The Making of African America

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.²

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.³ 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.⁴

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.⁵

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.⁶

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.⁷

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.⁸

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.⁹

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

The similarities between the international and the internal trade could not have been lost on anyone caught in the transit to the Deep South. Another similarity between the two is the fact that occasionally black men—like the so-called guardian slaves in the transatlantic voyage—were recruited to oversee other slaves. William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist, worked for a slave trader during his captivity in Missouri, much as Denmark Vesey had labored for a slave captain. But the black men and women shipped by sea shared most directly the experiences with their African forebears. While transatlantic traders established factories along the coast of Africa, American slave traders built or rented pens, or “jails,” where slaves could be warehoused, inspected, rehabilitated, and auctioned, sometimes to consignment agents who served as middlemen in the expanding transcontinental enterprise. Although slave traders advertised these places as “commodious residences,” there was no disguising that they were hellholes. The close quarters and unsanitary conditions bred disease, occasionally of an epidemic nature.²³ The rationalization of the slave trade may have reduced the slaves’ mortality rate, but it did nothing to mitigate the trade’s essential brutality.

Slaves, especially young women, found themselves subjected to all manner of sexual abuse. Traders prized light-skinned women or “fancy girls” for the high prices they fetched in New Orleans and other cities where they were forced to work as prostitutes. Traders also took advantage of these women, imposing themselves much as had the officers and sailors on the slave ships in an earlier era. Some in fact looked for young women precisely for that purpose and then boasted of their conquests. “[T]he slave pen,” wrote one former slave, “is only another name for a brothel.” As in the factories on the west coast of Africa, a few traders moved into settled, perhaps even loving, relationships with slave women. Richard Lumpkin, a Richmond slave trader, married one of his slaves and had their two daughters educated in the North. But relationships with black women and affection for their children did not change the dynamics of the slave trade.²⁴

There were other similarities between the two Middle Passages. Like the journey across the Atlantic, movement to the interior was also extraordinarily lonely and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one coffle, an observer characterized it as “a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral.” Indeed, with men and women dying or being sold and resold, slaves—step by step—were being severed from their most intimate human attachments. The despondency and despair that accompanied the first great migration became central features of the second as well. Surrendering to desperation, many deportees had difficulties establishing friendships or even maintaining old ones. After a while, some simply resigned themselves to their fate, turned inward, and became reclusive, trying to maintain their humanity in circumstances that denied it. Others exhibited a sort of manic glee—singing and laughing, perhaps a bit too loudly—to compensate for the cruel fate that had befallen them. “Amid all these distressing circumstances,” it was with just such a group of “cheerful and apparently happy creatures” that Abraham Lincoln shared a steamboat ride down the Mississippi. Unlike the slaves who Lincoln reported “danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards,” others dropped into a deep depression and determined to march no further. Charles Ball, like Olaudah Equiano nearly a century earlier, “longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.”²⁵

But the searing experience also forged strong friendships, as the westward march was also a time for establishing new relationships. Occasionally, some fell in love and married, as did Judy and Nelson Davis, who were thrown together in a coffle moving from Virginia to Mississippi and had the good fortune of ending up on the same plantation. Others who shared the transcontinental trek formed bonds akin to those established by shipmates on the voyage across the Atlantic. Mutual trust became one of the bases of resistance, which began almost simultaneously with the march.²⁶

The coffle—like the barracoons on the coast of Africa—was filled with rumor of revolt. While women and children marched unchained, traders—worried about insurrection—shackled the men together during transit and locked them tight when they stopped. But whatever the level of security and surveillance, it never was enough. Waiting for their first opportunity and calculating their chances carefully, a few slaves broke free and turned on their enslavers. Murder and mayhem made this second great migration almost as dangerous for slave traders as it was for slaves. While in-transit insurrections were both rare and rarely successful, the handful of slave traders maimed or killed by their captives was large enough for traders to manacle their captives and guard them carefully. The slaves’ occasional triumph—like the revolt aboard the Creole in 1841, in which slaves being shipped from Norfolk to New Orleans seized the ship and forced the captain to sail to the Bahamas—put every trader on guard. Far more common than revolt was flight. Slaves found it easier—and far less perilous—to slip into the night than to confront the heavily armed men who lorded over them.²⁷

As with their ancestors’ forced transit from Africa, slaves had the greatest chance for escape while they were close to home. Knowing the terrain, the fugitives could find refuge in familiar surroundings. Relying upon kin and friends, they secured shelter and support. They also helped themselves by keeping a careful account of their own movement. Charles Ball endeavored through his whole journey, from the time he crossed the Rappahannock River, to make such observations about the country, the roads he traveled, and the towns he passed through as would enable him, at some future period, to find his way back to Maryland.²⁸

Yet for even the most determined fugitives under the most favorable circumstances, freedom was a distant prospect. Successful flights were few, whether to the seeming safety of the North and Canada or to the anonymity of a nearby city. Moreover, since many fugitives simply wanted to return home—as did Ball—if only to say a last good-bye or make a final plea for life to remain as it had been, successful flight denied fugitives their primary goal, which was to recover their old lives, as they despaired severing their ties to home. Slave traders appreciated the slaves’ dilemma. They waited for runaways to reappear on the old homestead, seized them, and again began the southward journey.²⁹

Countering the forces aligned against them, black men and women tried their best to preempt their sale and deportation, which would separate them from their place. When rumors surfaced that their absentee owner might sell them to Texas from their home in Missouri, slaves Susan and Ersey were quick to remind their owner that they had “become much attached to the place (our Husbands being here),” that they had “a great many friends in this place,” and that they could not “bear to go to Texas with a parcel of strangers.” But few slaves dared to presume that the power of either argument or supplication could counter their owners’ avarice. Instead, they headed for the woods. Some took their families into hiding, not only to protect them but also to disrupt their owners’ plans. Others, bolder still, confronted their owners directly. A Virginia slave informed his new owner that he might be sold but he would not stay sold. “Lewis says he will not live with me, but will runaway if I attempt to keep him,” declared the astounded slaveowner.³⁰

If few slaves were so bold, even the most timorous were emboldened by the horrific implications of the sales from the place they called home. Ever so gingerly and with great trepidation, slaves approached their owners. The amalgam of heartfelt supplications and veiled threats—reminders of old loyalties and hints of future insubordination—occasionally had the desired effect. When his owner put him “on the block and sold him off,” one Virginia slave remembered that he “cried and cried till master’s brother told me to hush crying and he would get him tomorrow.” Eschewing such pleas, one slave mother, when threatened with separation from her newborn, “took the baby by its feet ... And with the baby’s head swinging downward, she vowed to smash its brains out before she’d leave it.” The master relented. Yet such reprieves were rarely permanent, for an owner’s death or financial reverses were forever putting slaves at risk for further trades.³¹

If their appeals were rejected, slaves tried other tacks. Attempting to save his son from being sold south, one slave father mobilized his resources and found a compliant white man to represent him at the public auction. But when the ruse was discovered, the slave trader rejected the deal, denouncing the hapless father for presuming to think he was “white.” Despite this frustrating instance, slaves never surrendered easily to the realities of the trade.³²

