincinnati: Devol and Haines, 1887). See also
Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 330331.
54. Burke, Watt & Co. to Jacob Bieller, December 18, 1835, Alonzo Snyder Papers,
LSU; C.F. McKay, Cotton Trade of the South, in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth
of the American Economy, 203; J.Lastraps to John Close, January1, 1834, March15 and
March22, 1834, February10, 1835, John Close Papers, LSU; Taylor (for Toledano) to John
Close, October30, 1837, John Close Papers, LSU.
55. Burke, Watt & Co. to Jacob Bieller, December 18, 1835, Alonzo Snyder Papers,
LSU.
56. Quoted in Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 23 (see also 60); Ward v. War
field, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 742, N.O. (18461861), 16, 18; Woodman B. Magoffin
to Messrs. Cowan, Dykes, and Spalding, September10, 1850, in Magoffin v. Cowan, Dykes
& Spalding, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3584 (1856), 13; D. Y. Grayson to Messrs.
Byrne, Vance &Co., November29, 1855, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 625 (Monroe), 15
Ogden (La.) 457 (1860), 126, 170. Court cases in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection,
Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
57. Extract dated August 9, 1836, William Minor Papers, LSU; Lastraps to John
Close, March20, December22, 1835, John Close Papers, LSU; Toledano (form letters) to
John Close, October1, 1838, October17, 1839, John Close Papers, LSU; Ward &Co. to
Thomas Carneal, April12, 1844, in Ward v. Warfield, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 472,
N.O. (184661), 43, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
58. Abbey, Cotton and the Cotton Planters, 188.
59. Byrne, Vance &Co. v. Grayson, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 625 (Monroe), 15
Ogden (La.) 457 (1860), 48. E.B. Lyons to J.Lallande, December5, 1850 in Lyons v. Lallande, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3207 (1854), 20. Both in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
60. J. Lallande to Mrs. E.B. Lyons, November30, 1850 in Lyons v. Lallande, Louisiana
Supreme Court Case 3207, N.O. (1854), 3233. E.B. Lyons to J.Lallande, December5,
1850, in Lyons v. Lallande, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 3207 (1854), 22. William Flowers to S.W. Downs, May9, 1839, in Flowers v. Downs, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 2280,
N.O. (1851), 23; Magoffin v. Cowan, Dykes, and Spalding, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
3584, N.O. (18461861),5. All in Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and
Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO.
61. Byrne, Vance &Co. v. Grayson, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 625 (Monroe), 15
Ogden (La.) 457 (1860), 31, 162, 174; Lyons v. Lallande, Louisiana Supreme Court Case
486
3207, 20, 3234, Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO; Taylor (for Toldedano) to John Close, September14,
1842, John Close, LSU.
62. Henry Keane to William Brandon, October11, 1853, in Keane v. Brandon and Semple, Louisiana Supreme Court Case 4047 (1856), Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection,
Archives and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, UNO; see also 7, 10, 11, 13, 17, 51,
61, 233.
63. M.W. Phillips, Duty of Cotton Planters, DeBows Review 7:5 (November 1849),
412; Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, 93. See also Buck, The Development and
Organisation of Anglo-American Trade, 25, 79; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers,
132133; Killick, Risk, Speculation, and Profit, 56; Killick, The Cotton Operations of
Alexander Brown and Sons, 169194. See also Ralph W. Haskins, Planter and Cotton
Factor in the Old South: Some Areas of Friction, Agricultural History 29:1 (January 1955),
114; James E. Boyle, Cotton and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange: A Century of Evolution
(Garden City,NY: Country Life Press, 1934).
65. James M. Chambers, On the Treatment and Cultivation of Cotton, ACP 1:7 (July
1853), 204; Phillips, Duty of Cotton Planters, 411; Kettel, Southern Wealth and Northern
Profits, 92; Southern Commercial Convention at New Orleans, No.4, DeBows Review
22:6 (June 1857), 758.
66. Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 14; Leonard Black, The Life and Sufferings of
Leonard Black, 17.
67. Kilbourne, Debt, Investment, Slaves, xi, 5, 14, 4974. See also Thomas D. Russell,
South Carolinas Largest Slave Auctioneering Firm, Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1992
1993), 1241; Thomas D. Russell, Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption of Slave Families at Court Sales, Utah Law Review (1996), 1161.
68. Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown, 202; J. W. Longuen, The Rev. J. W.
Longuen, as a Slave, and as a Freeman: A Narrative of the Real Life (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1859), 65 (see also 56, 156). See also J.D. Green, The Life of
J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave from Kentucky, 27; Mason, Life of Isaac Mason, 16; Pickard,
The Kidnapped and the Ransomed, 94.
10. Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade

1. See Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Seas (1855), ed. John
Leighly (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Maury is generally remembered as an oceanographer; see Charles Lee Lewis, Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder
of the Seas (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1927); Frances Leigh Williams, Matthew Fontaine Maury: Scientist of the Sea (New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1963); Chester G. Hearn, Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the
487
Oceans (Camden,ME: International Marine, 2002). He makes several appearances as a free

trader in Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port (New York: C.Scribners
Sons, 1939), 35, 54, 120, 232, 324, 348, 359, and figures prominently as a pro-slavery imperialist in Percy A. Martin, The Influence of the United States on the Opening of the Amazon to the Worlds Commerce, Hispanic American Historical Review 1:2 (May 1918), 146
162; and Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave
Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
2. Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Maritime Interests of the South and West, Southern Quarterly Review 4:8 (1843), 323.
3. See Alasdair Roberts, Americas First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political
Disorder after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). For contrasting
interpretations, see Peter L. Rousseau, Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the
Panic of 1837, Journal of Economic History 62:2 (June 2002), 457488 (emphasizing federally mandated specie flows within the United States); Peter Temin, The Jacksonian Economy
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1969), 6892 (emphasizing changes in the rate at which the
Bank of England discounted U.S. paper); Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in the United
States, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
4. Augusta Convention of Merchants, Minutes of the Proceedings of a Convention of
Merchants and Others, Held in Augusta, Georgia, October 16, 1837 (Augusta, 1838),7; Henry
Bluff (pseud. of Matthew Maury), To the Memphis Convention, PartI, Southern Literary Messenger 11:10 (October 1845), 577, 587; Anonymous, Direct Trade of the South,
DeBows Review 14:5 (May 1853), 440; Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions,
18371859 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), 8890, 133134, 175, 183, 193; A.Dudley Mann, Southern Direct Trade with Europe, DeBows Review 24:5 (May 1858), 352
354; James Lyons etal., Southern Commercial Convention at Montgomery, Alabama,
DeBows Review 25:5 (May 1858), 424; Matthew Maury, Captain Maurys Letter on American Affairs (Richmond, 1861), reprinted in Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 18611865,
ed. Frank Friedel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 3, 6. See also
U.S.Congress, Senate, Report of Israel D. Andrew on the Trade and Commerce of the British
North American Colonies, Senate Executive Document 112, 32nd Congress, 1st Session,
1853, partly reproduced in Stuart Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 17901860: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 73
75; David Christy, Cotton Is King; or, Slavery in the Light of Political Economy, in Cotton Is
King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E.N. Elliot (Augusta,GA: Pritchard, Abbott and
Loomis, 1860), 125.
5. Southern Commercial Convention at Savannah, DeBows Review 22:1 (January
1857), 8687. For other explicitly historical accounts see Mann, Southern Direct Trade
with Europe, 352376; Lyons etal., Southern Commercial Convention at Montgomery,
Alabama, 424428; Matthew Maury, Two Letters on the Southern Steamship Line, DeBows Review 22:5 (May 1857), 515; Maury, Captain Maurys Letter on American Affairs.
488
6. For the pattern of trade, see Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 9596; Matthew
Maury (unsigned), A Scheme for Rebuilding Southern Commerce: Direct Trade with the
South, Southern Literary Messenger 5:1 (January 1839), 612.
7. The question of low aggregate demand is an old one in the historical literature on
slavery. See especially Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the
Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Vintage, 1967), 155239. See also Importance of an Industrial Revolution in the South: Speech of J.D.B. DeBow, DeBows
Review 12:5 (May 1852), 554.
8. Lastraps and Bingime to John Close, February22, 1837; Taylor (for Toledano) to
John Close, October30, 1837; Adams and Whitard to John Close, August14, 1844; Follain
and Belloq to John Close, February2, 1845. All from John Close Papers, Lower Mississippi
Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University (hereafter cited as
LSU).
9. Henry Huntington to William N. Mercer, April4, 1837, quoted in George D. Green,
Finance and Economic Development in the Old South: Louisiana Banking, 18041861 (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 28. See also J.D.B. DeBow, Rail-Road Prospects and
Progress, DeBows Review 12:5 (May 1852), 502; J.D.B. DeBow, Direct Trade of Southern States with Europe, DeBows Review 4:2 (October 1847), 221; Harold D. Woodman,
King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop, 18001925 (Co
lumbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 136138; Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the
Growth of the American Economy, 156157.
10. Lyons etal., Southern Commercial Convention at Savannah, 8687; Importance
of an Industrial Revolution in the South: Speech of J.B.D. DeBow, 555. See also Mann,
Southern Direct Trade with Europe, 327; Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union:
Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2009), 262; Christy, Cotton Is King, 88.
11. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York:
A.B. Burdick, 1857), 334; Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New
York: H.B. Price, 1860), 138.
12. Southern Commercial Convention at New OrleansNo.2, DeBows Review 18:4
(April 1855), 522525 (a helve is a handle). See also Robert Royal Russell, Economic
Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 18401861, University of Illinois Studies in the Social
Sciences 2:1 (1923), 48.
13. Quoted in John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York:
Octagon Books, 1971; orig. pub. 1958), 110; M.W. Phillips, Plantation EconomyNo.1,
American Cotton Planter 1:1 (January 1853), 23. See also J.A. Turner, The Cotton Planters
Manual: Being a Compilation of Facts from the Best Authorities on the Culture of Cotton (New
York: C.M. Saxton, 1857), 48.
14. Quoted in Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi, 109.
15. Phillips, Plantation EconomyNo.1, 2122.
489
16. Direct Trade of the South, 440.

17. Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union, passim. Direct Trade of the South, 440, 442.
See also Maury, Captain Maurys Letter on American Affairs, 25; Wender, Southern
Commercial Conventions, 113, 135, 187.
18. Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union, 207209 (see also 238, 262, 348); McDuffie,
quoted in Christy, Cotton Is King, 88 (Ihave transposed the two elements of the quo
tation); James Henry Hammond, Slavery in the Light of Political Science, in Elliot,
ed.,Cotton Is King, 658; Augusta Convention of Merchants, Minutes of the Proceedings of
a Convention of Merchants and Others, Held in Augusta, Georgia, 7; Proceedings of the
Southern Commercial Convention at Charleston (1839), quoted in Wender, Southern
Commercial Conventions, 3738 (see also 1213, 20).
19. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 9596; Maury [unsigned], A Scheme for Rebuilding Southern Commerce, 212; Matthew Maury, Direct Foreign Trade of the
South, DeBows Review 12:2 (February 1852), 126148; Maury, Captain Maurys Letter
on American Affairs.
20. Southern Commercial Convention of New Orleans at New OrleansNo.3, DeBows Review 12:5 (May 1852), 633.
21. Virginia Commercial Convention, DeBows Review 12:1 (January 1852), 3637;
DeBow, Rail-Road Prospects and Progress, 502; Maury, Direct Foreign Trade of the
South, 129, 133; Importance of an Industrial Revolution in the South: Speech of J.D.B.
DeBow, 556 (also 558). See also Matthew Maury, Commerce of the South and West,
DeBows Review 12:4 (April 1852), 383; Southern Commercial Convention of New Orleans at New OrleansNo.3, 633. In the original, Maury wrote Sandy Hook, which I
have replaced with New York to eliminate the need to include an extended account of
the geography of the ports of New York and New Jersey.
22. Christy, Cotton Is King, 87, 94.
23. Mann, Southern Direct Trade with Europe, 373; C.F. McKay, Cotton Trade of
the South, quoted in Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 203.
See also Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union, 324.
24. Southern Commercial Convention at Savannah, DeBows Review 22:1 (January
1857), 9293; Pike, quoted in Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 128. See also
Jones, quoted in Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 191.
25. Southern Commercial Convention at Savannah (January 1857), 103. See also
Mann, Southern Direct Trade with Europe, 373.
26. On railroads in the antebellum South, see Aaron Wagner Marrs, Railroads in the Old
South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2009); Ulrich B. Phillips, A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1908; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011).
27. DeBow, Rail-Road Prospects and Progress, 506; Speech of James Robb, Esq. of
New Orleans, DeBows Review 12:5 (May 1852), 547548. See also New Orleans and At-
490
takapas Rail-Road, DeBows Review 11:2 (August 1851), 214217; Connection of the Atlantic with the Gulf Interests of Alabama: Montgomery and Pensacola Railroad, DeBows
Review 14:6 (June 1853), 567579; Scott P. Marler, Merchants and the Political Economy
of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: New Orleans and Its Hinterlands (Ph.D. diss., Rice
University, 2007) 55152.
28. Marler, Merchants and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana,
17, 53, 83, 84, 89, 9395. Though I find Marlers emphasis on the backwardness of New
Orleans anachronistic for the reasons outlined in the text, his work is brilliant, pathbreaking, and comprehensiveit has been an indispensable source and counterpoint for my own
thinking. See also Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-
Bellum Economy (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Merl E. Reed, New
Orleans and the Railroad: The Struggle for Commercial Empire, 18301860 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1966); Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery.
29. U.S. Congress, House, Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States, House
Executive Document No. 6, Part 2, 50th Congress, 1st Session, 1888, reproduced in
Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy, 175.
30. Southern Commercial Convention at New OrleansNo.3, 625.
31. DeBow, Rail-Road Prospects and Progress, 501502; Memphis and Louisville
Railroad, DeBows Review 12:5 (May 1852), 551; New Orleans News-letter and General
Weekly Review, September14, 1850, quoted in Marler, Merchants and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana, 56. See also Speech of James Robb, Esq. of New
Orleans, 543551 (on the way that divisions between the French and American communities in New Orleans, expressed through the division of the city into self-governing municipalities, hindered capital investment in railroads); Matthew Maury, On Extending the
Commerce of the South and West by Sea, DeBows Review 12:4 (April 1852), 381399.
32. For Maury as the visionary of 1850s pro-slavery imperialism, see editors introduction to Inca (pseud. of Matthew Maury), Shall the Valleys of the Amazon and the Mississippi Reciprocate Trade, DeBows Review 14:2 (February 1853), 137.
33. Maury (unsigned), A Scheme for Rebuilding Southern Commerce, 3, 412,2.
34. Bluff (pseud. of Maury), To the Memphis Convention, PartI, 577578.
35. Ibid., 571, 581, 582, 602; Henry Bluff (pseud. of Matthew Maury), To the Memphis
Convention, PartII, Southern Literary Messenger 11:11 (November 1845), 653, 655658.
36. Bluff (pseud. of Maury), To the Memphis Convention, PartI, 577, 585.
37. Ibid., 602.
38. M.F. Maury, The Isthmus Line to the Pacific, Southern Literary Messenger 15:5
(May 1849), 264265. See also Francis Lieber, The Ship Canal from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, Southern Literary Messenger 15:5 (May 1849), 266267. Liebers contribution represents a piece of doggerel verse published as an appropriate companion to the article by
Matthew Maury, culminating in the proposal to do away with the sobriquet the United
491
States of America in favor of Winland to emphasize maritime over terrestrial geog

