CHAPTER 7
Consumer Nationalism in Black and White
GEORGE W. TAYLOR’S PHILADELPHIA “Free Labor Warehouse” advertised that its proprietor “manufactures his Cotton Goods from Material procured directly from those growers who neither own nor hire Slaves.” By the 1860s almost all of Taylor’s cotton textiles were sourced from white, southern, yeoman farmers, and manufactured on his own premises. The store also sold Liberian coffee, Javanese coffee, and East India molasses. Taylor’s business, which operated from the 1840s through 1866, ranged from wholesaling to retailing, importing to manufacturing. His business correspondence with American and Liberian free-labor producers offers a window onto how ethical commerce influenced and was influenced by ideas of ethnic economic nationalism by midcentury. Relying on nationally sourced products was one way to shorten the supply chain. Buying locally, regionally, or nationally ensured that consumers were supporting their fellow citizens. In thinking not just about how to hurt slaveholders by refusing to consume their produce, but also about who would benefit from dollars spent, black and white abolitionists had to figure out what role economic nationalism would play in their decisions.
Ethical-commerce advocates had made a convincing case about consumer responsibility, and diverting their spending away from slaveholders was a convincing enough argument, even if many found it difficult to follow through. But where should their money be diverted to? If refusing to buy was a vote against a commercial practice, then did that transform active purchasing into a vote for a commercial practice? Using the power of the consumer as a “vote,” endorsement, or incentive gave rise to different debates about who should benefit from ethical capitalism. Should it benefit any free labor at all? Should it support other, secondary causes, like relief for the poor, uplift for the oppressed, or support for coreligionists?
Although American ethical businesses were actively engaged with their British counterparts, there was a certain hesitancy about British free-trade principles. More-skeptical American writers pointed out that British policy might just be masking self-interest; the effects of the withdrawal of protections that had isolated British free-labor sugar from competition with Brazilian and Cuban slave-labor sugar in 1846 were cited as an example. These writers were also disturbed by British arguments in support of free labor that painted Britain as the manufacturer and the rest of the world as producer of raw supplies and consumers. Of course, many free-produce stores did not want to be reliant on British free-labor goods, particularly when there was the option to source and manufacture those goods in a way that would support Americans. British and French sourcing of cotton from around the globe was actually worrying to many in the United States, not to just interested southerners who wanted to protect their market share. Although free-produce advocates were constantly searching for new sources of supply, they did not want to see the American economy destroyed. They mostly wanted slaveholders to be convinced that free labor was more efficient than enslaved labor so they would abandon the practice out of their own self-interest rather than through government compulsion.
But as arguments evolved in the 1850s, land became as important as labor in the economic arguments for the end of slavery. The unease about dependency that had been common in the late eighteenth century reared its head again as new capital-intensive industries raised questions about what “free” labor really meant, and who the beneficiaries of the profits of consumption were. Migration to new lands was increasingly posed as a solution to the erosion of the value of labor: European migration to the colonial frontiers; American migration onto Native American and Mexican lands in the West; but equally, African American migration to Canada, Mexico, Haiti, and Liberia, and West African migration to that continent’s agricultural frontiers. Seeking independence from the economic dominance of the slave-based regimes of the American South or Futa Jallon led to similar strategies as individuals sought to establish self-sufficient, market-oriented households in what for them were new lands. American proponents of ethical commerce, like George W. Taylor, found themselves increasingly advocating a new approach to land as a solution to the free-labor question about who would benefit from emancipation.
Economic Nationalism
Even as the British abolitionists were seeking out free trade with India and the wider East Indies, Egypt, and West Africa to source new supplies of cotton, in the United States Walker’s tariff bill of 1846 increased the rates for much of the produce imported from West Africa.1 For merchants interested in sourcing free cotton internationally, the abolitionists were put in an awkward position by their stance on tariffs, mirroring the tensions that had pitted British abolitionists against each other in the sugar debates, and demonstrating that arguments for free trade and for free labor often worked against each other. For Britain’s abolitionist businessmen and women, self-sufficiency meant free trade; for America’s it meant a focus on domestic production.2 On both sides of the Atlantic the framing of that self-sufficiency solution within free-produce businesses influenced, and was influenced by, evolving ideas of political economy and the relationship of the state to business.
Since the first nonimportation agreements, economic nationalism had been an important factor in American consumer decisions. Supporting American producers, especially at the expense of the East India Company, had been an important rallying cry uniting the colonies.3 The nonimportation agreements had articulated a vision of American self-reliance and removal from dependency on global commerce, which would allow for an even greater consumer revolution to drive American manufacturing and infrastructure development.4 The new republic sought to fulfill these fantasies through tariff protection of domestic industries.
Despite the initial connections between the antislavery abstention movements and Revolutionary nonimportation in framing the political value of commercial behavior, the free-produce movement, like the rest of American consumer life in the early republic, rested on many imported products. But the directors of the American Free Produce Association were eager not only to draw on their heavy mercantile membership but also to promote expanded opportunities for American producers. There was a decidedly powerful strain of American free-produce thinking that saw external commerce and external solutions to the slave-labor problem as insufficient. The influence of one of the early republic’s foremost political economists, Mathew Carey, and other promoters of self-sufficiency and commercial independence can be seen clearly as American Free Produce Association members worried about production for the home market and the country’s reliance on the British Empire.5
The influence of the self-sufficiency argument ultimately directed the country’s approach to West African commerce. Despite playing an early and important role in legitimate commerce during the Napoleonic Wars, the tariff of 1842 decisively ended the involvement of many of US legitimate-commerce merchants in the emerging groundnut trade, for instance. American legitimate traders (and illicit slave traders) had been the bane of British West African administration; in Gambia, Bathurst complained regularly about the ability of American ships to undercut British traders.6 In 1837 the United States was the largest importer of Gambian groundnuts, but the introduction of the tariff, which cost importers 32 cents per bushel, collapsed the US share of Gambia’s exports to just 2 percent of the total exports by value.7 As George Brooks notes, American trading firms were driven to look for the cheapest possible groundnuts in order to maintain some profit, but after the introduction of the tariff, the major source of peanuts for US consumers was the American South.8 The economic imperative of promoting home production outweighed the mercantile interest, with American involvement in legitimate commerce appearing to suffer as a result.
One potential beneficiary of the shift from mercantile to producer interest in American free-produce circles were parties interested in manufacturing free-produce cotton. This manufacturing idea was a subject of some debate in 1839, when the American Free Produce Association sought subscribers throughout the United States. One woman wrote to abolitionist Lucretia Mott that she was not going to subscribe to the foundation of a free-produce store: “It may be ignorance, but it appears to me that a manufactory for free cotton exclusively is what we want more than a repository for goods.”9 She was not alone in suggesting that a joint stock company could set up a factory if none existed. A representative of the Union (NY) Free Produce Association also believed that a paper factory was a more worthy investment of the society’s time and money than establishing stores.10
Manufacturing, however, was difficult. First, there was the issue of demand. In its fifth annual report, the AFPA was finally able to announce that “this demand has been, during the past year, twice as great as that of any former year, and that we have been able to place in the market, manufactures of better quality and at lower prices than at any previous period of the Association’s existence.” The report posited that the change was a result of the fact that “the Association is now relieved from some disadvantages under which it has laboured for a few years past, in consequence of having procured a supply of goods at a time when the price of cotton and the cost of manufacturing were high, a large part of which supply remained on hand after the great depression in the cotton market, and which could not, without loss, be offered for sale at rates which would compete at all with the rapidly falling prices of slave-grown manufactures.” With the rising prices of cotton in the 1840s, free-labor “cotton has been procured by the Association on better terms, and we hope to approximate in the price and quality of our manufactures, more nearly than ever, to others now on the market.”11 But the quantities they were able to source were still low enough that centralizing manufacture was not cost effective.
