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A Slave Is A Dead Soul.
-Juan Francisco Manzano, Autobiography of a Slave
Jefferson’s embrace of empire
evolved around the liberties of white men rather than of human beings
in general.
-Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
A Black character might appear in a
horror film, but you can bet he or she will be the first person to be
taken out first, as soon as the danger or “monster” makes
an appearance. It’s as if the underlying message is that the
danger or “monsters” and Black people shouldn’t
appear together. Should never appear together! Never have appeared
together! That is, according to Hollywood.
For the fantasy-producing industry,
unsettling messages make for discontented citizens!
Jordan Peele’s film, Get
Out suggests, however,
just the opposite - that the danger and Black people appearing
together, in reality, is reality! The film looks like a “horror”
flick to others simply following the action, as if from a distance.
In Get Out,
the kidnapping of Black people by white, wealthy people, in the
present time, is real! So the film asks, what happens when these
snatched, taken, kidnapped are drugged and dragged away from their
lives?
Because the danger seems, at first,
oblique, until the film forces its viewers to ask why would it appear
usual, normal, for Black Americans to appear as “servants”?
Even sexual playmates?
The “snatched” are taken
miles from home, and once effectively killed,
each lives a life they would have never dreamed of. On the other
hand, the perpetrators experience nothing less than bliss: everyone
is quite happy to have the privilege of having a dependable maid,
gardener, or sex partner. The violence of the
monster, however, is barely perceptible to anyone outside such a
fantastical narrative - except maybe to another Black American.
**
This is what makes it a “‘sunup
to sundown’” enterprise”: productivity! Greet
the sun rising and kiss it goodnight!
Work the enslaved Blacks
“harder” and “faster!” Greed and indifference
working hand-in-hand, ensured that when Americans, indeed the world,
thought of productivity, they looked to the Kingdom of Cotton in the
Mississippi Valley!
Between 1820 and 1860, historian
Walter Johnson writes in River
of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom,
“the productivity of the average slave on the average cotton
plantation in Mississippi increased sixfold.” In the parlance
of the day, writes Johnson, cotton was “‘made’ at
the juncture of these processes - ecology, labor, marketing, and
credit. Indeed, we might say that, along with the cotton, planters
themselves were made at the juncture of the process.” Affleck’s
Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book served
as another narrative guide to productivity and the wealthy. A
must-read “bestseller” for the man with a “design,”
a dream! Plenty of men want to reap the rewards of growing cotton!
However craftily written - imaging
notions of “liberties” for all men, white
men - the overall narrative of the cotton industry, built on the
ideology of capitalism, wasn’t designed to support such
“liberties” for all.
Even not all white men!
Yet, the introduction of African
slavery to the New World started something that few wanted to end,
except, of course, those Africans and their descendants, effectively
killed off at
capture!
Giving life to the steamboat and
railroad industries, to the merchants and banking class, to the
sellers and buyers of an assortment of must-have cotton-picking
instruments, and to the sellers and buyers of bales of cotton, the
Mississippi Valley’s Cotton Kingdom reduced Africans and
African Americans from human beings to “hands,” not just
on ledgers but most importantly, within their mega-narratives
designating who is exploitable.
The newcomers to the Mississippi
Valley took up Jefferson’s dream of land expansion and Empire.
A great
country sitting atop the world!
**
In Louisiana, in part of that
territory purchased from France by Jefferson in 1803, slaveholder
Alonzo Snyder keeps a record of his
achievements, his
progress. His 1852
records reveal how closely the system of productivity, while linking
enslaved Blacks to the land and from there to the market, the
slaveholder and those depended on this way of existing in the world
among others, also produces a culture indifferent to its inherent
cruelty.
“John picked 180 pounds on
Monday, 135 on Tuesday, 320 on Wednesday, 330 on Thursday, 315 on
Friday, and 325 on Saturday.” John’s total for the week
came to 1705 pounds of cotton picked for market. Letty picked “320
pounds on Monday, 325 on Tuesday, 385 on Wednesday, 365 on Thursday,
365 on Friday, and 350 on Saturday.” Her total of cotton picked
for the week, 2,110.
It’s nothing personal! It’s
strictly business!