raphy.
39. A couple of points beyond the argument at hand bear noting: (1)this version of
empire emerged from the problem of underconsumption rather than overproduction
it was mercantile rather than industrial in origin; (2)Maurys vision of the Pacific market as the ultimate fix for the U.S. economy was one of the templates for the subsequent
sixty or so years of U.S. imperialism.
40. Matthew Maury, The Panama Rail-Way and the Gulf of Mexico, Southern Literary Messenger 15:8 (August 1849), 444445, 448, 451; Maury, Direct Foreign Trade of the
South, 136.
41. Maury, On Extending the Commerce of the South and West by Sea, 394359 (I
have transposed the sentences of the quotation). See also Inca (pseud. of Maury), Shall
the Valleys of the Amazon and the Mississippi Reciprocate Trade, 137145; Maury, Direct Foreign Trade of the South, 126148; Matthew Maury, Valley of the Amazon, DeBows Review 14:5 (May 1853), 449460; Matthew Maury, Valley of the Amazon, No.II,
DeBows Review 14:6 (June 1853), 556567; Maury, Two Letters on the Southern Steamship Line, 513517.
42. For the intellectual history of nineteenth-century racism, see Reginald Horsman,Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind:
American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press,
2002).
43. Maury, The Panama Rail-Way and the Gulf of Mexico, 449.
44. Maury, Direct Foreign Trade of the South, 126, 142, 144, 147. See Gerald Horne,
The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New
York University Press, 2007). For the provenance of the final argument see Thomas R.
Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003), 1054.
11. Tales of Mississippian Empire

1. On all things geographic, see D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical
Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2: Continental America, 18001867 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993).
2. See Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age
of Emancipation (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Gerald Horne, The
Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York: New York
University Press, 2007); Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854
1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973).
492
3. See Richard White, The Geography of American Empire, Raritan 23:3 (Winter
2004),8. I am indebted to conversations with White for the conception of space that
frames most of what follows.
4. James D. B. DeBow, The West Indies, DeBows Review 5:6 (June 1848), 470;
Richard Burleigh Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans (New York: S.Hueston, 1850), 94, 191.
5. Eliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to California
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000); Pekka Hmlinen, The Comanche Empire
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
6. See David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 18481861 (New York: Harper and Row,
1976), 145176. For an interesting example of the travails of transcontinental travel via
Central America circa 1850, see David Knapp Pangborn, A Journey from New York to
San Francisco in 1850, American Historical Review 9:1 (October 1903), 104115.
7. Concerning everything to do with Lpez, I have been greatly reliant upon and am
correspondingly indebted to Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso Lpez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). I am likewise indebted to May, The Southern Dream of Caribbean Empire; Robert E. May, John A.
Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); and
Robert E. May, Manifest Destinys Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Also see Herminio Portell-Vla, Narciso
Lpez y su Epoca, 3 vols. (Havana: Cultural, 19301958); Coleccin de los Partes y Otros
Documentos Publicados en la Gaceta Oficial de la Habana, Referentes la Invasin de la
Gavilla de Piratas Capitaneada por el Traidor Narciso Lpez (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y Capitana General por S.M., 1851); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and Antebellum Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170196; Robert Granville
Caldwell, The Lpez Expeditions to Cuba, 18481851 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1915); Anderson Chenault Quisenberry, Lpezs Expeditions to Cuba, 1850 and 1851
(Louisville: J.P. Morton, 1906). See also Tom Chaffin, Sons of Washington: Narciso
Lpez, Filibustering, and U.S Nationalism, 18481851, Journal of the Early Republic 14
(1995), 79106; Richard Tansey, Southern Expansionism: Urban Interests in the Cuban
Filibusters, Plantation Society in the Americas 1 (1979), 227251; Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to
Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005).
8. Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 915, 2223, 4448, 74, 7779. Among those involved with
Lpez were John OSullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review
and original popularizer of the term manifest destiny; and George Law, the New York
steamboat magnate, merchant banker, and patron of U.S. senator Stephen A. Douglas.
9. For estimates of the numbers killed in action, see Louis Schlesinger, Personal Narrative of Louis Schlesinger of Adventures in Cuba and Ceuta, Democratic Review 31
(1852), 257, 562.
10. Duncan Smith (pseud. of Henry Burtnett), Narrative of Events Connected with
493
the Late Intended Invasion of Cuba, ed. L.M. Perez, Journal of Southern History 10 (1906),
345362; Marion Taylor, Col. M. C. Taylors Diary in Lpezs Crdenas Expedition,
1850, ed. A.C. Quisenberry, Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 19 (September 1921), 7989; AFlibustiero [sic], Life of General Lpez, and History of the Late Attempted Revolution in Cuba (New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1851), 1214.
11. May, John A. Quitman, 270295; C. Stanley Urban, The Abortive Quitman
Filibustering Expedition to Cuba, 18531855, Journal of Mississippi History 17:3 (July
1856), 175196; William Walker, The War in Nicaragua (Mobile: S.H. Goetzel, 1860), 239,
250, 255.
12. New York Herald, September19, 1849, quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 72; Samuel J.
Walker, Cuba and the South, DeBows Review 17:5 (November 1854), 520, 524.
13. Alexander Jones, Cuba in 1851 (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851),8; James
Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, June 30, 1823, quoted in Basil Rauch, American Interest
in Cuba, 18481855 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 24; Worthington
Chauncey Ford, ed., Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol.7 (New York: Macmillan, 1917),
372373, quoted in Meinig, The Shaping of America, 32.
14. DeBow, The West Indies, 456; Letter from Asabel Smith, DeBows Review 7:7
(December 1849), 540. See also Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the
United States (New York: International Publishers, 1962), 3132; Meinig, The Shaping of
America, 155. On U.S.-European rivalry in the Caribbean, see especially Lester D. Langley,
Struggle for the American Mediterranean: United StatesEuropean Rivalry in the Gulf-Carib
bean, 17761904 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976). Also see James E. Lewis, Jr.,
The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of
the Spanish Empire, 17831829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);
Howard Jones and Donald A. Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American
Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997); Kenneth Bourne,
Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 18151908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
15. May, John A. Quitman, 242244.
16. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 192.
17. New York Times, October 22, 1852, quoted in Foner, A History of Cuba, 30. Ive
transposed the original quotation, which reads The Cuban question is now the leading
one of the time.
18. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 192193. For a (not coincidentally) nearly identical
account, see Jones, Cuba in 1851, 11. For British interest in California, see Meinig, The
Shaping of America, 142145; Edward Everett to Crampton, December 1, 1852, quoted
in Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 177. For the British side of things, see David
Brown,Palmerston: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); James Chambers, Palmerston: The Peoples Darling (London: John Murray, 2004); Jasper Ridley, Lord
Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970).
494
19. New Orleans Delta, February 26, 1854, and New Orleans Courier, July1 and December24, 1851, quoted in Foner, A History of Cuba, 3132.
20. On all this, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots
of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
21. Anonymous, Destiny of the Slave States, DeBows Review 17:3 (September 1854),
280281.
22. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 250.
23. Edward A. Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New
York: Pudney and Russell, 1859), 108.
24. The Late Cuba Expedition, DeBows Review 9:2 (August 1850), 174; DeBow,
The West Indies, 475, 476; J.S. Thrasher, Address Delivered at the Celebration of the
Third Anniversary in Honor of the Martyrs for Cuban Freedom, pamphlet (New Orleans: Sherman, Wharton, 1854),3.
25. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 187188; DeBow, The West Indies, 475.
26. Thrasher, Address, 4, 3.
27. Thrasher, Address, 3; Unos Cubanos (Havana, 1848), quoted in Caldwell, The
Lpez Expeditions, 26; Ambrosio Jos Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs Addressed
to the People of the United States, September1st, 1852, pamphlet (New Orleans: Daily
Delta, 1853), 5,8. See also Jones, Cuba in 1851, 19.
28. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 183, 113.
29. See Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of LaEscalera and
the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown,CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1988).
30. Foner, A History of Cuba, 1719. See also Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 44. On
Cuban slave society in general, see Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the
Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave
Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 18601899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). On unrest and social order, see Jean-Pierre Tardieu, Morir o dominar: En torno al reglamento de esclavos de Cuba, 18411866 (Madrid: Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, 2003); Manuel Barcia Paz, Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance
on Western Cuban Plantations, 18081848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2008); Manuel Barcia Paz, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for
Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Gloria Garca
Rodrguez, Conspiraciones y revueltas: La actividad poltica de los negros en Cuba, 17901845
(Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2003); Alain Yacou, La longue guerre des ngres marrons de Cuba, 17961851 (Paris: Pointe--Pitre, 2009); on Cuba and the United States, see
Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Cuba y los Estados Unidos, 18051898 (Havana: Publicaciones de la Sociedad Cubana de Estudios Histricos e Internacionales, 1949); for a comparative approach, see Daniel E. Walker, No More, No More: Slavery and Cultural Resistance
in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
495
31. Gaspar Betancourt Cisneros, Thoughts upon the Incorporation of Cuba into the
American Confederation in Contraposition to Those Published by Don Jos Antonio
Saco (1849), quoted in Foner, A History of Cuba, 18; LaVerdad (New York), April27,
1848, quoted in Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 63.
32. See, for example, John S. Thrasher, Cuba and Louisiana: Letter to Samuel J. Peters, Esq. (New Orleans: Picayune Print, 1854),5; Letter from Asabel Smith, 538.
33. DeBow, The West Indies, 455470. See also the tables in Kimball, Cuba and the
Cubans, 166186, 211231; and Thrasher, Cuba and Louisiana, 34. On DeBows importance in formatting the optical field that defined American and Southern interest in Cuba,
see Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 190.
34. DeBow, The West Indies, 464470; Thrasher, Cuba and Louisiana, 3,4.
35. DeBow, The West Indies, 467, 470.
36. Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 195198, quotation on 196. For more accounting in
the conditional, see Thrasher, Cuba and Louisiana, 34; and Cisneros, Unos Cubanos, quoted in Caldwell, The Lpez Expeditions, 26.
37. DeBow, The West Indies, 498499, 484, 485.
38. Ibid., 486, 487, 488.
39. Ibid., 487, 488, 489, 493494.
40. Ibid., 486, 498.
41. Ibid., 486, 488.
42. Leon Fragua De Calvo, Reply to a Pamphlet Entitled Thoughts on the Annexation of Cuba to the United States, by Don Antonio Saco, in Kimball, Cuba and the Cubans, 250; Senator Andrew Butler, Congressional Globe 32:2, 96, quoted in Rauch, American
Interest in Cuba, 249; Destiny of the Slave States, DeBows Review 17:3 (September 1854),
284.
43. William L. Hodge, Report to the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce, in Reply
to the Questions Propounded by the Honorable Secretary of the Treasury, on the Subjectof the Tariff and Warehouse System, pamphlet (New Orleans: Office of The Daily
Tropic, 1845).
44. Tansey, Southern Expansionism, 229233. New Orleans Commercial Bulletin,
March29, 1851, and Daily Delta, June13, 1851, quoted in Tansey, Southern Expansionism, 230. See also Kelman, A River and Its City, 119123.
45. Tansey, Southern Expansionism, 229230.
46. Matthew Maury, The Panama Rail-Way and the Gulf of Mexico, Southern Literary Messenger 15:8 (August 1849), 442. For the classic account of the struggle between
North and South over Western commerce, see Barrington Moore, The American Civil
War: The Last Capitalist Revolution, in Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966),
111155.
47. New Orleans Crescent, May 20, 1854, quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 95; Samuel
496
Walker, Cuba and the South, DeBows Review 17:5 (November 1854), 524; New Orleans
Crescent, September1, 1849; Destiny of the Slave States, DeBows Review 17:3 (September 1854), 28; Maury, The Panama Rail-Way and the Gulf of Mexico, 443.
48. John OSullivan to James Buchanan, July4, 1846, quoted in Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 56.
49. Caldwell, The Lpez Expeditions, 3031; conversation reported by Abrosio Gonzales in the Charleston Mercury, August25, 1851, quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 46.
50. Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 11120, 262294; Foner, A History of Cuba,
1019.
51. An Act in Addition to the Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the
United States and to Repeal the Acts Therein Mentioned, Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 1st Session, 25672570. For some of the backstory of why the act was passed in the
first place, see Frank Lawrence Owsley, Jr., and Gene A. Smith, Filibusters and Expansionists: Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny, 18001821 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1997).
52. Taylor, Col. M. C. Taylors Diary, 8183; Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 104108, 118
119.
53. Taylor, Col. M. C. Taylors Diary, 8486; Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 113, 127, 128
139.
54. J.F.H. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman (New York: Harper,
1860), vol.2, 5961; Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 161, 167175.
55. Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 160161.
56. John OSullivan, The Late Cuba State Trials, Democratic Review 166 (April 1852),
308309.
57. Ibid., 310311; New Orleans Delta, January7, 1851, quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory,
177.
58. See OSullivan, The Late Cuba State Trials, 311. See also John Henderson, Considerations on the Constitutionality of the Presidents Proclamations (New Orleans:
Daily Delta, 1854).
60. Ibid., 228235.
61. Claiborne, Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, 6466, 7783; May, John A.
Quitman, 249250.
12. The Material Limits of Manifest Destiny