Occasionally these last-minute appeals fell in the slaves’ favor. In a few places, custom allowed slaves to choose another master if their present owner placed them for sale. Susan and Ersey, for example, did not think there would “be the least difficulty in getting ourselves sold” locally, but they needed permission to find a new owner so they would “not serparate” from their kin. But others were not so confident. The grim news that they or some loved one would be put on the auction block created a panic as slaves scrambled to find a surrogate master or pleaded for someone to hire them while they accumulated enough to purchase freedom. Maria Perkins’s note alerting her husband to the fact that their son had been sold captures something of the desperation of a parent about to lose a child. “I want you to tell dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me.... I don’t want a trader to get me.... I am quite heart sick.”³³

When at last it became clear that nothing could be done to prevent deportation, slaves began preparations for their new life. Those who had accumulated property in household items, furniture, and barnyard animals distributed them to relatives and friends or sold them to provide a small cushion of cash to carry to their new homes.³⁴ The transfer of material possessions was but one of the slaves’ concerns at this moment of high crisis. Friends and relatives had to be notified so they could say their last good-byes. “[W]ith much regret” as well as hopes that “if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven,” Arena Screven wrote his wife that he had been sold from Georgia to New Orleans, using a language so stiff that it could barely “Express the griffin.” That done, slave parents looked for someone who might play the role of fictive parent. Laura Clark recalled that her mother turned to a friend, Julie Powell, who was sold in the same parcel as Laura. “Momma said to old Julie, ‘Take kier of my baby Chile ... and if fen I never sees her no mo’ raise her for God.”’ Through the tears and the ritual exchange of gifts, slaves passed last-minute advice. Mementos that would represent the hopes of a lifetime had to be presented to the deportees.³⁵

Indeed few slaves forgot the terrifying moment when they were taken from their loved ones and sold to a distant and yet unknown place. In reminiscences collected years later, the memory of sale had hardly faded. It was “a day I’ll never ferget,” the elderly Mary Ferguson recalled in 1936, some seventy years after her sale. How could she, when, after her “crying’ an’ begin’ ” was dismissed, she was taken from her family. “I never never seed nor heared tell o’ my Ma an’ Paw, an’ bruthers, an’ susters from dat day to dis.”³⁶ The shock that so distressed those who experienced the transatlantic passage haunted the victims of the second Middle Passage as well.

Still, black men and women looked for some ways to maintain connections as the places they had made their own were about to be taken away from them. If the transatlantic passage permanently severed the ties with family, friends, and country, the transcontinental passage left the hope, however slim, that those connections could be maintained. Slaves transported by their owners had the greatest possibility of success. Some appended notes on their owners’ correspondence with their own families. “I wish to let you know that I think of you often and wish to see you very bad,” Rose wrote from a caravan en route to Alabama via her mistress’s letter to North Carolina. Rose’s mistress-amanuensis confirmed she had “a great many Messages from the Servants,” although most were reported as little more than “all give their love to all their friends and their best service to Master and Mistress.” Such bland renditions of the slaves’ heartfelt sentiments encouraged those few slaves who could write to, as one put it, “tak my pen in hand.”³⁷

Literate slaves maintained independent correspondence, and their messages had more bite. Phobia and Cash tried to keep in touch with their kin even as they were transported from Georgia to Louisiana. “Pleas tell my daughter Clarisse and Nancy a heap of how a do,” they wrote. Then they reminded Clarisse that her “affectionate mother and Father sends a heap of Love to you and your Husband and my Grand Children Phobia. Magi. & Cleo. John. Judy. Sue.” Phobia and Cash observed “that what [food] we have got to t[h]row away now it would be enough to furnish your Plantation for one Season.” But even the few literate slaves had difficulty maintaining ties half a continent away. Ten years after she arrived in Alabama from Virginia, Lucy finally found a way to communicate with her family. Most relied on bits of fugitive information of doubtful validity carried by planters and their wives returning from visits to the seaboard South.³⁸

These connections and the occasional slaves who returned from their new abodes to their old plantations accompanying their owners or on a sanctioned visit provided slaves in the older slave states with some understanding of where they might be sent. To be sure, such fragments passed in whispered rumors were distorted, but they offered a sense of the world to which captives would be transferred. The presence of such knowledge distinguished the internal migration from the transatlantic one, where Africans had almost no knowledge of the Americas.

But for the vast majority of deportees, the stark reality was that the journey from the seaboard South to the interior, like the transatlantic passage, was a one-way trip. There would be no return, even for the briefest of visits, and there would be no correspondence, even of the most abbreviated messages. Indeed, there would be no news of any sort: nothing of a daughter’s marriage, a grandchild’s birth, a parent’s death. This second Middle Passage, like the first, permanently severed its victims from the life they had once known. Slaves literally could not go home. Interviewed in the 1930s, a former Virginia slave, like the millions caught in the transatlantic trade, “had two brothers sold away an’ ain’t never seen ‘em no mo ’til dis day.”³⁹

But if they could not go home—and the number of migrants who reversed field and returned to their old homes was infinitesimal—the new arrivals remained intensely interested in and often deeply knowledgeable of their old homes. They renewed and refreshed knowledge of the seaboard and kept earlier arrivals alert to the people they had left behind. Small shards of information—news carried by new arrivals, gossip secured from their owners’ table—enlisted memories of the world they had lost but never surrendered. Indeed, the very inability of the migrants to return to their former homes fostered their demand to know more.⁴⁰

Arriving at some dense forest or forbidding clearing, having experienced all the nightmares of the second Middle Passage, deportees rehearsed the experience of the first black arrivals to plantation America. In their topography and geography, flora and fauna, the black-belt prairie or the river bottoms of the great valleys looked nothing like the tidewater or piedmont of Virginia and the swamps of low-country South Carolina and Georgia. The new ecology disoriented the migrants, as they searched for the familiar amid the foreign. Rough frontier conditions, debilitating work regimes, and brutal treatment left men and women psychologically spent as well as physically exhausted. The mortality rate of slaves spiked and fertility rates dropped as the first generation of cotton or sugar cultivators—many barely older than children—confronted an often deadly disease environment.⁴¹

In the face of frontier dangers, black men and women worked at quick pace—often under the lash—to get the first crops into the ground. Mastering a new crop and confronting slaveowners eager to ratchet up the level of exploitation took a toll. There was “no time off of’ de change of de seasons and after de crop was laid by. Dey was allus clearin’ mo’ lan’ or sump‘n,”’ remembered one former slave. Beyond the workplace, the forced migrants faced endless difficulties during those first years. Exhaustion compounded a deep melancholy that cast a pall over black life. The transplanted suffered from dejection that bordered on despondency. “[E]very time we look back and think ‘bout home,” recalled one Virginian who had been transported to Texas as a young man, “it make us sad.” Spartan circumstances—shabby housing, inadequate nutrition, and bad water—pushed some slaves over the edge.⁴²

However, within a generation of their arrival in the Southern interior, black people had recovered their balance and began to make the land their own. They mastered the landscape and the skills the new crops demanded. Like the first generation of Africans in mainland North America, they too created a new life built upon their own experiences and memories. This time, however, their memories were not drawn from Africa, from which they were removed by a century or more of American experience, but the Chesapeake, the low country, or occasionally the North, the world of their parents and often grandparents.

