30 30While the Bank is my goddess, its desks are my altars, And all my “fine phrenzy” is spent on defaulters.1
THE WAR WAS OVER, and at last Britain was respecting the American flag at sea. Money was flowing, albeit along unpredictable courses.
No energy was being consumed in partisan warfare; the Federalists had all but disappeared as a political force. Jackson didn’t only crush the Creeks; his victory at New Orleans gave the coup de grace to the disgraced Federalist Party, members of which had been threatening New England’s secession since 1793 and had openly sided with Britain during the conflict.
For the first time since the early days of the Washington administration, there was only one functional political party in the United States. At its head was Jefferson’s former law student James Monroe, who as a teenager had crossed the Delaware with Washington and as an adult had taken credit for the Louisiana Purchase. It was Monroe who dispatched Jackson to New Orleans, and he came into peacetime a national hero. Facing no serious opposition in the presidential election of 1816, he became the third consecutive president from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
After the extreme partisan battles during what some historians describe as the First Party System, the relative political tranquility of a one-party nation led a derrière-garde New England Federalist newspaper editor in 1817 to coin the sarcastic phrase “the era of good feelings,” a term that passed into general retrospective use to identify Monroe’s first (but not the second) presidential term. It was an era of especially good feelings for all those connected to the fast-growing commercial web spun out of cotton.
Monroe is the only US president to have an African capital city named after him: Monrovia, in Liberia, a country whose name betrays its intention as a destination of exile for manumitted ex-slaves. The American Colonization Society, which proposed to implement the self-deportation of free African Americans, was cofounded by Francis Scott Key, two years after he published “Defense of Fort McHenry.” Over the years, a plethora of famous political names attached themselves to the society, including James Madison, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Randolph, Andrew Jackson, and even Abraham Lincoln. The chimera of “colonization”—the white dream of mass black deportation that would comply with the vision Jefferson had projected in Notes on the State of Virginia— lasted until secession. Disclaiming any connection with abolitionism, it was a way of doing nothing about slavery. John Quincy Adams flatly called the Society a “fraudulent charitable institution.”2
The word “colonization” implied that African Americans would somehow establish American colonies, which would have meant freeing slaves to go establish foreign beachheads for the slavemasters. The idea was widely hated by free black people, who were subject to various odious restrictions but for the most part had no intention of leaving their homes, and some three thousand people of color assembled at Mother Bethel in 1817 to protest the formation of the society. Harriet Martineau, who in 1834 visited James Madison in retirement at his Montpelier plantation a week after he had sold “a dozen of his slaves,” wrote that “he accounted for his selling his slaves by mentioning their horror of going to Liberia, a horror which he admitted to be prevalent among the blacks.”3
The idea of colonization was hated just as much by hard-slavery Southerners, who saw it as soft on abolitionism and tending toward keeping a smaller portion of the population enslaved, when what they wanted was to see as much of the population enslaved as possible.
The party of Jefferson and Madison had discovered the uses of executive power, shifting considerably from its radical anti-federal stance of the first years of the republic. As they began rebuilding the White House and the Capitol, the Republicans now saw the federal government as a functional entity able to make the “internal improvements” that the fast-growing nation needed. A reliable paper money was needed, and the government needed a fiscal agent to support its wartime debt, much of it owed to foreign financiers. To that end, the Second Bank of the United States was chartered, for twenty years as the first had been, in 1817. Much of its capital stock was drawn not from its shareholders’ gold and silver, but from their holdings of public debt.4 The bank was also heavily invested in British bills of exchange.
With the War of 1812 over, shipowners had surplus privateering boats to sell. But besides privateering, these fast, maneuverable vessels were also in use by slave traders, who bought used privateers and commissioned new vessels as well.5 Baltimore-style “clippers,” made in Baltimore and many other places as well, would be the vessel of choice for an African slave trade that no longer came to the United States but would still carry perhaps more than a million kidnapped Africans to Cuba and Brazil. The misery of the experience would have been heightened by the boats’ characteristics: being light and fast made for even worse seasickness. This era of the slave trade was notorious for its tight-packing: the tiny below-decks compartments were typically only three feet or so high, so when the captives were put away at night, they rode lying down, packed tightly together; and since clippers “rode wet,” taking on large quantities of sea water, they were damp and cold.6
With the Chesapeake unblockaded, coastwise vessels could freely ply the route from Baltimore to New Orleans; those CASH FOR NEGROES advertisements began appearing in newspapers around the Chesapeake as of 1815. But it was a slow expansion at first, because the Second Bank of the United States tightened credit in 1818.