1. Louis Schlesinger, Personal Narrative of Louis Schlesinger of Adventures in Cuba
and Ceuta, Democratic Review 31 (1852), 210213; AFlibustiero [sic], Life of General
Lpez, and History of the Late Attempted Revolution in Cuba (New York: DeWitt and
497
Davenport, 1851), 22, 27. Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die (New York: Vintage Books,
1995), 159160.
2. Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 212.
3. Bond of Provisional Government of Cuba, dated April30, 1850, Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. For discount rates, see Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso Lpez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1996), 90; Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Its Relations with the United
States (New York: International Publishers, 1962), 88.
4. John W. Henderson to John A. Quitman, November6, 1850, in J.F.H. Claiborne,
Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, vol.2 (New York: Harper, 1860), 70.
5. Dispatches from Havana dated July16 and July17, 1851, in Alexander Jones, Cuba
in 1851 (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851), 4147. These papers quickly registered
the image of Cuban freedom fighters in the minds of an American audience made wary of
filibustering by the apparent indifference of the Creoles of Crdenas (at least) to the arrival of their supposed salvation in the person of Narciso Lpez. This rapid success later
convinced some cynics that the news of the rising in Prncipe had been a put-up job designed to create a bubble of interest in Lopezs bonds.
6. AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 4.
7. See Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 7577.
8. On the occupations of Lpezs soldiers, see Thomas W. Wilson, An Authentic
Narrative of the Piratical Descents upon Cuba (Havana, 1851), 4144. On the preponderance of clerks in Lpezs army, see also Richard Tansey, Southern Expansionism: Urban
Interests in the Cuban Filibusters, Plantation Society in the Americas 1 (1979), 233.
9. On the importance of newspapers in framing a field of political possibility, see Stuart Hall etal., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
11. Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 198.
12. Letter from C.N. Horwell to the True Delta, September4, 1851, in Wilson, An
Authentic Narrative, 33; on Banks Arcade, see Benjamin Moore Norman, Normans New
Orleans and Environs, ed. Matthew J. Schott (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1976), 156157.
13. Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 18; Declaration of James St.Levi, August31,
1851, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 36.
14. Duncan Smith (pseud. of Henry Burtnett), Narrative of Events Connected with
the Late Intended Invasion of Cuba (July 1851), ed. L.M. Perez, Journal of Southern His
tory 10 (1906), 348.
15. Ibid., 353354.
16. The Late Cuba Expedition, DeBows Review 9:2 (August 1850), 167.
498

18. Marion Taylor, Col. M.C. Taylors Diary in Lpezs Crdenas Expedition, 1850,
ed. A.C. Quisenberry, Register of Kentucky State Historical Society 19 (September 1921),
8182.
19. Taylor, Col. M.C. Taylors Diary, 84, 85.
21. Ibid., 214215.
22. Ibid., 217218.
23. Ibid., 218219.
24. Ibid., 218219.
25. Ibid., 219220.
26. Ibid., 223224.
27. Ibid., 352353.
28. Ibid., 353.
29. Declaration of Laine, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 38; Declaration of
St.Levi, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 37.
31. Ibid., 357.
32. Ibid., 361368.
33. Declaration of Laine, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 38; C.N. Horwell to
the True Delta, September4, 1851, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 32; Schlesinger,
Personal Narrative, 553558.
35. A Flibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 22; Declaration of Laine, in Wilson, An
Authentic Narrative, 38; Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 558, 562.
36. A Flibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 2224.
37. On the idea that war substantiates arguments in dead bodies, see Elaine Scarry, The
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), esp. 108157.
38. Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 16.
40. Ibid., 241, 245247.
41. Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 565568, 571.
42. C.N. Horwell to the True Delta, September4, 1851, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 34; Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 569, 571.
43. A Flibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 2425; Wilson, An Authentic Narrative,24.
44. AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 2627.
45. As quoted in Ambrosio Jos Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs Addressed to
499
the People of the United States, September 1st, 1852, pamphlet (New Orleans: Daily
Delta, 1853), 15.
46. Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 356, 365, 366, 553, 561, 566, 579590, quotation
on 579.
47. Ibid., 367, 561.
48. H. Vienne to My Dear and Affectionate Sisters and Brothers, August16, 1851, and
G.A. Cook to My Dear Friends, August16, 1851, in Jones, Cuba in 1851, 68; William Crittenden to John J. Crittenden, August16, 1851, quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 215.
49. C.N. Horwell to the True Delta, August31, 1851, and September4, 1851, in Wilson,
An Authentic Narrative, 2833.
50. La Prensa, August 16, 1851, translated and reprinted in Jones, Cuba in 1851, 62;
NewOrleans True Delta, August25, 1851, quoted in AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 32.
51. Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 610; J. Fisher to the Louisville Courier, August16, 1851, in AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 31.
52. On the association with speculators in Mexican lands, see Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 84.
53. Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 4; AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 26;
C. N. Horwell to the True Delta, September 4, 1851, in Wilson, An Authentic Narrative,34.
54. Millard Fillmore, Second Annual Message, December2, 1851, in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington,DC: Published
by the authority of Congress, 1897), vol.4, 2651. Fillmore began his address with his his
tory and condemnation of the invasion which took up, by my reckoning, just under one-
fourth of the address.
55. Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 554, 558.
56. AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez,4. In the original, the word redeem follows the rest of the quotation; the meaning is unaltered.
57. Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs, 13.
58. Ibid., 1011.
59. Ibid., 14; AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 21.
60. Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs, 15.
61. AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 25; Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 24;
Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 575576; Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs, 15.
62. Schlesinger, Personal Narrative, 575576; Wilson, An Authentic Narrative, 24;
AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 25; Gonzales, Manifesto on Cuban Affairs, 15.
63. See, for instance, A Flibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 24; Jones, Cuba in
1851,65.
64. Millard Fillmore, Proclamation of April25, 1851, in Richardson, A Compilation of
the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol.4, 2647; AFlibustiero, Life of General L-
500
pez, 24; Letters from Havana, dated August 16 and August 18, 1851, in Jones, Cuba in
1851, 59, 60, 65.
65. A Flibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 24, 25; Letters from Havana dated August16, 1851, in Jones, Cuba in 1851, 58, 59; Jones, Cuba in 1851, 65; Schlesinger, Personal
Narrative, 256.
66. Letters from Havana dated August16, 1851, in Jones, Cuba in 1851, 58, 59; AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 2324.
67. Samuel Walker, Cuba and the South, DeBows Review 17:5 (November 1854), 522;
AFlibustiero, Life of General Lpez, 25.
68. Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba: 18481855 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1948) 275.
69. Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias Garcia, and Maria del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave
Market, 17901830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2372.
70. Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 275278; Foner, A History of Cuba, 7682; Chester
Stanley Urban, The Ideology of Southern Imperialism: New Orleans and the Caribbean,
18451860, Louisiana Historical Quarterly 39 (January 1956), 5961.
71. Destiny of the Slave States, DeBows Review 17:3 (September 1854), 282; Ambrosio Gonzalez, in La Verdad, November20, 1853, quoted in Foner, A History of Cuba, 82;
Louisiana Senator John Slidell speaking in the United States Senate, quoted in Chester
Stanley Urban, The Idea of Progress and Southern Imperialism: New Orleans and the
Caribbean, 18451861 (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1943), 513514.
72. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston: Beacon, 1995).
73. Urban, The Idea of Progress, 511514; Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 288
289.
74. Walker, Cuba and the South, 524.
75. Abraham Lincoln to Senator John Parker Hale, January11, 1861, quoted in Rauch,
American Interest in Cuba, 303.
13. The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny

1. William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His
Associates (New York: Macmillan, 1916); Charles H. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny:
The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1980), 207. The literature on Walker is large and uneven. See Laurence Green, The Filibuster: The Career of William Walker (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1937); Albert Z. Carr, The
World and William Walker (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Frederic Rosengarten, Jr.,
Freebooters Must Die! The Life and Death of William Walker, the Most Notorious Filibuster
of the Nineteenth Century (Wayne, PA: Haverford House, 1976); and especially Amy S.
Greenberg, The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny: Character, Appearance, and Filibustering,
501
Journal of the Early Republic 20:4 (Winter 2000), 673699; and Robert E. May, Manifest
Destinys Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2002). See also E.Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 17981858 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 194
203; Aims McGuinness, Searching for Latin America: Race and Sovereignty in the
Americas in the 1850s, in Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2003), 87107; Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream:
Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2141.
For contemporary accounts (other than Walkers own), see James Carson Jamison, With
Walker in Nicaragua; or, Reminiscences of an Officer of the American Phalanx (Columbia,MO: E.W. Stephens, 1909). The most thorough account of William Walker is Alejandro Bolaos-Geyer, William Walker: The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, 5vols. (Lake Saint
Louis,MO: Alejandro Bolaos-Geyer, 19881991).
2. James Dunkerley, Power on the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America
(London: Verso, 1988), 320. See also Frances Kinloch Tijerno, Nicaragua: Identidad y cultura poltica, 18211858 (Managua: Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1999); Gregorio Selser,
Nicaragua de Walker a Somoza (Mexico City: Mex-Sur Editorial, 1984); Francisco Ortega
Arancibia, Cuarenta aos de historia de Nicaragua, 18381878, 3rd ed. (Managua: Fondo de
Promocin Cultural, Banco de Amrica, 1975); Virgilio Rodrguez Beteta, Trascendencia
nacional e internacional de la guerra de Centro Amrica contra Walker y sus filibusteros (Guatemala: Editorial del Ejrcito, 1976); Ivn Molina Jimnez, La campaa nacional, 18561857:
Una visin desde el sigloXXI (Alajuela: Museo Histrico Cultural Juan Santamara, 2000);
Gustavo Alemn Bolaos, Centenario de la guerra nacional de Nicaragua contra Walker, Costa
Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador y Honduras en la contienda (Guatemala, 1956); Lorenzo
Montfar, Walker en Centro-Amrica (Guatemala: La Unin, 1887); Joaqun Bernardo
Calvo, La campaa nacional contra los filibusteros en 1856 y 1857 (San Jose, Costa Rica: Tipografa Nacional, 1909); Dr.Miguel ngel lvarez, Los filibusteros en Nicaragua, 1855
18561857 (Managua: Editorial LaPrensa, 1944). For primary sources, see Angelita Garca
Pea, Documentos para la historia de la guerra nacional contra los filibusteros en Nicaragua
(San Salvador: Editorial Ahora, 1958). See also Gobat, Confronting the American Dream.
3. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 237240.
4. For more on Vanderbilts role, see Stephen Dando-Collins, Tycoons War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow Americas Most Famous Military Adventurer
(New York: DaCapo, 2009).
5. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 231233, 241249.
6. William Walker, The War in Nicaragua (New York: S.H. Goetzel, 1860).
7. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 345.
8. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 252. Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus, 1819.
9. From a request for official correspondence between the new government in Nicara-
502
gua and the United States, entered in the Congressional Record and quoted in Brown,
Agents of Manifest Destiny, 340.
10. For an example of the Costa Rican perspective, see Rafael Obregn, Costa Rica y la
guerra contra los filibusteros (Alajuela, Costa Rica: Museo Histrico Cultural Juan Santamara, 1991); and Costa Rica y la guerra del 56: La campaa del Trnsito, 18561857 (San Jos:
Editorial Costa Rica, 1976). The war had a profound cultural impact on the region and is
usually referred to simply as the National War. For an example of cultural production
rooted in memories of the conflict, see the poetry collection Jos Roberto Cea, La guerra
nacional (San Salvador, ElSalvador: Canoa Editores, 1992).
11. Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 359407. Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus, 12.
12. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 316317; Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny,
407408.
13. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 250.
14. Just for the sake of example, see Proceedings of the Southern Convention Held at
Vicksburg, DeBows Review 27:1 (July 1859), 96.
15. The classic statement is Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).
16. Stephanie M. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), viii, 535.
17. Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-west, by a Yankee (New York: Harper and Row,
1835), vol.2, 86; James Stirling, Letters from the Slave States (London: John W. Parker and
Son, 1857), 179.
18. See Edmund Ruffin, The Effects of the High Prices of Slaves, DeBows Review
26:6 (June 1859), 647657; Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York: Free Press, 1971), 3537; Frederic Bancroft, Slave
Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1931), 339364, quotations from 342, 351,
352, 364.
19. See Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 357; for comparison of slave prices to
cotton prices, see Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1963), 177.
20. Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1939), 8690; New Orleans Crescent, September17, 1859, quoted in
Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle, 88.
21. See, for instance, George Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principles; or, Social Evils
and Their Remedies, DeBows Review 22:5 (May 1857), 451; Late Southern Convention
at Montgomery, DeBows Review 24:6 (June 1858), 500; Edmund Ruffin, The Effects of
the High Prices of Slaves, Considered in Reference to the Interests of Agriculture, of Individuals, and of the Commonwealth of Virginia, DeBows Review 26:6 (June 1859), 650.
22. Edward Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor: To the People of Lou-
503
isiana, DeBows Review 25:5 (November 1858), 502; Southern Convention at Vicksburg,
DeBows Review 27:2 (August 1859), 208; Charter of the Knights of the Golden Circle,
quoted in William H. Bell, Knights of the Golden Circle: Its Organization and Activities
in Texas Prior to the Civil War (M.A.thesis, Texas A&M University, 1965), 213; Edward
Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Houses of the South (1859; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 53.
23. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York:
Burdick Brothers, 1857), 130. For the larger discussion, see James Oakes, The Peculiar
Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery, in Slavery and the American South, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 2956.
24. See especially the long quotation from George M. Weston in Helper, The Impending
Crisis of the South, 164: I do not recollect to ever have seen or heard non-slaveholding
whites referred to by Southern gentlemen as constituting any part of what thing they call
the South. When the rights of the South or its wrongs or its policy or its interests or its
institutions are spoken of reference is always intended to the rights, wrongs, policy, interests, and institutions of the three-hundred and forty-seven thousand slaveholders.
25. Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South, 3233, 43, 118, 121. See generally 4144,
118128.
26. Ibid., 300 (see also 128).
27. Ibid., 77, 169. The second quotation is in the singular (abandoned wretch...) in
the original.
28. See, for instance, Functions of the Slave, DeBows Review 26:4 (April 1859), 477.
On pro-slavery thought generally, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery:
Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 18301860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
29. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 5657. The classic statement of the complexities of this
triangular social formation is Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves
Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 724.
30. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 59.
31. Ibid., 58. For other violent, frustrated slaveholders, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James
Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1982); and Kenneth A. Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The
Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Kathleen Brown, Good
Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
32. William Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua: A History of the Central American
War (New York: Springer and Townsend, 1856), 199; Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers,
914, 32; Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 53.
33. Greenberg, The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, 673699.
504