The new society in the interior emerged slowly and unevenly, since the internal slave trade remained open and slave traders continued to import slaves from the seaboard. Moreover, even as portions of the interior matured into settled plantation societies, other areas remained open to settlement. Transplanted slaves, many of them but recently arrived from the seaboard, thus were subject to resale, from Alabama to Mississippi, from Mississippi to Arkansas, or from Arkansas to Texas. The death of an owner, the failure of the plantation, or a sudden surge of planter ambition might send slaves to the auction block.

But if the same terror that gripped Africans caught in the transatlantic trade touched African Americans crossing the North American continent, the latter had one advantage. Shared language and common experiences allowed slave deportees from the seaboard to communicate freely. The new generation of forced migrants escaped the linguistic isolation that so weighted upon black men and women in the first Middle Passage. So too had they escaped the shock of seeing white men—faces reddened and hair wild and stringy—for the first time. Such familiarity enabled them to almost immediately begin reconstructing an African American society in their new location.

Like their forebears who had been shipped across the Atlantic, the black men and women ensnared in the internal slave trade also carried much with them on their transcontinental journey. Although many moved with barely more than the clothes on their backs, they too were nonetheless not without ideas that would shape their lives in the Southern interior. The rapid reemergence of the slaves’ economy, the reconstruction of the slave family, and the growth of African American Christianity offer hints as to the cultural baggage that enslaved black men and women brought with them and how it was remade in the course of the transcontinental journey.

The slaves’ economy—the complex matrix of customs and laws that allowed slaves to engage in independent economic activities, participate in the marketplace, and accumulate small amounts of property—had been disrupted by the forced movement from the seaboard to the interior. But in time, plantation society matured and slaves revived their economy. As on the seaboard, the independent productive activities grew at the intersection of the complementary interests of masters and slaves. Desperate to expand production, some planters paid their slaves—so-called overwork—for laboring on Sundays and evenings, revealing how the distinction between what was the slave’s time and what was master’s time had gained some legitimacy in the eyes of both slave and slaveholder. The line was blurred still further when slaves liberated some of their owners’ possessions and traded them to white nonslaveholders and others for liquor, tobacco, and other niceties. Slaveowners despised such illicit activities, and, at their behest, lawmakers punished such exchanges severely, but owners often inadvertently encouraged such activities. To avoid the expenses of provisioning their slaves, they provided slaves with land for gardens and the time required to work them if slaves would accept the responsibility of feeding and clothing themselves. Slaves discovered markets for their produce among Native Americans, white nonslaveholders, and even their own masters.

Once slaveholders conceded the slaves’ ability to work independently and retain a portion of the product of their labor, there was no turning back. Slaves demanded the right to keep barnyard fowl, maintain gardens and provision grounds, and market their produce. Before long, the slaves’ economy metamorphosed from a privilege to an entitlement, much as it had been in the seaboard South. In addition to working the traditional gardens and grounds, slaves sold handicrafts, chopped wood for steamboats, and gathered moss and other marketable commodities. They labored into the night and on Sundays—traditionally the slaves’ own time—for overwork payments. With produce to sell, they established ties with white nonslaveholders, many of whom were delighted to purchase the slaves’ surplus, along with almost anything slaves could purloin from their owners.

The few dollars slaves earned by their own labor—or the “overplus” gained from the overwork—had great significance. This money supplemented the slaves’ diet, allowed them to clothe themselves far better than their masters’ dole, and permitted them small luxuries to ease the hard realities of frontier enslavement. “Den each fam’ly have some chickens and sell dem and de eggs and maybe go huntin’ and sell de hides and git some money,” remembered one former Alabama slave. “Den us buy what am Sunday clothes with dat money, sech as hats and pants and shoes and dresses.” The benefits black people derived from their own economies tied them to the land—sometimes directly as they took pride in their gardens and grounds, and sometimes indirectly as the benefits they enjoyed became necessities. The trading networks they established with others—slaves and nonslaves alike—familiarized them with their neighbors, creating family ties, communities of interest, and, before long, political alliances. Such work required that available hands do their share. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, gained acceptance among the slaves of his new plantation only when he agreed to contribute his overwork “earnings into the family stock.”⁴³

As Ball’s experience suggests, the slave family reemerged slowly. While planters still relied upon the slave trade to reproduce their labor force, they—like their seaboard counterparts—found value in allowing slaves to maintain their own domestic institutions. Slave masters recognized that the birth of slave children added to their wealth, and they followed the practice established on the seaboard of allowing slave men to visit their “broad wives” and of easing the burden on slave women during the last months of pregnancy.

Despite the lack of legal sanction and enormous practical difficulties, the family once again became the center of slave life. As in the seaboard South, the family served as the locus of education, governance, and occupational training. Families established courting patterns, marriage rituals, and child-rearing practices. The family defined the domestic division of labor and shaped the aspirations of young and old. From cradle to grave, the family was more than a source of love and affection. From the slaves’ perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or house servant, but of husband or wife, son or daughter—the precise opposite of their owners’ calculation.⁴⁴

New families began to take shape as strangers anointed each other as kin. The pain of loss remained, but black people kept the memories of those losses alive. With their fathers and mothers gone, young men and women selected parents from among the few elderly slaves who had been transported west. “Uncles” and “aunts” became revered figures on the pioneer plantations, for they represented a tie to the world that was lost. While elderly slaves, many of whom had been forcibly separated from husbands or wives, were slow to establish new families, perhaps for fear that new unions would again be broken, young men and women married and soon became parents. Joe Kirkpatrick, separated from his wife and daughters, carried to Florida a five-year-old orphan boy named George Jones and raised him as his son. Jones grew up and eventually married, naming his own daughters after the sisters, Lettice and Nellie, he had known only through the memory of his foster father. The second great migration, like the first, dismantled families, but not the idea of family.⁴⁵

Children soon populated the new plantation region. For enslaved men and women the arrival of a child affirmed their survival as a people. The new children also provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world that they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, slave parents restored the ties that had been forever severed by the second great migration. In so doing, they reconnected themselves and their children with the ancestors they would never know. Some transplanted slaves reached back beyond their parents’ generation to grandparents or other ancestors, suggesting how slavery’s long history in mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act.⁴⁶

Along those same pathways flowed other knowledge. Rituals for celebrating marriage, coming of age, breaking bread, and giving last rites to honored elders which had been transferred across the Atlantic and were reconstructed along the coast of mainland North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were passed on to new ground during the nineteenth. Along with the unfulfilled egalitarian promise of the Age of Revolution and the Great Awakenings, these rites survived in the minds of those forcibly deported from their seaboard homes. Such memories became the building blocks for reconstructing new communities in the black belt, Mississippi delta, trans-Mississippi west, and other parts of the land black men and women were making their own.