South Carolina’s Langdon Cheves, who had been a War Hawk and who had killed the First Bank in Congress, was named the Second Bank’s director in March 1819. On the question of the balance of credit versus metal, Cheves was all the way at the hard-money end of the scale.7 He was in favor of lavish personal spending coupled with extreme governmental restraint, and he was against the very concept of fractional reserves, the basis of modern banking. He continued tightening credit, accumulating governmental income in the form of inert specie while refusing to extend loans against it. That drove the Panic of 1819 into a depression the following year, during which he continued his extremely conservative management while many were ruined. Under his stewardship, the bank required each of its branches to make their own decisions with the capital they were allotted; by the time he resigned, Cheves had, in Howard Bodenhorn’s words, “effectively taken a national organization and transformed it into a network of independent banks operating under the loose direction of the parent institution in Philadelphia.”8 The result was an uncoordinated interregional cash flow, and a differential of exchange rates from region to region—not a good basis for a national commerce.
Cheves resigned in 1822, proud of the soundness of his overcapitalized bank, and was replaced by board member Nicholas Biddle in January 1823. Biddle—who, in a poem he wrote at a lady’s request shortly after he was named director, sang the praises of “that simplest, sublimest of truths — six per cent”—began letting credit out again, and organized specie shipments.9 Precious metal could be purchased like any other commodity, and Biddle brought in shiploads of silver from Mexico—now independent from Spain, and more tractable. The silver entered the bank’s system at its New Orleans branch, as New Orleans entered into its peak era of national influence. Biddle created a domestic exchange operation that could make capital easily mobile throughout the country, with a national currency supplied by him that was worth the same amount at any of the bank’s national branches.10
The appropriation of the Creek lands was a textbook case of accumulation by dispossession. Now the formation of a new capital class could begin, with confiscated lands as the basis of new wealth—if enough slave labor was available to clear it and make it produce.
Alabama’s liberation-for-slavery set off the great land rush remembered as “Alabama fever.” The US land office did land-office business, privatizing the newly available territory taken from the Native Americans and handing out the land in vast quantities on liberal credit terms. For slave traders, the takeover of Alabama by the cotton kingdom was the beginning of a long boom.
Cotton was a different kind of crop from tobacco or rice, and its cultivation imposed a different kind of brutality on its laborers. The whip-driven regime of cotton was like nothing known in Virginia. Tobacco cultivation was artisanship by comparison; rice cultivation was task labor, in which individual workers had specific, differentiated tasks to attend to. But cotton was based on the uniform, infinite repetition of the same tasks, requiring much in the way of manual dexterity and endurance.
The society of the enslaved of the cotton kingdom was a far cry from the family structures that still existed in Virginia and Maryland; the plantation populations that worked the cotton fields were the isolated remnants of destroyed families, jumbled together like the prison population they were. In the first years of the boom, about a third of them came from Virginia or Maryland, but they also came from Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and, increasingly, points south. The arrival of so many occasioned a new cultural collision among the enslaved, as black, English-speaking former Marylanders found themselves having to converse with Gullah speakers from the Lowcountry or French-speaking Louisianans—and, of course, until 1820 or so there were still some Africans coming in via piracy.
Some farmers left their played-out farms and set out for Alabama with their slaves; others went to market to buy as many slaves as they could get. Some planters traveled north to the Chesapeake, hoping to get better prices by buying slaves directly from planters who were selling; others formed small partnerships to travel around on buying trips—placing newspaper ads, visiting planters, attending auctions. They found eager vendors on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where Easton began an annual slave auction in 1818, selling off its surplus young farmhands away from their families for the convenience of the Alabama-fevered.11
States farther North got in on the action. New York and New Jersey both still had slavery in 1819, and slaveowners in both states took advantage of the opportunity to sell slaves off to Alabama. The numbers were nothing like Southern numbers, of course; the 1820 census showed 7,557 slaves in New Jersey out of a population of 277,575, and by 1830 the slave count was down to 2,254. Most of the diminution was from manumission, but some hundreds of enslaved people in eastern New Jersey were trafficked down South. By that state’s Act of Gradual Abolition in effect since 1804, they were supposed to give their consent to leave the state, but that consent was easily forged.12
The message was heard all through those states that still permitted slavery: raising slaves was a good business.