This debate over whether to raise funds to support the manufacture of free cotton, or to support the commercial agents and merchants who found sources of free cotton, reflected the uneasy coalition between different businessmen and women involved in free produce. Abolitionists, of course, were not entirely “the industrial interest.” They were made up of the manufacturing interest sometimes, and also the mercantile interest, agricultural interest, and consumer interest. But the challenge they faced was manufacturing free cotton into goods that could be sold in shops. The Philadelphia Free Produce Society of Friends hoped that some kind of depot could be established for collecting free-labor cotton from the south “to a single point,” from which to send it north for manufacture. They hoped this would keep prices low. One reason was that “we have at least prima facie evidence that it can be afforded at the same price” because it was usually “mingled” with slave-produced cotton, demonstrating that it was not manifestly more expensive or it would have been kept separate in order to charge a higher price. Once in the North, “as our northern manufactories employ freemen only, there appears no reason why cotton fabrics which come to us unsoiled by the sweat of the slave should be charged with any other burden than the cost of separation from the products of slave labour during its transit from the farm to the factory.”12 But this reasoning, which supported an argument for the low price of free-produce cotton, simultaneously pointed to the problematic nature of sourcing the cotton: namely, that it was indistinguishable from slave-produced cotton.
By the 1850s, the AFPA moved away from manufacturing its own cotton textiles toward sourcing domestically produced free-labor cotton goods to encourage independent manufacturers, like Joseph Bancroft and Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware. AFPA president George W. Taylor, whose main manufacturers were British, wrote to Gideon Smith in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, offering “14 bales good Mississippi cotton” to be made into something “saleable.”13 He acknowledged, “Of course there would be mixture at beginning and ending and the only way will be for thee to buy the cotton and sell me the goods made of such parts of this material as should be unmixed with thy other cotton at both beginning and ending.”14 Taylor sent out cotton to textile manufacturers in Connecticut, and in Manchester and Carlisle, England, but he also set up his own cotton manufacturing in 1854. Putting together his factory required sourcing cotton cards, bobbins, spools, a beater lap machine, frames, brindles, and fans from Philadelphia firms Whitier & Cons, A. Jenks & Son, Hy. W. Butterworth, John Jackson, the Spread Eagle Company in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Dean Cotton & Machine Company, in Taunton, Massachusetts.15 Although the decision to withdraw the AFPA from manufacturing came about because it looked like it would be too expensive to centralize production, the establishment of a variety of free-labor cotton manufacturers had an unintended ethical dimension farther up the supply chain. If enough small manufacturers placed orders for the weaving components, American businesses that made the parts used in manufacturing slave-produced cotton would also be able to be discerning in choosing their customers.
Buying Black
Although the majority of free-produce goods sold in American stores were sourced internationally, over the 1840s and 1850s Taylor and other businessmen involved in the movement sought to use American free labor, and to promote American manufacturing as one of their ethical aims. But which Americans? For free black members of the Colored Free Produce Society, the emphasis on the “value” of free labor was never part of the rhetorical strategy they employed, though consumer responsibility certainly was. When thinking about the effects of positive purchasing, the benefits of buying from black-owned businesses, or from freed slaves, were obvious.
In 1829 the Genius of Universal Emancipation had published a report that in both Ohio and Upper Canada, “sundry colored persons from Kentucky” were raising tobacco.16 Colored Free Produce Society subcommittee member James Pierce operated a shop that sold tobacco from Kentucky, Ohio, and Connecticut.17 Buying tobacco produced by free black farmers from Pierce’s store, or William Whipper’s, next to the Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia, would help support both these black entrepreneurs and the free black farmers who were competing with enslaved labor. Supporting formerly enslaved workers’ labor was one way for people to direct their consumer dollars. And there was an argument within various local and national black organizations that this was an important way to spend money. As Juliet Walker notes, both the National Negro Convention and the Jamaica Hamic Trade Association promoted “favored nation” status for the African diaspora, proposing “that economic advancement of diaspora Africans should proceed on the Jewish model.”18 The American Moral Reform Society, of which Whipper and Purvis were leaders, urged black Americans to “patronize only those businesses which accorded them equal treatment with whites.”19
It was in this atmosphere of black “supra” and “sub” nation-building (to borrow Peter Thompson’s phrase) that black businesses were operating in enterprises designed to undermine slavery.20 African American consumers could partly rectify their lack of political power outside of their black communities by using their economic power. Boycotting was an incredibly important tool, as had been demonstrated repeatedly in the late eighteenth century. But equally, supporting the labor of free or freed black people would help reduce the demand for enslaved labor while simultaneously contributing to “uplift” and the demonstration of black people’s capacity for independence and success outside the degrading conditions of slavery.21
In 1854 Jacob White Jr., a friend of African American free-produce promoters Robert Purvis and William Whipper, delivered a speech before the Banneker Institute, Philadelphia’s African American literary society, expressing his frustration with his fellow “colored Americans” for their “inconsistency.” He reiterated arguments about supply and demand, and consumers’ responsibility for the conditions of production. He was realistic in his assessment of impact, stating he did not “mean to intimate however that if the colored people were all to abstain from the use of slave products, that the abolition of slavery would be the result; But I do say that they would be acting with consistency if they were to make it a rule not to use any products but those of compensated labor.” But he did lament that “if there were but two stores in this city and one sold free produce and the other slave produce, I doubt that there could be found one colored person in fifty that would put themselves to the least trouble in order to patronize the store that sold the free produce.” He also called out the hypocrisy of abolitionists who failed to uphold free-produce principles: “And while they utter maledictions against the slaveholders, and cry against the system of slavery as an infernal system; they at the same time encourage the slave holder to continue his business.”22 For proponents of the free-produce cause, any abolitionists not participating in buying free-labor goods were inconsistent because they failed to support their words with practical actions.
All black entrepreneurs concerned about slavery were faced with decisions about what to do with their wealth, what their wealth represented to the community, and in what ways their accumulation of wealth might accidentally support slavery. The case of James Forten highlights how these interrelated goals could compete. Forten was, by any measure, an incredibly successful businessman. His sailmaking firm was an important contributor to Philadelphia’s maritime economy. By 1807 he was employing thirty men, white and black. He contributed to the building of the Bethel AME church, was a pillar of the Philadelphia black community, gave money to abolitionist causes, and assisted the Underground Railroad.23 But throughout his career to he had to use slave-produced cotton cloth to make his sails. In fact, if he had attempted to use non-slave-produced cotton for his sails, his business would have been much less successful. Very little non-slave-produced cotton was available in the 1810s and 1820s, the quality of the fabric was lower, and the price was much higher. Of course, if someone with Forten’s clout had decided to switch to free-labor cotton, it could have made an important symbolic impact. Given his share of the sailmaking market in Philadelphia, it could have made a real economic impact as well. But it would also have risked his business, one necessary for the support of the Philadelphia free black community and the wider cause of abolitionism. And Forten was by no means the only black man with business interests that tied him to the slave economy; John Black, Charles Brister, and Thomas Little, of Philadelphia, were all involved with sugar refining before emancipation in the West Indies.24 Buying these refiners’ sugar would support black businesses, but would also potentially support enslaved labor. Where in the supply chain should consumers be thinking about “positive purchasing”?
