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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
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Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Seed–1829-1837”
White masculinity is key to understanding the political and social environment around the expansion of slavery during this period. Indeed, “[w]hite men’s code of masculinity”—or their “ideas about what [makes] them men”—“shape[s] all lives on slavery’s frontier: shape[s] the costs of being black, the benefits of being white, the costs of being female” (217). There are constant struggles to assert and display masculinity, among rich and poor alike. On slavery’s frontier, these struggles are frequently physical and even lethal. As “violent conflicts over status, reputation, and pride of membership, access, and recognition” (221) grow, the rate of white-on-white murder far outstrips the rest of the country.
The equal distribution of power among white men is a key political concern of the moment, with many poorer white men bemoaning the way politics and other power struggles are dominated by “educated, wealthy men from the upper class” (222). Although conflict occurs within class groups, it is particularly pronounced in “less wealthy white men who [move] states [and become] increasingly confrontational toward those who [dare] to act like their betters” (222). On “the most basic level,” such violence works to treat one’s opponent like a slave who cannot “defend their pride, their manhood, or anything else” (219). As such, “the best way to insult a white man [is] to treat him like a black man, as if he [cannot] strike back, and the best way to disprove that [is] to strike back” (219).
Displays of status and masculinity do not only take place through white-on-white or male-on-male violence. Sexual conquests, particularly forced and coerced encounters, are also central to ideas of what it is to be a man. This is particularly pronounced during this period as many white migrants move to the region “with the idea in their heads that slavery’s frontier [is] a white man’s sexual playground” (238). The idea that white men are entitled to rape enslaved women has been present “from the beginning of slavery in the Americas, if not before” (235). However, the new slave trade “brand[s] and market[s] the ability to coerce sexuality, priming white entrepreneurs to believe that the purchase of enslaved-people-as-commodities offer[s] white men freedoms not found in ordinary life” (243). Enslaved women are increasingly sexualized and sold for the purposes of sexual abuse as, “in the early 1830s, the term ‘fancy girl’ or ‘maid’ [begins] to appear in the interstate slave trade” referring to “a young woman, usually light-skinned, sold at a high price explicitly linked to her sexual availability and attractiveness” (240).
Although there is public outcry calling for “proper forms of sexual morality to govern the public culture” (238), on some levels this only encourages these white men as they enjoy the way that “the existence of ‘fancy girls’ put[s] a piratical middle finger in propriety’s face” (241). Viewing themselves as “pirates” (241) and “lawless outsiders” (239), many white men use these abusive sexual encounters to display their dominance not only of the enslaved women they rape but of others, too, defying cultural mores and showing “pious white women that they [govern] nothing” (241). Similarly, it is not unusual for an enslaver to have “sex publicly, in front of other enslaved people, demonstrating his dominance over all of them” (237). The logic that shapes such sexual abuse also shapes other interactions, including business dealings in which a victorious business man is “metaphorically raping his competitors” (243). Ultimately, then, the new slave trade shapes the frontier region of the South into a “world where white men [see] their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved, feminized” (243). These white men then view themselves as outlaws, flouting outdated morals by flaunting their liaisons and abuses, displaying their masculinity through acquiring land and slaves, and demanding ever-greater flows of credit to keep their profits and power expanding. It is this complex of interwoven ideas of masculinity, race, entitlement, and power that support Andrew Jackson’s rise to power.
As the hero of the Battle of New Orleans and Horseshoe Bend, and the person who seized millions of acres of land from the Creek Nation, Jackson has considerable masculine capital. Among his supporters, he is seen as “the unpretentious but assertive man who dominate[s] his household and force[s] arrogant bullies into feminized submission” and as a man who “symboliz[es] who they [want] to be” (226). He particularly appeals to “the kind of white man” who resents the domination of politics by an exclusive club of upper-class elites and rich plantation owners and who wants “politics to change—to incorporate white male equality in both political practice and policy outcomes” (224). Jackson is “making a new kind of government,” one that builds “white men’s equal access to manhood and citizenship on the disenfranchisement of everyone else” (224). He promises “a reform program that [will enhance] the egalitarianism of white manhood citizenship” (228), “leverage[s] male resentment of female claims to power” (241) around sexual morality and household authority, and generally proposes to allow poorer, less-propertied white men greater access to profits and opportunities.