35. See Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). See also the chapter entitled
The Inversion of the Frontier Hero: William Walker and John Brown, 18551860, in
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 18001890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), esp. 242261.
36. Narciso Lpez, quoted in Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 61; John Hill Wheeler,
quoted in Greenberg, The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, 683, doggerel verse quoted in
Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 132; and Louisville Daily Courier, February19, 1859,
quoted in Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 18541861 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973),7. See, generally, Greenberg, The Grey-
Eyed Man of Destiny, 682687. In this context it is not surprising that when John Quitman set up an office in New Orleans to raise money for his abortive attempt to take over
Cuba, he rented a house on Rampart Streettucked in among the apartments where the
Valleys leading men visited their light-skinned concubines. See Robert E. May, John A.
Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 190.
37. Soul, quoted in Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 120, 143; John Henderson,
Considerations on the Constitutionality of the Presidents Proclamation (New Orleans,
1854),1. The exploding frog is from Aesops fable of a frog who tried to show his son (or
his friends, depending on the version) that he could puff himself up to be as big as an ox.
The moral being that self-conceit leads to self-destruction.
38. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 39, 40, 44 (see also 36, 43, 72, 179).
39. See, for example, The Problem of Misgovernment in Central America, DeBows
Review 23:6 (December 1857), 608624. See, generally, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge,MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981).
40. Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 17, 18, 13, 46.
41. William Gilmore Simms to William Porcher Miles, January25, 1858, in The Letters
of William Gilmore Simms, vol.4, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred T. Odell, and T.C.
Duncan Eaves (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1955), 11.
42. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 57 (see also 186); Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 184, 43 (see also 57, 63, 65).
43. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 37, 49.
44. Well, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 49; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny,
210.
45. Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor, 503504; see also Nicaragua, DeBows Review 22:1 (January 1857), 105109; and Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 108124.
46. Quoted in Greenberg, The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, 683.
505
47. Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 124, 261262; Nicaragua, DeBows Review 22:1 (January 1857), 106, 108.
48. Wells, Walkers Expedition to Nicaragua, 108109.
49. On El Nicaragense, see Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 307308; quotations
from ElNicaragense, January5, 1856, and April30, 1856, in Wells, Walkers Expedition to
Nicaragua, 109116.
50. Quoted in Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 375; quoted in Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 265. See also Greenberg, The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, 674675.
51. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 27, 34, 250.
52. Ibid., 256.
53. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 209210; Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny, 351
(see also 342).
54. Nicaragua, DeBows Review 22:1 (January 1857), 106.
55. Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor, 503.
56. William Walker, Slavery in Central and South America and Mexico, DeBows Review 23:4 (April 1857), 442.
57. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 259, 261.
58. Ibid., 262. See also Nicaragua, DeBows Review 22:1 (January 1857), 108.
60. Ibid., 259.
61. Walker, Slavery in Central and South America and Mexico, 442.
62. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 271272. See, generally, 258280.
63. Ibid., 273, 280.
64. Walker, Slavery in Central and South America and Mexico, 442443; Walker, The
War in Nicaragua, 280.
14. The Ignominious Effort to Reopen the Slave Trade

1. Anonymous, Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, DeBows Review 24:6
(June 1858), 579.
2. On the history of the reopening movement, see W.E.B. DuBois, The Suppression
of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 16381870 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), 168193; Harvey Wish, The Revival of the African Slave Trade in
the United States, 18561860, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27:4 (March 1941), 569
588; Ronald T. Takaki, The Movement to Reopen the African Slave Trade in South Carolina, South Carolina Historical Magazine 66:1 (January 1965), 3854; Barton J. Bernstein,
Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the African Slave Trade, Journal of Negro His
tory 51:1 (January 1966), 1635; James Paisley Hendrix, Jr., The Efforts to Reopen the
African Slave Trade in Louisiana, Louisiana History 10:2 (Spring 1969), 97123; Ronald
506
T. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New
York: Free Press, 1971); David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 18481861 (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976), 385404; and Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery:
Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 125186.
3. Hendrix, The Efforts to Reopen the African Slave Trade in Louisiana, 101102,
106111.
4. The Late Southern Convention, DeBows Review 27:1 (July 1859), 97.
5. On South Carolina and the slave trade, see Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery,
125186.
6. Hendrix, The Efforts to Reopen the African Slave Trade in Louisiana, 97123;
CO318/221, National Archives of Great Britain, Kew. I am grateful to Jim Downs for
providing me with the second reference.
7. Serial Set vol. 929, Session volume no. 12, 35th Congress, 1st Session, S. Exec.
Doc.49, 35, 1315, 1730, 3133; DuBois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, 210.
8. See, on the one hand, Bernstein, Southern Politics and Attempts to Reopen the
Slave Trade; and Potter, The Impending Crisis; and, on the other hand, Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery.
9. Leonidas W. Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade, Made to the Southern Convention
at Montgomery by L.W. Spratt, DeBows Review 24:6 (June 1858), 477.
10. Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade, 481, 483; Edward Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor: To the People of Louisiana, DeBows Review 25:5 (November
1858), 491506; Anonymous, The Middle Passage; or, Suffering of Slave and Free Immigrants, DeBows Review 22:6 (June 1857), 570583; Thomas Walton, Further Views of
the Advocates of the Slave Trade, DeBows Review 26:1 (January 1859), 62; Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, 585.
11. Walton, Further Views of the Advocates of the Slave Trade, 62; see also Spratt,
Report on the Slave Trade, 481; and Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, 585.
12. The Middle Passage; or, Suffering of Slave and Free Immigrants, 570583;
George Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principle; or, Social Evils and Their Remedies,
PartIISlave Trade, DeBows Review 22:5 (May 1857), 458. See also Spratt, Report on
the Slave Trade, 481482; Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, 585, 598.
13. Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, 585.
14. Ibid., 582, 587.
15. Edward Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Houses of the South (New
York: Negro Universities Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1859), 54.
16. Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor, 493, 499501 (quotation on
501).
17. Southern Convention at Vicksburg, DeBows Review 27:2 (August 1859), 219.
18. See Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets,
507
and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978); and Lacy Ford,
Reconsidering the Internal Slave Trade: Paternalism, Markets, and the Character of the
Old South, in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, 18081888, ed.
Walter Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 143164.
19. Lexington Valley Star, September13, 1860, quoted in Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade, 119.
20. Late Southern Convention at Montgomery, 589.
21. Edmund Ruffin, The Effects of the High Prices of Slaves, DeBows Review 26:6
(June 1858), 650. See also Editorial Miscellany, DeBows Review 26:4 (April 1859), 482;
African Labor Supply Association, DeBows Review 27:2 (August 1859), 232, 234.
22. Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade, 482, 490. The first clause in the original is in
the past tense.
24. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (New York: Negro
Universities Press, 1968; orig. pub. 1854), 241, 265.
25. Article 2: States Liberties and African Labor, DeBows Review 25:6 (December
1858), 626627.
26. Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade, 482.
27. See, for instance, Ruffin, The Effects of the High Prices of Slaves, 650; Deloney,
The South Demands More Negro Labor, 493.
28. For slaves regulation of their own reproduction, see Deborah Gray White, Arnt I
a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (W.W. Norton, 1985), 91118; for the emphasis on the articulation of the social reproduction of the slaveholding regime with the
biological reproduction of the enslaved population, see Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women:
Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004).
29. African Labor Supply Association, 233.
31. Ibid., 494499. See also Anonymous, Southern Slavery and the Cotton Trade,
DeBows Review 23:5 (November 1857), 475483; Editorial from New York Herald, Present Growth and Future Supply of Cotton, reprinted in DeBows Review 22:2 (February
1857), 197201.
32. Southern Slavery and the Cotton Trade, 475483; Fitzhugh, The Conservative
Principle, 451.
33. The Middle Passage; or, The Suffering of Slave and Free Immigrants, 581; Fitz
hugh, The Conservative Principle, 451.
34. Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor, 497; Southern Slavery and
the Cotton Trade, 475; Spratt, Report on the Slave Trade, 490491.
35. Present Growth and Future Supply of Cotton, reprinted in DeBows Review 22:2
(February 1857), 200.
508
36. Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Labor, 499; Present Growth and
Future Supply of Cotton, 197; Ruffin, The Effects of the High Prices of Slaves, 657,
652. Deloney referred to the slave shortage in the Lower South; Ruffin, to that in the Upper
South. See also Letter from James H. Brigham, DeBows Review 26:4 (April 1859), 482.
37. Southern Convention at Vicksburg, 213; Walton, Further Views of the Advocates of the Slave Trade, 6263; Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South:
How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857), 357; J.D.B. DeBow, The Times Are
Out of Joint, DeBows Review 23:6 (June 1857), 656658; Pollard, Black Diamonds, 66.
38. Quoted in Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Octagon
Books, 1971), 204; quoted in Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions, 18371859
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1930), 20; Anonymous, Rail-road Prospects
and Progress, DeBows Review 12:5 (May 1852), 498; Anonymous, The American Cotton
Planter, American Cotton Planter 1:1 (January 1853), 20; Anonymous, Direct Trade of
the Southern States with Europe, DeBows Review 4:3 (November 1847), 340.
39. Pollard, Black Diamonds, 111; Southern Convention at Vicksburg, 210; The
Middle Passage; or, The Suffering of Slave and Free Immigrant, 570583 (parable of the
bees on 579); Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principle, 448462 (quotations on 449 and
455); Deloney, The South Demands More Negro Slaves, 506.
40. Python, The Issues of 1860, DeBows Review 28:3 (March 1860), 246; Python,
The Relative Territorial Status of the North and the South, DeBows Review 27:1 (July
1859), 2,4.
41. Southern Convention at Vicksburg, 207.
42. Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principle, 451.
43. Southern Convention at Vicksburg, 210.
44. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade, 116; Southern Convention at Vicksburg, 214.
45. Robert E. May, Manifest Destinys Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 273274.
46. Fitzhugh, The Conservative Principle, 459; see also Pollard, Black Diamonds.
47. See, for instance, Article1: Acquisition of MexicoFilibustering, DeBows Review 25:6 (December 1858), 613626; followed immediately, with no page break, by Article2: States Liberties and African Labor, DeBows Review 25:5 (December 1858), 626
653. On the Knights of the Golden Circle, see William H. Bell, Knights of the Golden Circle:
Its Organization and Activities Prior to the Civil War (M.A.thesis, Texas A&M University,
1965); K.G.C.: AFull Exposure of the Southern Traitors, the Knights of the Golden Circle, pamphlet (Boston, 1861).
48. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers, 380390.
49. Takaki, A Pro-slavery Crusade, 227243; Confederate States of AmericaConstitution
for the Provisional Government, Article1, Section7.
50. Leonidas Spratt, in Charleston Mercury, February13, 1861, quoted in Takaki, A Proslavery Crusade, 243.
Acknowledgments
I began writing this book in New York in the fall of 2001, and its progress has
been shadowed by the stark and anguished lessons of these times. Alongside
fear and anger as I have written, however, have abided comfort and warmth,
friendship, solidarity, and love. The basic truth is this: so many people have
been so generous with their time, their ideas, and their support, that I cannot
even remember them all, still less hope to fit all their names into this small
space.
My most lasting debt is to my teachers. Margaret Hunt, Robert Gross, and
Kevin Sweeney long ago saw something in me and took the time to nurture it.
Nell Irvin Painters vision of history and passion for justice set the standard to
which I still aspire. Thomas Bender, David Blight, Robin Kelley, Daniel Rodgers, Emma Rothschild, and Richard White have provided me with years of
pastoral support: there is no accounting for the generosity they have shown
me. Steven Aron, Kathleen Brown, Phillip Brian Harper, Molly Nolan, Andrew Ross, Jeffery Sammons, and Marilyn Young have been both friends and
exemplary elders.
Edward Ayers, Ira Berlin, Catherine Clinton, David Brion Davis, Drew
Gilpin Faust, Eric Foner, Anthony Grafton, Stephen Hahn, Saidiya Hartman,
Norrece T. Jones, Winthrop Jordan, Wilma King, Peter Kolchin, Stephanie
McCurry, Arnold Rampersad, David Roediger, Amartya Sen, Rebecca Scott,
Amy Dru Stanley, Dale Tomich, and Deborah Gray White have gone from
being the names on the spines of the books I read in graduate school to real
510
Acknowledgments
people who have provided me with advice, criticism, and support; I have been
very lucky to work in their wake and share in their company.
The group of scholars once-assembled in and around the Black Atlantic
Seminar at Rutgers provided me with a model of intellectual home, even after
that community became fully virtual; my thanks to Mia Bay, Herman Bennett,
Christopher Brown, Barbara Krauthammer, and Jennifer Morgan. I distinctly
remember meeting both Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown, but it is
hard for me to remember a time before their ideas shaped my own. Somewhere
along the way, I met Chandan Reddy, talked with him for an hour or so, and
came away with a decades worth of things to think about.
I have known Steven Kantrowitz for a very long time, and have for almost
exactly that long enjoyed his intellectual company and emotional support. It
would be hard to invent a better, smarter, more purposeful, admirable friend
than Adam Green; I am very grateful to him.
The historical landscape of the nineteenth century has proven to be a paradoxically companionable place to work. Edward Baptist, Fitz Brundage,
Stephanie Camp, Jonathan Earle, Sharla Fett, Ariela Gross, Matthew Guterl,
Karl Jacoby, Anthony Kaye, Stephen Mihm, Scott Nelson, Susan ODonovan,
Gunther Peck, Dylan Penningroth, Seth Rockman, Adam Rothman, Joshua
Rothman, and Calvin Schermerhorn have provided useful and critical comments on my work-in-progress. Edward Ballesian, Jim Downs, Amy Greenberg, Scott Marler, Brian Schoen, and Patrick Wolfe have responded to (cold-
call) questions and shared their own research with me, for which I am especially
grateful.
I was fortunate to work in the History Department and American Studies
Program at NYU in the years during which I formulated this project, and
Ihope that the finished project reflects some of the intensity and vitality of
that place at that time. In addition to those named above, I would like to thank
Herrick Chapman, Lisa Duggan, Michael Gomez, Ada Ferrer, Rebecca Karl,
Yanni Kotsonis, Martha Hodes, Tricia Rose, Nikhil Singh, Daniel Walkowitz,
and Louise Young for their company. Greg Grandin has sent me numerous
references as our work began to converge (somewhere on the isthmus); several of the books framing themes emerged out my conversations with Manu
Goswami (i.e., her ideas that ended up in my book).
Acknowledgments
511
At Harvard, my colleagues have continually spurred me to think in new