As the networks expanded, slave society grew increasingly complicated. Kin connections not only joined men and women together in bonds of mutual support but also created new enmities and alliances. From among various networks of kin, work groups, and acquaintances emerged multiple hierarchies. Differences within the slave community required mediation, if only to prevent slaveowners from entering their disputes, a circumstance that slaves much preferred to avoid. Such responsibilities also fell to a new class of leaders, for the enforcement of the norms established by slaves could not be left to the slave masters.⁴⁷

Along with the new structure of leadership grew a host of new institutions, foremost among which was the African Christian church, which had generally been the province of free blacks prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The slaves’ commitment to Christianity expanded rapidly during the second great migration. By the eve of emancipation, one-quarter to one-third of the slave population and perhaps an even larger share of the free black population identified themselves as Christians. Although antebellum planters—themselves in the thrall of evangelical Christianity—generally supported the conversion of their slaves, Christianity took on a different meaning in the slave quarter than the Big House. While slave masters dwelled upon the Pauline doctrine of slave obedience as their entrée into Christianity, slaves found a different message in the Old Testament. Anointing themselves as the modern counterparts to the Children of Israel, they appropriated the story of Exodus as a parable of their own deliverance from bondage. The appearance of plantation chapels and the growth of a cadre of preachers and deacons, like the reemergence of the slaves’ economy and the slave family, tied black people even more firmly to place. The commitment to Christ added to the slaves’ sense of proprietorship over the site of their enslavement.⁴⁸

Another survivor of the transcontinental transfer of people of African descent—and one intimately connected to their embrace of Christianity—was the slaves’ music. Like the slave family and economy, the music of the quarter was also transformed by the second great migration, giving rise to a sound whose deep religiosity gained it the name “spiritual” when references to it first appeared in print. Although a recognizable descendant of the shouts of earlier years, spirituals had taken a new form, which some white observers characterized as “extravagant and nonsensical chants... and hallelujah songs.” They still contained much of the same rhythmic structure, antiphony, atonal forms, and various guttural interjections and were accompanied by hand clapping and foot stomping. They were almost always performed in a circular formation with the singer moving in a counterclockwise direction. But increasingly, Christian imagery and Jesus himself became central to the new music.⁴⁹

While the spirituals carried deep religious meaning and articulated multiple messages—joy and sorrow, hope and despair—as befitted a musical form that emerged from a collectivity, they also spoke both directly and in veiled allusions to the primal experience of people uprooted and forced to create place anew. The pain of separation—motherless children, for example—and the hope for a better life to which men and women might “steal away” were among the spiritual’s most persistent images. Movement abounded in references to roads and rivers, chariots and ships, and eventually trains. Slaves sang of running, traveling, and “travelin’ on.” They crossed rivers, forded streams, and flew “all over God’s Heab’n,” affirming how enslavement and forced migration had become the central experiences of African American life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even when such movement was wrapped in the imagery of the Old Testament, the journey of the “weary travelers” was as much a part of this world as the next. But the spirituals—in the same biblical language—also emphasized place: sometimes the nostalgia for a place lost, the desire to be “returned” and “carried home”; sometimes that other place, of final rewards. Like the improvisational character of music itself, black life amid the second great migraton was a process of continuous recreation. ⁵⁰

The movement and place that became so much a part of the slaves’ music remained a part of the slaves’ life. Black men and women continued to be sold and traded, and planters continued to move. Even in areas that were well established, planters—and their slaves—were constantly in motion. In Jasper County, Georgia, which had been settled for more than a generation by midcentury, nearly 60 percent of the slaveholders present in 1850 had gone elsewhere within the ten years that followed. While rates of persistence were generally higher for large slaveholders, even the grandees were constantly on the move. Planter mobility kept the slave community in flux, so that geographic mobility continued to be a feature of African American life. The origins of black men and women who opened accounts in the Little Rock branch of the Freedman’s Bank following the Civil War provide a sense of how the second Middle Passage had scattered black people across the Southern landscape: they traced their origins to some seventeen states, 142 different counties, and three foreign countries.⁵¹

The arrival of freedom amid civil war changed black life dramatically, altering the relationship between movement and place in African American life. The revolution of emancipation destroyed the sovereignty of the master and put in its place the discipline of the market. While former slaves found that Mr. Cash could be as hard a master as Mr. Lash, they appreciated the difference. There would be no more beatings, no more overseers, and no more intrusions into the most intimate relations between husbands and wives and parents and children. They would escape the endless days of forced sunup-to-sundown labor and enjoyed the right to quit for cause or even whim. Freedpeople celebrated these changes, embracing a new order that allowed them to enjoy the produce of their own labor and promised the opportunity to remake their world—perhaps the world—in accordance to the principles they had nourished as slaves.⁵²

Even before the shooting stopped, black men and women began the process of transforming themselves into a free people. They took new names, some of which were borrowed from former masters but most of which harked back to a lineage established by parents and grandparents in the Americas or, occasionally, grandparents and great-grandparents in Africa. They reconstructed families, searching out spouses and children who had been sold to distant parts of the South. Churches and schools that had operated clandestinely emerged from behind the veil of secrecy, and dozens of associations were created. The reinvigoration of African American civil society spawned a new politics as new men and women came to the fore and challenged old leaders. Everywhere freedpeople schemed to find new ways to put their knowledge, skill, and muscle to work to earn a living. Freedom commenced the process whereby black people would become, in the words of one black soldier, a “[p]eople capable of self support.”⁵³

At first, it appeared that the grand hopes initiated by the war and wartime freedom would be crushed as Andrew Johnson’s accession to the presidency empowered the old slaveholding class. But in the spring of 1867, the Radicals in Congress gained control over federal policy toward the South and expanded the rights of black people far beyond those defined by the Johnsonian settlement. In quick order, black men became citizens, voters, and—in some places—officeholders. Although the power of black lawmakers was limited by the covert enmity of their white Republican allies as well as the overt hostility of white Democratic enemies, they helped enact legislation providing black people with access to justice, schools, and a variety of social services. The revolution in black life would stall again, and before long, would move backward, as the Northern interest in remaking the South waned and the old regime reasserted itself. But the transformation that accompanied wartime emancipation changed the lives of black Southerners forever.⁵⁴

Among the most momentous of those changes that followed emancipation was the sudden termination of the second Middle Passage. For more than a half century, black people had been forcibly propelled across the continent, separated from their families and friends, and required to remake their lives anew. Freedom called a halt to the massive, forced deportation. After decades on the move, black people could deepen their roots on the land to which they had been exiled. Movement—or at least forced movement—was no longer the defining feature of African American life. In 1860, some 90 percent of the black population resided in the slave states. That figure did not change significantly over the course of the next four decades. At the beginning of the twentieth century, nine out of ten African Americans still lived in the South and fully three-quarters of these in the Southern countryside.⁵⁵ Once again, place emerged as the dominant force shaping African American society.

