The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Kilpatrick, another enslaved man, also helps to highlight this aspect of enslaved people’s solidarity and community-building, this time with a specific focus on how African-American men built new models of masculinity based around care, “ordinary virtues,” and “small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings” (282). Sold to “a trader passing through North Carolina in the 1830s” (280), Kilpatrick is separated from his wife and his two daughters, Lettice and Nelly. When he is sold on and builds “a cabin on his enslaver’s cotton labor camp,” he adopts George Jones, “a five-year-old orphaned by the trade” (281). When, thanks to Kilpatrick’s care, Jones grows into an adult, he has two daughters of his own and names them Lettice and Nelly. Baptist highlights the fact that in “the slave labor camps of the Southwest, an adult man’s commitment to ordinary as opposed to heroic virtues [can] mean the difference between life and death for children like George Jones” (282). Ultimately, Baptist shows that men like Kilpatrick and Jones help keep their communities alive and functioning, in the face of great horror and abuse, by adopting “an idea of manhood incompatible with the readiness-for-vengeance that [has] long defined manhood, not only for white in the antebellum South, but throughout much of Western history” (281).

Of course, not all African-American men eschew vengeance. David Walker, for instance, shows that many African Americans are righteously enraged by the abuse heaped upon them and their fellows by a white supremacist society and see violent revolt as the only solution. A free African American, Walker runs a secondhand clothing store in an African-American neighborhood in Boston. While living in Charleston, he had seen “panicked whites torture and execute over thirty enslaved men who had allegedly conspired […] to launch a slave revolt” (195). This and other experiences lead him to write and publish a book of essays titled An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, in which he declares that “[m]ost whites […] either directly or tacitly [support] slavery and [are] thus ‘our natural enemies’” (195). He calls for slaves to rise up against white violence and domination, insisting that “freedom is your natural right,” and promises white people that enslaved people will “glory in death,” statements that, Baptist notes, require “real courage” (196) in the volatile, racist society in which he lives. Walker’s writing spreads panic throughout white society and there are rumors that “various state governments [have] put a bounty of $3000 on [his] head” (197). When he does die, allegedly of consumption or tuberculosis, “[m]any African Americans [believe] that he [has] been poisoned” (197).