Florida—the prize that had eluded Monroe at the time of the Louisiana Purchase—was at last within reach. Spanish forces were stretched thin, engaged as they were in failing to suppress the independence wars being led in South America by Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín.
Monroe sent an eager Jackson to march some five thousand men into Spanish East Florida in 1818, in a de facto declaration of war on Spain without congressional consent. The expressed aim of Jackson’s invasion was to stop Native American terrorists from making raids into US territory, though the skirmishes had been bidirectional, with Georgians also raiding into Florida for livestock and slaves. Jackson’s Florida campaign was overtly a war on free black and indigenous people; his report of it made repeated reference to the enemy as “Indians and negroes”:
To chastise a savage foe, who, combined with a lawless band of negro brigands, have for some time past been carrying on a cruel and unprovoked war against the citizens of the United States, has compelled the president to direct me to march my army into Florida. I have penetrated to the Mickasuky towns and reduced them to ashes.13
Earlier we have spoken of the concept of an ongoing Gullah War; this was one of the major hostilities of its long course. Jackson’s marauders burned hundreds of houses, destroyed forts, killed an unknown number of Native Americans, and hung two native leaders in front of their people.
Jackson almost started another war with Britain by executing two British subjects in front of the black and native populations, impressing on them that they could not look to Britain for an alliance. The Englishman Alexander Arbuthnot, who had accurately warned the Seminole chief Billy Bowlegs that “the main drift of the Americans is to destroy the black population of Suwannee,” was hanged from the yardarm of his own schooner, while the Scotsman Robert C. Ambrister was shot by a firing squad. They were, Jackson wrote, “exciters of this savage [i.e., Native American] and negro war; legally condemned, and most justly punished.”14
Jackson was burning to go on to Cuba, where there were no Indians but many Africans. Security of maritime commerce was not fully assured, he insisted, until Cuba also was under US control. “I will insure you cuba in a few days,” he promised Monroe, if given the necessary support.15
Monroe was alarmed by the international implications of Jackson’s aggression in Florida, though he wanted the territory. Secretary of War John C. Calhoun liked the idea of taking Cuba, but not of the war with Spain that it would entail, and denied Jackson the forces to continue. (Calhoun was apparently also afraid that Jackson’s military ambitions might be Napoleonic and that he would take over civilian government.) He attacked Jackson in the closed meetings of the cabinet, demanding Monroe censure him—though Jackson only learned about that years later, when Calhoun was his vice president. The only member of the cabinet to defend Jackson’s action was Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who no less than Monroe saw Florida as essential to national security. Adams, who was far and away the most experienced diplomat of the time, proceeded to negotiate Jackson’s win against Spain to an annexationist conclusion that resulted in major territorial gains for the United States.
The Adams-Onís treaty of 1819 ceded East Florida to the United States and ended lingering controversies about West Florida. It also promised that the United States would not try to annex Texas; Adams perhaps believed that to be a keepable promise, but Jackson certainly did not. The treaty also ceded Spain’s claim on Oregon to the United States, extending the border to the West Coast, in a “joint occupation” with Great Britain, whose Hudson Bay Company competed with John Jacob Astor’s company for the fur trade there.
Mississippi, as yet sparsely populated and with Natchez its largest city, became a state in 1819. Most of it was still Choctaw or Chickasaw land, and there was popular discontent from Georgia westward about the slowness of the process of Indian removal. In 1820, Calhoun called in Andrew Jackson, a firm believer in deportation of Native Americans, together with Thomas Hinds, a Mississippi veteran of the Creek War, to negotiate—more like, arm-twist—the Treaty of Doak’s Stand with Jackson’s former ally, the Choctaw chief Pushmataha, which conveyed Choctaw land to the United States with a chunk of land beyond the Mississippi River ceded to them in return.16 (In practice, the Choctaw were unwilling to remove themselves, and it took until the 1830s, with Jackson as president, for their forced exile from the state of Mississippi to be accomplished.)
Memphis was developed into a town in 1819 by former Tennessee superior court judge John Overton, who would become for a time the richest man in Tennessee. Incorporated in 1826, it quickly became the regional distribution hub for large areas of Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri. As a slave-trade center that serviced the new plantations of the large, fertile region, it boasted Mississippi River connections to Natchez and New Orleans.