Think of twenty-three Johns and
Lettys because Snyder had, all total, twenty-five enslaved “hands”
on the Buena Vista plantation. And how many slaveholders such as
Alonzo Snyder?
The success of the slaveholders’
productivity depends on controlling the “labor” force.
For any Black, failing to “make weight” or leaving a
“cotton in the ball,” there’s the wrath of the
slaveholder to keep in mind. The Blacks could spot the worst of the
worst slaveholder, usually those in debt. The meanest and most
violent characters who thought nothing of administering fifteen or
thirty or more lashes. According to one enslaved Black, John Brown,
quoted in River of Dark
Dreams, it would be weeks
before he could walk.
The enslaved had to adjust, and
fast.
Jefferson’s vision of
“commercial imperialism” permeated the atmosphere, so
that white men on the periphery of the cotton industry, tinkered with
the vision to make it represent their interests. One such character
was that of Mathew Maury who, in the 1850s, spoke of a “pro-slavery
political economy.”
And why? In the distance, white men
like Maury, hear the increasing concerns of abolitionists calling for
the end of trade in Black people. If such a thing should come to
pass, what would become of the American men, struggling on the
periphery of the Cotton Kingdom? Are they not privileged too?
Shouldn’t their pursuit of liberty represent more than words on
paper?
Undead Black
people on plantations represent the monster in any version of the
American dream.
Looking to the Mississippi Valley,
Maury wrote of his vision and in his vision the Cotton Kingdom was
central but it was necessary if Jefferson’s vision is to be
fulfilled, to expand the industry toward the West and the South. And
in Maury’s vision, “the South” meant a “Southern
empire of commercial flow,” starting with Mexico. Railroads
“joining the Atlantic and Pacific ocean across the Isthmus of
Panama” would make the American Empire greater than any before
it!
And this greatness is there for the
taking, Maury argues. Don’t
we already have the Monroe Doctrine as a guiding narrative of
entitlement?
Maury asks his fellow Americans to
see with him the deficiencies already in the region to be conquered.
We are now, Maury claims, reaching 200 million consumers “through
the markets of the Atlantic Ocean.” But what if we closed this
spatial gap? In the Pacific “and the countries bordering upon
it not less than 600 million [people], whose wants have always been
meagerly supplied.”
“Space,” for Maury,
writes Johnson, shouldn’t be limited to the usual concepts of
politics, “national” or “regional.”
Re-imagine space as “economy produced space.” In this way
of thinking, borders and boundaries disappear and productivity and
profits take their place. We
flow like a river; we
gather unto ourselves what is rightful ours. We
project globally, and
“the riverine and maritime geography that defined the
Mississippi Valley and the cotton trade” becomes “empire.”
Look past the Mississippi Valley and
see our Amazon
Valley!
“If ever the vegetation there
me subdued and bought under,” writes Maury, “if ever the
soil be reclaimed from the forest, the reptile and the wild beast,
and subjected to the hoe, it must be done by the African, with the
American axe in his hand.”
Besides, God deemed it so!
Maury’s vision spurs others to
pursue the profits and power to be had in a global enterprise in
which sat the kings of the kingdom: white men of the nonslaveholding
class!
Someone like William Walker…
**
In an article by James D. B. DeBow,
another visionary, sees Cuba, Haiti and British and French West
Indies, writes Johnson, as ideal for Africans, for the “natural
history” of Blacks has never changed, he argued, throughout the
ages and in “all circumstances.” Blacks, DeBow continues,
are identifiable only in the “cane fields” as laborers,
under the control of their owners. It’s their “natural”
condition. Blacks flourish in this ordering of the social hierarchy,
becoming “civilized and useful” to the American dream.
But if emancipated, look out! “They degenerate back to
barbarism.”
Johnson interprets DeBow as
envisioning an image of lazy
Blacks who don’t
work hard enough, if not for their role as enslaved people.
True enough, but the description of
Black people as useful only if enslaved also calls out for narrative
re-reinforcements. Maury
to DeBow to immediate and future generations of historians: Write,
if you are able! Write the narrative warning of the dangers of undead
Blacks! On behalf of the brotherhood of victims terrified of the
undead, take a stand and unify! More, not fewer Blacks in bondage!