Juliet Walker has argued that “black entrepreneurship” in the antebellum era “can be understood from within the Schumpeterian framework of the ‘creative capitalist,’ ” in which “factors other than the achievement of monetary success can be seen as providing the motivating force for business participation.”25 She articulates the problems facing the historians of black business in the antebellum period, who are required to balance the arguments for the “bourgeoisification” of black entrepreneurs and the total loss of agency of the enslaved. But she points to the existence of the business relations committee of the National Council of Colored People to argue that “expressions of black entrepreneurship were shaped by the black community, both slave and free, for the promotion of black economic interests rather than for the profits of slave-owners or white employers.”26 For instance, Martin Delany’s writings for the North Star in the late 1840s emphasized the importance of “Practical Industry, and money-making business enterprises.” He argued that “we have been heretofore taught that these things were unfit for us, as they interfered with our prospects of heaven. This our oppressors taught us to prevent us from competing with them in business.”27
Within the broader abolition movement, the success of various free people of color was used to demonstrate the case for the civilizing benefits of commerce. For Benjamin Lundy, editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and for many conservative abolitionists, the existence of wealthy free people of color around the Atlantic World helped prove that black people were equal in their capacities. Lundy identified the unjust “legal oppression” of Jamaica’s free colored population who were forced to operate within the system of British slavery before abolition and emancipation. He pointed out that this group was “worth property to the amount of $23,000,000,” including four named individuals worth more than $100,000, who had largely cornered the island’s pimento production.28 Their success in business demonstrated the absurdity of oppressive laws that held back the African diaspora’s full participation in the Atlantic economy. For Lundy and his readers, it was another example of prejudice disrupting the otherwise efficient and just market.
Black businessmen and women were not trying to convince white slaveholders that their labor would be “more efficient” if free. They were trying to become entrepreneurs and landowners in their own right. Ethical capitalism was proposed as the most “consistent” form of resistance against the slave system, but in making positive consumption choices (not just simply boycotting everything), people’s power as consumers became an endorsement, and that fostered a proliferation of choices. There was no one obvious way to make purchases in support of the black Atlantic.
Black Coffee
Taylor proposed Liberian coffee as one way that people could support the black diaspora with their purchases. Throughout the 1850s, Taylor sold coffee grown in Liberia on the plantations of his trading partner, Stephen Benson.29 Although he had regular customers for Liberian coffee, it was an acquired taste. At one point, Taylor complained to Benson “that the last parcel of Coffee tho handsome, has not the flavour that pleases my former customers for thy Coffee. Whether it is want of age or some difference in the caring, I cannot tell. If thou couldst procure some trees or seeds of the best variety from Java, the Coffee would more certainly please every coffee drinker.”30
Liberia worked as an antislavery brand, but also posed a problem. White free-labor merchants knew that their customers wanted the brand of Liberia, partly to demonstrate the value of free black labor, partly to undercut the argument for slavery among those who claimed that black labor had to be coerced, and partly to support the freed slaves and free black Americans who chose to immigrate to Africa. They bought things they didn’t need at high prices to support the project. But there were tensions that emerged between the plans, tensions that pointed to the complex position in which free black people in the Atlantic World found themselves. Demonstrating that Liberia was a successful commercial economy could prove the equal capacity of black and white people; but it could also encourage an argument that said black and white couldn’t live together.31
Liberian coffee was not the first free-labor brand of coffee. Haiti had been the go-to free-labor source for coffee in the United States. Coffee production could be undertaken without enslaved labor, on smaller parcels of land farmed by “peasant” agriculturalists, without significant capital outlays for machinery, and with resistance interwoven in its history. Although Haiti’s commercial weight in the Atlantic didn’t match Cuba’s or Brazil’s in coffee production, it offered a morally powerful alternative source for coffee, particularly before prices dropped with Brazil’s push into coffee in the 1830s.32 Coffee production had begun to devolve to manumitted people in the decade prior to the Haitian Revolution, with laborers remaining on plantations, but receiving smaller parcels of land on which to grow crops like coffee. With the movements for parcelization of land in Jean Petion’s Republic of Haiti, coffee became the dominant export, replacing sugar.33 Export duties on coffee shipped from Haiti at the end of the 1810s were $1.21 per hundredweight.34 This would have given the Haitian state approximately $356,000 in income from coffee exports per year on average over the first half of the 1820s.35 This was one of the larger of the export duties, on a crop in great demand in the United States, essentially their largest market.36
As with many ideas for a post-emancipation black labor force, excessive emphasis was put on the moral force of prosperity. In 1822 Jean-Pierre Boyer came into power as the new president of the unified Haitian republic in dire need of labor and investment to jump-start the economy. He sought out interest among African Americans inclined toward emigration as well as those interested in the success of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere: he offered to provide not only travel to the republic, but also land, an offer ultimately extended to more than 6,000 free northerners in the two years of the scheme’s operation. Boyer’s American representative, and the chairman of the Haitian Emigration Society of Colored People, based in New York, told the first emigrants that “the happiness of millions of the present and future generations, depends upon your prosperity, and that your prosperity depends much upon yourselves.”37
Because free-labor coffee was actually available from a variety of global sources, the appeal of supporting former slaves and ensuring the prosperity of the African diaspora was important for marketing Haitian and Liberian coffees. In fact, because information on free-labor sources was so hard to come by, coffee from Haiti was actually something of a trope. Free-produce consumers knew that coffee came from Haiti, and they knew that Haiti had no slaves, so this was an easy way to assert free-labor credentials. An otherwise unsuccessful reconnaissance by a committee appointed to look for free-labor cultivation around the world reported, “Coffee is also produced in abundance in the island of Hayti, and some parts of South America, by free labor. These productions, unstained by slavery, may now be had in the cities of New York and Philadelphia, and likewise at Wilmington in Delaware.”38 Free-produce tracts, like Anna Richardson’s There Is Death in the Pot!, listed Haiti among the producers of free-labor coffee.39
Despite the brand recognition of Haitian free-produce coffee, coffee was one of the first commercial agricultural experimental crops tested by Macaulay in the early Sierra Leone colony, and was being exported from West Africa as early as 1821–1822, when Daniel Dailey shipped forty-four bags of coffee (around 37 pounds) valued at $562.50 from Princess Island with the returning Brown & Ives brigantine Richard. The American import duty for coffee in 1822 was 5 cents per pound, and the coffee itself cost 15 cents per pound, meaning that, at that valuation, the coffee would net roughly a 100 percent profit.40 This was a strong price incentive for interested Liberian-American producer-imported partnerships like Taylor and Benson. The price of coffee for producers in Liberia increased in the decades around the American Civil War, as first “per-capita consumption grew to three pounds a year in 1830, five and a half pounds by 1850, and eight pounds by 1859,” and then increased demand collided with the conditions of the war itself when “a pound of coffee sold for 42 cents by the end of the war, having risen from 14 cents in 1861.”41
Taylor’s advice to Benson revealed that “Liberia” could also be a free-produce brand. Over the course of more than a decade of business exchanges with Benson, Taylor made plenty of suggestions about the movement’s desires for African produce. But he also revealed that basically anything sent to him that he could label as Liberian—and therefore the product of “free labor”—would sell. Using formerly enslaved laborers had the benefit not only of “improving” their situation, but also of demonstrating that the same laborers, in free conditions, could compete with slavery. Free-produce advocates seeking out new commodities produced “by the labor of emancipated slaves, and other free persons of color, in the West Indian Islands and on the American Continent” hoped it “will shew the extent of the pecuniary advantages which this mode of proceeding undoubtedly possesses over that of cultivating the land by slave labor.”42 But looking specifically to Liberia to prove the value of free labor was a form of positive purchasing that proponents hoped could help freed slaves.
