The Making of African America (16 page)

Although there was a symbiotic relationship between the needs of the slaveowners in the slave-exporting region and those of would-be slaveowners in the importing region, their interests did not always coincide. Fearful that their plantations would become a dumping ground for slave rebels, black-belt planters tried to bar men and women they considered troublemakers. Some of the first laws enacted by the territorial legislatures of Mississippi and Alabama prohibited the entry of slaves with histories of rebelliousness or criminality. Louisiana required imported slaves to be accompanied by certificates attesting to their “good moral character,” although the character test was never defined. At other times, various states prohibited the import or the export of slaves for reasons of state policy, humanitarian and commercial. For example, in 1817, Maryland prohibited the export of slaves who had been promised freedom. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, at one time or another, barred the importation of slaves when the expanding black population appeared to threaten the state's security or the rising price of slaves threatened the economy. But such moments did not last. Often they were the product of some momentary crisis, as in the panic that followed the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. Generally, when the panic subsided, the laws were quickly repealed, and when they were not, they fell into disuse. Even then demand for slaves always trumped such legislation.
¹⁰

The handful of slave rebels shipped southwest could not disguise the planters' satisfaction, as they received young men and women whose strength hastened the transformation of a wilderness and whose fecundity assured the continued viability of the plantation workforce. From the slaveholders' perspective, the very old and the very young who could not withstand the rigors of the transcontinental journey were just extra baggage. Young adults composed the mass of those shipped west and, over time, their share of the forced migration increased. In 1810, slaves between age fifteen and thirty made up one-quarter of the deportees. By 1830, they equaled nearly 45 percent.
¹¹

The forced migration distorted the age and sex balance of the black population in both exporting and importing regions. The Southern interior—like Virginia and South Carolina in the eighteenth century—was an extraordinarily youthful place. Men below the age of twenty-five represented nearly 39 percent of Alabama's slaves in 1820, a higher portion than in Virginia, where young men (similarly defined) made up about 35 percent of all slaves. The proportion was doubtless even higher on the largest plantations, for wealthier planters had the resources to purchase the slaves they believed most useful for the difficult work of creating a new plantation. On the estate of the largest planter in the wealthy panhandle area of Florida, a unit of some 213 slaves in 1830—123 males and 86 females—included no women and only one man over age fifty-five. The old heads, experienced men and women whose knowledge might guide the nascent slave community and subvert the planters' project, were missing.
¹²

The youth that characterized the population of the Southern interior was balanced out by the elderly men and women who were left behind, much like the effect on the west coast of Africa during the height of the international slave trade. In 1820, slaves over age forty-five comprised some 11 percent of the population of Virginia, while they made up less than 6 percent of the population of Alabama. A comparison between the Alabama county of Greene, where only four slaves in one hundred had reached the age of forty-five, and the tidewater Virginia county of Surry, where slaves of that age were proportionately four times as numerous, exposes the stark differences in the age structure of the slave-importing states of the interior and the slave-exporting states of the seaboard.
¹³

The internal slave trade—like its international predecessor—also warped the sexual balance of the black population, at least for a time. As enslaved men trekked west to build the new plantation economy, the settled seaboard South became a disproportionately female society. The female majority within the slave population fit well with the seaboard South's function as the nursery of the workforce for the Southern interior. Although abolitionists (and, subsequently, historians) found charges of the forced breeding of slaves difficult to substantiate, there was no questioning the slaveholders' appreciation for the value of the slaves' producing children.
¹⁴
For some seaboard slaveowners, slave children were their most profitable “crop,” and they knew it. They encouraged slave women to have children, offered incentives of free time or even cash and threatened barren women with sale. However, the male majority in the Southern interior did not last long, perhaps because of—as with the first Middle Passage—the higher rates of male mortality. Within a generation of the arrival of the first slaves, a sexually balanced population emerged in the cotton South, both assuring the viability of the planters' labor force and reestablishing a self-sustaining black population.
¹⁵

The complementary needs of buyers and sellers-hard-pressed seaboard farmers and ambitious black-belt planters—reshaped black society in other ways as well. Summing up the conventional wisdom, a veteran of the plantation business advised that “it is better to buy none in families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 14 to 25 years of age, (buying no children or aged negroes).” Indeed, in defining the slave family as women and very young children, slave traders showed little interest in the family groups that they demeaned as “mixed lots.” Enslaved black men and women came to appreciate the fragility of the marriage bond, and parents came to understand that their teenage children would disappear, never to be seen again. Sales to the interior shattered approximately one slave marriage in five and separated one-third of children under fourteen from one or both of their parents. The preferences of slaveholders both as sellers and buyers destabilized slave families, ensuring that husbands and wives would be separated and children would be taken from parents. Nothing revealed the full extent of the second Middle Passage so much as this.
¹⁶

Beyond sex and age and the peculiar matter of judging a slave's character, black-belt planters had other preferences that shaped black life during the second great migration. Westward-moving planters frequently took their favorites with them. Those who purchased slaves from traders also made choices. Just as some eighteenth-century slave masters prized Igbos over Angolans, Gambians over Calabars, some of their nineteenth-century counterparts desired Virginians over Carolinians or vice versa. Slave traders made much of the places of origin when they advertised their slaves, playing to the prejudices of their customers.
¹⁷

Viewed as a whole, the internal slave trade, like the international one, mixed people from different regions. A close look at the origins of enslaved black men and women carried to middle Florida in the 1830s reveals that a large share of men and women were drawn from Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina and over 25 percent from South Carolina and Georgia, but also that others were taken from places as disparate as Kentucky and Louisiana. Even those from Virginia, the most important source of Florida's slaves, came from different parts of the state, with about one-third coming from the tidewater region, another third from the piedmont, and with small numbers from Southside and northern Virginia and a handful drawn from the Shenandoah Valley and the surrounding mountains. Mixing slaves at the point of purchase and sale, as well as during their long trek, made it difficult for planters to exercise their preferences.
¹⁸