DeBow manages, as Johnson notes, “to
convert the economic effects of a series of decisions made by free
people, about how to organize their lives and priorities after
emancipation into a set of assertion’s about race and history.”
That’s a substantial shove of the mega-narrative supporting the
cotton plantation system toward a permanent policy.
**
Fleeing oppression is the narrative
I learned in Catholic elementary school in the 1950s. The good
pilgrims fled the oppression - economic and religious - in Europe to
pursuit freedom in the New World. Gone would be the centuries of
intolerance and aggression. So it’s no surprise that by 1823,
the US creates a narrative, the Monroe Doctrine, in which it decrees
the necessity of Americans (white men) to take “by military
force if necessary, the transfer of Cuba from Spain to any other
imperial power.”
While the threat of war is meant to
deter England from landing troops in Cuba, it’s Spain, a
declining Empire, that America wants to give the boot to! By 1848, US
perseverance seems to be paying off. When the US-Mexican War ends,
writes Johnson, the US, through the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,
expanded its territory, gaining “the present-day states of
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and California.”
So the US flexes its muscles again,
to its fellow European colonialists: We
are coming! We are coming! We’ll set up camps! Settlements!
Homes and businesses! Churches. We’ll occupy territory!
When greed masters the economic
space, indifference shuts down commonsense debates about how much is
too much sugar and too much cotton. Instead, debate centers on the
role of the Creole populations in the Central and Caribbean
countries. Not that the conquerors care about the people themselves,
no. But rather, the question asked is whether or not the Creole
population will join the US cause for liberty? Would Spain free its
enslaved Black population to fight side-by-side with their former
enslavers?
The Creoles, thinking of their own
interests and gains as a result of slavery, did favor the US
expansionists. They reasoned: “Negroes are
not an obstacle to
liberty on the political rights of the Americans; where the Negroes
are not an
instrument in the hands of the government to terrify and subjugate
its citizens; where the Negroes are
not an inexhaustible mine
of taxes and contributions.”
But…
**
And before Walker…
General Narciso Lopez leaves New
Orleans on a steamboat while a crowd cheers him on his journey toward
Cuba. DeBow’s message worked: the Americans on the docks,
waving and shouting, recognized their future on board the Pampero.
Cuba had to be invaded!
And the plan of invasion almost
worked - if not for a conspiracy that robbed America of its rightful
destiny.
As Johnson writes, the newspaper,
the Delta, writing
of the concerns of Americans fearing a battle with Spainish soldiers,
let alone, undead Blacks,
articulated a drying up of the funds for the continuation of Lopez’s
journey. It was illegal, Johnson explains, to “cold-call donors
or soldiers.” Lopez turned his attention to nonslaveholding
white men, struggling to be at the top of the food chain, where sat,
the slaveholding class.
With the pursuit of wealth and power
embedded in American culture, Lopez capitalized on exploiting the
white men at the bottom. They, too, want to join Jefferson’s
dream or at least contribute to the destiny that is America.
Men, bricklayers, farmers,
boatmen, join my army! Join me, Lopez!
And Lopez’s invitation worked!
A hundred men put their “lives
in jeopardy” to join Lopez’s army in the summer of 1851,
expecting, in turn, $4,000 “in bonds payable by the
revolutionary government of Cuba.” (Like “the Wall,”
to be paid for by Mexico!). Have no fear, otherwise! “One
American was equal to ten Spaniards.”
The Indigenous were not consulted!
They were, after all, an oppressed population, and, as such, why
wouldn’t they substitute their lives under the rule of the
Spaniards for the Americans? “Cuban patriots” would
welcome the Americans with open arms, reasoned men like Lopez. For
the “cause of liberty,” the oppressed would be willing to
join an armed insurrection - of questionable characters.
It was all a scam! Johnson notes
that Lopez’s greed blinded his vision of the scammers, the even
greedier exploiters determined at all cost to conqueror Central
America with whatever fool would sign up. Drawing Lopez “further
and further into their confidence” the “organizers”
unfurling lie after lie about the existence of “invasion plans”
and “stores of guns and ammunition.”
There were even 14,000 supporters of
Lopez’s mission on the island, just waiting for him to arrive!