Grateful to Andrew Jackson, the politicians of Mississippi in 1821 named their newly created capital city for him. Located on the bluffs overlooking the Pearl River, at the site of a trading-post stop on the Natchez Trace, the town of Jackson connected by water to New Orleans via Lake Ponchartrain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to get to and from Jackson. The governing elite of Natchez, which was the only important commercial center in Mississippi at the time, blocked internal improvements that would have removed the sunken logs that booby-trapped the Pearl River, which was, said Senator Thomas Buck Reed in 1826, “useless to the inhabitants, or nearly so, from the want of resources in the State to adapt it for the purposes of commerce.”17 Roads were rudimentary.
Spain’s empire continued to deteriorate; Mexico became independent in 1821, the same year the Spanish evacuated San Agustín for the second and last time pursuant to the Adams-Onís Treaty. The combat-averse Thomas Jefferson could not have imagined a less likely figure than Andrew Jackson to realize his dream of snatching the Floridas. Jackson had done it not by ensnaring the Indians in debt as Jefferson had imagined but by forcibly evicting them, even as he fought a war of repression against the free black people who lived among them. With the same stroke, he accomplished the Carolinian dream: now there was no free territory to the south that the enslaved of South Carolina and Georgia could escape to, or organize insurrections from.
The South had been made safe for plantation slavery. There was no more Native American threat, no more maroon havens, no more Spanish, no more British. It no longer needed the protection of the United States from enemies south and west. South Carolina could now afford to become even more uncooperative with the federal government.
Monroe sent Jackson to install the Florida state government, but he resigned after only nine and a half months in St. Augustine, amid complaints of dictatorial behavior, and went back to Tennessee to become a senator. The Americans built a new town near the site of the long-disappeared Huguenot community of Fort Caroline, called—what else?—Jacksonville.
Sectional politics resulted in one of the nation’s historic political struggles, fought in 1819–20, over whether the sparsely populated territory of Missouri, acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase and previously a slave territory under the French and Spanish, would be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state. The prize at stake was control of the Senate, which was crucial for the slaveholders. The House was coming under control of the North, because in terms of population the North was handily outpopulating the South through immigration. It had already outstripped the three-fifths constitutional advantage, and the gap was widening.
Another prize was the concession to sell slaves to Missouri pioneers; needless to say, Virginia was enthusiastically in favor of Missouri’s annexation as a slave state. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky began earning his nickname of “the Great Compromiser”—which was not a compliment in South Carolina—by leading through Congress the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri with slavery to the Union as the twenty-fourth state in 1821. In exchange, Maine was detached from Massachusetts and admitted as the twenty-third state, thus maintaining the Senate in a stalemate.
But as part of the compromise, slavery was outlawed west of the Mississippi and north of a line at 36°30″ latitude. The planter class of South Carolina, who could not expand their system into the West without slaves, was outraged; this, they shouted, was federal overreach. Frederic Bancroft wrote that slaveowners
had not previously believed that their chief interest was in danger. The far-seeing were now convinced of this. The whole South was sure to be permanently sectionalized if the politico-antislavery North ever became thoroughly organized. The political strength of the North depended on the development of interests and the extent to which prejudices and fears could be excited. Formerly sectionalism had usually been mild and courteous. Henceforth it was rarely to be either mild or courteous.18
Missouri had been acquired as part of the Louisiana Territory by Jefferson, who in his retirement saw what would happen. His remark in a letter of April 22, 1820, to John Holmes of Maine, is well known: “A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” But Jefferson was unambiguously on the slavery side of the question, agreeing with the Southerners that Congress had no right to legislate such matters for the states. Jefferson, ever the champion of exile for free black people, convinced himself that slaves trafficked to Missouri would be … happier:
The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected … But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other. Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier.
He finished the letter by absolving himself and his generation and dismissing his juniors: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons.”19
During all this time, kidnapped Africans had been smuggled into American seaports, especially via Jean Lafitte’s pirate/privateer operation in the Gulf of Mexico. With Napoleon gone and the British once again allies, the US Navy concentrated on eradicating piracy. The milestone in the closing of the African slave trade was the 1819 Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy, which was amended in 1820 to include the foreign slave trade as piracy, a crime carrying the death penalty. The ruling families of South Carolina saw that as an insult, but the slaveowners of Virginia liked it, and they were in charge in Washington.