ways about old problems, while occasionally reminding me of the virtues of
thinking in old ways about old problems. I am especially grateful to Emmanuel
Akyeampong, David Armitage, Sven Beckert, Sugata Bose, Daniel Carpenter,
Glenda Carpio, Joyce Chaplin, Lizabeth Cohen, Nancy Cott, Christine Desan,
Caroline Elkins, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Gordon, Annette Gordon-
Reed, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Jim Kloppenberg, Jill Lepore, Mary
Lewis, Malinda Lowery, Kenneth Mack, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, Lisa
McGirr, Ian Miller, Susan ODonovan, Rachel St.John, Amartya Sen, Tommie
Shelby, Jim Sidanius, Judith Surkis, Richard Tuck, and Laurel Ulrich.
During the time that I was working on this book, I was privileged with extraordinary students. Among them, Branden Adams, Ann Cheng, Peter Hudson, Sara Johnson, Micki McElya, and Molly Mitchell helped to research parts
of the book. I can honestly say that this would not be the same book without
the assistance, both as researcher and as editor, of Andrew Baker, an extraordinary historian in his own right as well as an inveterate foe of periphrasis.
I have been working on this book long enough to have dined out on it a few
times, and I am grateful to those who took the time to listen to me talk about
the book, and who generously shared their ideas and, in some cases, their stories with me in the following places: the University of Missouri, Brown University, the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, the Missouri Conference on History, Yale University, the Radcliffe Institute, Boston University,
Stanford University, New York University, Colorado State University
Pueblo, P.S. 41 (the Greenwich Village School), Princeton University, the
University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Connecticut, MIT, Charles University (Prague), Rutgers University, Oxford University, the University of Washington, Amherst College, the University of
North CarolinaChapel Hill, the University of North CarolinaCharlotte,
the University of Alabama, Pennsylvania State University, Cambridge Friends
School, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, Haverford
College, the University of Cincinnati, the Natchez Conference, Louisiana
State University, the University of New Orleans, the University of Virginia,
the University of Richmond, and the University of Kansas. My research has
been generously supported by New York University, Harvard University, the
512
Acknowledgments
American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences (where I had the good fortune of sharing my time with
William Christian, Scott Shapiro, Alison Mackeen, Webb Keane, and Adele
Pinch), the Radcliffe Institute, the American Philosophical Society, and the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
I am especially grateful to the editorial team at Harvard University Press:
Joyce Seltzer for her vision, Brian Distelberg for his patience, and Maria
Ascher for her enthusiasm.
I am indebted to archivists in the Supreme Court of Louisiana Collection at
the University of New Orleanss Earl K. Long Library, the Lower Mississippi
Valley Collection at Louisiana Universitys Hill Memorial Library, the Historic
New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana Collection at the New Orleans Public
Library (Wayne Everard, Greg Osborne, and Irene Wainwright deserve special mention), the Parish Archive in Jefferson and St. John the Baptist Parishes,
the Missouri Historical Society, the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection
in Ellis Library at the University of MissouriColumbia, the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of MissouriSt. Louis, and the Mississippi
Department of Archives and History. I am ever-grateful to John Hazlett, Judith Schafer, and Marie Windell, without whom none of this would have been
possible.
My parents will never read this book, but their lives, their struggles (many
on my behalf ), and their love are the predicates for everything I have been able
to do since they sent me out into the world. Keith Harris Wyche has also gone
too soon. Only he could have ever told the true story of this books earliest
inspirations (provocations, really) in the still-segregated River City where
we were children together. George and Barbara Johnson have loved me like a
son. The idea behind this book was my brothers before it was mine. He has
buoyed me, believed in me, and born witness with me to enough tragic-comic
drama to fill another long book. Christy Miller and Zara and Wynn Johnson
make having a family seem like the happiest, most natural thing in the world.
Venus Masselam, Albert and David Fleig, and Robert and Elizabeth Findling
have welcomed me into their family, rooted for me to finish, and come up with
a seemingly endless series of patient, probing, loving questions to draw me out
about my work.
This book has wound through my life along with the lives of my children.
Acknowledgments
513
Giulia and Luca Johnson were born at its beginning, and as I have written it
they have inspired and comforted me with their joy in discovery, the breathtaking generosity of their love for each other, and (in later years) their belief
that social justice and human equality are things worth fighting for. Their love
has sustained me. Xander and Natalie-Susan Frank have embraced me with
their munificent hearts, encouraged me with their transporting curiosity, and
been proud to call me their (other) father in a way that I could never have predicted and still scarcely deserve. I am existentially grateful to them. Joseph
Felix Johnson is the bookend this time; he came along right at the finish
happiness and good fortune in human form.
When I convinced Alison Frank Johnson to book a passage with me, I did
not tell her the ship was traveling upstream. Or about the shoals, the snags, the
sandbars, and the shifting schedule. But shes stuck out the journey and read
this through several times along the way, correcting it, arguing with it, improving it, but, above all, believing in it. More than that: in sharing the world
with Alison, I have learned to love it. She has shown me a way to peace even
amid the strife of my own mind. And at the end of the journey, she has seen
me home.
Index
Abeona, 119
Abolition/emancipation, 6869, 400, 413414,
429n17; in West Indies, 69, 316317, 362. See
also Haitian Revolution
Acadia, 269270
Accessory Transit Company, 368, 369, 370, 388
Adams, Henry, 23
Adams, John Quincy, 30, 306, 321322
Adams-Ons Treaty, 29, 431n29
Affleck, Thomas, 468n41
Afflecks Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book,
244245, 256
African Labor Supply Association, 396
Agency, 119, 147; of slaves, 9, 212, 214, 216217,
277; criticisms of historians views on, 910,
214, 216217, 424n19; of slaveholders, 910,
223, 264, 273, 274
Alabama, 41, 70, 86, 268, 381, 419, 434n75
Alec, 240241
Al-Hassan, 18
Alsworth, A. G., 194196
Amazon River Valley, 299302
America, 114
American Cotton Planter, 13, 161, 163, 166, 173, 193,
202, 266, 268, 269, 460n39; on skin color, 160; as
reformist, 181, 183185, 191192, 286287,
465n12; on peas, 187; on productivity, 246; on
credit, 277278
American Eagle, 447n31
American Navigation Acts, 288
A. M. Wright, 143144, 146
Anders, 214215
Andry, Manuel, 19, 2021
Anglo-Norman, 13, 118
Arizona, 307
Arkansas, 36
Atlantic, 121
Atlantic slave trade, 2728, 190, 253, 313, 361, 369;
efforts at reopening, 1516, 17, 374, 381, 390,
395420, 426n28
Augusta, Georgia, 84
Baird, Robert, 75, 7778, 80, 81, 82, 118, 130, 132
133
Baker, Andrew, 464n7
Baldwin, Joseph, 37, 262
Ball, Charles, 163, 164, 177, 190191, 193, 217, 218,
224, 229, 230, 231; on being sold, 152153, 211
212; on picking cotton, 162, 210; on hoeing and
weeding cotton, 166; on observation of slaves,
166, 167; on flogging, 171, 191, 215, 248; on corn,
178; on malnutrition, 179; on fish, 185186; on
nursing mothers, 198; on slave community, 211
212; on being a runaway, 215, 232, 233235, 237
238; on woodsmanship, 230
Bank of England, 282
Barings, 259, 282
Baton Rouge, 27
Baylor, C. G., 278
Beasly, Daniel, 139140
Bedford, William, 282
Ben Franklin, 112, 118
Benjamin, Judah, 295
Benjamin, Walter, 244, 423n4
Ben Sherrod, 113, 115116, 118
Berlin, Ira: Cultivation and Culture, 425n20
Bernoudi, Bernard, 21
Betha, T. B., 283
516
Index
Bibb, Henry, 189, 215, 223224; on escaping, 145,
221, 223, 225, 228; on flogging, 170; on sleep
deprivation, 173; on starvation, 179, 212213; on
slave food, 188; on nursing mothers, 198; on
burying his child, 199; on stealing, 213214
Bills of exchange, 127128
Birds, 209210
Black, Leonard, 174, 215, 231, 279
Black Hawk, 114, 270
Blake, Ruel, 4950, 51, 5455
Boazman, J. W., 197198
Boston, 81
Boyce, W. W., 282
Brandon, William, 263, 275276
Brandywine, 116, 118
Brazil, 397, 401
Breckinridge, John, 32
Brick Yard Jack, 114
Brigham, James, 397
Brooks, Mary Ellen, 160161
Brown, Albert Gallatin, 417
Brown, Gersham, 63, 64, 71
Brown, John, 65, 163, 164, 169, 174, 175, 187, 189,
190, 212, 215, 217218, 220, 238, 245; on flogging, 171172; on scraping cotton, 173174; as
runaway, 224225, 226227
Brown, William Wells, 145146, 172, 189, 190, 198,
219, 279
Brown Brothers, 259, 261262, 282
Bruner, Peter, 161, 212, 219, 225
Brunswick, 6263
Buchanan, James, 322, 330
Buckeye, 114
Buckingham, J. S., 76, 80, 135, 442n36; on New Orleans, 7, 85, 133134; on slave labor, 8384; The
Slave States of America, 85; on racial etiquette,
136
Bulkely, Francis, 181182
Bulletin (New Orleans), 285
Burke, Watt, and Co., 271, 272
Burr, Aaron, 26
Burtnett, Henry, 336337
Butler, Andrew, 317318
Caesar, 21
Cafetal de Fras, battle of, 346347, 348, 349, 352,
353
Calhoun, John A., 282
Calhoun, John C., 322, 443n54
California, 304, 307308
alikan, Koray, 266
Camp, Stephanie, 229
Capital crimes, 240243