On August 3, 1851, “at four
o’clock in the morning,” the
Pampero sets sail for
Cuba. But the steamboat was already ailing: “her machinery
needed repairs that the general,” writes Johnson, “operating
under the threat of federal seizure, didn’t have time to make.”
Five days out, the coal is running low.
News in the Delta,
nonetheless, sings the praise of the general and his men.
When the steamboat arrives at Las
Pozas, mosquitoes greet them with glee! Oppressive heat bear hugs
them. Lopez and his men are forced to dump their gear, including
weaponry, along the way, as they walked in search of a safe location
to camp. The “unique mangoes” caught their attention and,
despite warnings from Lopez, many of the men ate of the fruit.
Realizing he was witnessing
“indiscipline and insubordination of ill-trained soldiers,”
the general pleas with his men to think of survival.
The people of Las Pozas certainly
thought of their survival. They fled! The Indigenous want no part of
the “filibusters in overthrowing their Spanish oppressors.”
Creole planters, in the meantime, verbalized support for Lopez. That
is, until he arrived! Then they refused to join the fight!
On August 13th, Lopez and his men
were attacked. As the general urged them to fight on, the remaining
men had to make their way on soil that was a bloody, “sticky
mess.”
After thirty minutes, some thirty to
thirty-five of Lopez’s men added to the “sticky mess”
as the dead or the wounded. As for the Spanish, one hundred and
eighty soldiers were dead, but, as Johnson explains, their force at
the start of the battle numbered “close to eight hundred.”
It wasn’t good for Lopez who
promptly left his wounded behind. He continued on.
Following the direction of an
enslaved Black guide, Lopez and his remaining men entered the woods.
Johnson suggests that it’s possible the guide did a little
misdirecting
of the Americans. Arriving at Cafetal de Frias, Lopez walks among his
dead with no idea that “he was already dead” himself.
Controlling the narrative flow of the news, are the Spaniards,
declining in Empire, but pros at effectively killing their monster
with words.
World, take note: the “general
was a hopeless interloper.” And it seemed so, for Lopez and his
men were forced to roast
his horse named Roast.
It would be their last
meal.
The next day, the Spanish cavalry
surrounded Lopez and his men and began picking them off, “one
by one.” August 28th was Lopez’s day to be captured. And
he is.
On September 1, 1851, it’s
reported that a collar is placed around his neck, cutting off his
airflow and crushing his windpipe. “It would take the general
several agonizing minutes to die.”
As Johnson explains, “Lopez’s
inglorious surrender - indeed, his entire filibuster career - marked
a rupture in the received history of the United States, the South,
and the Mississippi Valley: a rupture in the idea of Manifest Destiny
that was no less difficult for the philosophers of filibusterism to
repair for being the bungled work of a quixotic fool.”
Nonetheless, William Walker offers a
mass for Lopez’s “soul.” The great destiny of
America is still there for the taking! To Central America - again!
Jefferson’s dream is, after
all, a “Southern dream of Caribbean empire.”
In the era of “Negro Fever,”
an American becomes
president of Nicaragua. At least, temporarily, William Walker is
president of Nicaragua.
**
Walker wastes no time: he appeals to
the discontent of the nonslaveholding white Southerner, as Johnson
suggests, finding themselves in
the margins of the
American Empire narrative, too close to the enslaved Blacks. Because
“Negro Fever” was drawing higher prices than ever before,
“slave prices were ‘raging far above their legitimate
level…” A Black, Johnson explains, who would have been
purchased “for $400 in 1828 now,” with thirty years on
him, “sells for $800.” The higher prices of human labor
cost increased in the Cotton Kingdom as cotton sold “ten and
one-half cents” higher than it had two or three years before.
The nonslaveholding white population
didn’t miss how further down they were being pushed by the
enterprise in the Mississippi Valley.
By the 1850s, writes Johnson, “Deep
South slaveholders were riding the slaves-cotton-slaves-cotton cycle
to new levels of prosperity.” Everyone could and did, he adds,
see the visible signs of success in the Mississippi Valley.
Certainly, the nonslaveholding class.
In pursuit of his interpretation of
Jefferson’s vision of American Empire, William Walker sees
himself as the embodiment of that American
vision, a vision he
inserts, as did DeBow, that prefigures white nonslaveholders.