The domestic slave trade was going full tilt. Finally, the competition from African importations was completely gone. With the British navy no longer harassing American ships, there was now a safe, legal ocean corridor for shipping slaves South in the domestic slave trade.
The legally mandated domestication of the slave trade put a sharp cap on how fast plantations could expand; they could only grow as fast as the enslaved women of the South could turn out babies.
The demand was intense. Over the next twenty years, as the power looms of Lancashire sucked up all the cotton the South could grow, enslaved wombs were not merely sources of local enrichment but were also suppliers in a global system of agricultural input, industrial output, and financial expansion.
How well or how harshly to treat an enslaved mother was a principal issue in plantation management, affecting as it did the survivability of children. Those farmers more inclined to long-term profit from “increase” than to shorter-term profit from labor were obliged to “promote their health and render them prolific,” as one writer put it.20
In a now-notorious letter of January 17, 1819, that was in another era routinely ignored by Jefferson biographers, the seventy-six-year-old ex-president, plagued by debt and frustrated by the death in infancy of some of his human capital, emphasized urgently that producing children was a specialized occupation, on a par with other skills enslaved laborers might have:
The loss of 5. little ones in 4 years induces me to fear that the overseers do not permit the women to devote as much time as is necessary to the care of their children: that they view their labor as the 1st object and the raising their child but as secondary.
I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object, and that a child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man…. I must pray you to inculcate upon the overseers that it is not their labor, but their increase which is the first consideration with us.21
By this time, the interstate slave trade that Jefferson had done so much to facilitate was taking off, and the market it created for his slaves’ “increase” offered the only hope for escaping his crushing burden of debt. In telling the overseer to ease off on hard labor for “breeding” women, Jefferson laid out the financial tradeoff that careful farm managers had to consider in deciding how to apply their female labor: how much time women should spend working the land versus how much to spend reproducing. This could involve calculations against market prices for crops—high prices meant more field labor, low prices more birth labor. Or, since poor land required more labor to be applied to it, it could mean balancing the fertility of a patch of land against the fertility of an enslaved woman.
Jefferson’s one-child-every-two-years quota was, it should be noted, not the worst: an even more rapacious owner could insist on faster breeding. Martha Jackson, born in 1850 and interviewed in Livingston, Alabama, recalled that her “Antie” was a “breeder ’oman [who] brought in chillun ev’y twelve month jes’ lack a cow bringin’ in a calf.”22 Indeed, Jefferson had established the two-year limit experientially, because, as previously noted, his own frail wife had died at the age of thirty-three from six pregnancies in less than ten years, her health growing visibly worse with each confinement.
Not that that was unusual: white or black, women commonly were pregnant that often, and they not infrequently died during and especially after childbirth. One might wonder: if the reproductive ability of enslaved women was so valuable, why did they consistently sell for lower prices than men? Perhaps because women weakened from repeated pregnancy were less productive in the field, but also because women were a riskier purchase, often dying in their twenties because the prevailing unsanitary methods of childbirth were so deadly.*
In testimony during an 1839 court case in Warren County, Mississippi, about a farm at which “the policy is not to make large crops but to raise young negroes,” Tobius Stephens “suggested rating ‘breeding women’ at half a hand,” writes Christopher Morris: “[Stephens wrote] ‘If breeding women are worked hard on the hills, it is likely to produce abortion & sickness.’ A witness for the plaintiff thought the current administrator had not managed the plantation very well, and offered as evidence his observation of women working in fields.’”23 Concern for the women’s well-being was not the issue in the court case, needless to say; what was being decided was the financial acumen of the manager. Jefferson was nothing if not consistent in his promotion of a two-year cycle of commercial human reproduction. In a letter of June 30, 1820, to John Wayles Eppes, in the course of justifying a plan to sell off twenty enslaved people in families rather than only laboring men, he discussed his captives in terms otherwise applicable to livestock management, as per the use of the verb stocking: “I know no error more consuming to an estate than that of stocking farms with men almost exclusively,” Jefferson wrote. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm. what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”24
An addition to the capital! The variant word capitalism had not yet been coined, but the term capital had remained in Jefferson’s lexicon twenty-eight years after his “4 percent” letter to Washington, and it still applied to slaves. Jefferson understood clearly how the concept of capital applied to his society. Capital is money that makes more money, and slaves were property who made more property—including more slaves, who could be used as money when the need arose. It was therefore advisable to “stock” a farm with enslaved women, who would “breed” every two years, and in doing so would make a per annum capital growth target, as Jefferson had identified in his 1792 letter to Washington.