Capitalism, 3, 3639, 73, 74, 135; investment in
steamboats, 56, 78, 9799, 101, 120124, 141
142, 143, 320; relationship to slavery, 10, 8687,
196, 210, 244, 251, 252254, 279, 282; accumulation of capital, 11, 61, 101, 142, 143, 437n28;
overinvestment, 1214; definitions of, 252254;
commodity fetishism, 265266, 483n41
Cartwright, Samuel, 148, 200203, 207, 208,
470n56
Castaeda, Jose Antonio, 357
Castelln, Francisco, 384
Cattle, 176177, 180, 181, 186, 191
Central America, 385, 389390, 405, 417, 420; Liberals vs. Conservatives in, 367, 368369
Chaffin, Tom, 326; Fatal Glory, 492n7
Charles, 18
Charleston, 41, 84
Charleston Mercury, 97
Cherokee, 3031
Chesapeake, 144, 146
Chickasaw, 5, 25, 2931
Chieftan, 64, 148
Choctaw, 4, 5, 25, 3031, 37, 47
Chouteau, Gabriel, 139140
Christy, David, 177178, 247; Cotton Is King, 280,
291
Churchill, W. M., 283
Cincinatti, 339340
Cist, Charles, 116
Civil War, 302, 365
Claiborne, William C. C., 28, 33
Clay, Henry, 30
Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 368
Climate, 8788, 120, 249, 262264, 268
Clipper, 111
Close, John, 265, 266, 270, 284
Cloud, N. B., 268269
Club de la Habana, 304, 322, 331
Coats, Jemmy, 168
Colorado, 307
Comanche Empire, 304
Commercial Bulletin (New Orleans), 319
Commission merchants. See Cotton factors
Commodity fetishism, 265266, 483n41
Compromise of 1850, 15, 307308, 328, 373, 427n32
Confederate States of America, 12, 16; relations
with Great Britain, 381, 419; constitution, 419
420
Constitution, 112
Cook, Gilman, 353
Corn, 176177, 178, 182, 187, 219220
Index
517
Costa Rica, 370, 502n10
Cotton: market for, 5, 1013, 34, 4142, 47, 100,
124, 177178, 244, 249, 250253, 254278, 319
320, 408410, 411, 420; transportation on steamboats, 6, 93, 256257, 265, 269270; Petit
Gulf /Gossypium barbadense, 8, 9, 151152, 249;
plantations, 8, 1920, 154155, 203, 206, 228;
mono-cropping, 8, 181, 285286, 287, 410, 418;
prices for, 13, 14, 41, 100, 176, 266275, 276278,
282, 284, 374375, 403, 416; calculation of bales
per hand per acre, 13, 153154, 177, 197, 246
247, 254; vs. sugar, 42, 164, 455n1, 479n5; picking, 151153, 158, 161, 162163, 167, 174, 198,
247248, 249, 479n5; seeds, 152, 157, 158159,
163, 165, 263, 455n3; packing into bales, 155, 159,
164, 165, 174, 210, 251252, 254255; planting,
156159, 162, 173174; ginning, 158159, 174,
210, 250, 255; scraping, 162, 173174; calculation
of pounds per day, 247248, 249250, 278; quality standards/market grade, 249252; insurance
on, 266; speculation in, 266271
Cotton, Joshua, 51, 5254, 55, 5657, 59, 71, 436n13
Cotton factors, 68, 85, 113, 265, 266, 267268, 271
278, 282, 294295, 321; relations with cotton
planters, 13, 42, 259262, 263264, 269270,
272, 273277. See also Merchants
Cotton Planters Manual, 166, 202, 255, 277
Courier (New Orleans), 309, 334
Credit, 13, 34, 37, 86, 128, 245, 257, 258264, 290,
294, 320; indebtedness of planters, 3, 12, 4445,
259, 260263, 264, 266, 275279, 282; slaves as
collateral, 87, 279; endorsement, 127, 262, 264,
284
Creek, 4, 5, 25, 3031, 34, 76, 117
Creole, 325, 326327
Cresent (New Orleans), 320, 382
Crittenden, John J., 359, 365
Crittenden, William, 342, 343344, 347349, 351,
352, 353, 354, 358361, 365
Cuba, 302, 304314, 320321, 413, 420, 426n28,
432n47; and United States, 4, 15, 306, 307, 321,
322323, 383384; Lpez invasions, 1415, 304
306, 319, 322, 323, 324329, 330365, 371, 388,
497n5, 499n54; Spanish colonialism in, 283, 304
306, 307, 311315, 321323, 350351, 361, 363;
Crdenas, 305, 325329, 332, 338, 354, 497n5;
and American slavery, 312313, 314, 321, 362
364, 371; La Escalera, 313314; slavery in, 313
315, 360363, 397, 401; Puerto Prncipe, 331
335, 354, 497n5
Cultivator, 119
Cunynghame, Arthur, 38, 107, 135, 137; on New
Orleans, 84; on cutoffs, 90; on steamboats, 101,

103, 115, 121, 122, 133, 448nn49,57; on snags, 103;
on the Sultana, 115
Cupidon, 18
Cutoffs, 88, 90
Daily Delta, 319, 325, 332, 333, 335, 339, 397
Davis, Jefferson, 443n54
Dean, Albe, 54
DeBow, J. D. B., 284, 290291, 311312, 337, 412;
on slave productivity, 13, 14; on Cuba, 314315,
334335; on emancipation, 316317; reopening
of slave trade advocated by, 396, 407
DeBows Review, 266, 278, 282, 284, 288, 290, 300,
309, 320, 393394, 412, 414, 471n66; and reopening of slave trade, 15, 396; on New Orleans, 256;
on railroads, 294295; on Walker, 390391
Deforestation, 90, 94, 154156
Dehumanization vs. dishumanization, 207208
Deloney, Edward, 405, 408, 411
Delphine, 175
Democratic Party, 419, 443n54
Democratic Review, 351352
Depression of 1837, 12, 176, 255, 259, 262, 281285,
288289
Deslondes, Charles, 14, 19, 20, 21, 33, 428n4
De Soto, 113114
Devol, George: Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi, 132, 133, 134135
DeWitt Clinton, 144
Diaca, 18
Dick, 64
Dick (accused of murder), 241
Direct trade. See Free trade
Distribution Bill, 281
Dogs, 234238, 240, 243
Donovan, Angus, 51, 54, 55, 5657, 436n16
Douglass, Frederick, 176, 219, 303
Dred Scott case, 396
Du Bois, W. E. B., 1, 19, 23, 73, 176; The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United
States of America, 426n26, 427n33
Dureau, Baptiste, 7879
El Dorado, 142143, 145, 148
Elliot, E. N.: Cotton Is King, 201
Ellis, Lot and Willis, 240
El Nicaragense, 388389
El Salvador, 370
Embargo Act of 1807, 27
Endorsement, 127, 262, 264, 284
Engerman, Stanley L.: Time on the Cross, 464n7
518
Index
Enlightenment, the, 204
Enna, Manuel, 344, 346, 347
Enos, 148
Enterprise, 74
Etienne, 114
Everett, Edward, 309
Faust, Drew Gilpin: James Henry Hammond and the
Old South, 425n20
Federal spending, 288, 290, 443n54
Felix, 139141, 147, 148
Filibusters, 322, 323328, 337364, 396, 417418,
420; and Neutrality Act, 323324, 326, 327328,
339, 359, 363, 366, 384; in New Orleans, 324
329, 332, 333, 335, 339, 348349, 354, 371372,
419, 504n36. See also Crittenden, William; Henderson, John; Lpez, Narciso; Quitman, John;
Thrasher, John; Walker, William
Fillmore, Millard, 322, 355, 359, 499n54
Financial Register, 260261
Fitch, John, 107
Fitz, Gideon, 38
Fitzhugh, George, 366, 400, 409, 413, 414, 417
Flagg, Edmund, 7475, 77, 82, 118
Florida, 4, 20, 25, 2627, 2829, 419
Flowers, William, 275
Fogel, Robert W.: Time on the Cross, 464n7
Follett, Richard, 468n41
Foote, Henry, 57, 403, 417, 436n16
Fortier, Cadet, 19, 20
Fragua de Calvo, Leon, 304
France, 22, 23, 419, 429n17
Freedom, 13, 115, 146, 147, 292, 364, 372, 377, 393,
399, 410, 420; Jeffersons empire for liberty, 34,
2425, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 47, 56, 7172, 423n5;
free labor, 14, 252, 253254, 372, 393, 396, 399,
405, 416, 459n36; for slaves, 6869, 140, 144, 149,
209210, 228, 231, 234, 316317, 362, 400, 413
414, 429n17; for slaveholders, 377, 414, 417
Freeman, Frederick, 336
Free people of color, 7, 21, 22, 23, 33, 141, 143144
Free trade, 280, 288293, 296, 297, 301302, 314
316, 318, 321, 335, 365
Fry, Gladys-Marie, 476n55
Fulton, Robert, 7374, 107
Gaines, Edmund, 30
Garret, Daniel, 22
Garrison, Cornelius, 369, 370
Gender, 131, 160161, 229
General Land Office, 45, 3436, 37, 3839, 40,
228
Genesis: 1:2729, 151, 205; 37:79, 151

Genovese, Eugene D.: Roll, Jordan, Roll, 472n15;
The Political Economy of Slavery, 425n20
George, 64
George (escaped on Chieftan), 148
Georgia, 41, 70, 86, 268
Georgia, 113, 114
Georgiana, 324, 325, 327
German Coast Slave Insurrection, 1922, 33,
427n2, 428nn9,10
Gilbert, 22
Gilroy, Paul: The Black Atlantic, 424n14
Global economy, 181183, 250251, 278, 280, 288,
368; the South as region of, 2, 5, 10, 1115, 34,
42, 86, 249, 252253, 255271, 277, 291292,
298302, 400401, 408410, 418, 427n32
Gonzales, Ambrosio, 356357
Goodman, Nan: Shifting the Blame, 448n52
Gossypium barbadense, 8, 9, 151152, 249
Gould, E. W., 79, 441n23
Grandy, Moses, 156, 173, 211; on being flogged,
168169, 216; on nursing mothers, 198; dream of
freedom, 209210
Granville, 64
Gray, Lewis Cecil: History of Agriculture in the
Southern United States to 1860, 425n20
Great Britain, 399, 408, 410, 417; relations with
United States, 2526, 27, 28, 307, 308309, 322,
334, 362, 368; and Cuba, 307, 321; relations with
Spain, 313; and Nicaragua, 368; relations with
Confederacy, 381, 419; and Honduras, 419
Greeley, Horace, 395
Green, J. D., 218, 220, 225, 235, 236, 238
Green, William, 169, 197, 245
Greenberg, Amy, 382, 383
Guatemala, 370
Gulf of Mexico, 304, 320321
Gutman, Herbert, 216
Hagan, John, 85
Haitian Revolution, 22, 6869, 288, 316317, 321,
361, 413414, 429n17; fear of, 14, 20, 3133, 84,
314, 362363; LOuverture, 14, 23; refugees
from, 21, 33, 432n47
Hall, James, 91, 98100, 123124
Hamilton, Thomas, 71, 7576, 133, 442n40
Hammond, James Henry, 165, 289, 290, 374375,
463n2
Hampton, Wade, 20, 21
Hardy, 234235
Harkins, George, 30
Harper, Chancellor, 203207, 208, 209
Index
519
Harry, 18
Harvey, David: Limits to Capital, 424n18, 445n6
Havana, 81, 84, 341
Hayden, William, 161162, 228, 230, 233
Hayne, Robert, 291
Hector, 21
Hegel, G. W. F., 439n3
Helen McGregor, 118
Helper, Hinton Rowan: on merchants, 278, 284
285; The Impending Crisis of the South, 376379;
on slaveholders, 412
Henderson, John, 326328, 329, 332, 356, 384,
504n37
Henry, 240241
Henry, George, 269
Henry Clay, 101, 130
Hilliard, Miriam, 199
Historical inevitability, 310312, 314318, 321322,
351
Hodge, William L., 318319
Hoggat, William, 241
Honduras, 370, 419
Horses, 222224, 228, 232233
Horseshoe Bend, battle of, 4
Horwell, C. N., 353354
Houstoun, Matilda, 71, 135; on fear of slave revolts,
84, 136; on steamboats, 99, 107, 121122, 129
130, 131132
H. R. Hill, 132
Hudson, 118
Hughes, Henry: Treatise on Sociology, 406
Hughes, Louis, 163, 164, 169, 172, 173, 185, 187,
190, 217, 218, 459n36; on girdled trees, 154155;
on nursing mothers, 161, 198, 199; on holiday
banquets, 179; on flogging, 213; as runaway, 217,
220, 235; on packing cotton, 255
Humphreys v. Utz, 171
Hundley, Daniel, 275, 284285
Hunter, Louis C., 87, 88, 128129, 445n66
Huntington, Henry, 275, 284
Hunts Merchants Magazine, 441n21
Imperialism, pro-slavery, 2425, 307321, 398,
412413, 417420, 426nn26,28, 427nn32,33; and
Native Americans, 2, 5, 2831, 3334; among
slaveholders, 8, 12, 1415; and Maury, 296302,
491n39; and sexual conquest, 382384, 386387.
See also Cuba; Filibusters; Nicaragua
Imported foodstuffs, 176178, 180181, 186, 286
Import-export statistics, 282286, 289, 299
Indian Removal Act of 1830, 36
Indian Territory, 30
Ingraham, Joseph Holt, 155, 374