To be sure, black people were not locked in place, as there was plenty of room to roam within the South. Former slaves prized nothing more than the right to travel freely, which they believed to be an essential element of their new freedom, and they exercised it at every opportunity. Everywhere, it seemed, black people were on the move, and yet their patterns of movement revealed both the extent and the limit to African American mobility during that period. Having been tethered to an owner’s estate, they demonstrated their liberty by vacating their old homesteads, sometimes permanently, as they reassembled families and communities that had been shattered by slavery and then further dispersed in the turmoil of the Civil War. Former slaveholders and some federal officials complained loudly about the freedpeople’s “wandering propensities” and the seemingly endless comings and goings, which they interpreted as evidence of anarchy in the countryside and confirmation of the chaotic character of black society. They could do little to stop it.⁵⁶

In the years that followed, black Southerners continued to churn, as men and women tested their freedom of movement, challenging efforts of both former masters and federal officers who would deny them an essential attribute of a free people. For many, it was a desire to leave the place where they had been known as slaves or to escape the presence of former owners who never surrendered their sense of proprietorship or simply to appraise the meaning of their freshly proclaimed liberty. For others, it was the hope of better wages or working conditions and the chance for a new start. Even those who remained on the old plantation or hunkered down in their old neighborhood continued to be on the move. No longer needing a master’s permission to travel, they ranged freely over the Southern landscape, visiting relatives and friends, tending to their own business, and exploring a world that they had known previously only on someone else’s terms.

When white authorities—whether former slaveholders or federal officers—attempted to constrain their mobility, blacks reasserted their freedom of movement, voting with their feet. No element of the Black Codes enacted by planter-controlled legislatures that had been impaneled under President Johnson in the years immediately after the war met with greater resistance from freedpeople than the vagrancy and anti-enticement laws that had been designed to freeze them in place. They protested with equal vehemence the attempts that federal officers, eager to restore cotton production and fearful that former slaves might migrate to the North, had designed to immobilize them.⁵⁷

The search for new opportunities propelled some black men and women to distant places. Like other Americans, black Southerners drifted toward the underdeveloped periphery—both west and south—as some freedpeople and their children migrated to Florida, the Mississippi Delta, and Texas, where new, unbroken land provided possibilities for working the land or higher wages in the mines, sawmills, and timber camps. The proportion of the black population residing in Southern cities also increased, and some black people moved northward, sparking a small spike in the Northern black population.⁵⁸

Occasionally, this steady flow turned spectacular, particularly as the repressive planter-controlled governments took power. In 1877, following the collapse of Reconstruction, several thousand former slaves fled Mississippi for Kansas in a movement they compared to the biblical exodus. These “Exodusters” marked the most spectacular flight from the failure of racial democracy in the South. A decade later, frustration with the failure of Reconstruction sent many black Southerners to the unorganized Western territory, where they established some two dozen black towns. While some gazed west, others looked east, giving new life to the American Colonization Society’s design to remove black people to Africa. Henry McNeal Turner, a former Union army chaplain and AM E Bishop, promoted yet another exodus to Liberia. But, all totaled, these and other migratory escapes attracted only a tiny fragment of black Southerners. In the forty years following the Civil War, only 2,500 African Americans settled in Africa. The settlements in Kansas, Oklahoma, Liberia, and dozens of other migratory schemes spoke to the desperation of black Southerners, but many could not leave. Most would not.⁵⁹

Thus, even the most mobile black people did not move far. The number of black people leaving the South for other parts of the United States during the late nineteenth century remained small. Less than 3 percent of black people born in the South—a mere 150,000—lived beyond its borders in 1870, and that proportion changed little over the next three decades. Indicative of the stability of the Southern-born black population, a higher proportion of Northern-born black people lived in the South than black Southerners resided in the North. Only a tiny fraction of the black population—less than 350,000 between 1870 and 1900—left the region of their birth, most in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The vast majority of these derived from the upper South, especially Virginia. In short, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, the regional distribution of the black population between North and South hardly changed.⁶⁰

Within the South, the vast majority of black Southerners resided in the state of their birth; this was even more evident in the black belt. In portions of the seaboard South, from which the mass of black people had been forcibly extracted, connections to that place were much deeper among those who had remained. Five hundred of the 584 depositors of the Wilmington, North Carolina, branch of the Freedman’s Bank had been born in North Carolina, with more than three hundred of them born in the counties adjacent to Wilmington. At the turn of the century, of the some 132,000 Georgia-born black men and women who lived outside of the state of their birth, only 12,000, or roughly I percent of all black Georgians, resided in the North. A decade later, almost 90 percent of black Louisianans had been born in the state of their nativity. The proportion was a bit lower in the upper South, where nearly three-quarters of black Kentuckians resided in the state of their birth, but Mississippi matched Louisiana’s total. The demographic pattern in other states followed suit.⁶¹

Black Southerners also remained in the countryside. Although the number of black city dwellers grew rapidly in the years after emancipation, the proportion of black Southerners residing in cities or towns remained small. At the turn of the new century, better than eight of ten African Americans remained in the rural South. In the states of the lower South, the proportion was much higher, reaching nearly 95 percent in Mississippi. Even in states of the upper South, which had more substantial urban centers like Richmond, Louisville, and Nashville, the black population remained disproportionately rural.⁶²

Within the rural South, particularly the plantation South, the geography of African American life had taken on a new form following the Civil War as black people abandoned the plantation, which they identified with the subordination of slavery. Rather than reside in the shadow of the Big House, they spread throughout in their old neighborhoods, often dragging their cabins near the fields they worked, an act which reflected the desire to live apart from the white people who once owned them. Before long, they evolved into small villages. These “little communities in the woods,” as one observer called them, with their stores, schools, and churches—although generally too small to be mapped—represented the collective interest of free people.⁶³

Whatever the social implications for the spatial reformation of rural life, the new arrangement did not change the contours of African American geography. The reconfiguration of the plantation only tied black people more tightly to the countryside. The pronounced attachment of black Southerners to their place surprised white Northerners, who anticipated movement and perhaps feared a northward exodus. “Never was there a people ... more attached to familiar places than they,” reported a Union army officer in February 1862. Three years later, at war’s end, when officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau began the process of relocating the men and women who had found refuge in federal contraband camps, they discovered that freedpeople were loath to move, even with higher wages and other incentives in the offing. “There seems to be a great reluctance on the part of the majority,” wrote General Charles Howard, the brother of Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard, from Virginia in the summer of 1865, “to leave the miserable homes they have established here, and start forth to parts of the country new and strange to them.” Howard’s observation was repeated many times by so-called labor agents, some of them former slave traders, who found few takers when they offered free transport and the prospect of high wages to freedpeople willing to move to areas of the southwest that were just coming under cultivation.⁶⁴

These same local attachments shaped freedpeople’s principal wartime goal of securing an independent proprietorship of the land their forebears had worked as slaves. “We has a right to the land where we are located,” a former slave declared at war’s end. “Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon.... For just that reason, we have a divine right to the land,” he repeated for emphasis. In claiming their “divine right,” these former slaves were simply restating what Frederick Law Olmsted had earlier called the “fixed point of the negro’s system of ethics”: that “the result of labour belongs of rights to the labourer.” From the freedpeople’s perspective, as one Freedmen’s Bureau officer noted, “the negro regards the ownership of land as a privilege that ought to be co-existent with his freedom.” But it was not simply that their labor had given it worth; their lives had given it meaning. For this reason, black people did not simply want land, but particular lands—the lands they and their parents had worked, the lands their “fathers’ bones were laid upon.”⁶⁵