Separate but Equal in Liberia
Liberian coffee was controversial not because of its labor inputs—it was produced with free labor, despite the rumors to the contrary—but because of the associations of the country with the colonization movement. Supporting Liberian produce could be seen as supporting the argument that black and white could not coexist in the United States, that America was a white-man’s country. Mathew Carey, the American political economist, wrote to the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1828 to support its project in Liberia. After realizing that natural population increase would put the African American population at ten million by 1868, he was eager to help the society “withdraw from the United States annually, so many of the colored population, and provide them a comfortable home and all the advantages of civilization in Africa, as will make the number here remain stationary.”43 By the 1830s many felt that the possibilities for racial harmony offered by the revolutionary generation had dissipated, and in their place racial separatism was emerging as a consensus view among both moderate and conservative white Americans.44
The economic possibilities offered by migration to Liberia were epitomized by Taylor’s coffee supplier in Liberia, Stephen Benson. Benson was born in 1816 to free African American parents in the slave state of Maryland. As a six-year-old, he emigrated with his family to the newly established colony of Liberia. Benson learned Bassa, a native Liberian language, and was one of the few early presidents seen by indigenous Liberians to be making the effort to integrate both settler and indigenous into the Republic. He was only thirty-nine when he became president of the Republic, representing the agricultural interests of the country (in contrast to Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the first president, who was perceived as representing the commercial interests of the trading elite).45 Benson had established a “large coffee farm” in Bassa Cove as early as 1849, when as a thirty-three-year-old he welcomed R. R. Gurley, the visiting ACS secretary, who appreciated his hospitality.46 Despite the fact that he grew up almost entirely in Liberia, Benson maintained a strong connection to the ACS and to American commercial agents in particular. In setting up his coffee business, he kept in close contact with potential buyers in the American market, but also sent out feelers in the British and French markets. He began corresponding with George W. Taylor in the 1850s.
Settlers like Benson wrote back to US audiences with news of the varieties of ways to make money in Liberia. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, which was a fairly broad church for all kinds of antislavery schemes, reprinted from the ACS paper, the African Repository, the article “Address of the Colonists to the Free People of Color in the United States.” The colonists argued, “Our trade and commerce is chiefly confined to the coast, to the interior parts of the continent, and to foreign vessels. It is already valuable and fast increasing. It is carried on in the productions of the country, consisting of rice, palm oil, ivory, tortoise-shell, dye woods, golds, hide, wax, and a small amount of coffee; and it brings us in return the products and manufactures of the four quarters of the world. Seldom, indeed, is our harbour clear of European and American shipping; and the bustle and thronging of our streets, show something, already of the activity of the smaller seaports of the United States.”47 As editor of the Genius, Lundy kept an agent in Monrovia; in 1832 it was Dr. J. W. Prout. He not only sold copies of the Genius in Liberia, which would have kept Liberian settlers abreast of the developments in abolitionist arguments about legitimate commerce, free produce, and free labor, but he also provided Lundy and his readers with information on the market in various commodities in West Africa. From Rev. Mr M’Gill, Monrovia, Lundy reported, “There is a great deal of trade carried on here, with foreigners, and also with the natives. There are two or three arrivals almost every week, with supplies of nearly all kinds.”48
Exports of sugar and coffee from Liberia both began to expand in the 1850s, peaking in the 1860s before declining from the 1870s on.49 Bassa, where Benson’s plantation was located, became the principal producer of coffee by the early 1860s.50 The other major Americo-Liberian coffee plantations were run by Allen B. Hooper, who had 70,000 to 80,000 coffee plants in the mid-1850s, and Abraham Blackledge, who had 10,000 coffee plants.51 While palm oil, rice, and camwood were some of the easiest, most lucrative ways to promote “legitimate” commerce from Africa because they were already locally produced, coffee came to be seen as Africa’s niche offering, largely as a result of the efforts of Liberian settlers and their American trading networks. Taylor found there was a particularly good market for Liberian coffee: “Any coffee here may wish to sell you may very properly consign to me and I will get a good price for it. Any thing else thou art disposed to return which is the product of the labor of free persons.”52 Benson’s sugar and coffee consignment to Taylor netted him $122.24 in 1864.53 In 1865 George W. Taylor sold Benson’s coffee at his Philadelphia store for 45 cents per pound.54 Benson’s agricultural success overlapped with the peak of Liberia’s commercial agriculture. Coffee was an especial beneficiary of the new interest in Liberian investment that emerged with the country’s independence from the controversial American Colonization Society. As an independent black republic, it was a beacon of hope for those interested in using ethical trade to demonstrate that black and white people had equal capacities for self-government and economic advancement.
Fig 7.1 George W. Taylor receipt. The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Coffee became a hugely successful venture, at least temporarily, for those involved in Liberia. Prices continued to rise through the Civil War, reaching a peak in the 1880s before declining again in the 1890s. This commodity boom created pockets of wealth in the African American diaspora. But to fully realize the profits, Liberians altered their laws so that white entrepreneurs like Edward Morris, of Philadelphia, could lease land as a foreigner, expanding Liberia’s production for the American market.55 This enriched those renting the land out, and theoretically could have benefited the country as a whole, as new revenues from increased exports were reinvested in the country. But in fact, the change in the laws illustrates how success in commerce was often difficult to fully align with success in the promotion of a moral project.
Liberia gained its independence from the American Colonization Society in 1847, establishing itself as a republic run by and for African American settlers. Americo-Liberian men gained political independence in order to exert political power in an Atlantic system that had not granted them voting rights within the expanding United States, or recognition of their colonial status by rival British and Sierra Leonean merchants.56 But they did not extend rights to the wider Liberian population, or to Americo-Liberian women, and while migration to Liberia could expand the political and economic opportunities available to black Americans, it could also undermine the fight for political representation within the United States. Migration was a way of asserting independence; it encouraged the development of smallholder capitalism, but it could weaken wider claims of political belonging.
The ambivalence of black nationalist political thought in the United States toward the establishment of a separate nation-state was underlined by ambivalence toward economic participation with black nation-building projects.57 Voting with one’s dollar was a political statement, but not always an entirely straightforward one when the purchase of Liberian coffee simultaneously demonstrated the power of legitimate commerce, encouraged a black entrepreneur, and promoted a controversial colonization project based on an exclusive, separatist ethnic nationalism.
Free Soil, Free Labor, White Men
Colonization, of course, did not necessarily have to be a project aimed at resettling the black population. Elihu Burritt, the internationally influential abolitionist, wrote to the Quaker Ecroyd brothers in Britain in 1854 full of enthusiasm for a free-labor project. He was staying with Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the two had been discussing a plan to establish a plantation “of 100 or 200 acres in South Carolina, Georgia or Alabama” to demonstrate free labor’s superiority. Burritt wrote asking John Ecroyd if he would be willing to undertake the experiment, noting that although they would want to use “free coloured labour at first, I have thought a few stalwart Germans, fresh from the continent might be the best hands we could find. They might be found in any number in New York. I think such labourers would be less likely to excite suspicion as ‘abolitionist agitators’ in the South than any other class attainable.”58 John Ecroyd responded politely that although he thought it was a good idea in principle, he was not confident of making a profit, and after all, “in any experiment to be tried the object must be to show to the public that there will be as much profit by cultivating Cotton with Free labour as with Slaves.”
But Burritt was by no means alone in believing that an emphasis on German, white labor would be the most popular for this project. This plan followed in the footsteps of other radical abolitionist and millenarian projects both within and outside of the United States, including Frances Wright’s plan for Nashoba thirty years earlier. Nashoba had also been organized to bring together black and white labor, and Wright’s plan had envisioned enslaved laborers earning their money for self-purchase and transportation to Liberia or Haiti.59 The fact that Burritt and Harriet Beecher Stowe had come up with their plan was notable because although they were both vocal promoters of free produce, Stowe was also an important voice in the resurgent colonization movement. Their plan, which emphasized white free labor, came at a time when free-soil activism was embracing an argument for white, yeoman farmer’s free labor (and land ownership) replacing enslaved labor’s dominance of westward expansion.