The thirty-three-year-old Walker
begins with fundraising for his army, promising to not only pay good
money but also to distribute “land grants” at
the end of the battle.
Fifty-eight men, called Fifty-six Immortals, since, as Johnson
explains, one receives a court martial for cowardice and another goes
missing, took up Walker’s call to invade Nicaragua.
Walker’s destination is Lake
Nicaragua. The way he saw it, with hard work and ingenuity, the Lake
could connect the Pacific on the West and the Atlantic on the East
with trade from the Mississippi Valley. Once in Nicaragua, Walker
calls for unification, nodding to his Conservative rival, Patrice
Rivas. But not waiting for an answer, Walker declares “Rivas a
traitor” and calls for another “an election.” And
so it happens that “in June 1856, eighteen months after his
bootless surrender to the U. S. Army in California, William Walker
was elected president of Nicaragua.”
Walker’s filibuster government
initiates the looting of
Nicaragua. His government “(re)legalize[s] slavery.” He
also (“re)open[s] the African slave trade,” establishing,
“an international market in flesh” to fund the enterprise
in Nicaragua.
Black humanity, along with gold and
silver, went up the Lake and, packed, all, aboard ships headed toward
the US, and the Cotton Kingdom in the Mississippi Valley.
American tycoon, Cornelius
Vanderbilt, saw enough and took it upon himself to give Walker the
boot! After losing “control of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan
River,” Walker is forced to surrender on May 1, 1857, to “a
US Navy ship waiting just off the western coast of Nicaragua.”
Walker’s “cruelty and
indifference” toward his men, writes Johnson, preceded him. His
image as a brutal man didn’t wane. And when word reached the US
about the men he left behind, their bodies washing up in Northern
ports “in the most pitiable condition,” he should have
been history.
On the contrary, Walker continued
his crusade, moving his operation to New Orleans and making trips
around the South in an effort “to raise money for his next”
and last trip - back to Nicaragua!
The lesson for the contrary: the
pursuit of liberty and Empire can’t be a one-man show.
**
The South’s identification as
the slaveholding land of white supremacy, despite the existence of
nonslaveholders, nonetheless, created a need for both slaveholders
and nonslaveholders “to seek solutions outside the boundaries
of their region and of the United States.” The focus shifted to
Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, a landscape hosting the
interests of Europeans. And who granted the English, French, and
Spanish the right to capitalize on the wealth and free labor? Hinton
Rowan Helper in his tract, “The Impending Crisis of the South,”
takes up the cause by, once again, reminding Americans to unify in
fear of an undead
Black population. No surprise, Helper specifically appeals to the
nonslaveholding class.
In a crisis,
Helper argues, white men take up arms; they fight for what has been
stolen from them, denied them; they fight to possess the wealth and
power that is rightfully theirs. Helper begins by redefining “the
South,” detaching it from its identification with the
institution of slavery and the interests of the slaveholders.
Nonslaveholding white men are the South’s “rightful
exclusive owners.” Either the South is a land of slaveholding
rich white men or it’s the land of white supremacy where “white
inequality - black slaves - was forcibly excised.” For Helper,
the South couldn’t be both!
He counted on the nonslaveholding
class hatred of Blacks to follow the ideology of white supremacy.
In subsequent years, Walker writes,
The War in Nicaragua,
a book, Johnson explains, that was no more than “a piece of
agitprop designed to convince Southerners that the solution to their
problems lay in Nicaragua.” It advocated the rise of
nonslaveholding white man in search of their manhood.
You’ll find your manhood in Nicaragua! Never
mind the presence of “Indians and Negroes,” governed,
Walker claimed, by the “mongrel,” that is, the union of
European and Indigenous people in the country. Want
to be a slave, stay home!
The misdirected
keep coming, wondering
even now in 2021, why they encounter the monster - reflecting, for
anyone with eyes to see, their irrationality, greed, indifference,
and cruelty back to them!
Slavery ensured the “social
and historical” progress of white America. It enabled white
Americans to proclaim freedom as their rightful state of existence
while denying the freedom of others. Black humanity, relegated to
“hands,” the better to control and exploit, ultimately
reclaim their humanity.
Some
Americans have been angry about this development ever since!
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