36 36You cannot think (to return to the songs of my boatmen) how strange some of their words are: in one, they repeatedly chanted the “sentiment” that “God made man, and man makes”—what do you think?—“money!” Is not that a peculiar poetical proposition?1
PIERCE MEASE BUTLER HADN’T wanted his impulsive, high-spirited, strong-willed, self-absorbed, talkative wife, Frances “Fanny” Kemble Butler, to come South, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. In late 1838, she traveled to the Sea Islands of Georgia to spend fifteen disturbing weeks as plantation mistress of Butler Island. Her husband had inherited the property from his grandfather the framer: Major Pierce Butler, the father of the fugitive slave clause to the Constitution, who in his day had been the second largest slaveowner—which is to say, the second richest man—in Georgia.
Kemble was the superstar young actress who revitalized British theater, then came to America for a year of performances in 1833–34 that inspired American girls to wear their hair in “Fanny Kemble curls.” Butler assiduously devoted more than a year to courting the famous young woman nearly full-time, which he could do because he did not work, or even have an identifiable profession other than spending money.
In spite of the sums she was earning from her performances, Kemble’s finances were spread thin by her family’s expenses, and the handsome, self-assured Butler seemed to offer, among other things, financial stability. But then she found out what being married to a slaveowner meant, in the context of a nineteenth-century marriage. Living with her husband in Philadelphia, she found that Mrs. Pierce Butler was expected not to have a stage career, publish her writing, associate with her former friends, or disagree with her husband in any way. Kemble had not declared herself to be an abolitionist before her marriage, but her diaries suggest that she made a personal connection between her condition as a married woman and that of the enslaved. She lived out her contradictions in public, via her twin careers as writer and actress, in one of the high-profile marriage disasters of the century.2
Kemble had apparently believed Butler’s assurances that he was one of the “good” slaveowners. But after he became the full owner of his grandfather’s Sea Island estate following the death of his brother in 1836, she saw the reality. Kemble is most remembered today for Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, her account of the months she passed there. A collection of privately circulated letters, harshly critical of slavery, she ultimately allowed it to be published in 1863 in London in the hope it might help keep Britain from siding with the Confederacy.
In it, to Butler’s everlasting humiliation that his wife had gone so far out of his control, she matter-of-factly blew the whistle on slavery as a system of concubinage and breeding. She wrote of rewards and privileges for childbearing women that were “indirect inducements to reckless propagation … a woman thinks, and not much amiss, that the more frequently she adds to the number of her master’s live-stock by bringing new slaves into the world, the more claims she will have upon his consideration and good-will.”3
Kemble shared in the racism of the times, as in her ape-libel description of one of the enslaved who was possessed of a beautiful singing voice (in which, incidentally, she references the African American use of the word “brother”):
By-the-by, this individual does speak, and therefore I presume he is not an ape, ourang-outang, chimpanzee, or gorilla; but I could not, I confess, have conceived it possible that the presence of articulate sounds, and the absence of an articulate tail, should make, externally at least, so completely the only appreciable difference between a man and a monkey, as they appear to do in this individual ‘black brother.’ Such stupendous long thin hands, and long flat feet, I did never see off a large quadruped of the ape species. But, as I said before, Isaac speaks, and I am much comforted thereby.4
At the same time, she saw the mote when it was not in her own eye:
One of their songs displeased me not a little, for it embodied the opinion that ‘twenty-six black girls not make mulatto yellow girl’; and as I told them I did not like it, they have omitted it since. This desperate tendency to despise and undervalue their own race and colour, which is one of the very worst results of their abject condition, is intolerable to me.5
Kemble was appalled by “the meritorious air with which the women always made haste to inform me of the number of children they had borne, and the frequent occasions on which the older slaves would direct my attention to their children, exclaiming, ‘Look, missis! little niggers for you and massa, plenty little niggers for you and little missis!’” After Butler forbade her to continue carrying him requests for better treatment from the enslaved, she received a visit from the pregnant women whose owner she did not want to be, but whose labor supported her and provided a legacy for their two daughters:
The women who visited me yesterday were all in the family-way, and came to entreat of me to have the sentence (what else can I call it?) modified which condemns them to resume their labor of hoeing in the fields three weeks after their confinement . . Their principal spokeswoman … implored me to have a kind of labor given to them less exhausting during the month after their confinement, I held the table before me so hard in order not to cry that I think my fingers ought to have left a mark on it.6
Once Kemble saw what Butler’s fortune really depended on—and realized that he too had been fornicating with enslaved women—the marriage was over, though ending it took years, created a public spectacle, and set in motion a lifelong battle for the affections of the couple’s two daughters. Divorce was uncommon in those days, and the law was not friendly to it. South Carolina did not allow divorce at all (until 1949).7 The suit was filed in Philadelphia, where state laws were relatively liberal on divorce; but the presumption was that children belonged to the father, and Butler kept the daughters. In a legal narrative drawn up for Butler by his attorneys in the course of divorce proceedings, which Butler published and circulated privately, he expressed his view of marriage as a contract between unequal partners:
One reason, and perhaps the fundamental one, for the ill success which attended my marriage, will readily be found in the peculiar views which were entertained by Mrs. Butler on the subject of marriage … She held that marriage should be companionship on equal terms—partnership in which, if both partners agree, it is well; but if they do not, neither is bound to yield—and that at no time has one partner a right to control the other.8
He recalled that “although we resided in Pennsylvania, where slavery does not exist, the greater part of my property lies in the State of Georgia, and consists of plantations and negroes. Mrs. Butler, after our marriage, not before, declared herself to be in principle an abolitionist …”9
But that was before Kemble met Die, who
had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and stripes them. I give you the woman’s words; she did not speak of this as of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when I said, “Did they do that to you when you were with child?” she simply replied, “Yes, missis.” And to all this I listen—I, an English woman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, “That thing shall not be done again[.”]10
Once independent, she went back to work, paying her family’s expenses by giving one-woman readings of Shakespeare plays.
