Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South

Epilogue

Epilogue B etween the last decade of the eighteenth century and the onset of civil war, the coastal upper reaches of the southern united States became a slave market society. the ordeals of slaves’ networking to protect family members from separation feature as chapters in that history, as the enslaved were put to work in diversified agriculture, processing, and transportation in places where their ancestors had chiefly cultivated tobacco. enslaved watermen and sailors helped to integrate a national market by ferrying goods to market, while domestic workers toiled in kitchens and parlors and raised the next generation of children. the upper South became more economically diverse as some of the capital generated by selling slaves to distant owners was used to support the intensification of commercial activity. as consequent demand for consumer products rose, so did slaves’ productivity, whether they were processing tobacco for a world market or constructing the ships that would take it there. the production and reproduction of african american families with deep roots had significant ramifications for the political economy. enslaved families bore the costs of laborers sent to the cotton kingdom and those put to work refashioning the landscape nearer to home. Epilogue 203 those who hewed wood for ties and carried water for steam locomotives also bid farewell to their children, who traveled on those same conveyances as goods to market. the advancements in the market that the railroad made possible were embedded within a changing landscape of slavery as slaves who had once driven carts or hilled corn now fired the engines of the upper South’s industrial future. John and lilly baptist witnessed the landscape of that historical drama at key moments of its development. both were born enslaved in Virginia, around 1777, and were still residing in caroline county when freedmen’s bureau agents arrived to legalize their marriage in 1866. but for the rare exception , marriages between slaves had no legal status. the baptists had last been owned by Joseph a. chandler, physician in his early thirties and owner of nineteen slaves in 1860. but chandler did not own the baptists’ surviving children, ellen, 49, agnes, 45, and Judy, 47. in a time in which the average life expectancy for an american slave was just above thirty, even the baptists’ daughters had lived to be senior citizens.1 by the time the freedmen’s bureau agents interviewed them, John and lilly baptist had seen generations brought up and bound away from their corner of the upper South. they were just fourteen when they married in 1791. George Washington was in his first term as president. When that marriage was recognized in law, abraham lincoln had already been assassinated. When they took their vows, no american had yet patented a profitable cotton gin or launched a steamboat south of the potomac river. florida and the louisiana territory were claimed by Spain but firmly held by their indigenous owners. the lands that would become the cotton kingdom, from western Georgia to alabama and mississippi were owned by the muskogee-creeks, cherokees, chickasaws, and choctaws. there were thirteen states then in the united States, and the ink on the bill of rights was not yet dry. by 1866, John and lilly baptist could look out over the country of their birth and recall generations of their enslaved neighbors carried off to distant lands—friends and kin they had laughed with, worshiped with, and loved—including generations of children who had first seen the sun rise over an old tidewater landscape of tobacco and wheat and would see it set beneath the new landscape of cotton and sugar. Since the founding of the federal republic, word had reached the baptists of nearly every major event, and they had seen signs of corresponding changes in the land. they had been married nine years when Gabriel’s rebellion was uncovered in henrico county, forty miles to the south, and twelve years by 204 Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom the time of the louisiana purchase. John baptist was then working as a farm laborer, and lilly, born lilly timlie, likely toiled in the fields as well. during their prime working years, goods, people, and information moved no faster than the gallop of a horse or a ship at full sail. like charles ball, John baptist likely drove a wagon loaded with tobacco and corn to a ferry on a river like the rappahannock or...