The Making of African America (15 page)

For more than half of the nineteenth century, movement defined African American life under slavery. Then, almost as quickly as it began, the movement stopped, leaving black people again rooted in place.

 

Between the elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and Abraham Lincoln in 1860, more than one million black people—slave and free—were forced from the homes they and their forebears had created in the most difficult of circumstances. This great migration, really a second Middle Passage, dwarfed the transatlantic slave trade that had carried African peoples to mainland North America. Driven by a seemingly insatiable demand for cotton and an expanding market for sugar, the massive migration sent black people across the continent, assigning the vast majority to another half century of captivity and providing immediate freedom for a few who had somehow escaped bondage. Some of the latter fled northward to the free states or Canada; others reentered the Atlantic from where they or their ancestors had come, completing the diasporic circle. But, for the mass of black migrants, movement only tightened the constraints of bondage. Ousted from their seaboard residence, they were forcibly transported into the American interior as part of slavery's expansion, redefining African American life.

Like those who had been forcibly transported across the Atlantic, the lives of men and women ensnared in the second great migration were changed forever. Husbands and wives were separated and children orphaned. As some families were torn apart, others forged new domestic relations, marrying or remarrying, becoming parents and adoptive parents, and creating yet new lineages and networks of kin. Migrants came to speak new languages, practice new skills, worship new gods, and sing new songs, as thousands of men and women abandoned beliefs of their parents and grandparents and embraced new ideas, even if they held fast to some old ones. In the process, tobacco and rice cultivators came to grow cotton and sugar while some craftsmen lost their skills and a few laborers gained new responsibilities and status.

Those left behind did not escape the impact of this second great migration. In portions of the settled seaboard South, the slave population fell especially precipitously, but in no part of the South did black people escape the nightmarish effects of the massive deportation, as the trauma of loss weighed as heavily on those who remained as on those carried off. Just as those who remained in Africa had to rebuild their lives as fully as those who had been shipped across the great ocean, so those left in the seaboard South were changed. Their families also had to be remade, their communities rebuilt, their leaders chosen anew, and—perhaps most importantly—their social order rethought.
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The massive deportation took two forms. Hundreds of thousands of slaves marched west with their owners, their owners' kin, or their agents as the shock troops of the massive expansion of cotton and sugar production in the states of the lower South. Seeing opportunities westward, some prominent planters transferred their entire retinue of slaves to new plantation sites. Others, perhaps a bit more cautious, moved with a few chosen hands—generally young men—to begin the creation of new empires of cotton and cane. Once settled, additional slaves followed.

Through the first two decades of the nineteenth century, planters in transit carried most of their slaves with them to the interior. Having brought their own slaves South, some slave masters—wanting to augment their labor force—journeyed back to the seaboard to purchase others. A few shuttled back and forth, buying a few slaves at every turn. But over time, the westward-moving slaveowners surrendered control of slave transit to a new group of merchants whose sole business became the trade in human beings. Although the balance between the two trades was forever changing, it fell heavily in favor of the slave traders. The number of black-belt and delta planters who returned to the seaboard to purchase slaves declined, leaving slave traders in command. During the course of the nineteenth century, traders carried roughly two-thirds of the slaves from the seaboard to the interior.
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This second great migration began slowly in the years following the American Revolution when so-called “Georgia men” transported slaves southward in the wake of emancipation in the northern states and widespread manumission in the northern portions of the seaboard South.
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On the eve of freedom, black men and women saw liberty snatched from their grasp as slaveholders and slave traders conspired to defeat the promise of post-Revolutionary emancipation. In the rush to transform men and women into cash, Georgia men cared little about the distinction between those enslaved for a term and those enslaved for life, or even the distinction between slavery and freedom. Free people of color found themselves swept into the transcontinental dragnet. Kidnapping increased sharply and remained an omnipresent danger to free black men and women. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice had become so pervasive that it gained a name: “blackbirding.” Although many states legislated against it, enforcement proved difficult against the insidious combination of greed and stealth.
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As planters—aided by the American soldiers and militiamen—ousted native peoples and took possession of some of the richest land on the continent, the Georgia trade outgrew its name. Increasingly, slaves moved more west than south into Alabama and Mississippi and then across the Mississippi river into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The internal slave trade became the largest enterprise in the South outside of the plantation itself, rivaling the transatlantic trade of centuries past. It too developed its own language: “prime hands,” “bucks,” “breeding wenches,” and “fancy girls.” Its routes were regularized and dotted by pens, jails, and yards that provided hostelries for slave traders and warehouses for slaves. Its seasonality—when best to move slaves and when to retain them—became part of the rhythm of Southern life, much like planting and harvest. Its terminals—Alexandria, Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, and Washington at one end and Natchez, New Orleans, and Vicksburg at the other—became infamous. There was hardly a Southern town, no matter how inconsequential, without an auction block, prominently located near the courthouse or the busiest tavern. In all, the slave trade, with its hubs and regional centers, its spurs and circuits, reached into every cranny of Southern society. Forced movement had again become an integral part of black life.

