Walter Johnson

White lies: Human property and domestic slavery aboard the slave ship Creole

Abstract We cannot suppress the slave trade – it is a natural operation, as old and constant as the ocean. George Fitzhugh It is one thing to manage a company of slaves on a Virginia plantation and quite another to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty. Frederick Douglass This paper explores the voyage of the slave ship Creole, which left Virginia in 1841 with a cargo of 135 persons bound for New Orleans. Although the importation of slaves from Africa into the United States was banned from 1808, the expansion of slavery into the American Southwest took the form of forced migration within the United States, or at least beneath the United Statess flag. About two-thirds of a million slaves were transported in this “domestic” slave trade between 1820 and 1860 (another three hundred thousands were moved by their owners in the same period). But those aboard the Creole were not to be among them: a group of slaves aboard revolted, and took the ship to Nassau in the Bahamas, where slavery had been abolished in 1834. The 1807 Congressional Act, which paralleled the British Act of 1807 ending British involvement in the African trade, forbade the further importation of African slaves after 1 January 1808 and sought to draw a line between the henceforth “domestic” economy of American slavery and the global economy in human beings. By instituting a distinction between “slaveholding” and “slave trading”, the act sought to align the limits of its economy with its polity, its slavery with its security, and its “property” with is “humanity”. The American flag gave protection to these trade actions, which became the flag of convenience for slave traders worldwide. The Creole and the contradictory imperatives of slaveholding and security aboard the boat; the dramatic attempts by those slaves aboard to attain freedom and transportation to a new home in Africa – although they came from different parts of Virginia, different communities, and different families – moments of white collusion, inter-racial cooperation, and black mercy aboard vessel; all combine in the telling of this story of slavery in the nineteenth-century Atlantic.

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash

Douglas Egertons fascinating article begins with an image of slave rebels in Charleston in 1822 planning to rob a bank. And, indeed, it speaks volumes that such an image should be interesting in and of itself, as it surely is. We have focused intensively in the literature on slavery and slave revolts to discern underlying tendencies and long-term transformations, but there is much about the everyday life of slavery (and especially of enslaved resistance) about which we know next to nothing. And apparently when slave rebels thought about revolt one of the practical steps they considered was to take over banks and steal the money inside (if, of course, taking that money from those banks could be called stealing given that it represented, in congealed form, labor that had been wrung from their bodies). Egerton asks why they began with the banks.Ranging widely and comparatively in time and space, Egerton proposes a big answer composed of several smaller arguments. To wit: Urban environments that hosted banks were shaped by structures and practices that both suggested and supported collective revolt as a solution to the problem of slavery. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities, Egerton points out, were geographically complex: They provided a lot of places to hide and a lot of places to encounter subversive ideas and discontented people. And they provided enslaved people with a lot of ways to make money. The urban economy was sufficiently complex that it required flexible terms of employment even for slave labor. The skilled labor of a cabinet-maker would never be needed all the time by one owner, but through hiring out, it might be useful to any number of clients and transformed into an income stream. Likewise, a man trying to set up a tavern in his front room might not have had the money to invest in buying a slave, but hiring a slave for a year at a time might have been a way to begin to make that money. And, finally, there were all the petty bribes and small cash incentives through which notionally unpropertied slaves were daily and regularly coaxed into labor everywhere in the Americas.1And this money, Egerton argues, was meaningful. It was the lubricant that offered slaves an entree to the treating and drinking of the multiracial tavern life of the docks, a world that Egertons wonderful books on the revolts in Richmond in 1800 and Charleston in 1822 demonstrates was full of the subversive ideas and rough characters that made the idea of revolution believable. But there was more to money than that, for money, Egerton suggests, shaped the aspirational structure of revolt. The experience of having had money in their hands, Egerton argues, was, for slaves an experience of freedom: of possibilities that were otherwise foreclosed, of crossing boundaries that were in principle defined by race, but in practice, it turned out, defined by the cash nexus. Of buying fine clothes, or standing for a round of drinks, of experiencing the tonic power of being able to choose, to evaluate, consider, compare, linger. Of behaving like a clerk. For Egerton, this experience was one of psychological independence of the very sort that made it possible to imagine revolution and freedom.I must admit that it took me a while to get used to this idea, but after my initial skepticism, I did so, and it is, of course, a really bright and interesting idea. Enslaved people lived in a society where power and beauty and sanctity and all sorts of other virtues were experienced and expressed as control over commodities. And the only irony in the fact that some of them-many of them?-might have joined their owners in imagining that the achievement of human freedom could be indexed by the possession of things is the most obvious one. It seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a world in which enslaved people could care for themselves and express their love for one another by pursuing money and purchasing goods. And, indeed, it seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a world in which that micro-economic activity might mark out pathways and forge connections that could be activated with the current of revolt. …