A full half century later, the sense of ownership that derived from the generations who occupied the land and whose labor made it productive continued to resonate with former slaves. When an elderly black South Carolinian named Morris discovered his new landlord, Bernard Baruch, was going to evict him, he restated the connections that had created his sense of place there. “I was born on dis place and I ain’t agoin’ off,” Morris lectured one of the great financiers of the twentieth century. “My Mammy and Daddy worked de rice fields. Dey’s buried here. De fust ting I remember are dose rice banks. I growed up in dem from dat high.... No Mist’ Bernie, you ain’t agoin’ to run old Morris off dis place.” Morris stayed.⁶⁶

Such emotive rendering of the importance of place reflected the centrality of family and community in the lives of former slaves. Husbands and wives, parents and children, and all manner of extended kin had found one another in the aftermath of the war, reconstructing families as they—not their former owners—understood them. No longer sold at their owner’s whim, forced to beg permission to visit a wife or sweet-heart or live in fear of permanent separation, newly freed men and women cemented the once-precarious relations that bound them together as kin. They savored the creation of domestic life under one roof as many enjoyed, for the first time, what free people took for granted: the ability for husbands and wives to sleep in the same bed and for parents to know their children were safely under the same roof. The enormous energy—psychological and physical—of the reconstruction of black life and the memory of the difficulties they had endured to maintain their families during slavery only reinforced their connection to the land upon which they had grown up, courted, married, raised children, buried their parents, and lived within a web of kin and friends.

While the failure of forty acres and a mule as well as other efforts at land reform had crushed the hopes of black people for an economic independence that they believed to be a necessary element of freedom, it did nothing to reduce their ties to the land. Freedpeople, forced to cultivate the same crops in the same way, were determined to avoid any employment that smacked of slavery. They searched for ways to gain a modicum of landed independence, avoiding—as best they could—the direct supervision of a white overseer, gang labor, and other trappings of the old regime that would place them under the immediate control of white men. For many, wage labor was just another form of coercion and subordination, and the contract—touted by Freedmen’s Bureau officers as the basis of equality with their masters-turned-employers—was seen as a snare that would once again reduce them to subordination. Although distinguished from slavery by the direct remuneration they would receive for their exertions, many freedpeople believed—in the words of one former slave—that “the contract system would tend to bring them back into a state of slavery again.” These desires for independence reinforced new connections to place.

Conceding what they could not resist, black people tried to piece together independent livelihoods, hunting and fishing, truck gardening, and selling items crafted by their own hands. It was a chancy business, especially as planter-controlled legislatures closed the open range to hunters, required licenses to fish and oyster, and enacted taxes that could only be paid in cash. Few black men and women—particularly those with large families—could secure a competency in this manner. In time, most turned to the work they knew and returned to the fields, reinforcing the ties to the places they knew best.

In the years following the war, a host of arrangements—many of them ad hoc—emerged that allowed freedpeople to secure control over their own lives. The character of these arrangements differed from place to place, depending on the nature of the crop, the quality of the land, and the demands of the planters and merchants who controlled the land. In some places, freedpeople worked by the task, setting their own pace. Elsewhere former slaves exchanged three days of their labor for the right to work independently the other three. Still other freedpeople organized themselves into squads or clubs for purposes to negotiate the terms of their labor.⁶⁷

To escape the shadow of slavery, especially in the cotton South, various systems of tenancy emerged. Black farmers with capital of their own entered into straightforward rental agreements or simple tenancy, gaining access to land for a period of time, supplying their own working stock, feed, tools, seed, and fertilizer. They worked on their own and kept the proceeds of their labor. Those who had similar agricultural accoutrements but lacked the cash to rent land—or could not find planters or merchants who would rent to them directly—negotiated varieties of share tenancies. Under such agreements, they shared with the landowner the proceeds of the sale of their crop according to some agreed-upon formula.

Most black men and women had no resources besides their own labor and that of their family. For them, sharecropping—whereby the landowner supplied land as well as the draft animals, tools, seed, fertilizer, and even at times food and clothing—became the arrangement of necessity. Often landowners held a lien again the crop, which entitled them to the first rights for the return the crops produced. If anything remained, the sharecropper received that, but such surplus rarely amounted to much, thus creating a new cycle that trapped its victims in debt.

Sharecropping also took a variety of forms, differing from place to place, from crop to crop, and from time to time, depending on what precisely the farmer and the landowner supplied. The sharecropper’s portion rested upon the size of his family and whether his wife and children worked, as well as his own abilities. In addition, sharecroppers could negotiate rights to take firewood from the forest, fish in the streams, run stock in the woods, or keep a substantial garden. At times, they were subject to rules that regulated everything from their deportment to the number of visitors they might entertain. The mixture of prerogatives and restrictions played out in limitless combinations, so that nearly each sharecropping agreement was unique. Whatever the peculiarities of the particular arrangements, they all operated to tie black people to particular places.⁶⁸

Even when these arrangements were highly restrictive, black men and women saw some benefit in them, at least at first. They allowed impoverished, newly freed slaves to live apart from those who owned the land they worked, permitting them to control their own family life, and—to a degree—their own labor. Antebellum laws and customs had defined sharecropping as a partnership. By law, freedpeople also had a hand in determining what would be grown and how it would be grown. Under such arrangements, sharecropping was a sharp break with the slave economy, in which the slave master fixed the division of labor and determined when and how slaves worked and what they produced.

But if sharecropping allowed black people to avoid the reimposition of the old economic dependency, it was far from the landed independence they had hoped to achieve. Over time, sharecropping—and to a lesser degree share tenancy, and sometimes even simply tenancy—devolved into a system by which landowners directly extracted labor. As the rights of sharecroppers and tenants atrophied, control of the processes of production fell more and more to those who owned the land. The various forms of tenancy and sharecropping that once offered black people opportunities to control their lives became new mechanisms of exploitation.⁶⁹

The transformation of tenancy and sharecropping took place at an uneven pace during the last decades of the nineteenth century, but everywhere they came to resemble wage labor. Landlords determined what tenants and sharecroppers planted, as well as sometimes when and how they planted it. As they took control over the work regimen, they also shifted their costs to tenants and sharecroppers by requiring them to purchase seed, fertilizer, mules, farm implements, and other equipment from their storehouse, as landlords transformed themselves into merchants or storekeepers. Tenants and sharecroppers often found themselves paid in scrip that was redeemable only at that very same store, where the prices for food, clothing, and other necessities were inflated far above those available elsewhere. Adding to the injury, planters charged interest on unpaid balances, often at usurious rates.