One of his key challenges is to the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.). Feeling entitled to unrestricted credit and endless, lust-fueled expansion, many of Jackson’s entrepreneurial supporters see the B.U.S. as resembling “a maiden-aunt chaperone who frown[s] at any sign of a creeping hand” (244). They want Jackson to take down “the B.U.S. […] before it rape[s] ordinary male citizens” (243) by refusing to fund their enterprises while corruptly supporting the established elite’s effort to consolidate their power.
In an “unprecedented act,” Jackson vetoes the bank’s attempts to renew its charter in 1832, despite an act agreeing to the re-charter being “passed with overwhelming support by both houses” (250). There is outcry and many unite against the decision, including some former supporters, forming “the brand new party of Jackson’s opponents: the Whigs” (251). Others remain staunchly in support and, “energized by Jackson’s assertive refusal to accept anything less than white male equality” (251), they form the new Democratic Party.
The president of the B.U.S., Nicholas Biddle, and Jackson’s political opponent, Henry Clay, think that vetoing the act will lose Jackson the presidency. However, his move proves far more popular than they suspect especially with “[w]hite men forced to the margins of the changing US economy” (252), and Jackson is reelected “by a clear majority in both popular and electoral votes” (251). This “convince[s] Jackson that the people now [expect] him to cut off the Monster Bank’s power to divert the blessings of government to the well-connected” (252) and, in September 1833, his administration begins “to draw down the $10 million in federal money that [is] still sitting in the B.U.S. account,” redistributing it to smaller state-chartered, “politically friendly” banks, called “‘pet’ banks” (252) by Jackson’s opponents. In November, Biddle retaliates and “the B.U.S. beg[ins] to call in all its loans […] deliberately induc[ing] a massive recession” (253). Many blame Jackson but “the president refuse[s] to quail” believing, like his followers, that this only supports his decision to veto the re-charter and reinforcing his “claim that B.U.S. supporters [hate] white men’s democracy” (254).
By the spring of 1834, the economy begins to improve, largely because of the growing use of “slave bonds” (254) by a rapidly expanding number of state-chartered new banks. Slave bonds allow borrowers to use slaves as collateral, to take out mortgages on their human property that they can sell as bonds around the world, and use the proceeds “to fund the capital-intensive projects of shareholders—in other words, to help them buy slaves” (254). This allows “the total amount of bank loans available to southwestern borrows” to grow from “$40 million, including $30 million lent by the B.U.S.” in 1832 to “more than $80 million” (255) by 1837. In turn, this allows a rapid expansion of slavery and “150,000 enslaved people [are] moved from the old states to the new,” where work on “millions of new acres” (256), doubles the US cotton crop.
Ironically, although Jackson “had mobilized common white male anger at arrogant, antidemocratic supporters of the B.U.S. and its allies,” his policies and “the ensuing deployment of banking innovations [do not] make the southern financial environment more democratic” (256). The “old insiders manag[e] to remain insiders” and, as “[b]anker and planter [are] often the same” (256) or at least closely related, “the new banks [do] nothing too different from the B.U.S. when it [comes] to distributing credit to lower-class men” (257). Whatever his intentions, Jackson’s “policies repeatedly [give] the frontier’s entrepreneurial elite exactly what most of them wanted: more Indian lands, more territories to the west for slavery, free trade for cotton, and, finally, destruction of all limits on their ability to leverage enslaved people’s bodies as credit” (252). The result is the strengthening of old hierarchies and “the biggest boom yet seen in the history of slavery’s expansion” (258).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Blood–1836-1844”
An “asset bubble” or “a situation in which an important asset has become wildly overvalued compared to realistic predictions of future returns” (269) usually occurs when “three conditions occur at the same time” (270). In the mid-1830s, this occurs in the slave South. The first condition, “the elimination of market regulation,” occurs after Jackson “destroy[s] the B.U.S. and replace[s] it with nothing” while states also fail to “control how much money banks printed and lent” (270). The second condition, “financial innovations that make it easier to expand the leverage of borrowers,” is present in the form of slave bonds that provide “distant investors with opportunity to purchases shares in the income flows of thousands of slaves—to speculate, in effect, on future revenues generated by cotton and slaves” (270). The final condition, “the euphoric belief that the rules […] have changed, that somehow ‘this time will be different’ and asset prices will not return to their mean,” is present throughout the Southwest, where entrepreneurs underestimate “both the likelihood and the probable magnitude of financial corrections” (270).
