Marching his troop to a section of planted furrows, Simon posted his soldiers: one adult or two children to the head of each row. He announced 11 men as “captains” for the day, and from his slate named 15 laborers to follow each. Beyond a grove of trees, the rising sun showed that a vast field opened beyond. On Ball’s first day in the cotton fields, he and an army of 170 enslaved men, women, and children trudged past uncounted rows of plants, through a mile of clods drying from the hoe. In fact, you could say that the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip. But the source of this ever-rising productivity wasn’t a machine like the ones that were crucial to the textile mills. On the 19th-century cotton frontier, just like in 19th-century factories, enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year. The first slavery, the one of the sugar islands and tobacco fields, had not yielded continuous improvements in labor efficiency. forced migration truly different from the Atlantic slave trade was that it led to continuous increases in productivity per person. By 1820, whites had already transported more than 200,000 enslaved people to the South’s new frontiers in the years since 1790. And now whole armies of slaves, most of them from older states like Maryland, were being moved to new soil. The southwestern frontier was not an island, but an entire subcontinent stripped from its original inhabitants (Cherokee, Shawnee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, etc.) within the span of a generation. This system was inherently new, and it would come to shape not only his life, but the history of the entire United States.Įver since the early 1500s, when Europeans began to transport enslaved Africans to Brazil and the Caribbean islands in large numbers, slavery in the New World had expanded by a process of extension: adding new slaves from Africa, clearing new fields on the next sugar island. There he was resold, and there, on a cotton slave labor camp called Congaree, he encountered the new kind of slavery that was emerging on the frontiers of the early-19th-century South. In 1805, Charles Ball, an enslaved man from Maryland, was sold to a slave trader who marched him in chains to South Carolina.

Baptist the half has never been told