Prices for slaves might go down, but there was always a market for them. After all the banks had suspended specie payments, and planters by the thousands had sworn never to deal with banks and paper money again, there were still hundreds of thousands of enslaved people, whose bodies were the most reliable store of value.
No free black youth in the North was entirely safe from the “negro stealers.” One of the best-known slave narratives, meticulously adapted into an Oscar-winning movie in 2013, has as its full title Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River in Louisiana. It describes how Northup was lured in 1841 from Saratoga, New York, to Washington, DC, with the promise of work. He was kidnapped and sold, becoming a captive of two slave traders infamous for their brutality. At the shipping end was James Birch of the District of Columbia, the same trader who had put Dorcas Allen and her children up for sale. After protesting that he was a free man from New York, Northup received a severe beating from Birch, described in detail, with the threat never again to say such a thing or he’d be killed. “I doubt not he understood then better than I did,” Northup wrote, “the danger and the penalty of selling a free man into slavery.”
While imprisoned in Washington, a woman named Eliza arrived, with a son Randall and a daughter named Emily, who, recalled Northup,
was seven or eight years old, of light complexion, and with a face of admirable beauty. Her hair fell in curls around her neck, while the style and richness of her dress, and the neatness of her whole appearance indicated she had been brought up in the midst of wealth. She was a sweet child indeed. The woman also was arrayed in silk, with rings upon her fingers, and golden ornaments suspended from her ears. Her air and manners, the correctness and propriety of her language—all showed evidently, that she had sometime stood above the common level of a slave. She seemed to be amazed at finding herself in such a place as that.
After two weeks imprisoned in Washington, Northup and the pen’s other captives were marched to a steamboat in the dead of night and taken down the Potomac, then transferred to stagecoaches and finally taken by rail to Richmond, where they were examined and where Northup was chained together in the pen with Robert, a kidnapped free-born black man from Cincinnati. They were put on an oceangoing brig that took on four more slaves at a stop in Norfolk; as they were sailing to New Orleans, Robert died of smallpox. Arriving there, they were taken charge of by Theophilus Freeman, one of New Orleans’s largest slave dealers; Northup, who had contracted smallpox, was taken to Charity Hospital and managed to recuperate.
Northup watched as Freeman sold Eliza’s son Randall away, then sold Eliza, refusing the buyer’s offer, urged by Eliza’s desperate pleading, to sell her daughter Emily to him as well:
He would not sell her then on any account whatever. There were heaps and piles of money to be made of her, he said, when she was a few years older. There were men enough in New-Orleans who would give five thousand dollars for such an extra, handsome, fancy piece as Emily would be, rather than not get her. No, no, he would not sell her then. She was a beauty—a picture—a doll—one of the regular bloods—none of your thick-lipped, bullet-headed, cotton-picking niggers—if she was might he be d--d.
When Eliza heard Freeman’s determination not to part with Emily, she became absolutely frantic.
“I will not go without her. They shall not take her from me,” she fairly shrieked, her shrieks commingling with the loud and angry voice of Freeman, commanding her to be silent.11
As an unidentified formerly enslaved man, born circa 1845, recalled: “I’ve seen them sell women away from little children, and women would be cryin’ and they’d slap ’em about cryin’.”12
Biddle’s United States Bank of Pennsylvania failed in February 1841. The settlement of its outstanding liabilities on behalf of creditors took years. To try to collect on its debts, the British trustees created the Bacon Trust, headed by John Bacon, which was assigned $12.5 million in assets to recover; 41 percent of them were in Mississippi and another 30 percent were in New Orleans and Mobile.13
Louisiana passed a measure allowing debtors to settle at twenty-five cents on the dollar, and in Louisiana, since slaves were considered “immovables,” they could not be seized and separately sold. Neither of those conditions held in Mississippi, where the Bacon Trust became the biggest financier and “probably ranked among the largest slaveholders” in the state, says Richard Holcombe Kilbourne, who assembled its history out of a mass of archival documents.
The Bacon Trust’s man on the ground, Joseph L. Roberts, actively managed as many as four plantations at a time.14 The value of mortgage debt, he found, was often compromised by the prior removal of “the slaves which ma[de] mortgaged debts most safe.” Once again, coined labor beat coined land: Roberts could not accept land in satisfaction of debts, because it was not salable; slaves, however were: “Negroes,” he wrote, “c[ould] be sold & attain th[e] object but land not.”15 The Bacon Trust thus involved itself repeatedly in the person-selling business. Prices were still “dull,” but, as Roberts wrote, “good Negroes I am told will sell readily altho they will not bring high prices.” Accordingly, Roberts accepted slaves as security, sometimes large numbers of them, and sold them, sometimes at sheriff’s sales, sometimes buying them back on his own account.16
In 1846, after Roberts had taken over a Louisiana plantation from a scam artist who had run the place down, his agent “reported a wretched state of things—Only 53 Negroes large & small; they received 60 Negroes with the place & their natural increase, inclusive of deaths, ought now to have made on the place at least 75 in number—several of the Negroes now there are sickly & inefficient from overwork & exposure—some frost bitten, some ruptured, some branded on their hips as runaways—all without shoes & most of them without winter clothing or blankets.”17
The frost-bitten people who were property had to be discounted by the British banks’ representative. Perhaps their fate was that nightmare of the enslaved: being sold at auction as “refuse slaves.”