These conditions cause a “bubble” in which the price of slaves, which previously “had always tracked that of cotton” (269), “soar[s] upwards on a new trajectory” (270). Vast investments and the violent “efficiency” of the pushing system mean that there is “much more cotton in 1836 than there had been in 1828” (271), and “consumers’ demand for cotton goods simply [cannot] keep up with this vast increase in supply” (272). Banks begin denying credit to British cotton traders, who quickly collapse as prices for cotton go into “a free fall” (273) in 1836. Traders send “bags of letters desperately calling in the mountains of debt owed by American trading partners” and “arrays of interlinked debtors and creditors [begin] to cascade down” (273), from cotton buyers in New Orleans to banks in New York. Having “lent far more paper money than their own reserves of cash justified,” Southwestern banks are the worst affected “economic actors” (273). The cotton merchants that owe them money have “nothing but cotton, which [is] selling for less than the cost of transportation” and even prices for slaves, usually “a liquid resource in times of trouble for many a white person,” are now “uselessly low” (274). Unable to call in debts or pay the “massive upcoming interest payments on bonds sold on worldwide financial markets” (274), Southwestern and New York banks close, leaving “the financial sector in a kind of induced coma” (275).
Although “sensible macroeconomic policymakers usually prescribe ‘priming the pump,’ in which the government’s deficit spending encourages private investment,” Democrat President Martin Van Buren declines to take such a path and “refuse[s] to underwrite the expansion of credit for the banking system” (276). Others step in instead, including Nicholas Biddle, of what was once the B.U.S. and is now re-chartered as the Pennsylvania Bank of the United States (B.U.S.P.). The B.U.S.P. “issue[s] millions of dollars in ‘post-notes’—promises to pay the holder of the note in a year or eighteen months for the face value of the note plus six percent interest.
Biddle’s post-notes revitalize the economy to some extent and the price of cotton climbs again, “as enslavers across slavery’s frontier [prepare] to plant for 1839” (277). Knowing they are in a dire financial situation, they plant a great deal, force slaves to harvest at incredible rates, and ship “1,650,000 bales of cotton in 1839—225,000 more than in any previous year” (277). This increased supply causes the price of cotton to plummet once again, taking down in the process “Biddle’s B.U.S.P., which had bet everything on being able to redeem post-notes by selling cotton at high prices” (277-78). It also contributes to the political demise of Van Buren, whose “presidency had been ambushed by first one panic and then another” (278). William Henry Harrison wins the presidency and, now “in control of both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government” (278), the Whigs pass “a national bankruptcy law that would allow federal courts to stop chaotic deleveraging and rationalize the process of debt liquidation and financial recovery” (279). However, before the Bankruptcy Act is fully implemented, Harrison dies of pneumonia and is replaced by former vice president John Tyler. “[M]ulish by disposition” and “essentially a Virginia Democrat” (279), Tyler undermines such efforts to regulate banking.
In a “world where white men [see] their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved, feminized” (243), the ongoing financial devastation leaves many white men with a distinct sense of “impotence” (274). Black men, however, have been developing new models of masculinity. Slavery’s abuse, violence, and control “cut[s] and stain[s] enslaved men specifically as men, systematically denying them the opportunity to assert traditionally masculine roles” (262). Some Black men respond through “heroism” or “the willingness to seek out death to avoid domination” and a “readiness-for-vengeance” (281). However, most do not take this path, even though white men view this “alleged nonresistance of enslaved men as evidence that they [are] not heroes, proof that they [are] not really men” (281). Many enslaved men instead seek a masculine identity shaped not by “heroism” but by what Tzvetan Todorov calls “ordinary virtues,” finding “transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people [and] [t]hrough small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings” (282).