The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery

What does it mean to speak of the commodification of people as a domain of historical inquiry? Why put it that way? What does it mean to say that a person has been commodified? Is this about slavery? Prostitution? Wage labor? The sale of donated organs, fetal tissue samples, and sections of the human genome? Is it about the way that my personal data is sold without me knowing anything about it? Is it about the Coke machine in my kids school cafeteria-the sale of her unwitting little field of vision, her tiny stomach, and her enormous desire to be grown-up? At first glance, the phrase seems impossibly baggy: inviting all sorts of comparisons of the incommensurable, and posing questions that sit at odd angles to the standard categories of historical inquiry. But perhaps thats the point: by inviting comparisons, the editors have framed a question that draws attention to the connections and similarities between historical processes that are usually analyzed as if they were distinct-slavery, wage labor, and prostitution, say-and calls attention to the historically embedded distinctions that separate them from one another as ethical, legal, and analytical subjects.In reflecting on these wonderful essays, I want first to review the older version of the question out of which this one seems to have been conjugated: the Question of the relation of caDitalism to slaverv. And I want to do so with particular attention to the work of Karl Marx and the most influential of those who have written about slavery in the United States in orthodox Marxian terms; for it is, after all, this intellectual tradition that has most actively kept alive the idea that when you talk about capitalism and slavery you are talking about two things, rather than one. Finally, I want to propose a heterodox reading of a short section of Capital that foregrounds the question, which Marx so insistently repressed throughout the rest of the text: the question of slavery.If it is hard to think about slavery as capitalism, that is because it is supposed to be: slavery is, in some sense, unthinkable in the historical terms that frame western political economy.1 In both Smithian and Marxian economics, slavery serves as an un-theorized historical backdrop to the history of capitalism, an un-thought (even when present) past to the inevitable emergence of the present. This foundational exclusion of the fact of slavery from the framing of political economy, I would argue, has had consequences that bedevil us down to the present moment.James Oakes recently has argued that Adam Smith and the bourgeois political economists who followed him spent a great deal of time and energy trying to reconcile what everybody knew-that slavery would inevitably give way to free labor because of the superior capacity of self-interest as a tool of labor discipline-with what seemed nevertheless to be everywhere the stubborn fact: slaveholders were making a great deal of money. Smith resolved this problem, according to Oakes, by passing it off to other regions of intellectual inquiry. Perhaps it was the pride of man that made him love to domineer, combined with the excessive fertility of the tropics, that accounted for the persistence of slavery m the face of its inherent inefficiency and inevitable decline.2 Perhaps, that is, the persistence of slavery was a question to be answered by psychology or geography (by moral philosophy or natural history, to use terms Smith would recognize) but certainly not political economy.If Smith displaced the question of slavery, it might be said that Marx simply evaded it. The magnificent critique of the commodity form with which Marx began Capital, for instance, unfolds from a detailed consideration of the nature of a bolt of linen. Out of the dual character of that linen as an object and a commodity-having a use value and an exchange value-Marx develops the notion of the fetishism of commodities, the habit of mind by which things are made to seem as if they exist in relation to one another (compared according to their prices) rather than to their vises and the circumstances of their production (which reflected the larger matrix of social relations). …