The resultant jumbling also made it more difficult for black people to find kin and friends among those sold south. The heterogeneity of the internal slave trade left black migrants isolated and alone, so that the black men and women taken from the seaboard South experienced all the horrors of their ancestors' transatlantic journey. Like their forebears, they too had been forcibly separated from everyone and everything they knew and loved. Their westward journey was also traumatic and often deadly. Even before departing, many experienced the harrowing pain and humiliation of having their persons inspected in the most minute and intimate ways. Once the trade was under way, the grim reality of being separated from everyone they knew and loved became manifest. As with the transatlantic slave trade, slaves ensnared in the internal trade would realize—in one chilling moment—the full implications of their captivity.

Having arrived at what would be their new home, only rarely did they see a familiar face. In the new plantations of the southwest, slaves from the Chesapeake and the low country mingled in the new plantations with slaves smuggled from Africa and the West Indies and free blacks kidnapped from the Northern states. While some slaves bragged of their origins—claiming that “Virginia de best” and South Carolinians “eats cottonseed”—such regional chauvinism soon disappeared. Unlike in the eighteenth century, observers failed to dwell upon the peculiar twang in the voice of Virginia slaves or the lilt in the language of those from the low country. But if older distinctions between Virginians and South Carolinians and Africans and African Americans disappeared, new ones emerged, as the new arrivals were not always welcome by the first-comers.
¹⁹

Still, the shared experience of being bought and sold unified black people as perhaps no other. The destination of most seaboard slaves moved steadily westward with the expansion of the cotton kingdom so that the trek from the interior was arduous and, for many, increasingly long. Coffles trudging at the rate of some fifteen to twenty miles a day could make the trip between tidewater Virginia and the Mississippi Valley in about two months under ideal conditions. But conditions were rarely ideal, and muddy roads and swollen rivers forced slaves to detour and could substantially increase the time slaves spent on the road. In fact, few slaves moved without such delays, for travel was rarely direct. Meandering from town to town, much as African captives moved from village to village, and as their seaborne counterparts in the African trade had earlier sailed from port to port, traders here and there sold a few slaves and purchased others. A trader carried Charles Ball, a Maryland slave, southward to Georgia in a coffle that numbered some fifty slaves. Along the way, he periodically stopped, pitched camp, and peddled slaves in the neighborhood, literally moving from door to door. In the evening he would return, Ball reported, with those “whom he had not disposed of.” The others remained tethered to camp, anxiously waiting for their turn.
²⁰
Many—perhaps most—transplanted slaves shared Ball's experience of being sold door-to-door. While most slaves faced the auction block and public sales at one time or another, many moved invisibly in the quiet bargaining between trader and would-be owner, out of public view.

Although the logic of commerce urged that these valued commodities be well fed and housed, logic no more prevailed in the second Middle Passage than it did in the first. Eager to pad their profits, traders—in particular the marginal operators—skimped on the care and feeding of their human property. They bedded their slaves with little protection, forcing them to sleep on the dank ground in open fields or some equally uninviting board floor in drafty buildings. They fed the captives on whatever was available and replaced only the most threadbare garments. If men and women fell ill, they could expect only the most rudimentary medical care, if any, for traders were quick to cut their losses. Fearing that a contagion that had taken the lives of several of his slaves would damage his ongoing business, Isaac Franklin, Natchez's leading slave trader, refused to call a physician to treat his ailing slaves. Instead, he let the slaves suffer and die, and then dumped their bodies in a nearby ravine. The infamous captain of the Zong, who threw sickly slaves overboard, had nothing on Isaac Franklin. While the mortality rate for the internal slave trade never approached that of the transatlantic transfer, it surpassed that of those who remained in the seaboard states.
²¹

Like the traders, slaveowners in transit were also on the make, bartering old hands for new ones or selling men and women to finance yet other new ventures. Slaves sold along the way rarely remained in place for long and were often resold, thus reliving over and over the horrific protocols of the trade. With their bodies greased to hide blemishes and hair painted to disguise age, slaves found themselves repeatedly placed on the auction block to be poked, prodded, priced, and packed off—perhaps to be sold again. Resale came quickly for some. Others lingered just long enough to establish themselves and gain a degree of comfort with their new surroundings, only to be suddenly uprooted again by the death of their new owner, the settlement of an estate, or an owner's whim. A few were held in a state of limbo, while speculators brokered the most profitable deal. For some black men and women, the auction block and the slave pen became a way of life as well as the symbol of their long ordeal. Many of those caught in the trade did not live to tell the tale. Some—grieving for their past and despairing for their future—took their own lives. Yet others fell when they could not maintain the feverish pace of the march.

Over time the regularization of the slave trade reduced some of the hazards of the long march. Slave traders standardized their routes and adopted new technologies. They relied more on flatboats, steamboats, and eventually railroads, improving the circumstances under which slaves were transferred if only to assure the safe delivery of a valuable commodity. By the 1830s, the great slave traders began to transfer slaves by oceangoing vessels, generally from Alexandria, Baltimore, or Norfolk to New Orleans, which emerged as the nation's largest slave market. Moreover, while the large traders rationalized their operations, small-time, undercapitalized itinerants—scrambling through the backcountry districts and crossroad hamlets to make a few dollars—transported a large proportion of the slaves. Their underfunded operations increased the risk to the black men and women sold westward. Without a stable base and with few connections, they traveled a haphazard path, camping where they could and foraging for food as they might. When successful, such operations might propel these speculators into the ranks of the prosperous; they did just the opposite for slaves.
²²