Forced migration in the expansion of the slave frontier has decimated enslaved people’s families and personal relationships, but there are also opportunities to “start again,” to remarry and have children, to adopt orphans or care for those left without support in the wake of slavery’s progress. Defying the way “[c]aring is not central to most definitions of masculinity,” the “kindness of enslaved men” leads them “to create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them” (282). Joe Kilpatrick is one such man. Having been separated from his wife and two daughters, Lettice and Nelly, by forced migration, he adopts George Jones, “a five-year-old orphaned by the trade” (280). When, thanks to Kilpatrick’s care, Jones grows into an adult, he has two daughters of his own and names them Lettice and Nelly. Men like Kilpatrick and Jones adopt “an idea of manhood incompatible with the readiness-for-vengeance that [has] long defined manhood, not only for white in the antebellum South, but throughout much of Western history” (281). In doing so, they make “ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that [tells] them that as men they [have] failed” (282) and so, through “a billion acts of quiet love that [keep] children and others alive, such men [challenge] southern white and Western definitions of manhood” (284) and pave the way for a future in which African Americans will be free and strong in their communities.
However, in the meantime, the bursting of the bubble means that enslaved people’s families and interpersonal relationships will be disrupted once again. With the collapse of slave prices, white people’s interpersonal relationships are in turmoil. Enslaved people become “the currency of contention within white families” (286) as relatives quarrel and cheat one another, while “[m]en [accost] each other in the streets demanding payment for debts” (273) and “[e]veryone, it seem[s], [is] lying and cheating each other in the scrabble to escape the traps they [have] built for themselves” (285). One popular way of cheating others is to be “‘G.T.T.’—gone to Texas,” in which one flees with slaves to the Texas. Once a Mexican territory and now an independent republic since the Texas Revolution in 1836, GTTs head to Texas in order to avoid courts and creditors or to claim that the slaves have “run off” (288). This deceptive flight is “one reason why the enslaved population of the republic across the Sabine River increase[s] from 4,000 in 1837 to more than 27,000 by 1845” (288). It also disrupts and destroys many enslaved people’s communities, as well as the “[f]amilies, new and old, […] broken on the block” (294) and sold off by indebted enslavers, the “secondary forced migrations during the decade of planter disaster” (296) sees many others separated to be sent to Texas or elsewhere.
There are also more macro-scale conflicts surrounding Texas. Southern enslavers are keen to annex Texas as a rich new territory into which the slave frontier can continue its expansion. Northern opponents argue that “this massive new slave territory [will] render New England forever politically irrelevant” (268). Despite this, proslavery politician John C. Calhoun uses arguments that slavery is naturally “the proper state for people of African descent” (301) and fears about British interference in Texas to further his cause, allowing Tyler and incoming president James K. Polk to secure the annexing of Texas. Further conflict occurs with British pressure to end international slave trading and efforts to free “British industry from dependence on US planters” (299), as well as international outrage when southern banks repudiate their bonds, refusing to pay bondholders the money they are owed and causing a “self-inflicted choking-off of ties to worldwide credit markets” (292).
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
These chapters introduce another of the book’s themes: masculinity. Understanding white masculinity and white men’s “ideas about what [makes] them men” (217) is essential to understanding many aspects of life on the slave frontier and beyond. One key expression of this is “violent conflicts over status, reputation, and pride of membership, access, and recognition” (221), which leads to a white-on-white murder rate that is far higher on slavery’s frontier than anywhere else in the nation. Race is central to this violence because white people have normalized violence against largely defenseless enslaved people of color to such a degree that “the best way to insult a white man [is] to treat him like a black man, as if he [cannot] strike back, and the best way to disprove that [is] to strike back” (219).
White men’s efforts to prove their masculinity and display their status are not limited to white-on-white or male-on-male violence but rather frequently take the form of sexual violence against enslaved women. The new slave trade is central to this shift, as it actually “brand[s] and market[s] the ability to coerce sexuality, priming white entrepreneurs to believe that the purchase of enslaved-people-as-commodities offer[s] white men freedoms not found in ordinary life” (243). The sexual abuse of enslaved women “proves” white masculinity not only as a display of dominance over enslaved women and the enslaved men who cannot protect them but also as “a piratical middle finger in propriety’s face” (241), one that allows white men to see themselves as “lawless outsiders” (239) and show “pious white women that they [govern] nothing” (241).
