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 important, within their mega-narratives designating who is exploitable.
The new comers to the Mississippi Valley took up Jefferson's dream of land expansion and Empire. A great country sitting atop the world!
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In Louisiana, part of that territory purchased from France by Jefferson in 1803, slaveholder Alonzo Snyder keeps 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, for Snyder had twenty-five enslaved people on the Buena Vista plantation. And how many slaveholders such as Alonzo Snyder owned even this small grouping of Black people?
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 peripheral 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? White men like Maury hear the increasing concerns of the abolitionist calling for the end of trade in Black people. If slavery should come to an end, what would become of white men struggling on the peripheral 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, B ut it was necessary, if Jefferson's vision was 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 taken, 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."
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