In the half century following the close of the transatlantic slave trade, both planters and traders expanded the transcontinental transfer of black men and women. The cascade of humanity flowing from the seaboard South swelled ever larger. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, traders and owners sent out an estimated 120,000 slaves westward and southward, with the states and territories of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana being the largest recipients. That number increased substantially and reached a high point during the following decade. It increased yet again during the 1830s, when slave traders and migrating planters ousted almost 300,000 black men, women, and children. Most of the slaves still came from Maryland and Virginia, but South Carolina and Georgia—once destinations—became points of departure for transporting black people to Alabama and Mississippi. During the 1830s, South Carolina and Georgia each forwarded nearly 100,000 slaves, with most being sent to the rich ribbon of alluvial soil that soon denominated the black belt. Others took up residence along the great rivers of the region: the Alabama, Tombigbee, Tennessee, and Mississippi.

The trade slackened as the Panic of 1837 reduced cotton and sugar production and deflated the price of slaves, giving beleaguered black people on the seaboard a measure of relief. But the respite was momentary. Rather than mark the beginning of the end of the internal slave trade, the Panic only allowed the forces that drove the slave trade to gather strength, as leading members of the planter class added to their holdings and consolidated their place atop Southern society.

The assault on enslaved black families and communities resumed in the 1840s as cotton and sugar prices revived and, with them, the demand for slaves. Black people were again on the move. For the next two decades, the traffic in slaves grew steadily. Nearly a quarter of a million slaves left the seaboard for the interior between 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War, with more than half being shipped west of the Mississippi River. Again slaves were drawn from areas that once had imported slaves, as the exporting region gradually drifted southward and westward. At midcentury, Georgia, Tennessee, and even portions of Alabama were sending their slaves west. The process by which importer states became exporters continued almost until the moment of slavery's demise.

The outbreak of the Civil War hardly ended the deportation of black men and women. Slaveholders on the periphery of the South, fearing that their slaves would escape to the advancing Union army, shipped them inland. Thousands of enslaved black men and women were sent to upland farms and plantations, and many more were sold to Texas and other parts of the trans-Mississippi west as the pace of the trade accelerated.
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By the time the Confederate defeat ended the second great migration, the geography of black America had been radically restructured; the center of slave life had shifted from the seaboard South to the interior. In 1790, nearly half of all enslaved African Americans resided in Virginia; on the eve of the Civil War that figure had shriveled to 12 percent. While Virginia's slave population increased just barely during the nineteenth century, Maryland's declined. Meanwhile, the slave populations of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas swelled beyond recognition. The territory of Mississippi—which encompassed lands that would eventually be part of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—contained some 3,000 slaves at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1860, well over 400,000 slaves lived in Mississippi alone. On the eve of the Civil War, more than half of the slave population resided in the Southern interior.
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Along with the massive movement to the interior was a still larger local trade, where enslaved black people were sold within their neighborhoods, counties, or states. This intrastate trade—which may have exceeded the interstate trade—was often just the beginning of the second great migration, as slaves sold locally were later carried west. Even the trade within a locality—a state certainly and perhaps even a county—could have the same disruptive effect as the long-distance transfer; hence, local trades should be considered part of the second Middle Passage.
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This great migration, like the first, reflected the needs of sellers in the slave-exporting region and buyers in the slave-importing region, each of whom carefully considered the age, sex, and productive and reproductive capacity of their human property. Although slavery in the settled South remained profitable, many slaveholders found themselves burdened by a surplus of slaves, as the switch from tobacco to cereal cultivation and mixed farming reduced the need for a year-round labor force. Planters and farmers, who increasingly thought of themselves as employers and not masters, found that hired hands—enslaved as well as free—who might be engaged during planting and harvest were more attractive than workers who required yearlong support. In some places, the preference was for hired slaves; in others, for wage labor, both black and white. “Employment and reward for industry and discharge if otherwise,” boomed one border-state defender of the wage-labor system. Similar developments in the region's towns, which grew in number and size during the nineteenth century, increased demand for skilled workers—blacksmiths, carpenters, and coopers as well as wagoners and sometimes boatmen—for urban shops and manufactories. As the demand for brute labor declined, so too did the need for young men and women who had muscle and energy but little knowledge of the work at hand. One in three slaves between the ages of ten and twenty residing in the seaboard South at the beginning of the nineteenth century would be gone by 1860.

Economic changes drove the transformation of the region's demography. The switch to cereal and mixed farming and the growth of manufacturing reflected the declining profitability of plantation agriculture in portions of the settled South. Marginal agriculturalists found themselves sliding toward financial ruin and the region edged toward economic stagnation. In such circumstances, slaves were their owners' most valuable and generally most marketable asset. The sale of slaves not only might stave off bankruptcy, but also would enable slaveowners to purchase the seeds, animals, tools, and machines that could revive their own prospects and, in time, the region's economy.
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Slaveowners in the settled South also learned the slave trade was a profitable way to rid themselves of unruly and intransigent slave men and women. During the nineteenth century, the threat of sale became the most potent mechanism of slave discipline, as black people, according to one observer of the transfer of slaves from Maryland to Georgia, “dread nothing on earth so much as this.” “They regard the south with perfect horror, and to be sent there is considered as the worst punishment that could be inflicted on them.” Slave masters found that selling a few slaves “down the river” had a visible effect on order in the quarter. The fear of sale allowed slaveholders to extort promises of faithful service and pledges of future loyalty from their slaves. Not a few used the threat “to put a slave in their pocket”— meaning to put cash in their pocket in exchange for the slave—as a means of extracting additional drafts of labor. For slaveowners, sale became not only a source of wealth and a way of discipline, but also a means to destabilize the slave community, stripping it of its most effective leaders and intimidating those who remained. Strangely, putting aside the lash for the threat of sale also allowed planters to claim a new standard of humanity.
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