1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [184]
And so came the discreet trip upriver, to shamefacedly answer one of those vulgar ads inside the Richmond papers: CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! CASH FOR SLAVES! Well, better that, anyhow, than having one’s ancestral house on King Street—its roof a bit leaky these days, to be sure, but still a handsome old place—seized and auctioned by the sheriff at the courthouse door.
This was how it might have gone with a slaveholder of the very best intentions. There were many whose intentions were a good deal worse.
Back at the turn of the century, no less a Virginian than Thomas Jefferson had recognized the strong financial incentives for a planter to increase his yield of Negro children. The author of the Declaration was always half idealist, half scientist—the two halves often at war with each other. The idealist dreamt of universal emancipation (someday), while the scientist could not help calculating that the offspring of a “breeding woman” at Monticello were worth substantially more than her labor. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” Jefferson wrote to his son-in-law—since, as he explained, “what she produces is an addition to capital.” (A few lines later, he went back to discussing his lofty schemes for the University of Virginia.) By the 1850s, this calculus had given rise to an industry that each year converted tens of thousands of black Virginians into hard cash before sending them south. The Richmond firm of D. M. Pulliam & Co.—one of many competing dealers in the state capital—went so far as to classify its wares into twenty separate categories, from “No. 1 MEN, Extra” down to “Scrubs,” a term for the elderly, the sickly, or the crippled.29
Rare indeed was the black family in Hampton that had not lost one of its members—a sister, a husband, a daughter, a father—to this ever-burgeoning trade. On local farms where slaves were expressly raised for sale, the common practice was to send children to market when they reached the age of eight: old enough to have survived the common diseases of infancy and to be useful in the fields.30
For those not sold, enslavement still often meant a life of sudden disruptions and separations. Hampton was neither quite as placid nor quite as stable as it appeared. The antebellum South had invested heavily in its self-image as a place of changeless order, but in truth, it could sometimes be almost as ruthlessly dynamic as a California gold field or a Manhattan slum. When the more ambitious scions of the old families decided to seek their fortunes in Arkansas or Texas—or even just in another county—the slaves must be equitably divided according to their cash value. Many tidewater field hands, too, were “hired out” annually: slaveholders who possessed more Negroes than they needed rented them to planters short of labor. In Hampton, as in many other places, January 1 was when old rental contracts expired and slaves’ services were auctioned off for the year ahead, sending them to different, often far-flung, plantations. One former slave would recall how each New Year’s Day, “the cries and tears of brothers, sisters, wives, and husbands were heard in [Hampton’s] streets” as black families were separated—at least for twelve months, but possibly forever.31
In short, enslaved Negroes bore witness to, and suffered, all the unbridled energy and restless change of entrepreneurial America, without ever reaping its benefits. Occasionally, perhaps, a slave might put aside a fistful of seeds at harvest