The “Slave Speculators”
Enslaved Africans being led in a coffle. Image: Buel, J.W. Heroes of the Dark Continent. (New York, 1890), 66. Library of Congress
By the mid-1820s, a new breed of entrepreneurs appeared in the Mississippi Valley, young men who were getting rich fast by specializing in one commodity — humans. Historian E.E. Baptist describes this part of American history in his book The Half Has Never Been Told (2016). Here is part of what has never been told:
“Buying ... enslaved people for low prices in Virginia and Maryland, these young men ‘thrust them into the prison-house for safe-keeping,’ drove their enslaved purchases ‘handcuffed through the country like cattle,’ and boated them down the rivers and around the cape of Florida to New Orleans or elsewhere to the southwest.
“The new entrepreneurs were efficiently connecting stored wealth to markets by handling the entire middle portion of the forced migration process. And African Americans gave them a new name. Robert Falls heard it from his mother, who told him that her enslaver sold her ‘to the slave speculators,’ who drove her and the rest of the coffle ‘like a pack of mules, to the market.’ They went through North Carolina, where, Falls later said, ‘she began to have fits. You see they had sold her away from her baby.’” (Baptist 2016, p. 179)
This human commerce directly affected the Eastern Shore. “One of the most famous speculators, Austin Woolfolk of Baltimore, created a number of innovations that produced increasingly efficient market connections between the old states and the slave frontier. He set up branches of his firm in both selling and buying areas, allowing his trading activities to run more or less continuously.
“In districts ripe with buyable slaves, such as Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Austin Woolfolk and his brother John used advertisements to generate a groundswell of brand recognition.
“Soon competitors did the same, such as Samuel Reynold, who came to Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1831 and placed an ad in the Easton Republican Star. It proclaimed that he wouldn’t leave the Easton Hotel until he bought ‘100 NEGROES, from the age of twelve to twenty-five years, for which he will give higher prices than any real purchaser that is now in the market.’
“Young Frederick Douglass, who was sent back from Baltimore (where he had secretly learned to read) to rural Talbot County, remembered that for those who didn’t read the newspapers, Woolfolk’s employees tacked up ‘flaming hand-bills’ — printed in loud typefaces — headed CASH FOR NEGROES. Woolfolk, who bought Jacob Green’s mother, paid cash. But they refused to haggle, Green recalled; they typically offered a standard rate for individuals of a particular age and sex.”
Baptist writes: “Most of the African Americans who left Kent County went south with speculators, not north to freedom. In 1829 through 1831, the certificates from New Orleans show slave traders bought 100 slaves in Kent County and took them to Louisiana. Kent County at the time had about 10,000 people, 3,000 of whom were enslaved, so 100 sales equaled more than 3 percent of the enslaved.” (pp. 179-180).
Kent County was second only to Charleston, S.C., in that time period for the number of enslaved people sold away to New Orleans: Charleston sold 165, Kent County 100.
Looking even closer: “Ninety-seven of the Kent County slaves sold in New Orleans were between the ages of 10 and 30, and 79 were between 14 and 23, the age group that held most of those who were sold as ‘hands.’
“Look with the eyes of Methodist minister and Kent County native John Dixon Long. He saw the result of these sales at the water’s edge where those to be transported were to be loaded onto a ferry. A crowd of mothers, fathers, and friends waited to say goodbye to one out of every 10 young men and women in the community. Armed white men kept the two crowds apart, for although a coffle-chain already bound the men and boys, everyone was a potential escape threat.
“Not even the women were allowed into the bushes. ‘I have seen [the men], at the Ferry,’ Long remembered, ‘under the necessity of violating the decencies of nature before the women, not being permitted to retire.’ They did the best they could, the opposite sex turning away in kindness.
“Then the barge grounded on the sand and the time came to say goodbye: ‘Farewell, mother,’ ‘farewell, child,’ ‘farewell, John,’ ‘farewell, Bill.’” (p. 180)
In Morgnec, Kent County, in 1876, Henry Wilson married Martha Jane Caulk. A farmhand and also a preacher, he was known as “Rev.” Their granddaughter Dorothy Taylor Campher recently told his story of being a fugitive from slavery to Karen Somerville:
“Where he was when all this happened nobody knows. He was too young or maybe too confused to understand where the world was at. There were nine children and their mother and father. They were all slaves. He of course told this story about his life to my mother, Sarah Mariah Wilson; he was her father, and when he came here from Richmond, Va., all those years ago he married Martha Jane Caulk.
“They were on an auction block. He was watching these White men [as they] skinned back the lips of his parents to look at their teeth. Then he heard them remark about their ages and condition. They were sold. And sold separately mind you. ‘All us children,’ he would say, ‘were screaming and crying and wrapping ourselves around the legs of our parents but that didn’t mean anything to them — they’d just pull us off, throw you to the side and kept on with their selling and buying.’
“But my father broke out in song as they were putting him in that cart and I always remember him shouting: ‘YOU CAN SELL ME TO GEORGIA BUT YOU CANNOT SELL MY SOUL. WE WILL JOIN THE BAND OF ANGELS GOING THROUGH THE PROMISED LAND. GOODBYE WIFE AND CHILDREN ‘TIL WE MEET AGAIN.’”
Martha Jane sang that song to Sarah, and Sarah sang it to Dorothy. She says the melody was rote and chanted with the lines repeating at always in the same pace. She likened the style to that of today’s rap. They were all sold that day, the last time to see each other in life.
Campher continued her story, “Henry was nine years old at the time and described himself as being a big strapping boy. Henry ended up delivered to a shanty, a hut with no floor. He recalled someone doling out one pair of shoes and one pair of overalls, just once a year; no matter what the weather was you got no more. And the food — uncooked fat-meat, meal, and molasses — was rationed days at a time. Years passed and Henry was in his teens — early, mid- or late teens we don’t know — but he says he ran away. He slept under a bridge near the river and he stayed close to small streams. He said he could hear the dogs barking through the woods by a white man and his madame and they took him and put him in a bale of hay on their wagon and he said he could hear the barking get closer.” Henry lived to be free.
For more about the "slave speculators," and other aspects of the history of slavery in America, read E.E. Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The title also reveals that this is the story of how profoundly slavery has shaped America today.
Jeanette E. Sherbondy is a retired anthropology professor from Washington College and has lived here since 1986. In retirement she has been active with the Kent County Historical Society and Sumner Hall, one of the organizers of Legacy Day, and helped get highway /historical markers recognizing Henry Highland Garnet. She published an article on her ethnohistorical research of the free Black village, Morgnec.
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