Although they resembled wage laborers in many ways, sharecroppers rarely received their remuneration weekly or even monthly. Instead, they were paid at the end of the crop year, a system that allowed planters to deduct the expenses that annually accrued to the sharecropper’s account. When the year-end “settling up” arrived, black tenants and sharecroppers generally found they had little to show for their efforts. Many were deeply in debt. Often settling one year’s debt with the proceeds of the next, they were entrapped in a cycle of dependence. Those who had a positive return often discovered that they stood in a long line of creditors, as planters and merchants also had many debts, some of which stretched to Northern factors and bankers. These moneyed men enjoyed the advantage of a superior lien—that is, a legal guarantee that gave them rights to proceeds of the sale of the crop. They would be paid before the tenants or sharecroppers. In some states, the entire standing crop fell to the landlord until the tenant’s obligations were fulfilled. Tenants, in the words of the Georgia Supreme Court, had “only a right to go on the land to plant, work, and gather the crops.”⁷⁰ Tenants who attempted to sell any portion of the standing crops could be fined or jailed. While the law spoke in color-blind terms of landlords and tenants, the weight of the new restrictions fell upon black workers.

As the obligations of black tenants and sharecroppers grew, and their rights shrank, many were forced out of the cash economy into a system of long-term mortgages and short-term barter in which their debts accumulated on the landlord’s books. Unable to repay, they had no choice but to agree to work yet another year, often at the same terms, for the same landlord, on the same land. If they dared to break the arrangement, workers might be prosecuted under so-called false-pretences laws, which criminalized the breaking of a contract. Black workers saw their right to quit, the fundamental tenet of the free labor system, compromised again and again.

The deterioration of the political rights of black people made escape from economic subordination ever more difficult. In the heady years of Radical Reconstruction, black farmers and laborers might challenge their landlord’s year-end calculations, hoping that an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau or a locally elected sheriff or judge—who might well be a former slave—would lend a sympathetic ear. If the case went to court, they might find black jurors equally supportive. But the collapse of Reconstruction, the dissolution of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and the Supreme Court’s nullification of the Civil Rights Act left black workers almost defenseless before their enemies. Landlords and planters, seizing their advantage, enacted a host of legal subterfuges to disfranchise black men. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses—backed by the omnipresent threat of violence—forced black people out of the South’s polity. Sympathetic Freedmen’s Bureau agents, sheriffs, and judges could no longer be found, and the testimony of black plaintiffs in court—if allowed—carried little weight before juries from which black men had been excluded. Tenants or sharecroppers who dared to challenge the planter’s or merchant’s bookkeeping—even the grossest frauds—found themselves with no authority to which they might appeal with a reasonable hope of success. Since many of the questionable calculations were based upon oral agreements or agreements written in a form inaccessible to barely literate or illiterate black tenants and sharecroppers, disagreements came down to who said what. In such circumstances, challenging the word of a white landlord could be nothing short of a death sentence.

Paralleling and complementing the loss of political rights was the imposition of legislation designed to immobilize black workers, geographically as well as occupationally. Many of these new laws echoed the Black Codes enacted during Johnsonian Reconstruction. Vagrancy laws—which, when not literally racially specific, were enforced in racially specific ways—required black workers to be employed by a certain date, usually in early January, when they had to contract for the year. Those who failed to do so could be arrested, jailed, and—if unable to pay their fines—hired out. From there they could be rented back to the same planter—or someone just like him—whom they had tried to escape. Convict labor accounted for an increasingly large portion of the Southern labor force and loomed equally large in the experience of African American workers. At the end of the nineteenth century, according to one estimate, convict leasing ensnared more than one-third of black agricultural workers in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi at one time or another.⁷²

As the imposition of the legal apparatus of white supremacy nailed African Americans to the base of the social order, constraints on their mobility grew. Rather than loosen the ties of black people to the land, the postwar settlement laced them tighter. Between 1880 and 1910, the number of black sharecroppers increased from 429,000 to 673,000. By the end of the nineteenth century, some 75 percent of black Southerners worked in such relations. For some, the chains of debt came to resemble the chains of slavery, as landowners and merchants assumed a sense of proprietorship over their workers—who they sometimes deemed “their people”—which was much akin to masters’ sense of proprietorship over their slaves. In the early twentieth century, when black people would at last begin moving north, would-be migrants discovered their path blocked by their landlords, often backed by the force of law. If my tenant “goes away,” declared one landlord, “I just go and get him.”⁷³

Even those who escaped the cycle of debt, ironically, also found themselves tied to the land. Hard work, shrewd bargaining, and perhaps a measure of luck permitted some black agriculturalists to remain free agents. These ambitious men negotiated year after year for some new and better tenure arrangement—more productive land, a larger share of the crop, or a lower interest rate—which would enable them to move from the ranks of sharecroppers to that of share tenants or perhaps even renters, with hopes of eventually becoming landowners. But ascending the agricultural ladder also constrained their physical mobility. The key to negotiating a better tenure arrangement rested upon having a reputation as a hard worker who asked few questions, made few demands, and at year’s end produced a bumper crop. According to one observer of Southern agricultural relations, “Being acceptable here is no empty phrase. It means that he and his family are industrious and his credit is good. It means that he is considered safe by local white people—he knows ‘his place’ and stays in it.”⁷⁴

Even the most obsequious black farmers rarely gained the much-sought prize, but those who secured it did so within the tight confines of neighborhoods where reputations—formed in direct face-to-face relations over decades and sometimes over generations—had been established. Of all commodities, reputations were the least portable. If tenancy and sharecropping kept black farmers on the move looking for better terms, it also assured that they would not move far. Most did not leave their county of residence, and many remained in the same locale. For most black people, the vectors of movement were neither long nor linear but lateral: short movements as black sharecroppers searched out a better deal. Rather the constant motion was a kind of march in place, a churning that changed everything and nothing.⁷⁵

Landed black agriculturalists, whose numbers increased in the late nineteenth century, escaped the snare of sharecropping and tenancy—certainly more so than day laborers. The growth in the number of black landowners added to the stability to black life. In Alabama in 1870, less than one black farmer in one hundred owned the land he worked. The number of propertied black agriculturalists increased steadily in the years that followed, so that almost one in seven owned land. Similar developments could be found throughout the plantation South, so that almost one-fifth of black farmers owned land by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Often this land—edging on swamps and the sandy hills—was of such poor quality that it could not provide the independent livelihood black Southerners desired. It did, however, provide a home and a good deal more than symbolic security. Land purchased at the enormous cost of the labor of entire families had special meaning. Black landowners were reluctant to leave the land that it took a generation or more to accumulate.⁷⁶

Many black Southerners found—with no little irony—that their ties to the land had rooted them in the land. Ultimately, their strongest connections to place were not chains of debt or even threats of physical violence but bonds of familiarity and, for many, affection. The growing constraints on black life at century’s end persuaded them not to flee but to hunker down. As whites limited the economic opportunities of black people, disfranchised black men, and denied black men and women access to a formal education, black people turned more and more to their own world. Exclusion and segregation quickened the development of a universe of separate churches, schools, associations, and sometimes whole towns. There seemed little choice, as the majority of white people—Northern as well as Southern—embraced white supremacy, with white jurists announcing the doctrine of separate but equal and white intellectuals elaborating theories of racial superiority. While black people bridled at the imputations of inferiority that accompanied exclusion from the larger public sphere and protested the constraints it placed upon them, they took pride in their distinctive institutions. Black churches, schools, fraternal orders, and benevolent and political associations provided a buffer from the dismal poverty and shelter from the increasingly vicious racial depredations and savage racial violence. Black towns demonstrated that black people could govern themselves, a point affirmed by black churches, schools, and associations as well. The advantages of avoiding commerce with white Southerners and their gratuitous insults encouraged black Southerners to keep to themselves. Increasingly, black life turned inward and black men and women established a place where they could act with authority, intelligence, and independence, where the presumption of black incompetence had no weight, where their successes could be rewarded, and—perhaps most importantly—where the authority of black people was recognized.

