RELATIONS: America
Soon after I began research into my family history, I discovered that the LSU Special Collections library had an archive of my family’s papers, the ISRAEL L. ADAMS FAMILY PAPERS — an amazing treasure trove of information on my ancestors that I had not known existed. I requested and received a copy of the 705 page PDF document and began to pore through the collection of letters, inventories, receipts, and bills of sale for enslaved human beings. One bill of sale particularly struck me, perhaps because of the date of sale and the name — or perhaps because the young man was exactly the same age as my son.
According to this bill of sale, my 2nd great grandfather purchased a 20 year old Black man for $1,300 on Christmas Eve, 1856. The young man’s name was America. The symbolism took my breath away.
Who was America? Where was he born? Did he have a wife and children? What were his circumstances before he found himself in the hands of slave traders? To find out, I started with the only information I had — his first name, approximate birth date (1836), market value, and the name of the firm that trafficked him, Bolton, Dickens, and Company.
Bolton, Dickens, and Company was one of the largest professional slave trading firms in North America, with sales amounting to millions of dollars. The firm purchased enslaved people in the Upper South (Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri) and sold them to planters in the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana).
Thanks to the work of historians and archivists, Bolton, Dickens, and Company account books have been preserved and even digitized. Within an hour of research on my home computer, I was able to find America listed in their account book. There he was on page 5 in an entry dated December 19th, 1856: “no 84 America.” The account book showed that America had been purchased by the firm for $1080 and sold for $1300. America had been literally sold down the river — from Memphis, Tennessee, to Waterproof, Louisiana, by slave traders Bolton, Dickens and Co. — for a profit to them of $220.
America was not alone in being forced to migrate south. In fact, he was part of one of the largest forced migrations in U.S. history, larger even than the Trail of Tears. According to the National Museum of American History, approximately a million enslaved people were forced to migrate from the Upper South to the cotton plantations of the Deep South to meet the demand for forced labor that had made cotton king.
The more money the planters made from cotton, the more cotton they wanted to grow. The more cotton the planters wanted to grow, the more slaves they needed to grow the cotton. The world’s desire for cotton — and the Southern planters’ and Northern industrialists’ desire for profits — seemed insatiable.
— Henry Louis Gates
In fact, “the number of slaves needed in the new states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, where cotton reigned, increased by an average of 27.5 percent each decade.” The forced labor of these tens of thousands of enslaved people turbo charged the U.S. economy. In 1850 the United States produced about one billion pounds of cotton, while the sale of cotton abroad brought about $72 million into the U.S. economy, a figure that represented 49% of all U.S. export sales.
“The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation.”
— Edward E. Baptist
Young America, then, had become a cog in the machinery of industrialization and global capitalism. But what about his particular life as an individual? I wondered what I could discover from the few details I had.
Bolton, Dickens, and Company, I learned, used Memphis as a base of operations and had built a prison there to hold enslaved individuals. Company advertisements referred to this prison as a “Negro Mart.” From there, enslaved people were transported — either via ship or forced march or a combination of the two — to the firm’s branches in Richmond, Vicksburg, Mobile, Charleston, Lexington, and Jefferson City to be sold.
I assume that America was imprisoned at this “Negro Mart” before being transported south. What was his experience there? I could not find a first-hand account of the Memphis “Negro Mart,” but in his book Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup describes his experience of a “slave pen” like this:
“In one part of the wall there was a strongly ironed door, opening into a narrow, covered passage, leading along one side of the house into the street. The doom of the colored man, upon whom the door leading out of that narrow passage closed, was sealed. The top of the wall supported one end of a roof, which ascended inwards, forming a kind of open shed. Underneath the roof there was a crazy loft all round, where slaves, if so disposed, might sleep at night, or in inclement weather seek shelter from the storm. It was like a farmer’s barnyard in most respects, save it was so constructed that the outside world could never see the human cattle that were herded there.”
According to an article in The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, enslaved people “who were adapted to more tropical climates were shipped to Vicksburg for the New Orleans and Texas trade.” Records show that Bolton, Dickens, and Company used a steamboat called the Princess to transport enslaved people, so it is likely that America traveled aboard that boat, which regularly stopped in Waterproof.
The Princess was said to be one of the most luxurious steamboats on the Mississippi River. According to historian Kelby Ouchley, “Lavish meals were served four times a day in a great central hall and surviving menus list such gourmet delicacies as broiled pompano and stuffed crabs.” As cargo, however, America would not have enjoyed such fare. Instead, traders treated enslaved people like livestock. They were exposed to the elements, given few provisions, and often chained together and forced to stand or lie in their own excrement.