With the “Texas question” in the 1830s came new plans for white American colonization of western territories. Benjamin Lundy, that prolific free-produce advocate, sought out a land grant from the Mexican government in 1835. The purpose of his project was “Mexican Colonization and Sugar, Cotton, and Rice Cultivation by Free Labor,” for which he was granted land in Tamaulipas provided he find 250 colonists to accompany him. “This section of the country,” he argued, “is adapted to the culture of sugar, rice, corn, indigo, tobacco, and cotton; also the various culinary vegetables, generally produced in our middle and southern states.” He chose Mexico to “test the advantages of FREE LABOR, on this continent” because “it is important that such experiments be made as near as possible to our slave holding states, where those articles are produced; (both the laws, and the prejudices of the white inhabitants, forbid its being done, effectually, therein;) and the section of country that I have chosen, is the most suitable for this purpose.” Although this was a colonization settlement within another country, Tamaulipas bordered the Rio Grande and was contiguous to what would become, in 1836, the Republic of Texas, and later part of the brief Republic of the Rio Grande. But while Texas was being settled by slaveholders, Lundy hoped to create a free-labor, free-soil alternative. He “succeeded in making the necessary preliminary arrangements, for a resort to the ‘practical,’ final, and hitherto incontrovertible argument, against the perpetuation of slavery. This kind of ‘argument’ has overthrown that horrible system in the British dominions, and will, eventually, do it here, if promptly applied.”60 If they could only get their hands on cotton-growing land, they could show that free labor would be better than enslaved labor. And eventually, probably, that land would become part of the United States. As the Free Soil, and then the Republican, Party made use of this language, ethical-commerce advocates found their arguments making their way into the mainstream.
In 1852 George W. Taylor wrote to a business partner, “I am glad thou art a free soil. I also voted that ticket.”61 The glorification of the work ethic, democratization, and small-producer ideology was a powerful strain of free-labor ideology.62 It merged with the free-soil argument when both groups found they shared a common language over the issue of Texas annexation. The Workingman’s Advocate declared support for Texas annexation on two conditions: “First, that the abolition of all slavery, white as well as black, shall be provided for, by preventing all further sale of her public lands, and reserving them for actual settlers,” and “secondly, that no human being shall be born a slave in Texas after the annexation.”63 This highlights the extent to which the ideas of wage slavery had seeped into understandings of land and labor inequalities by the 1840s. Of course, those conditions were not adhered to, which helped fuel concerns that blossomed fully during the turbulent 1850s that none of the newly acquired soil of the West would be open to free labor. Free soil and free labor became increasingly popular arguments against the “slave power,” with Jacksonian Democrats and recent immigrants joining abolitionists in promoting arguments that enslaved labor was backward, inefficient, corrupting, and detrimental to the vision of American equality, even as it was propped up by a representative system that gave extra power to slaveholding states through the Constitution’s three-fifths clause that counted enslaved people towards the congressionally represented populations of those states.64
Although Taylor hoped that American manufacturers would benefit from his patronage, and that by directing the manufacturing of cotton goods himself, he could be sure he could respond to his customers’ tastes, he still required regular, large supplies of guaranteed free-labor cotton. Economic nationalism extended beyond arguments that free-labor production should support American manufacturers. In the United States, long pervaded by a mythology of yeoman farmer democracy, land was key to rising above the permanent wage class, or the “mudsill” as it was more derogatorily put by southern political economist James Henry Hammond in 1858.65 For Taylor, East India, Egyptian, or Nigerian cotton could offer a temporary solution to a problem of supply. But ultimately, the goal was to transform American agriculture into the productive, free-labor engine of American growth. Neither European nor American abolitionists wanted to rely on American enslaved labor. Europeans turned to colonial sources of supply; Americans turned to their own white labor force. American free-produce consumers wanted to help to further the goal of making all Americans into independent producers, and to rise above the wages-for-consumer-goods model proposed by the British.
The prolific writings of commercial abolitionists, and especially the defenses of and advertisements for their retail schemes, were cementing the logic of free labor into understandings of American political economy, and bringing the nationalist understandings of American political economy into abolitionist commerce. Lundy wrote in an early editorial, “A vast proportion of the Agriculturalists of Maryland are fully impressed with the idea that slave-labor is unprofitable.” In a statement that would come to be associated with the rise of the Free-Soilers, he continued, “Upon due reflection they will find that white laborers will not settle among them while slavery is tolerated, and such a marked distinction, as is now visible, exists between those who labor and those who do not.”66 Reaching beyond the core abolition demographic, Lundy and others sought to make their arguments appealing by pointing out that slavery affected white labor relations as much as the productivity of black workers.
Free soil was widely appealing, and worked in tandem with the increasing glorification of labor by a broad spectrum of northern society.67 The argument that newly acquired western territories should be settled by white farmers resonated with free-produce businesses searching for free-labor cotton. In 1852 the Free Soil Party’s presidential platform declared, “That we inscribe on our banner Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men, and under it will fight on and fight ever until a triumphant victory shall reward our exertions.” This was not a new argument, but a new articulation of an idea of independent production that predated the founding of the nation. Benjamin Franklin had explained that “no man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master.”68 Improvement, the progress of individuals within society, and the development of the economy as a whole, relied on people’s capacity to work and accumulate capital that could be invested in new enterprises, from family farms to small businesses, to the elusive but tantalizing rags-to-riches dream. But as Eric Foner points out, “economic independence” was the ultimate goal, rather than excessive wealth.69 Monopoly, government kickbacks, and gross accumulation were anathema to the middle class, which supported free-labor and free-soil arguments politically, as well as through their purchases.