Eppes, the recipient of Jefferson’s letter, was the recently retired US senator from Virginia and was Jefferson’s son-in-law, having been married to Jefferson’s daughter Maria (or Mary, or Patsy), who was his first cousin. Maria had died in childbirth-related complications sixteen years before, in 1804, as her mother Martha (or Patty) Wayles Jefferson had died from childbirth before her, and as her grandmother had died after giving birth to her mother. As Maria’s confinement approached, Jefferson perhaps failed to reassure the frightened twenty-four-year-old when he wrote her from the White House: “You are prepared to meet it [childbirth] with courage, I hope. Some female friend of your mamma’s (I forget whom) used to say it was no more than a jog of the elbow.”25
Maria knew better, having watched her mother die and having given birth twice already. She gave birth in February and died in April. The bereaved Eppes took up with a woman who may also have been Jefferson’s daughter, at least according to present-day Hemings family oral tradition and local belief. By the time Jefferson wrote his “addition to the capital” letter, Eppes was cohabiting with Betsy Hemings, whom Jefferson had given to Eppes and Maria as a wedding present.26 If she was indeed Jefferson’s daughter, she would thus have been the deceased Maria’s half sister, making a creepy parallel with the way her aunt Sally had been the deceased Martha Wayles Jefferson’s half sister. All the above-named (except for Jefferson himself) were descended from John Wayles. After Eppes died, Betsy Hemings was never sold, and she is buried alongside him. Whoever Betsy Hemings’s father was, the Hemingses had provided the Wayles-Jefferson family with three generations of what Madison Hemings, Sally’s son, referred to as “concubine” in a March 13, 1873, interview in the Pike County (Ohio) Republican, in which he declared Jefferson to have been his father and which is our only record of his thoughts.
Jefferson died on the same day as John Adams, on the mystically suggestive date of July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the date of the Declaration. His unpopularity as president had begun to fade with the growth of a patriotic cult around the Founding Fathers, fueled by Henry Clay’s popular mythologizing discourse.27
Jefferson had desperately hoped to grow his way out of the debt that tormented him in his final years. Like many Southern planters, he failed. When he died, the boom in Virginia-born slaves was only starting to get under way.
William Barry, who visited Monticello in 1832, wrote, “All is dilapidation and ruin.”28 Most of the gadgetry, maps, and fixtures in the interior of the present-day Monticello that is so impressively maintained by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is a loving work of collection, restoration, and re-imagination. Jefferson’s things were sold off, as were all his slaves but the ones descended from Betty Hemings. Among the other things that it is, the shrine that is present-day Monticello is a well-kept window into the practice of slavery, complete with (as of 2015) rebuilt slave cabins.
Lucy Cottrell, the woman in this picture, was fifteen on January 15, 1827, when she was put on the auction block—one of 140 people sold, along with the farm implements, crops, and livestock of Monticello. She was bought, together with her mother, Dolly, by the Germanborn University of Virginia modern languages professor George Blaetterman, who had been vetted by Jefferson before being hired. Blaetterman was booted from the faculty in 1840 for horsewhipping his wife—twice in a single week, “once on the public road.” It was around 1845 that the family had a daguerreotype made of Blaetterman’s granddaughter Charlotte in the arms of the woman who attended her, making Cottrell one of the first African Americans to have been the subject of a portrait photograph. After Blaetterman died, his widow took Lucy and Dolly Cottrell to Maysville, Kentucky, around 1850, where she freed them five years later.29
The woman holding the child in this picture, made from a daguerreotype taken ca. 1845, is Lucy Cottrell, formerly enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.