Despite these conditions America survived the journey, which is often referred to as the Second Middle Passage, and arrived in Louisiana, where my 2nd great grandfather, Israel Adams, purchased him. I can infer from America’s $1,300 price, which was roughly the average going rate for a field hand, that my ancestor intended to force him to labor in the fields of his 1,600 acre plantation, ominously named “Locust Ridge,” where the cash crop was cotton.
What would America’s work in the cotton fields have been like? On a typical plantation, slaves worked in the fields ten or more hours a day, six days a week. At planting or harvesting time, planters often forced enslaved workers to stay in the fields 15 or 16 hours a day. Solomon Northup, who like America was forcibly relocated from the Upper to the Lower South and forced to labor in a cotton field, describes the work like this:
Epps [the planter] appeared at the cabin door, and, presenting me a sack, ordered me to the cotton field. At this time I had had no experience whatever in cotton picking. It was an awkward business indeed. While, others used both hands, snatching the cotton and depositing it in the mouth of the sack, with a precision and dexterity that was incomprehensible to me, I had to seize the boll with one hand, and deliberately draw out the white, gushing blossom with the other.
Depositing the cotton in the sack, moreover, was a difficulty that demanded the exercise of both hand and eyes. I was compelled to pick it from the ground where it would fall, nearly as often as from the stalk where it had grown. I made havoc also with the branches, loaded with the yet unbroken bolls, the long, cumbersome sack swinging from side to side in a manner not allowable in the cotton field. After a most laborious day I arrived at the gin-house with my load. When the scale determined its weight to be only ninety-five pounds, not half the quantity required of the poorest picker, Epps threatened the severest flogging, but in consideration of my being a ‘raw hand,’ concluded to pardon me on that occasion.
It was rarely that a day passed by without one or more whippings. This occurred at the time the cotton was weighed. The delinquent, whose weight had fallen short, was taken out, stripped, made to lie upon the ground, face downwards, when he received a punishment proportioned to his offence. It is the literal, unvarnished truth, that the crack of the lash, and the shrieking of the slaves, can be heard from dark till bed time, on Epps’ plantation, any day almost during the entire period of the cotton-picking season.
Here, Northup describes what planters called the “pushing system.” In this system, which led pounds of cotton picked per slave to rise dramatically — from 1.4 million pounds in 1800 to 2 billion in 1860 — enslaved workers were given a quota to meet. When they did not meet the quota, they were whipped or otherwise punished. According to Edward Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told, planters used not only constant beating but also other forms of torture, such as sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, and even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, he writes, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”
These assertions can be hard to stomach for someone whose ancestors owned and ran more than half a dozen cotton plantations, but I do not doubt them. The primary source evidence is overwhelming. A Natchez doctor described the end of a cotton picking day in 1835 like this:
“The overseer meets all hands at the scales, with the lamp, scales, and whip. Each basket is carefully weighed, and the nett weight of cotton set down upon the slate, opposite the name of the picker. … [O]ccasionally the countenance of an idler may be seen to fall. ‘So many pounds short,’ cries the overseer, and takes up his whip, exclaiming, ‘Step this way, you damn lazy scoundrel,’ or ‘Short pounds, you bitch.’ ”
Neither do family stories contradict this unflattering portrait of my enslaver ancestors. My cousin recalls my great aunt Lib as saying that Israel Adams “was known as Marse Izzy to the slaves, and he ruled with an iron hand.”
After the 1856 bill of sale, I can find no further mention of America specifically. The 1860 slave schedule for Tensas Parish notes that Israel Adams enslaved 39 people at Locust Ridge Plantation, three of whom were 25 year old men. If America was 20 in 1856, he would have been around 25 in 1860, so one of the men listed may be him. But there is no way to confirm, as this slave schedule, like most, does not list the names of the enslaved people — only their ages, genders, skin colors, and any infirmities.
Did America live to experience freedom when enslaved people were emancipated in January, 1863, or was he a “slave for life” as the bill of sale defined him? I searched census records after 1870, the first year that Black Americans were listed, but found nothing conclusive.
America was someone’s son, someone’s friend, someone’s best beloved. Yet the only evidence I can find of his existence is his name in a slave trader’s account book and on a bill of his sale — and next to his name on both documents, a dollar amount.**
“The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”
― Edward E. Baptist
*Author’s note: Since this was published, I have found documentation that America was still alive in 1860. My research into his life is ongoing.
Special thanks to Edward Adams, my newly discovered cousin, for granting me permission to title my blog RELATIONS. which is also the title of his book on his Adams and Stewart family history.
About the Author
I began researching my family’s involvement in the slave society of the South in the spring of 2021. Until that time, I knew very little about American history and nothing about genealogy. I am slowly learning about both. To read about my motivation for writing this blog, please see Why focus on this dark chapter of my family history? In addition to the essays and interviews published on Medium, I have published essays and op-eds in Salon, the Austin American Statesman, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, among others. I live in Austin, Texas, with my husband, dog, and five chickens.
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