The search for free-labor supplies of cotton, in particular, increasingly turned to white farmers, with decreasing emphasis placed on “freed slaves.” People like Abraham Pennock and the founding members of the Philadelphia Free Produce Association sought products grown and manufactured in North America in order to promote American production and save on costs. The Free Produce Society of Friends saw cotton as the most pressing free-labor issue, arguing that because cotton is “the principal basis of our foreign commerce, as well as the support of our most lucrative manufactures in the Northern States,” it made sense for their fund-raising to be focused on sourcing, manufacturing, and distributing free-labor cotton.70 In the constitution of the AFPA, Pennock and James Mott set out the connections explicitly, in a statement of principles worth quoting in full:
It is known that in those States where Slavery still prevails there are many persons who deprecate its continuance, some of whom are engaged by their own and the labor of other hired Freemen in the production of articles similar to most of those usually the result of slave labor. To these free laborers it is believed that a market for the ready sale of their surplus produce would be an object of importance, tending, in some degree, to compensate for the difficulties to which they are subject from being surrounded by a Slave population. By affording proper encouragement to the free labourer he may be brought into a full and fair competition, on the same soil and in the same climate, in the production of the same articles, with the Slave. Reason and experience teach that this will clearly demonstrate a superiority of profit to the free laborer; and it is confidently believed that a diminution in the use of Slaves must soon follow. Satisfy the Slave-holder that the net income from his estate would be increased by contorting his Slaves into free hired laborers, and an important advance will be made in the great work of emancipation.71
Echoes of this hopefully imagined free southerner would, of course, linger through the opening months of the American Civil War. Free-labor and free-soil ideology worked on the premise that there was a majority in favor of abolition because the “slave power” had deprived them of their ability to make their way as independent yeoman farmers, in a sort of echo of the arguments made by Macaulay and Cropper that Britons would have been East India sugar consumers if the West India monopoly had not created market inefficiencies. Already by the early 1840s the AFPA sourced raw cotton from Phineas Nixon, Borden White, Thomas Kennedy, John Kennedy, and Nathan Hunt—all white North Carolina planters, connected to Quaker networks, who did not use enslaved labor.72
Free-cotton supplier Esther Nixon wrote to the AFPA in 1840, “The low price of cotton holds out no great inducement to raise [free cotton] for profit but few are satisfied that it is a duty.” Still, she was hopeful that combining her moral duty with some fortuitous local circumstances, she would be able to help in the uplift of a recently arrived “poor young man who has been raised on a cotton plantation who has lately come into this neighbourhood with his family.”73 The Free Produce Society was excited to report that “in various parts of the Union there are planters who cultivate cotton by the hands of freemen. Some, because they are unwilling or unable to purchase slaves. Some planters probably prefer free to slave labour because of its superior cheapness.”74 Convinced that the cheapness argument would win the day, they presented another aspect of American free-labor arguments. In the case of cotton agriculture, free-produce proponents latched onto the myth of the yeoman farmer as the fundamental actor and beneficiary of American democracy. Farmers with little capital were unable to purchase slaves or the vast plantation acreage to support an enslaved workforce, especially as the cotton belt was increasingly being snapped up by speculators looking to make a fortune from leveraged cotton planters. The “average farmer” who could have contributed to America’s cotton supply had been squeezed out of production. This tapped into Jean-Baptiste Say’s argument that slavery degraded master and slave, and created a condition where “labor can never be honourable, or even respectable, where it is executed by an inferior caste.”75
As the transition from legitimate-commerce to free-produce to free-labor to free-soil ideology was completed in some abolitionist circles, the racial and international division of labor acquired a moral legitimacy. Because of the existing Quaker networks that drove the AFPA’s subscription lists, and because of the existence of wholly separate colored free produce associations catering to their own consumers, the production and manufacturing questions in America came to rest on free white labor. A free-cotton label certificate, produced by the Quaker North Carolina planter Nathan Hunt Jr., assured purchasers of Philadelphia merchant Morris Longstreth’s cotton products that they were “exclusively, cotton raised by free white persons, or at least by free labourers, and that no cotton, raised by slaves, has been mixed therewith.”76 The emphasis on white labor could be tied back to worries about fraud—white laborers were definitely not slaves—but it also attested to the emerging free-soil arguments that would dominate popular antislavery by 1860.
Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation republished a calculation by Horton Jefferson Howard of the impact a shift to free labor could have on national production. “To some, it may appear that the calculation is rather extravagant; but when we consider what has already been done in the business of producing tobacco by free labor, we are led to believe that the indolence and carelessness of slaves will more than counterbalance the advantages of the southern climate, and that the cultivation of cotton, in Ohio, by free hands, may successfully compete with the same business, performed by slaves, in our southern states.” Building on Smith’s arguments about the inefficiency of slave labor, this dedicated abolition journal promoted an image of “indolent” and “careless” slaves to argue for the benefits of free-labor production. Lundy editorialized that “the support of invention and improvement, which is so generally fostered by the freemen of the north, while it is discountenanced and discouraged by the slaveholders of the south” was crucial “not only in the construction of roads and canals, but in all the minutiae of business.” In other words, slavery was just bad business.77
The extracted paragraph by Horton Jefferson Howard extolled the virtues of Ohio free-labor cotton. “We have recently seen a specimen of cotton, raised by John Smith, of Goshen Township, Belmont County, which, as far as we are able to judge, is of the first quality.” Although Quaker consumers of free produce in Britain, like the Sturges and Gilletts, bought American cotton “made by escaped slaves,” the majority of the free-produce experiments taking place in the United States—in places like Mississippi, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and North Carolina—used free white labor. Drawing on the rhetoric of the American yeoman farmer ideal, Howard wrote, “The citizens of Ohio, when they ascertain a thing is practicable, have a fashion of doing instead of talking about it. And we give our southern brethren fair warning, that our citizens will shortly show them the Second Epistle to raising Tobacco! We have proved that tobacco raised by that curse of our national escutcheon, slave labor, cannot compete with the labor of FREEMEN. NEITHER CAN IT IN THE RAISING OF COTTON!!!”78
The argument that slave labor “cannot compete with the labor of freemen” was backed up with a lot of data—often spurious—reprinted from British tracts like those published by Macaulay and Cropper. The Western Luminary also published “An Essay on The Comparative Value of Free and Slave Labor,” which calculated that a slave cost $74 per year, including $24 interest on purchase, $20 to replace capital, $15 for clothing, $5 in taxes, medical attendance and other expenses, and $10 as a proportion of overseers’ wages. In contrast, “the ordinary wages of freemen in upper Virginia are from $60 to $75 per ann with board. It seems then that a slave costs as much as a free labourer, and if he does three fourths as much work, his employer loses 15 to 20 dollars per annum by him.”79 The argument that slavery produced inefficient work by poorly incentivizing enslaved laborers was a constant, though questionable, refrain.
A subscriber from North Carolina wrote to Lundy, sending $5 and adding, “Our state will not flourish unless our policy shall become favorable to internal improvements, domestic industry, and to encourage manufactures, of which we have the materials in abundance.” Lundy editorialized, “This is certainly true. No state is better conditioned by nature for these things than North Carolina; but like Virginia, she has long been losing the very cream of her population, the free white laboring classes, by emigration, because of her mistaken policy in neglecting, if not refusing, to use her water power, and the rich agricultural and mineral productions, for the supply of her own wants.”80 These early editorials pieced together from reprinted articles, book reviews, and speeches, as well as Lundy’s own work with the free-produce movement, helped form abolitionist opinion with regard to the economic benefits of antislavery to the country, and the wider appeals that the movement could make to the broadest possible audience.
The Free Produce Society of Friends, of which Taylor was a secretary, met in January 1846, and a letter from a merchant in Memphis, Tennessee, was read aloud. “As regards free labour cotton,” the merchant wrote, “we have no sort of difficulty in buying it in almost any reasonable quantity. About one fifth of the cotton brought to this market from north Mississippi is of that kind and always of good quality.” Confirming the suspicions of the committee about the incentives and productivity of enslaved labor, the merchant explained, “White people who plant seldom make more than from five to twenty bales, and handle it with more care than the large planters (who trust to their slaves) and generally get it out of the fields earlier.” The merchant promised, “We pay no more for free labor cotton than any other and should your friends be induced to favor me with an order for a constant supply they may rely upon my honor that every bale shall be strictly ‘free labor’ and each invoice shall be sworn to before a magistrate and the name and residence of each grower be given. Such orders may be given me under limit using the Liverpool standard of quality.”81
George W. Taylor and the wider American Free Produce movement came to rely on one man in particular in their search for white free-labor cotton: Nathan Thomas. Thomas traveled the South for Taylor and the Association, sourcing small batches of cotton grown by white farmers without enslaved labor. In 1845 he sourced sixty-three bales from fifteen different producers. Ginning the cotton, which took place before it was shipped, added “a small additional expense for bailing, in order to make it entirely clear from Slave labor.” He managed this because “a part we got white men to handle entirely by renting gins and other part was ginned through the Christmas Holladays when the slaves got the entire proffit and the rest we have had to pay the slaves (with the concent of their claimants) for ther servises over and above the usual toll for ginning according to the number of them engaged in it as the gins are all owned by the large planters, we have had to seek the most favourable opportunities for having it put up right, which makes by far the greatest difficulty in obtaining free cotton.”82 Once again, the problem of ensuring an ethically guaranteed supply reared its head. Wages, for Thomas, were one way around the problem.