Insects and parasites, 263, 268
Interstate slave trade, 5, 4042, 159, 190, 375, 401,
403406, 416, 418, 420
Isaac, Rhys, 222
Isham, 241
Israel, 241
Jack, 146
Jacko, 64, 143144, 146
Jackson, Andrew (president), 2526, 2831, 3334,
281; on independent farmers, 34; and Nullification Crisis, 373
Jackson, Andrew (slave), 175, 187, 213, 214, 221
222, 237; as runaway, 219, 225226, 228, 233
Jacobs, Harriet, 171, 196
Jamaica, 316, 413414
James, C. L. R., 22
James Madison, 100, 446n22
James Monroe, 114
Janvier, 18
Jarrett, Isaac, 193
Jefferson, Thomas: attitudes regarding white yeoman farmers, 3, 2425, 37, 47; attitudes regarding Mississippi River Valley, 34, 5, 24, 34, 45,
47; and Louisiana Purchase, 34, 23, 25, 26, 31
32, 47; on empire for liberty, 34, 2425, 31, 34,
37, 38, 40, 47, 56, 7172, 423n5; on New Orleans,
22; on territorial expansion, 2425, 3132; attitudes regarding slavery, 3132, 47, 404405,
432n44
Jessamin, 21
Jim, 5152, 190
J. M. White, 102
Job, 114
Joe, 50
John, 6263
John (accused of poisoning master), 241
John L. Avery, 110, 113, 118, 120
Johnson, Paul E., 439n3
Johnson, William, 49
Jones, Alexander: Cuba in 1851, 306
Joseph, 18
Junta Cubana/Junta Promovedora de los Intereses
Polticos de Cuba, 304, 322, 331
Kane, Adam, 91, 94
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1516, 364, 373, 393, 399,
427n32
Kant, Immanuel, 439n3
Kastor, David J., 428n9
Kate Fleming, 103
520
Index
Kate Kearney, 103
Kaye, Anthony, 229
Keelboats, 77, 87
Kelman, Ari: A River and Its City, 425n20
Kentucky, 70, 221
Kerr, Victor, 359
Kettel, Thomas, 246, 258259, 277, 278, 479n6
Kidd, H. A., The Experience of a Blown-Up
Man, 13
Kimball, Richard Burleigh, 308309, 311, 313, 316,
334335
Kingston, 84
Knight, John, 159, 160, 220
Knights of the Golden Circle, 418
Kooche, 18
Labaune, Thomas, 139
Lady Washington, 144, 146
Lafitte, Jean, 28
Land: speculation in, 5, 37, 3840; price of, 3738;
vs. slaves, 8687, 279; oldfield, 156, 228229,
243; overinvestment in, 320
Lane, Lunsford, 187
Lanman, James, 77
Las Pozas, battle of, 344345, 347, 348, 352, 353, 354
La Union (New Orleans), 334, 349
Law, George, 368, 492n8
Lee, James, 50
Leonora, 129130, 131, 136
Levees, 90, 155
Leviticus: 25:44, 205; 25:45, 205
Lieber, Francis, 490n38
Liebig, Justus von: Organic Chemistry, 180181,
465n12
Lincoln, Abraham, 322, 365, 398, 419
Lindor, 21
Lion, 143
Lioness, 110
Little John, 237
Liverpool, 84, 290; and cotton trade, 10, 12, 41, 42,
81, 249, 251252, 255, 257, 258, 260, 267, 270,
271, 272, 273, 277, 282, 283; merchant banks in,
259, 261
Lloyds Steamboat Directory, and Disasters on the
Western Waters, 107113, 120, 447n31
Lobdell, John, 100, 446n22
Lockett, Andrew, 144
Longuen, James, 174, 279
Lpez, Narciso, 359, 492nn7,8, 497n5; Cuba invaded by, 1415, 304306, 319, 322, 323, 324
329, 330365, 371, 388, 497n5, 499n54; execution, 330331, 350351
Louis, 21
Louisiana, 15, 70, 363, 381, 397398, 411, 419; slave
population, 11, 14, 32, 41, 159, 256; vs. Virginia,
14, 42, 86; German Coast Slave Insurrection,
1922, 33, 427n2, 428nn9,10; banking regulation
in, 85; urbanization in, 85; Supreme Court, 119,
171, 269270; law of 1816 regulating steamboats,
142143, 147148, 149; cotton production in,
256, 268; sugar production in, 290; Board of
Public Works, 444n54
Louisiana, 108109, 110112, 118, 120, 144, 148
149
Louisiana Courier, 395
Louisiana Purchase, 2324, 2728, 306, 431n29;
Creole whites in, 2, 25, 27, 33, 34; and Jefferson,
34, 23, 25, 26, 3132, 47
LOuverture, Toussaint, 14, 23
Lowell, Mass., 6
Lyell, Charles, 135, 136138
Lynchs Law, 70
Lyons, E. B., 274275
Lyons, James, 283
Mabry, Jesse, 5051
Mackay, Charles, 83, 116
Madison, James: Federalist 10, 24; on territorial expansion, 24, 25, 26; on Mississippi River Valley,
25
Madison County, Miss., slave revolt scare, 4659,
66, 69, 435n1, 436n13
Magnolia, 121, 145
Magoffin, Beniah, 275
Manchester, 1011, 12
Manifest destiny, 311, 326, 332, 351, 390, 412413,
426n28, 492n8
Mann, A. Dudley, 282283, 291
Manufacturing, 6, 11
Manure, 180182, 183185, 460n39, 465n18
Map of United States, 303304
Marginal whites, 5556, 436nn13,14
Marler, Scott P., 490n28
Maroons, 19
Marseilles, 81
Martineau, Harriet, 101, 130
Marx, Karl, 180, 366; on fetishism of commodities,
265266, 483n41; on history happening twice,
331; on capitalist accumulation, 437n28
Maryland, 14, 41, 70, 86
Maryland, 114
Mason, Isaac, 218, 227228, 229230, 238; on being
beaten, 169, 174, 278229; on food for slaves,
187189; as runaway, 214, 234; on lying, 225
Index
521
Maury, Matthew, 282, 283, 320, 490n38, 491n39; on
New York City, 258; on Mississippi Valley, 280
281, 291, 296302; on free trade, 300301
May, Robert E.: John A. Quitman, 492n7; Manifest
Destinys Underworld, 492n7; The Southern
Dream of Caribbean Empire, 492n7
McCurry, Stephanie, 373
McDuffie, George, 289
McKay, C. F., 271, 291
McPherson, James M.: Battle Cry of Freedom,
427n32
Mechanic, 113
Melville, Herman: The Confidence-Man, 126128,
135
Merchants, 14, 122123, 127, 152, 253, 258, 267, 282,
289, 304, 307, 313, 323, 409; relations with cotton
planters, 11, 12, 13, 42, 81, 250, 259262, 263
264, 269270, 272, 273277, 278, 279, 284285,
288, 290, 301302; merchant banks, 13, 259260,
261, 262, 264, 276, 315; in New Orleans, 259,
276, 284, 293294, 296, 321, 371, 372, 397398;
in New York City, 276, 282, 417. See also Cotton
factors
Mercury (Charleston), 395
Mexico, 4, 365, 366, 383, 413, 420
Miasmas, 184185
Miles, William, 241
Milton, Homer, 20, 21
Mingo, 18
Mississippi, 15, 38, 40, 175, 248, 381, 397, 419,
434n75; slave population, 11, 14, 32, 41, 47, 159,
256, 435n1; vs. Virginia, 14, 86; banks in, 3637;
Madison County slave revolt scare, 4659, 66,
69, 435n1, 436n13; Beatie s Bluff, 48, 436n13;
Rodney, 151152; interrogation of slaves in,
240243; cotton production in, 256, 268, 285
286
Missouri, 101, 140
Missouri Compromise, 15, 427n32
Mitchell, Timothy, 90
Money, 37, 4244, 45, 87, 127128, 281282, 286
Moniteur de la Louisiane, Le, 428n10
Monmouth, 76, 117
Monroe, James, 306
Monroe Doctrine, 307, 368
Moore, John Hebron: Agriculture in Ante-Bellum
Mississippi, 425n20; The Emergence of the Cotton
Kingdom in the Old Southwest, 425n20
Morgan, Charles, 369, 370
Morgan, Philip D.: Cultivation and Culture, 425n20
Morris, Christopher, 436n13
Moselle, 110
Mosquito Fleet, 88
Mumford, Lewis: Technics and Civilization, 440n16
Muoz, Trinidad, 384
Murrell, John, 5761, 6469, 7071, 437n28
Napoleon I, 23, 429n17, 432n47
Natchez, 106
Natchez Trace, 60, 66
National Police Gazette, 133
Native Americans, 2, 4, 5, 2526, 2831, 3334, 76
77, 470n54
Ned, 64
Neutrality Act of 1818, 323324, 326, 327328, 339,
359, 363, 366, 384
New England, 288
New Mexico, 307
New Orleans, 28, 7980, 125, 155, 297, 298300,
321, 490n28; and cotton trade, 2, 6, 1011, 41,
256257, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268,
270, 272275, 276, 277, 282, 283, 293296, 319
320; population, 7, 84; and German Coast Slave
Insurrection, 20, 21, 22; Haitian refugees in, 21,
33, 432n47; levee in, 7983, 108, 294, 318319;
St. Louis Hospital, 84; slave market, 84, 85, 86
87, 146, 159; St. Charles Hotel, 85, 371; mayor
of, 142; French Quarter, 196; merchants in, 259,
276, 284, 293294, 296, 321, 371, 372, 397398;
and railroads, 293294; filibusters in, 324329,
332, 333, 335, 339, 348349, 354, 371372, 419,
504n36
New Orleans, battle of, 4, 28
New Orleans, 73
New Orleans Price Current, 267
New York, 144
New York City, 84, 283, 290, 296; and cotton trade,
41, 42, 81, 257258, 259, 261, 267, 270, 271, 273,
277, 282, 283; banks in, 261, 281, 320; merchants
in, 276, 282, 417
Nicaragua, 4, 1517, 302, 365, 366394, 413,
426n28; Walker as president of, 15, 366, 369371,
374, 381, 390; Grenada, 367; Liberals in, 367,
368369, 384385; economic conditions, 367
368, 387; Musquito Indians, 368; slavery in, 369,
387, 390394, 417418, 420
N. M. Rothschild and Sons, 259
Non-Intercourse Act of 1808, 27, 42
Nonslaveholding whites, 14, 15, 16, 406407, 414;
vs. slaveholding whites, 5, 7172, 372374, 375
381, 402, 408, 417, 503n24
Northup, Solomon, 170, 177, 214, 216, 218, 227; on
escaping, 146, 235236; on picking cotton, 151,
163, 248; on sugar, 164; on being observed, 167;
522
Index
Northup, Solomon (continued)
on flogging, 168, 171, 174, 239; on holiday meals,
179; on birds, 209
Norvell, 240
Nullification Crisis, 289, 373
ODonovan, Susan Eva, 229; Becoming Free in the
Cotton South, 425n20
Odor, 184185, 200, 470n56
Oldfield, 156, 228229, 243
Olmsted, Frederick Law, 192, 222, 232, 236, 246,
265; on knowledge acquired by slaves, 165; on
observation of slaves, 167, 168; on flogging, 172;
on food for slaves, 180; on stealing by slaves,
213; on slave catchers, 225; on cotton picking,
248; on credit, 264; on planters and merchants,
277
Omar, 18
Oregon Trail, 304
Ostend Manifesto, 364
OSullivan, John, 325326, 492n8
Overseers, 39, 62, 63, 170, 171, 172, 192, 196, 227,
230, 235, 460n39; visual mastery exercised by,
166, 167168
Owen, Shupley, 62, 63
Packet trade, 99, 100, 258, 290, 296297, 301,
446n17
Pampero, 330, 339342, 352
Panola, 265, 266
Parker, John, 148, 220, 221, 239240, 476n56; on
escaping, 145, 146147, 220, 231232, 235; on
clear-cutting, 154; on hobnailed boots, 238
Pascal, Blaise, 126
Paskoff, Paul, 122, 443n54
Paternalism, 192, 194, 196, 197, 198
Patriarchy, white, relationship to slavery, 3, 24, 47,
373, 379, 395, 406407, 408, 415416, 417
Patriot War, 2627
Patsey, 170, 196
Peas, 186187
Pennsylvania, 110
Perret, Charles, 21
Peter (accused of killing white man), 240
Peter (escaped on Lion), 143
Peter (Madison County, Miss.), 49, 5455
Peterson, Dawn, 462n57
Petit Gulf cotton, 8, 9, 151152, 249
Pezuela, Marqus Juan de la, 361362, 364
Phil, 175
Philadelphia, 81
Phillips, Enos, 145
Phillips, M. W.: on cotton seeds, 165; as agricultural

reformer, 165, 191194, 197, 199, 285286; on
indebtedness, 199, 276, 278; on manure, 183
Phillips, Ulrich B.: Life and Labor in the Old South,
425n20
Phoenix, 447n31
Pickard, Kate, 198
Picquet, Louisa, 170171, 196197
Pierce, Franklin, 322, 364, 384
Pigs, 176177, 180, 191
Pike, Albert, 285, 292
Pitch, the, 335337
Poinsett, Joel, 122123
Polk, James K., 322, 323
Pollard, Edward, 376, 378381, 402, 412; Black
Diamonds, 110, 381
Poor whites, 7172, 113114, 115, 130131. See also
Nonslaveholding whites
Potter, David: The Impending Crisis, 426n28
Powell, R. D., 167
Prgay, Jnos, 343, 345
Prairie, 118
Pratt, Daniel, 183185
Preemption laws, 3740
Prices: of cotton, 13, 14, 41, 100, 176, 266275,
276278, 282, 284, 374375, 403, 416; of slaves,
14, 4142, 190, 256, 374376, 402404, 406; of
land, 3738; of goods, 78
Prince, 144
Progress, ideas of, 7778, 314318, 321, 367, 392
Promissory notes, 4445, 434n75
Property rights, 225226
Pryor, Henry, 401402, 404
Puerto Rico, 306
Quadroons, 8182, 137
Quamana, 18
Quitman, John, 305, 307308, 326, 328329, 363
364, 504n36
Rachel, 6162
Railroads, 16, 98, 124125, 290, 293296, 298299,
319
Rainbow, 447n31
Red River Raft, 8990
Reformers, agricultural, 156158, 180181, 198,
217218, 263, 283297, 468n41; M. W. Phillips,
165, 191194, 197, 199, 285286; David Pratt,
183185
R. E. Lee, 106
Republican (St. Louis), 102
Reuben, 231
Index
523
Richmond, 41, 42
Rio de Janeiro, 84
Rivas, Patricio, 369
Robb, James, 293294
Robert, 138139, 140141, 148
Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugne, 450n11
Rohrbough, Malcolm, 34
Roper, Moses, 174, 175, 190, 227, 228
Rothman, Adam: Slave Country, 433n51
Ruffin, Edmund, 405, 411
Runaway slaves, 7, 19, 29, 6264, 111, 189191,
214216, 219228, 231238, 444n54; on steamboats, 138141, 142, 143150, 227
Russell, Edward, 12
Sam (escaped on Lady Washington), 146, 147
Sam (Madison County, Miss.), 5051
Sam (stolen from William Eason), 6566
San Francisco, 417
Santa Fe, 103
Santa Fe Trail, 304
Saunders, Romulus, 322
Saunders, William, 51, 5354, 55
Sawyers, 89
Scarry, Elaine: The Body in Pain, 428n12, 462n57
Schama, Simon, 74
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang: The Railway Journey,
440n16
Schlesinger, Louis, 330, 340, 342, 345, 348, 349, 350;
on Lpez, 339, 356; on battle of Las Pozas, 344,
352, 353; on battle of Cafetal de Fras, 346, 352,
353; on failure of Lpez invasion, 351353, 360
Schoen, Brian, 288
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 439n3
Scott, 144, 148149
Scott, Rebecca, 432n47
Sears, John F., 439n3
Secession, 1617, 397, 398, 419, 420, 427n31
Sectionalism, 14, 16, 285, 288289, 292, 372373,
396397, 398, 401
Seminole, 2829, 3031, 128
Seven Years War, 22
Sexual violence, 170171, 195, 204205
Shreve, Henry, 7374, 90
Sigur, Laurence, 325, 327, 329, 332, 339
Simon, 240
Sinha, Manisha: The Counterrevolution of Slavery,
427n33
Skin color, 138, 159161, 162, 200
Skulking, 5253, 436n7
Slave catchers, 222225, 233234
Slaveholders, 39, 159162, 165175, 219, 221, 240
243, 244246, 436n13, 472n15, 476n55, 479n5;

