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

2 Watermen

chapter 2 Watermen O n ships, boats, docks, canals, and waterways, enslaved people participated in the upper South’s commercial redevelopment. the market whose sinews they in part constituted made possible the resources they sought, yet the same process of market intensification exposed more and more enslaved people to traumatic family separations. that was an irony of nineteenth-century american slavery and perhaps its tragedy as well. modern political economies such as the united States and its trading partners around the globe saw increased demand for products that architects of the system put slaves to work producing. Whether europeans or americans bought cotton clothes, tobacco twists, sugar crystals, or coffee beans, their money found its way into the pockets of those who wrung the raw materials—and some of the finished products—from the sweat of the brow of enslaved african americans. but enslaved people too stood within that system of cash and trade. markets were made of people. as slaves in the coastal upper South of the united States piloted boats, ferried goods, packed, sailed, or constructed ships, they formed ties with coworkers, customers, employers, and other market actors. they drew resources from maritime contacts in commerce and re- allocated them, using them to maintain family ties, often working overtime and out of sight of owners and overseers. Slaves like moses Grandy moved many of the goods and people that knitted together a revitalized political economy in the coastal regions of the upper South after 1814.1 the circumstances under which Grandy lost his family members were connected to increasing demands for enslaved laborers in locations distant from his natal neighborhood in a swampy northeastern corner of north carolina. yet the means by which he accumulated resources to gather them up again also sprang from commercial intensification that integrated Grandy’s immediate environment into an atlantic and global market. by the time Grandy published his autobiography in 1843 the formerly enslaved boatman witnessed four generations of his family separated by sale. When he was young, Grandy recalled that his father “was often sold through the failure of his successive owners,” until he was removed beyond reach of communication, and “four sisters and four brothers” had likewise been sold away. in desperation, Grandy’s mother hid him in the woods. She could not protect him, however, from being taken from her and hired out to a succession of abusive masters as a child.2 tough early working conditions eventually gave way to work aboard canal boats in the first decade of the nineteenth century, on which Grandy learned the arts of riverine navigation. by his twenties, he was piloting boats and managing men. in swamps of solemn cypress, their knobby knees pointing up at the Spanish moss hanging from ponderous limbs, Grandy supervised other enslaved workers loading boats with timber and other goods. on the canal system that connected the albemarle Sound with Virginia’s James river trading complex, he guided boats to market and brought back goods and profits to his masters.3 from the docks, boats, and brackish waters of coastal north carolina, Grandy witnessed the slave trade intensify in tandem with the market for the goods he hauled. neither was an abstraction. piloting a boat on the dismal Swamp canal, he looked up one friday in response to a woman shouting his name to see a coffle of slaves marching away from home, led by two men he knew. he recognized his wife in the drove of people bound together and walking . She was tied up in a wagon. “She cried out to me, ‘i am gone,’” Grandy recalled. With considerable “consternation,” he then approached one of the slavers, asking, “for God’s sake, have you bought my wife?” the man said that he had and matter-of-factly reported that “she had done nothing, but that her master wanted money.” Such excuses rang in the ears and broke the hearts of 64 Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom Watermen 65 generations of enslaved husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. When Grandy advanced, the man he identified as mr. rogerson drew a pistol, warning him to come no closer to his property. “i asked for leave to shake hands with her,” Grandy recalled, “which he refused, but said i might stand at a distance and talk with her.” the captors seemed unmoved at a husband and wife so affected. by the time...