Wage Slavery and Peasant Freedom
Despite reliance on proof of wages as a means of establishing a slave-free supply chain, “wage slavery” itself emerged as a regular economic villain in the 1830s in both Britain and America.83 Eric Foner has argued that “many Americans experienced the expansion of capitalism not as an enhancement of the power to shape their world, but as a loss of control over their own lives.”84 The emergence of arguments against “wage slavery” were at least partially the result of abolitionist campaigning. Amy Dru Stanley has written, “A wealth of studies have demonstrated how antislavery itself, by establishing the slave as the absolute symbol of un-freedom, thereby vindicated the freedoms of wage laborers vested with formal rights. So too, it has been argued, did the prerogatives (‘wages’) of whiteness elevate ostensibly unfree proletarians far above the status of black chattels.”85 There was a growing fear, from the 1830s onward, that the degredations of slavery were creeping into other aspects of American society through physical and legal expansion, as well as through the “wage slavery” that, many worried, came along with the industrial changes emerging in the North’s urban centers.86 This was echoed across the North Atlantic: at the same time that legitimate-commerce proponents were justifying “domestic” slavery in African contexts by narrowing the definition of slavery, the definition was being expanded by critics of waged labor conditions in industrializing countries. In large part this reflected, as Jonathan Glickstein has argued, the overlapping arguments about the causes of poverty that informed both approaches to African labor and issues of poor relief in industrial cities. The familiar argument that consumerism would operate as a “positive incentive” to a work ethic echoed in both discourses.87
American activists felt the need to respond to proslavery arguments that seized on the radical critique of wage slavery to cast the condition of the laboring classes of the world as “fearful” because industrialists were not responsible for the well-being of their workers, or, in fact, their longevity.88 This case was built on the same economic logic that anti-slave-trade activists had used to claim that the continued flow of new slaves into the West Indies was allowing slave owners to “consume” them (their labor) without paying any attention to ensuring their welfare, in order to profit from their initial investment. Slaves were too cheap and ready, and so slaveholders could squeeze as much labor as possible out of them for as little input as possible. Cutting off more supplies of slaves would vastly improve the conditions under which enslaved laborers operated. By this same logic, proslavery polemics in the 1840s and 1850s argued that the wages for labor were too cheap in the manufacturing districts of the US North, but with nowhere else to turn, and fierce competition from a large immigrant labor supply, workers were more and more enslaved to their employers, without any reciprocated benefits.89 Proslavery arguments about wage slavery were intended to point out abolitionists’ hypocrisy, but also to equate the two systems in an attempt to prevent aggrieved factory workers from sympathizing with the enslaved.
Fears of wage slavery and dependency characterized French responses to British antislavery’s new global division of labor as well. Despite the failure of French plans for Senegalese cotton and sugar plantations by 1831, sugar continued to feature in French abolition plans in this period. As with British debates, the role of tariffs was crucial to framing the free-labor argument. The French agronomist and sugar-beet cultivator, Mathieu de Dombasle, worried that “the inevitable abolition of slavery in the Americas, propounded by Britain’s cynical efforts to increase the profitability of its Indian possessions, would further reduce the supply of American sugar and make France dependent upon British and Dutch importations from their Asian colonies.”90 The French debate in the early 1840s about protecting their sugar-producing colonies in Africa and the Caribbean with tariffs mirrored the British deliberations. But the country’s most influential political economists regularly pointed to the deep inequalities in Britain, and the poor conditions of waged laborers there, to argue for a national rather than imperial approach to both agriculture and industry that emphasized labor value over consumer value—that is, making improvements in the standard of living by raising wages rather than by lowering the cost of goods. Sugar beets grown in France, they reasoned, would benefit France more than sugar cane grown in French colonies because it would provide employment for French laborers. Both French and American economic thought was concerned that the free trade promoted by British liberals would benefit Britain by encouraging French and American dependency on British manufactures.91 Indigenizing production was essential to national economic independence. But avoiding the dependent condition that had emerged among the laboring classes in Britain was equally important. Access to land—and the myth of agricultural self-sufficiency—provided a solution to that problem.
Access to land in the North American West could help prevent in the United States the degradation associated with the industrial working classes of Britain. By converting their factory wages into savings that could be used to purchase land, and independence, white men in America were assured of the temporary nature of their labor conditions, and a condition that was temporary, it was argued, could not be slavery.92 The contradictions inherent in what Ian McGuire refers to as “mainstream free laborism” could only “reconfigure rather than eradicate hierarchies of race and class.”93 The British encountered this problem as they sought to justify global slavery and indenture as a means of “improving” the conditions of African and Asian populations by allegedly turning them into productive consumers. But unlike those African and Asian populations, the white male wage workers of the United States were increasingly represented in the halls of power. As the franchise expanded, political power could be added to commercial power, and so white men—unlike women and most African Americans—could exercise political power through voting, rather than merely purchasing. And the free-produce movement adapted its arguments to address the critiques offered by both economically radical and proslavery publications’ invocations of the wage slavery problem facing white northern men.
Land access and mobility were strategies that occupied nationalist political economy in the United States and France, but they were not limited to those countries. The possibility of migration in both the United States and West Africa also held the same potential for smallholding as a form of economic independence. Migrants from the overpopulated Futa Jallon plateau spread out through the region to its northwest—a region controlled by the kingdom of Kaabu—looking for opportunities to establish themselves in groundnut cultivation, or to find secure supplies of salt and pasture for livestock rearing. In the Siin region of Senegal, archaeological evidence shows that the Serer developed a dispersed pattern of village settlement to grow groundnuts, participating in the wider trend—a sense that land would solve the problem of unequal labor relations.94
The need for migrant labor in the production of groundnuts in Senegal allowed slaves to emancipate themselves, moving far from their owners and working as free laborers until they accumulated enough wealth to set up their own households.95 As Boubacar Barry argues, “They were drawn there by the growth of peanut farming, which, while using a great deal of slave labor, also provided employment for hired seasonal workers.”96 This suggests that legitimate commerce ultimately did provide opportunities for the some of the formerly enslaved workers of West Africa. Even for those who stayed put after emancipation, this decision could be influenced by access to land, as Benedetta Rossi writes of the migrants of slave descent in Ader, Niger, on the northern border of the Sokoto Caliphate: “If they could not access property in their regions of migration, they could at least retain their recently acquired lands in Ader and thereby avoid turning into proletarians in other parts of West Africa, a condition that would have been reminiscent of their erstwhile disenfranchisement as slaves.”97
Migration and economic change through the mid-nineteenth century gave rise to new West African religious leaders who challenged the state power of the old order with revolutionary visions of the state. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 5, Al Hajj Umar Tal waged a war that pitted jihadis against French-backed Wolof states. But he was not alone in challenging the union of European and African commercial interest, nor was he the only revolutionary who drew in migrants hoping to free themselves from the predations of both colonial and African states.98 These proliferating religious and political wars then caused more migration and increasing competition for productive land. When the marabout wars erupted in the Saloum Delta, people fled to the Gambia River, where Governor D’Arcy granted “the starving refugees from the Salum country” land in Fitzgerald Town, frustrating “the natives of Albreda” who contested his right to cede that land.99
Amadou Bamba, the marabout who founded the Mouride brotherhood in 1883, offered a different route to challenge the encroachment of the French and British states, emphasizing pacifism as well as industrious agricultural labor.100 Throughout Senegal and the Western Soudan, his Mouride brotherhood rose in prominence, gathering followers and establishing new commercial agrarian colonies.101 Mourides would work for the brotherhood for ten years, growing groundnuts that built up and supported the community, and after that period they would receive land of their own but continue to contribute part of their crop to the community via their marabouts.102 Praising the industriousness of the Mourides, even as they arrested and exiled Bamba, the French noted that their groundnut fields “are immense and magnificent” and, under the influence of the marabouts, “they stay in their fields until eleven o’clock in the evening, then go to pray at the mosque.”103 Association with the Mouridiyya was a way for individuals to assert moral and economic autonomy from the Wolof aristocrats in their alliance with the French, even as it conferred new economic, political, and moral authority to the marabouts.