indebtedness of, 3, 12, 4445, 259, 260263, 264,
266, 275279, 282; fear of slave revolts among,
5, 6, 1314, 3133, 4659, 6970, 84, 136, 309,
313314, 361364, 371, 405; vs. nonslaveholding
whites, 5, 7172, 372374, 375381, 402, 408,
417, 503n24; agency of, 910, 223, 264, 273,
274; relations with cotton factors, 13, 42, 259
262, 263264, 269270, 272, 273277; attitudes
regarding Cuba, 1415, 307, 309, 313, 362363,
364365, 371; attitudes regarding Nicaragua, 15
17, 365, 371372, 373374, 417418; during Madison County, Miss., slave revolt scare, 4657;
reputation of, 148149; visual mastery of, 166
168, 202, 221223, 227, 232, 242243; punishment of slaves by, 168170, 171173, 174175,
188189, 190191, 206, 213, 239240, 248249,
278279, 462n57; torture of slaves by, 173, 174
175, 242, 462n57; as rapists, 195, 204205; horses
used by, 222224, 228, 232233; and written
communication, 224225; class consciousness
among, 226; dogs used by, 234238, 240, 243;
attitudes regarding reopening Atlantic slave
trade, 373374, 407408, 411417, 418
Slave markets, 5, 160, 179, 189190, 195, 401406,
409, 414, 420; prices of slaves in, 14, 4142, 190,
256, 374376, 402404, 406; New Orleans, 84,
85, 8687, 146, 159. See also Atlantic slave trade;
Interstate slave trade
Slave narratives, 216, 219, 231232, 239, 455n1,
459n36. See also Ball, Charles; Bibb, Henry;
Brown, John; Grandy, Moses; Hughes, Louis;
Mason, Isaac; Northup, Solomon; Parker, John
Slavery: relationship to white patriarchy, 3, 24, 47,
373, 379, 395, 406407, 408, 415416, 417; expansion of, 8, 1415, 3132, 309, 310311, 313,
317318, 364365, 366, 371372, 405, 406407,
411412, 417420; defenders of, 11, 13, 14, 17, 31,
32, 177178, 191, 200204, 209, 246247, 257,
258, 271, 280281, 282283, 284, 287293, 296
302, 314, 316318, 378381, 390394, 395420,
479n6; relationship to low aggregate demand, 11,
283284, 293, 298; opponents of, 31, 191, 192,
216, 284, 410; as topic of conversation on steamboats, 135136; relationship to economic development, 283284, 293, 298, 300302, 374, 376
377, 399400, 401, 402403, 411412, 418;
relationship to white supremacy, 372374, 377
381, 390394, 398, 402, 406408, 413416, 418,
420. See also Atlantic slave trade; Interstate slave
trade
Slaves: as hands, 8, 10, 13, 152154, 157, 158, 159,
524
Index
Slaves (continued)
161, 162, 165, 166, 168, 175, 197, 210; agency
of, 89, 212, 214, 216217, 277; overinvestment
in, 1213, 320, 411; as capital, 1214, 66, 8687,
113114, 194, 196, 210, 279, 479n5; family breakups, 14; prices of, 14, 4142, 190, 256, 374376,
402404, 406; singing of, 8283; vs. land, 8687,
279; as collateral, 87, 279; vs. poor whites, 113
114, 115, 121; value of, 113114, 115, 121, 153154,
241242, 434n71; labor as work, 154, 164165;
household slaves, 160161, 196; children of, 161
162, 192193, 195, 197199, 210211, 375, 376,
468n41, 469n47; field hands, 162164, 165166,
464n7; knowledge acquired by, 164166, 229
231, 459n36; punishment of, 168170, 171173,
174175, 188189, 190191, 206, 213, 239240,
248249, 278279, 462n57; sleep deprivation
among, 173; torture of, 173, 174175, 242,
462n57; working day, 173, 244, 278; food for,
178180, 185189, 211, 212214, 217, 219220,
230231, 283284, 463n7, 473n15; malnutrition
among, 179; odor of, 184; and manure, 184185;
reproduction of, 192196, 197199, 405, 406
407; nursing mothers, 196198, 199; cooperation
among, 210212; solidarity among, 214216,
217; feet of, 219; productivity of, 244250, 256,
479n5. See also Runaway slaves
Slave speculators, 4142
Slave stealing, 6167
Slidell, John, 363
Smedes, Susan Dabney, 186, 466n25
Smith, Adam, on merchant capital, 11
Snags, 8990, 103, 110, 120, 122
Snyder, Alonzo, 210, 247, 254255
Soil erosion, 155, 156157
Soil exhaustion, 8, 156157, 180184, 191, 246, 410,
465n18
Sonthonax, Lger-Flicit, 429n17
Soul, Pierre, 322, 323, 384, 390
South, the: as region of global economy, 2, 5, 10,
1115, 34, 42, 86, 249, 252253, 255271, 277,
291292, 298302, 400401, 408410, 418,
427n32; Lower South vs. Upper South, 5, 15, 41,
86, 159160, 375376, 403405, 406, 417, 419; as
region of the United States, 11, 12, 400401; low
aggregate demand in, 11, 283284, 293, 298;
Southern commercial conventions, 13, 16, 278,
282285, 289, 290291, 292, 293, 294, 297, 395
396, 398399, 401, 403, 414, 443n54; Southern
exports vs. imports, 282287, 288, 289, 291294,
299; vs. the North, 284285, 286287, 288, 289

292, 296297, 376377, 398400, 412
South America, 69
South Carolina, 255, 283, 373, 381, 395, 397
Southern Agriculturalist, 166
Southern Cultivator, 166
Southern Literary Messenger, 296, 298
Spain: relations with United States, 2223, 25, 26
27, 29, 306, 307, 322323, 431n29; colonial rule
in Cuba, 283, 304306, 307, 311315, 321323,
350351, 361, 363; relations with Great Britain,
313
Specie, 37, 43, 128, 281282. See also Money
Spratt, Leonidas, 412, 414; on reopening slave
trade, 295296, 298299, 400, 405, 407, 415, 420;
on slaves and masters, 395, 400, 407
States rights, 328, 372
St. Augustine, 27
Steamboats, 58, 7396, 424n10, 441nn21,23,
443n54, 449n72; accidents involving, 13, 103,
107120, 122124; investment in, 56, 78, 97
99, 101, 120124, 141142, 143, 320; cotton transportation on, 6, 93, 256257, 265, 269270; falling rate of profit from, 8, 98, 101, 103, 123124,
424n18, 445n6; owners, 8, 9899, 100, 101, 102
103, 113, 114, 115116, 119121, 122124, 141
142, 143, 147; as sublime, 7475, 103; speed/rec
ord times, 77, 78, 102, 104106, 118, 121122;
and deforestation, 90, 94; design, 9194, 9899,
101102; high-pressure engines on, 9394, 122,
445n66; pilots, 9496, 117, 118, 119120, 123,
142; riverboat gamblers, 96, 132135, 450n11;
captains, 98, 101, 103, 110, 117118, 123, 133,
138139, 142143, 145146, 147150; vs. railroads, 98, 124125, 320; packet trade, 99, 100;
insurance on, 99, 113, 115, 122123, 447n41,
448n48; transient trade, 99100; reputation of,
100101; racing of, 102, 106, 117118; engineers,
116117, 118, 119120, 121, 123, 445n66; stokers/
firemen, 116117, 141, 143; Act of 1852 regarding, 119120; deck passengers on, 129131; segregation on, 129135, 136139; class differences
on, 130131; thieves on, 131132; racial etiquette
on, 136138, 452n27; escaped slaves on, 138141,
142, 143150, 227
Stevenson, David, 130
Stewart, Mart A.: What Nature Suffers to Groe,
425n20
Stewart, Virgil, 5861, 6466, 6768, 69, 70,
437n28
Still, Peter, 175, 214
Index
525
Still, Vina, 198199
Stirling, James, 259, 374
St. Levi, James, 335336
Stoll, Stephen: Larding the Lean Earth, 425n20
Stono Rebellion of 1739, 427n2
St. Paul, 103
Stroyer, Jacob, 175, 190, 211212, 227
Sublime, the, 7475, 103, 439n3
Sugar, 22, 23, 43, 290, 315, 316317, 361, 468n41;
vs. cotton, 42, 164, 455n1, 479n5
Sultana, 115, 118
Sun (New York), 332
Susan Lord, 324, 327
Talisman, 120
Tariffs, 11, 27, 288, 289, 290, 292, 373
Tarpley, Colin, 286
Tarver, Ben, 212
Taylor, Marion, 337339
Taylor, Thomas, 143
Taylor, Zachary, 322
Telemacque, 18
Tempest, 120
Tennessee, 70
Tennessee, 103
Texas, 4, 25, 282, 307, 308, 397, 419
Thorpe, T. B., 263
Thrasher, John, 311, 312, 315
Tiger, 143
Time, 77, 78, 244, 246, 266267, 270272, 274,
405406; historical inevitability, 310312, 314
318, 321322, 351
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 122123
Tom, 6264
Toombs, Robert, 292
Torture of slaves, 173, 174175, 242, 462n57
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, 30, 36, 37
Treaty of Ghent, 28
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, 307308
Treaty of San Lorenzo, 2223
Tremont, 117
Trenholm, George, 282
Trezevant, J. T., 295
Trollope, Frances, 71, 82, 129, 442n37
True Delta, 349, 354
Turnbull, David, 313
Turner, J. A.: The Cotton Planters Manual, 166,
202, 255, 277
Turner, Nat, 14, 429n13
Twain, Mark: on cutoffs, 88; Life on the Mississippi,
75, 9495, 102, 319320, 446n17; on steamboats,

77, 9495, 101102, 106, 119, 446n17
Underground Railroad, 221, 232
United States: and Cuba, 4, 15, 306, 307, 321323,
383384; and Nicaragua, 4, 368; relations with
Spain, 2223, 25, 2627, 29, 306, 307, 322323,
431n29; relations with Great Britain, 2526, 27,
28, 307, 308309, 322, 334, 362, 368; Neutrality
Act of 1818, 323324, 326, 327328, 339, 359,
363, 366, 384; Constitution, 372
United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 325,
492n8
United States v. John Henderson, 326328, 329
U.S.-Mexican War, 15, 298, 307308, 337, 431n29
U.S. Supreme Court: Gibbons v. Ogden, 74; Dred
Scott decision, 396; Swift v. Tyson, 434n75
Utah, 307
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 368, 369, 370, 417
Varon, Elizabeth: Disunion! 427n31
Vesey, Denmark, 14
Vienne, Honor, 353
Virginia, 16, 18, 41, 70, 283, 373, 404405, 419; vs.
Louisiana, 14, 42, 86
Visual mastery, 166168, 202, 221223, 227, 232,
242243
Walker, Samuel, 320
Walker, William, 366372, 381394, 420; as president of Nicaragua, 15, 366, 369371, 374, 381,
390; and white supremacy, 367, 382; The War in
Nicaragua, 368369, 383, 391; early life, 381
382; on confidence, 386; views regarding slavery,
390391, 392394, 395, 408, 417418; invasion
of Honduras, 419
Wallace, James Burn, 179
Walton, Thomas, 399, 412
Ward v. Warfield, 269270
Warfield, Thomas, 272273
Washington, D.C., 70
Washington, George, 322
Washington, Madison, 14
Weaver, 50
Wells, William, 385
Western World, 138139
West Indies, 69, 316317, 362
Weston, George M., 503n24
White, Deborah Gray: Arnt I a Woman? 425n20
White, Richard, 304
White mans republicanism, 321, 335, 351, 365
526
Index
White supremacy, 26, 33, 72, 82, 115, 130, 136143,
149, 187188, 200208, 382, 386; relationship to
slavery, 372374, 377381, 390394, 398, 402,
406408, 413416, 418, 420
White yeoman farmers, 2, 3, 2425, 37, 47
Whitney, Eli, 255
Wiley, 216
Wilsinson, James, 26
Wilson, John Stainback, 184, 469n47

Wilson, Thomas, 335, 354, 355
Work: defined, 154, 164; labor as, 154, 164165
Yancey, B. C., 283, 401, 403, 443n54
Yancey, William, 399
Yellow fever, 348, 442n40

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Walter Johnson

Copyright 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

1 Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares in Louisiana

2 The Panic of 1835

3 The Steamboat Sublime

5 The Runaways River

7 The Empire of the White Mans Will

8 The Carceral Landscape

9 The Mississippi Valley in the Time of Cotton

10 Capital, Cotton, and Free Trade

11 Tales of Mississippian Empire

12 The Material Limits of Manifest Destiny

13 The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny

14 The Ignominious Effort to Reopen the Slave Trade

that history the history of slavery, capitalism, and imperialism in the

United States to freeze economic history at a given moment, and develop

larly the long-standing question of the relationship of slavery and capitalism.

address to the topic), the most

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

emergent manufacturing economies of Europe.23 Jefferson imagined a global

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

as it turned out, however, white social reproduction in the Mississippi Valley

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Negroes to insurrection, and then proceed to the Mississippi was expunged

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

problem of the administration of federal lands was a problem of legibility

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

strained by any effectual laws requiring them to maintain a reasonable ratio of

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

what held these regional, national, and international economies together

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

Jeffersonian Visions and Nightmares

The Panic of 1835

By the time anyone in Madison County wrote anything down, at least

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

opposite Island No.95 when a nonslaveholding white man named Gersham

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

stewart s prophecy of the apocalypse of John Murrell remapped the

The Panic of 1835

The Panic of 1835

The Steamboat Sublime