By the time Monticello was liquidated, the self-reproducing capital represented by slaves was about to be subjected to a new kind of profit-extracting process unknown in Jefferson’s generation. Louisiana, the commercial giant of the South, created a new way of financing plantation agriculture: the property bank. After the Louisiana legislature chartered a bank called the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana in 1827, capitalized at two million dollars, that bank began to bundle mortgages—largely collateralized, as were most Southern mortgages, by slaves, who thus made up a large part of the “property” of the “property bank.”30 Shored up by a guarantee from the State of Louisiana, the bank began to sell bonds in the financial capitals of the North, and in England and Europe. Edward E. Baptist, who calls attention to this securitization process, writes that “a British bank could now sell a completely commodified slave: not a particular individual who could die or run away, but a bond that was the right to a one-slave-sized slice of a pie made from the income of thousands of slaves.”31 Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi followed suit.32
When Jefferson took office in 1801, the African slave trade was still open. When Monroe left office in 1825, that trade was a distant memory, and the domestic slave trade in African Americans was on the verge of its great boom era. Managing that transition was one of the achievements, if one wishes to regard it as such, of the Virginia Dynasty.
The liquidation of Monticello in which Lucy and the others were sold was supervised by Jefferson’s eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, with the help of his brother-in-law Nicholas P. Trist, a young Virginia-born Louisiana sugar planter who had married Jefferson’s granddaughter Virginia Jefferson Randolph. We will meet Mr. Trist again.
As the center of population gravity shifted westward, the stage was set for the change from a political machine based in Virginia to one with roots in Tennessee. Intending to follow James Monroe as the fourth consecutive Jeffersonian president, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and a plurality of the electoral vote in the 1824 presidential election. But it was taken from him by John Quincy Adams in what Jacksonians branded as the “corrupt bargain,”* for the backroom agreement Adams was alleged to have made to appoint the ambitious Henry Clay to the post of secretary of state in exchange for his electors.33
Appointing Clay doomed Adams’s presidency from the start. Enraged at the outcome of the election, Jackson declined Adams’s invitation to serve as secretary of war. Instead, with a group of advisors that included the New York professional politician Martin Van Buren and communications-magnate-in-the-making Amos Kendall, he built a powerful political machine that reshaped the nation and trained its political firepower on Adams, whose every initiative was blocked in Congress. The next four years was a full-time campaign for a Jackson presidency.
Adams’s career had been marked by his distaste for political parties, and he did not have a political organization. The Jacksonians had a populist platform: land and gold. Adams, a cosmopolitan, Puritan-descended intellectual who spoke the language of diplomacy in erudite phrases laden with classical references and did not have the popular touch, wanted a federal government that would make infrastructural improvements and improve education. But Jackson, a ruffian who spoke the plain language of a warrior, wanted a weak federal government that would distribute as much former Indian land and as much specie as possible to individuals in an expanding slave society. Adams thought Jackson “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name,” but he learned a rough lesson at Jackson’s hands about communicating with the public.34 At a time when newcomers with no inherited wealth were increasing the free population faster than established families could hand wealth down, Jackson’s party harnessed the political power of this new force.
Presidential candidates still were expected to remain somewhat aloof from campaigning, though candidates for lower offices showed no such restraint and traveled a lively circuit of political barbecues. Jackson spent the next four years running for president while pretending not to, burnishing his heroic aura. The Port Gibson, Mississippi, Correspondent of November 3, 1827, reported his words as:
I have saved your women and children from the tomahawk and scalping knife. I have protected your great emporium from flames, and from British myrmidons, and when all other resources failed, have obtained and annexed to your State, an extensive domain, adding wealth and numbers to your restricted limits.35
The Jacksonians assembled what became the Democratic Party, with institutional continuity to the one we have today, whose bases were Nashville in the South and New York in the North. John C. Calhoun, who had been vice president under Adams, switched sides and ran with Jackson, who was elected president by a landslide in 1828. As Jackson had done in the 1824 election and would do again in 1832, he carried every county in Mississippi.
*Despite black women’s lower level of nutrition and generally poorer conditions, they may have been less at risk in childbirth than white women in one respect. Black women, who sometimes gave birth in the field and who followed African birthing practices that required them to squat, were likely more frequently successful at expelling the placenta; the mistresses, who gave birth lying on their backs according to then-current medical protocol, may have been less successful in expelling the placenta, with a correspondingly greater danger of infection or hemorrhage.
*“Corrupt bargain” was already a well-worn phrase in Anglo-American political discourse by the time the Jacksonians hung it on Adams and Clay.
Three advertisements from the Natchez Mississippi Free Trader, December 22, 1852.