The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Read Online Free PDF Page A

Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.

Afterword

    THE CORPSE
    1861–1937
    L IZA MCCALLUM WALKED SLOWLY back from the lawyer’s office. Just a few days had passed since her second husband, Cade, had died. Now he lay in a whitewashed, above-ground New Orleans tomb. The February wind, cold for Louisiana, bit her seventy-three-year-old bones. It blew a freak flurry across the city of the dead, sweeping stray flakes like tiny sheetsof paper over the whitewashed wall and toward Liza’s slow walk along nearby Oak Street.
    She was probably thinking about the cold mechanics of how to keep living. Since 1890, Cade had been receiving a pension from the federal government as a former soldier of the Union Army. To get it transferred to her, she had to prove they had been legally married. So now the lawyer would mail her depositionto Washington, where bureaucrats would judge it. A clerk would eventually file the document with all the other paper that made up the McCallum case. Then he would put Bundle 11, Can 53367, back in its place between 53366 and 53368 on the shelf, in a warehouse full of shelves.
    On those shelves still sleep the biographies of a million men who had defended the nation against those who had foughtfor the slaveholders’ right to expand slavery. The bundles and cans also contain the stories of soldiers’ families, friends, fellow-soldiers, and communities. And yet they hold clouds of silence, too, fogs that seep from their pages and weigh on the dark air between and under the shelves. For instance, Liza’s own life story, which she told in the depositions she gave to support her claim to Cade’spension, also revealed that she simply couldn’t know all of Cade’s biography. Cade McCallum, Liza told the lawyer, had been born somewhere near the Atlantic. An army friend, who also submitted to an interview for the pension claim, had once said Cade was born in North Carolina, but all Liza remembered wasstories about catching fish from a boat. Maybe he had told her Maryland. Like each of themillions of individuals whose biographies together composed the great epic of the expansion of slavery’s body, he could have explained to Liza how forced migration had destroyed the life into which he’d been born. He could have told her that story every night for decades. But when they both closed their eyes to sleep, no one but Cade—to borrow the words of another survivor of enslavement—could truly“guess the awfulness of it” for him in his own life. Perhaps half of every story is forever unheard. 1
    Yet Liza knew some essential facts. She knew that in 1850, when Cade was already a grown man, his enslaver sent him to Richmond. Turned into money, shipped on to New Orleans, and sold as a hand, by 1861 Cade was toiling on the Iberville Parish slave labor camp of a woman whom he remembered as“Madame Palang.” Liza, for her own part, was in 1861 the property and chief capital investment of a Boonville, Missouri, storekeeper. When news of Fort Sumter came, the Missouri state government immediately split in two halves, pro-Union and pro-Confederate. When the Union Army gained control over the area around St. Louis, antislavery writers in the northern press pushed President Lincoln to usewar powers for emancipation. Lincoln refused, announcing, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky,” and countermanding Union general John Frémont’s preemptive assertion of emancipation in Missouri—like Kentucky, a border state. But Liza’s enslaver already saw how (just as at Fortress Monroe in Virginia) the presence of Union troops at St. Louis could tempt enslaved African Americansto escape. Hearing that a man named Daniel Berger was buying up slaves to take them south, he cashed Liza out for US dollars. By the late summer of 1861, she was “in the traders’ yard” in the town of Plaquemine,