This little piece is a
fuller version of an essay, which, in accordance with the Ol' Bloviator's
quixotic crusade to better educate the Yankees on matters historical, was
posted up yonder at TIME.COM.
Reflecting on recent calls for
stripping the name of Robert E. Lee, a slave owner who went to war in slavery's
defense, from Washington & Lee University, historian Emory Thomas noted
that since the school's other namesake, George Washington, was also a
slaveholder, and raised the awkward possibility that one of the country's most
distinguished liberal arts institutions might be known one day simply as
"&." Thomas spoke with tongue securely in cheek, but the scenario he
posited seemed a logical, if absurd, progression of the current obsession with
de-christening institutions, buildings, parks, or thoroughfares named for
someone with ties to slavery. However well-intentioned such efforts may be,
recent explorations by several historians suggest how truly monumental the task
of rooting out connections with such an indisputably powerful, intricately
pervasive, and ultimately integral institution would be.
African slave labor had been
introduced on the tobacco plantations of the seventeenth century Chesapeake,
but slavery's emergence as a truly dominant force in national and international
commerce and finance awaited the arrival in 1793 of Eli Whitney's fabulous
cotton gin, which spurred the explosive spread of cotton-growing and slavery
across the southern interior and into the new southwestern states of Alabama
and Mississippi. The booming southwestern cotton frontier proved an
irresistible magnet for both people, free and unfree, and financial investment.
Some struggling Upper South planters opted to relocate with their slaves in
tow. With slave prices rising meteorically in response to soaring demand, and
stoked as well by a congressional ban on further importation after 1808, many
others simply consigned their increasingly valuable human property to a massive
stream of bound labor destined first for the lucrative slave markets of the
Southwest. Cotton accounted for nearly one-third of the value of U.S. exported
merchandise by 1820, and closer to two-thirds by 1860, more than three-fourths
of it going to Great Britain.
Maintaining this fibrous connection
between southern slave plantations and the voracious looms of Lancashire required
myriad supporting ventures in production, trade, services, and financing on
both sides of the Atlantic. With the American banking system still wracked with
growing pains in the early nineteenth century, English firms like Baring
Brothers marketed high-yield bonds backed by the slaveholdings of planters in
Louisiana and elsewhere, while profits extracted from the slave trade supplied
vital capital for the nascent Barclays Bank. As the American financial system
matured, a wide range of domestic banks got in on this act. Two of these,
Citizens' Bank and Canal Bank of Louisiana, which accepted roughly 13,000
slaves as collateral and came to own well over a thousand slaves outright,
became cogs in the great financial wheel that became J. P. Morgan Chase. Likewise,
Moses Taylor, director of the City Bank of New York, the forerunner of Citibank,
managed the fruits of the tireless exertions of slaves on large sugar
plantations and was also deeply involved in the illicit importation of slaves
into Cuba.
Northern shippers also profited
handsomely after 1808 in the brisk interstate transfer in slaves that saw some
one million bondsmen transferred by sea as well as land from the Upper to the
Lower South between 1810 and 1860. Thus it was not in New Orleans but Providence
that some of the state's most prosperous and influential citizens gathered at
what the local newspaper described as "a very numerous and respectable"
meeting, on November 2, 1835, to unanimously endorse several resolutions
condemning the actions of recently formed anti-slavery societies in the free
states, declaring "coercive measures for the abolition of slavery" a "violation
of the sacred rights of property" and "dangerous to the existing friendship and
of business between different sections of our country." This proclamation was
altogether fitting. Rhode Island had sent more than twice as many ships to
Africa for slaves than all of the other colonies or states combined, many of
them as part of the infamous Triangular Trade in New England rum, African
slaves and southern or Caribbean molasses and sugar. Across the region, a
sizable workforce was also employed in building the vessels requisite to these
activities. Although slavery was said to be the "peculiar institution" of the
South, so pervasive were Boston's entanglements with it that one wonders
whether when the Lowells spoke only to the Cabots, the subject of their common
ties to the slave trade ever came up.
As for New York, surely there are
few cities, North or South, where so many prominent physical fixtures are tied
to slavery, even down to key sports venues like Madison Square Garden, Citi
Field, and the Barclay Center. These disturbing reminders are actually less
incongruous than they seem. Even though
the international slave trade had been illegal for more than half a century,
this illicit commerce was being conducted so brazenly in the city, the London
Times dubbed New York "the greatest slave trading market in the world" in
1860.This appellation seemed to trouble the city's Episcopalians less than
their Anglican brethren across the water, however. More than once the
convention of the Diocese of New York declined by an "overwhelming majority"
even to discuss resolutions asking the Bishop and clergy of the Diocese to
speak out against a practice, so blatantly contrary to "the teachings of the
Church" and "the laws of God."
Ironically,
in an era when so much wealth was derived from pursuits directly related to
slavery the two institutions seemingly most deserving of philanthropy were
churches and colleges. Surely no institution of higher learning has confronted
its historical indebtedness to slavery and the slave trade more forthrightly
than Brown University, whose principal early benefactors included the Brown
brothers, who, operating as under the name of Nicholas Brown and Company raked
in hefty profits from trading and transporting slaves. All told, at least
thirty members of Brown's early governing board at one time owned or captained
slave ships. Meanwhile, Tench Francis, who wrote the insurance for some of the
Brown Company's slaving voyages, became one of the founding trustees of the
University of Pennsylvania, whose ranks presented a virtual who's who of
Philadelphia's high-profile slave traders.
And so it goes, from Rutgers, to Columbia, to Yale and Harvard, all of
which and others detailed in Craig Steven Wilder's Ebony and
Ivory, benefited significantly at some point from the largesse of
men who owned or trafficked in human beings.
Although we might quibble about
matters of degree, there is no escaping the critical role of slavery in
facilitating our development as a nation. Historian Calvin
Schermerhorn has it right when he calls enslaved Africans laboring in
southern cotton fields "the strengths and sinews of a robust capitalist
system." By maximizing the output of labor-intensive cotton agriculture in order
to keep pace with the demands of mechanized textile production abroad, slavery
established a vital and timely reciprocity with the Industrial Revolution that
would first stabilize and then position this country for its remarkably swift
journey from the periphery to the core of the world economy. Lest they
exaggerate what can be achieved by simply scouring the taint of slavery from
the faces of a variety of American institutions and edifices, those who propose
to do so would do well to heed the words of a former bondsman featured in the
title of Edward Baptist's recent book
on slavery and American capitalism, for they are truly reacting to a story
whose "half has never been told."
