The American Slave Coast

Published on: December 14th, 2015
by Nita Ketner

Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette’s new book, The American Slave Coast, is a history of America’s repugnant slave breeding industry. From the era of early colonization through Emancipation, the book analyzes how the thirteen colonies’ desire for independence, the subsequent United States’ expansion westward, a prodigious crops production and a complicated, erratic money system intersected with a highly charged “intra-Southern” conflict to create a system of enslavement that may have been the first American instance of “Too Big To Fail.”

Europeans had long identified coastal regions of Africa according to the resources the areas produced, thus, the “Gold” Coast and the “Ivory” Coast. Some historians have referred to the Chesapeake region of North America as the “Tobacco Coast.” The Sublettes assert that same region, specifically the land stretching from ports in Maryland and Virginia, to Charleston, South Carolina, could be dubbed the “Slave Coast.” South Carolina primarily dealt in kidnapped Africans, while Maryland and Virginia acquired more slaves through what was called “natural increase,” the reproduction of people they already owned. Young America sought to establish a dominant economy and soon began taking over western lands. To accomplish this, a vast labor force was needed. Slave owners from Chesapeake to South Carolina competed fiercely to provide it.

New Orleans, as the major Southern port, also played a role in the industry. But after a ban on the importation of enslaved people, especially from the Caribbean where many successful slave uprisings were achieved through bloody warfare, the city became a regional clearinghouse for slave-selling. Advertisements marketed these human beings with the peculiar adjective “likely.” For females, that meant the promise to reproduce: an investment with a “return” of more slaves. For men, it meant an expectation to perform at least ten years of hard labor before dropping dead. In countless heart-wrenching scenarios, those on the public auction block were stripped and inspected by prospective buyers. If families had arrived in New Orleans intact, it was here where they were most likely to be forcefully separated. Young men were usually sent to brutal, dangerous labor on the sugar cane plantations. Young, light-skinned women, dubbed “fancy girls,” fetched a higher price than their darker skinned, older sisters.  With so many of these unfortunate souls sent to market from the Chesapeake area, it gives a more sinister weight to the expression “sold down the river.” Many of the buildings where these auctions took place still stand in the French Quarter and Central Business District. The addresses provide a mental map for a gruesome ghost tour.

Sublette and Sublette have laid out in great detail the thorny relationship between North and South as the two regions duked it out over the rules of issuing money and credit, of interstate and international trade, and of property rights. At the very core of this was the institution of slavery.  The authors emphasize that “Slavery was a central fact of America, not a sidebar,” and have unearthed and thoroughly sifted through voluminous historical documents to prove it. Along the way, they introduce us to an array of intriguing characters, not a few of them enduring icons whose mythologized names we, as American school children, were required to memorize and encouraged to revere. We also meet many once-notorious individuals whose names have been swept under the rug of time: heartless slave traders, sleazy newspaper publishers, unscrupulous politicians and their fortunate sons exist alongside ardent abolitionists, pious and extravagant wealthy widows, and unlikely do-gooders. Additionally, we are given accounts of Indian wars, slave revolts, and vigilantism. Elegantly written, the book often feels like an epic, historical novel. Tragically, this is not fiction.

Exhaustively researched and meticulously annotated, The American Slave Coast is not always an easy read. It describes an “economy in which people were capital, children were interest, and women were routinely violated.” However, the Sublettes avoid gratuitousness by presenting relatively few sensational accounts of the “horrifying reality” of life as an enslaved person, opting instead to punctuate the facts via terse, understated truths, such as, “White births were recorded in a Bible; black births, in a ledger.” It also asserts how the effects of slavery continue to reverberate in modern times, for example, the way the wording of the Constitution – and its avoidance of the issue of slavery - established the earliest groundwork for the “uniquely American” concept of carceral labor and the prison industrial complex.

The American Slave Coast is being published as the debate over the removal of Confederate monuments reaches critical mass. It offers food for thought to those who wish to see these monuments stand. For those who want them eradicated, it provides much to plead their case.

The American Slave Coast is available at all of the finer bookstores in town, and online from Amazon.
Also by Ned Sublette: The World that Made New Orleans

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