Lisa Lindsay writes of Yorubaland (southern Nigeria) in the period of transition to wage labor at the end of the nineteenth century, “Young men generally took advantage of agricultural commercialization and the expansion of wage labor to become increasingly autonomous from their elders.”104 For these young men, as for factory workers in America’s eastern cities, working in wage labor, as a temporary condition, could allow them to save enough money to get married, buy land of their own, and set themselves up as “big men.” Land meant independence. Liberian colonists from America like Jacob Gibson and George Ellis McDonogh could declare themselves pleased with “five acre lots” because that land offered possibilities for self-sufficiency in “potatoes, cassadoes, arrow root, corn.”105 The settlers in Freetown, who had parcels of agricultural land beyond the town limits, “value their allotments, and cling to them, with as much tenacity as an Irish Peasant to his ‘Spot of Land.’ ”106 Once established, smallholders in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States and Europe were not likely to make vast fortunes in plantation-style commodity production. But their participation in “peasant agriculture” did not mean they were unable to participate in global trade or were enacting a timeless, traditional way of living. The shift from large scale, state-backed agricultural projects for legitimate produce to a system that rewarded smallholders at little to no investment on the part of the state was possible in part because of the emerging liberal political economy that abolitionist businessmen and women had seized on in making their arguments for ethical capitalism.107 Land promised freedom to work and to consume industriously, with dignity.
Dependency on the “frivolous materiality” of the consumer revolution, dependency on the labor of others, and dependency on the wages of laboring for another were all interlocking challenges that by the mid-nineteenth century were part of a wider argument about citizenship, belonging, independence, and masculinity. Among American free-soilers, the embrace of masculine equality and independence echoed the concerns of feminization that had been present in the eighteenth-century debates about luxury. The ideological construction of slavery (dependency) and of its opposite, free labor, were different in settings where the availability of land and the relative scarcity of labor made economic independence and self-sufficiency a potent political trope. The ability to migrate and establish a new household was a form of success recognizable to people around the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century. But whether migration and the establishment of independent landholding generated political power, or the recognition of fundamental equality among diverse peoples, or the success of a particular ethnic community, was more contested.
“Peasant” or “yeoman” categories of cash crop producer were ideologically framed as independent of the power of slave owners, landlords, and states. As consumers, these laborers represented the ideal of industrious, household-level production and promised the kinds of growth that had accompanied the earlier consumer revolution. As exemplars of a certain kind of abolitionist hope for emancipation, in places like Ghana and Senegambia, peasant smallholders exceeded abolitionists’ wildest expectations. But as national aggregators of wealth, smallholders were less satisfactory, because theirs were not large, capital-intensive investments. In fact, the kinds of economic growth promised by both West African and western US smallholder agriculture were extensive rather than intensive: bringing new lands into production rather than radically transforming efficiencies. And for commercial middlemen and tariff-oriented states, the independence of these producers could be frustrating, as Mill and Carlyle both found in the case of the British West Indies.108 Self-sufficiency could be framed as a “backward” step in the formation of capitalist modernity even as it was embraced by a wide range of Atlantic actors for the freedoms it promised, because it undermined the political and economic elites—whether Caribbean or West African—who had been the target of other commercial abolitionist policies aimed at maintaining the status quo.
In the United States, the Republican Party won the election of 1860 on the back of a campaign that had incorporated arguments about free labor, free white male labor, colonizationism, and free soil that had been mixing in American political discussions for decades. It was given additional power as the political representation of white men expanded and farmers on the rural frontier were incorporated as citizens. After the Civil War, white yeoman cotton farming expanded from 17 percent to 44 percent of all US cotton production as prices dropped for cotton-growing land.109 The search for consumers and producers of free-produce goods had helped abolitionists articulate specific arguments about the ethical American economy and the beneficiaries who would win from abolition. In America, black laborers, producers, and consumers fit awkwardly into the vision of national economic welfare for white ethical-commerce advocates.
In West Africa, where “peasant” agriculture had the possibility to transform land–labor relations, the contest among proposed beneficiaries of the transition to legitimate commerce intensified. Land was the answer to the search for freedom, in West Africa and in America, but as a result, control of migration to the productive hinterlands of the global economy became a fundamental political priority of mid-nineteenth century Atlantic nation-states. President Abraham Lincoln’s support for colonization projects for former slaves drew criticism from black and white abolitionists, but was not inconsistent with the free-soil and free-labor vision set out by abolitionist businessmen like George W. Taylor.110
TAYLOR’S SEARCH FOR COTTON produced by white yeoman farmers and his support of Liberian colonization were both part of the same emerging logic of ethical consumption in the 1850s and 1860s. Consuming ethically was more complicated than simply switching from goods produced by enslaved labor to goods produced by free labor; once the economic argument had been made that consuming goods made by enslaved labor was endorsing them or providing incentive for their production, it became clear, if it wasn’t already, that the act of purchasing was always a political act. No longer could conscientious consumers make purchases mindlessly. They had to worry about supply chains and guarantees, they had to think about what their money was supporting. And they had to make decisions. If they bought a bag whose proceeds went to supporting recently freed slaves, was that the same value, ethically, as buying cotton produced by white, American free labor? Did buying Haitian coffee mean the same thing in the immediate aftermath of the Haitian Revolution as it did under President Boyer? Did purchasing Liberian coffee support the black diaspora, or did it support efforts to relocate America’s black population? Was it more important to support American manufacturers or American farmers?
Arguments about cotton supplies had shifted British arguments about what constituted ethical free labor “at home” versus free labor “abroad.” But thinking about questions of agricultural labor in the United States, where cotton was a domestic product, aligned in slightly different ways with the racialized arguments emerging around indentured labor and domestic African slavery. White settler colonialism and American westward expansion were overlapping ideologies of land appropriation and cultivation, and similar ideas of “white only” territory were familiar in the second half of the nineteenth century in Algeria, Australia, Canada, and South Africa, where the violent destruction of indigenous peoples’ communities, cultures, and economies allowed for expanded cash crop production.111
But as cash crop production encouraged the migration of former slaves away from masters and the erosion of political power among African slave-trading polities, legitimate-commerce proponents began to worry about how to maintain trading ties and a stable consumer market in the face of shifting political fortunes for their allies. They encouraged a view that the most reasonable course, one in the consumer’s best interest, was to support traditional authorities and trading partners and encourage them to “train” their enslaved and formerly enslaved laborers. Inequality was assumed to be a natural part of the world order. Indenture and domestic slavery were justified by ethical capitalism. African colonization and free-soilerism worked alongside free produce because they articulated a similar view of inequality, in which distance ameliorated inequality by creating localized, relative equality. Americans could participate in the same arguments about the global division of labor as European colonialists, and would do so increasingly in the era after the American Civil War.112 But this wasn’t a new, postwar development. It had roots in the imagination of global and domestic production that arose with abolitionists’ attempts to appeal to as wide a range as possible of consumers, merchants, and producers to promote an economic argument against slavery.
Ethical commerce did not provide an answer to the questions of who should benefit from emancipation, but the questions themselves were influential in shaping the arguments that came to a head with the American Civil War. Working in coalition with these different voices brought the economic arguments against slavery into the mainstream in an incredibly powerful way. As an aggrieved writer noted in DeBow’s Review, New Orleans’s proslavery agricultural and industrial newspaper, “Political economists have, for the most part [since the eighteenth century], been constantly tending, with a stronger and stronger bias, against slavery.”113 But “positive purchasing” also made it clear that the variety of commercial solutions to the problem of slavery did not all point to the same result, and the economic beneficiaries of a more moral consumerism were by no means guaranteed to be the enslaved, in Africa or in America.