The strategy bore both success and yet greater trials. As the number of black landowners increased, so also did other measures of success. One such measure was the expansion of black literacy, which grew from under 20 percent to over 60 percent during the last half of the nineteenth century. Yet success aroused fear and spurred the anger of white Southerners. Violence against black people grew, as measured by the increase in the grisly crime of lynching. Often white Southerners aimed their anger precisely at those who had succeeded in contradicting the stereotypes of African American incompetence. Such hideous violence pushed black men and women increasingly into their own world.⁷⁷

No part of this separate universe was more important than the church. Usually a small, whitewashed building of modest dimensions located at some well-traveled crossroads and often presided over by an itinerant whose responsibilities extended to several congregations, the church remained—as it had been in slave times—the center of rural black life. Its minister’s message rarely veered from a close reading of the gospel and, in his official pronouncements, almost always steered away from anything that could be deemed offensive to the white planters and merchants whose shadows loomed over the lives of his congregants. The weekly sermons presented a stern but loving God who would balance the scales of justice and offered hope not only for the next world but also for the here and now: as He had promised, faith had delivered His people from slavery and it would deliver them from the current injustices. Meanwhile, the weekly gatherings became the occasion for the believers—and not a few skeptics—to nourish their stomachs as well as their souls, bind themselves together as a community, recognize their frailties, gather their courage, and affirm their worth. The torrent of emotions renewed the faith of people who had little else but faith, reassuring them that they were God’s children and that He had not forsaken them.⁷⁸

As reflected in their most important institution, the dangers that everywhere surrounded black Southerners nurtured a deeply conservative bent in postemancipation black life. With the possibilities of falling outweighing those of rising, black men and women became increasingly defensive as they protected what little they had. To counter the endless intrusion of white people in their lives, they painstakingly preserved those aspects of their past that they had created at great cost during slavery and its immediate aftermath. Family, church, and community rooted them in the South. Within this realm, nothing revealed a greater sense of attachment to place than the music that emerged in the broad swath of the postwar plantation South that stretched from upcountry Georgia to Texas.

While the roots of gospel, ragtime, and jazz could be found in this musical renaissance, none more fully captured the black experience in the postbellum countryside than the blues. In its plaintive moans, wails, and cries along with its assertions of suffering and hardship, the blues evoked the pain of the continued constraints on black life. Although it often focused on the travail of individual men and women, in its larger dimensions it was a musical response to white supremacy. Like black churches, schools, and towns, the blues also represented an inward turn—a separate world in which whites could not enter. The blues employed traditional American instrumentation—the piano, guitar, and harmonica, along with washboards, spoons, and jugs—and it drew upon long-established African American rhythmic and tonal patterns. At times, it echoed the field shouts and spirituals. And like them, the blues exhibited extraordinary flexibility and range, calling for—indeed demanding—creativity. Although in time the three-line couplet followed by a one-line refrain—the AAB pattern—became the standard blues form, blues men and women prized improvisation and spontaneity, so that no two performances—even by the same singer—were alike.⁷⁹

Blues singers would eventually gain national and even international reputations and would play for presidents and royalty in grand concert halls, but the blues had its origins in crossroad juke joints, front porches, back rooms, and prison cells where impoverished itinerants—generally men—sang a familiar story to other equally impoverished men and women. They sang of a people betrayed and beaten. Many of these betrayals were personal—cheating men and unfaithful women—but the weight of white domination was ever present. Crooked sheriffs jailed honest men and women, greedy planters cheated hardworking croppers, and rampaging mobs showed no mercy.⁸⁰ “They arrest me for murder, and I ain’t never harm a man,” sang blueman Furry Lewis.⁸¹

As the new music suggested, black people—having survived the second great migration—had regained their footing in the late-nineteenth-century South. Rootedness, once again, had become the primary characteristic of black life, as most black Southerners remained in the state and often in the same county and sometimes in the same neighborhood of their birth.⁸² The musical, religious, familial, and communal ties grew more distinctive with time. By the beginning of the twentieth century, their peculiar character became a matter of common repute among visitors to the region. When a young W. E. B. DuBois, a black Yankee wrapped in Harvard doctorate and brimming with Germanic ideas respecting national and racial character, traveled south, he saw a world radically different from his native New England. Rural black Southerners—almost all of them farmers, working under one form of tenure or another—had created a universe different from anything he had known. Rooted in the land they worked, black people still had a special relationship to place. They were no longer separated by walls of status but by rules requiring physical separation in every aspect of life, from the hospitals where they were born (if indeed they could enter such places) to the cemeteries in which they were buried. Between birth and death, black people were educated in separate schools, prayed in separate churches, drank from separate water fountains, and used separate “necessaries.” The rigid segregation—the desire to keep black people in their place—in fact did much to create a sense of place.

That sense of place was reinforced by the absence of other possibilities. If black people looked to the North or the West, they saw little chance to find employment or enjoy a richer social life. Those who ventured outside the region found few clues that the North was a promised land. Indeed, revanchist racism reversed the expansion of civil rights that had followed the Civil War. State and municipal civil rights legislation that had passed in the North during Reconstruction fell into disuse. Black Northerners found their role in Northern politics shrinking, as black elected officials disappeared and the number of patronage appointments shrank. Their place in the Northern economy followed the same downward course, as black professionals lost their constituencies and black shopkeepers their clientele. At the end of the nineteenth century, black Southerners had greater access to skilled work than did black workers in the North, where employers denied them employment in the manufacturing sector and were forcing them out of craftwork. Those who ignored these daunting obstacles often faced the implacable opposition of Northern black leaders who denounced Southern migrants as “a floating, shiftless and depraved element.”⁸³ If black Southerners faced desperate times, they saw precious little reason to decamp to the North.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, DuBois’s depiction of black Southerners as rural, agricultural peasants played out in infinite variations in literature, politics, and music. Visitors, contemporary social scientists, and later historians expanded on DuBois’s theme, reiterating that “the sight and sounds of the working of the South had changed but little, as if time had passed over the landscape. Generations of blacks inherited the same routines, the same provisions, the same houses, and same obligations, the same compensation.”⁸⁴

Yet what once stood still was about to move. In 1895, sensing the quakes that would again remake African American life, Booker T. Washington urged black people to “cast down [their] bucket” and remain in their ancestral home. Others added their own plea. Robert Abbott, a yet-unknown journalist, affirmed Washington’s call, declaring that “it is best ninety and nine percent of our people to remain in the southland.”⁸⁵ They were, however, too late. Black life was about to change again. Abbott, as editor of the Chicago Defender, would become a ferocious advocate of Northern immigration. Blues men and women, who once sang about their native South, would soon add new themes to their repertoire. Songs of place would soon be replaced by songs of movement.⁸⁶