The conditions of the slave frontier that allow white men numerous opportunities to violently display their masculinity also “systematically [deny] [enslaved men] the opportunity to assert traditionally masculine roles” (262). Instead, many embrace alternative models of masculinity, seeking to define their manhood through embracing “ordinary virtues” and “small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings” (282). As forced migration tears apart families and communities, leaving many orphaned, separated, lost, and alone, there are ample opportunities for enslaved men to “to create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them” (282). In doing so, they not only help keep their communities alive but also fundamentally challenge “southern white and Western definitions of manhood” (284).
A concern with masculinity also dominates the political realm, with the idea of white male equality growing in prominence. Poorer white men are increasingly offended by the supposedly emasculating effects of a political system dominated by “educated, wealthy men from the upper class” (222) denying them access to political authority. Both this concern and its expression as a question of masculinity are key to Andrew Jackson’s rise to power. Seen as “the unpretentious but assertive man who dominate[s] his household and force[s] arrogant bullies into feminized submission” (226) and with a string of military victories behind him, Jackson is an exemplar of successful masculinity. Indeed, for many of his supporters, he “symboliz[es] who they [want] to be” (226). He is also building “a new kind of government” that constructs “white men’s equal access to manhood and citizenship on the disenfranchisement of everyone else” (224). He promises “a reform program that [will enhance] the egalitarianism of white manhood citizenship” (228) and one of his first targets is the B.U.S. The men who see themselves as “pirates” (241) and “lawless outsiders” (239) view the B.U.S. as “a maiden-aunt chaperone who frown[s] at any sign of a creeping hand” (244), limiting their “masculine” pursuit of credit, profits, and expansion.
When Jackson vetoes the B.U.S.’s re-charter, opponents like bank president Nicholas Biddle think that the outcry will cost Jackson the presidency, but Jackson’s “manly” assertiveness is extremely popular and Jackson, representing the newly-formed Democratic Party, is reelected “by a clear majority in both popular and electoral votes” (251). This emboldens Jackson to “draw down the $10 million in federal money that [is] still sitting in the B.U.S. account” and redistribute it to politically-friendly “‘pet’ banks” (252), starting a process of financial modernization that Jackson, who maintains that he does not trust banks, probably did not intend. When Biddle’s B.U.S. retaliates against the vetoing of the re-charter by “call[ing] in all its loans […] [and] deliberately induc[ing] a massive recession” (253), the economy is saved by the growing use of slave bonds put out by the boom of new, state-chartered banks. Slave bonds are based on mortgages taken out on slaves and sold as bonds around the world, with the proceeds funding shareholders’ expansions and investment in more slaves. This more than doubles “the total amount of bank loans available to southwestern borrows” (255), modernizing the economy and allowing for further rapid expansion of the slave frontier.
However, while these changes are modernizing, the “deployment of banking innovations [does not] make the southern financial environment more democratic” and the “old insiders manag[e] to remain insiders” (256). Moreover, while the “destruction of all limits on [enslavers’] ability to leverage enslaved people’s bodies as credit” (252) initially contributes to “the biggest boom yet seen in the history of slavery’s expansion” (258), rampant, unregulated lending driven by reckless displays of masculinity causes an asset bubble. When the bubble bursts and cotton prices enter “a free fall” (273) in 1836, “arrays of interlinked debtors and creditors [begin] to cascade down” (273), not only in America but in Europe, too. This sets the conditions for a significant shift in the relationship between the North and South that will eventually lead to the Civil War, as the book’s closing chapters will explore.
The early indications of growing discord and divergence center on conflict over the future of Texas. An independent republic since 1836, Texas is seen by southerners as the site of the next vast expansion of the slave frontier, and many believe that annexing the republic and securing further credit to establish new plantations there will salvage their ailing cotton economy. However, there is considerable northern opposition to this proposal because many fear “this massive new slave territory [will] render New England forever politically irrelevant” (268). This opposition is unsuccessful and Texas is annexed to the US, but the tensions and distrust remain. The South finds itself in conflict with the British over the future of the international slave trade, and with worldwide financial systems, when southern banks repudiate their bonds and refuse to pay their debts. With its total reliance, and absolute insistence, on the further expansion of slavery, the South is increasingly at odds with the North and the wider political world, setting the scene for the lead up to the Civil War.
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