Follow the Drinking Gourd song

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated  Thu, 14 Oct 2004 23:59:36 -0400,  Wilson Gray
<wilson.gray at RCN.COM> writes

>  > If, as Jim suggests, the song was extremely local, isn't also odd that
>  > Parks (and Parks alone) should have picked up one stanza in North
>  > Carolina and several more a thousand miles away in Texas
>
>  FWIW, my ancestors were slaves in North Carolina before being
>  transported to Texas after Stephen F. Austin, a former slave-holder
>  from Missouri, was successful in re-establishing slavery in Texas. When
>  Texas was part of Mexico, slavery had been outlawed.

Were your ancestors lucky enough to be transported as a family group, or did
they suffer the all-too-common fate of having families broken up for the slave
sale?

As to why your ancestors got taken from North Carolina to Texas, there is a
rather complex reason.

You might think slaves were cheap.  On the contrary.  Circa 1850 a good field
hand would fetch around $500 at auction.  This is equivalent to something
like $100,000 in today's money.  Or another comparison: in 1850 a white artisan
might receive an annual wage of $180 or so, and an unskilled white worker
somewhat less.  If you bought a slave and put him to work, you had to work him for
something like five years before you were doing better than if you had hired a
white laborer.

And you had to buy a slave for cash.  Banks did not like to loan money on
collateral that might at any time drop dead or escape to the North.  (Gives a new
meaning to "collateral damage".)

The rule of thumb was that it took 30 slaves to justify having a white
overseer.  (For less than 30 slaves, on slave was designated the "driver" and acted
as overseer.)  To set up such a plantation with 30+ slaves and an overseer
meant an extremely illiquid investment of the equivalent of 2 to 4 million of
today's dollars.

Other countries' aristocracies were "land-poor".  The plantation owners in
the South, even the prosperous ones, were "slave-poor", to coin a term.  This
was the big economic shortcoming of the South, that so much of its capital was
tied up in slaves.

So what did a plantation Massa or other slaveowner do when he needed money?
He had no choice but to sell some of his slaves.  It might almost be said that
in the slave-owning parts of the South, the unit of currency was not the
dollar but the slave.

What about the infamous cruelty of having slave families broken up for resale
(which strikes me as one of the very worst aspects of slave life in the
South)?  It was not (usually) intentional cruelty on the part of Massa but rather
callousness on the part of the slave-dealer, who said, "I'll take the big one
with the muscles, but his woman ain't gonna fetch enough to make it worthwhile
taking her, and there's no market for the young-uns."

And the slave-dealer was himself in a financial bind.  He was dealing in
slaves, who as I said before were big-ticket items, in a cash- and credit-short
economy, which meant that he had to recoup his investment by resale for cash as
quickly as he could, or else he'd go bankrupt as his working cash ran out.
Even renting out his slaves (a dollar a day was a typical rate) would not do,
because he had to depend on quick turnover to keep from using up his limited
supply of cash.

Where was the market for slaves?  Not in the eastern South, where the
Tidewater (the only area where plantations were found) was already divided up into
plantations most of which grew enough slaves of their own that they didn't have
to buy any.  No, the market was on the frontier where previously empty land
was available for new plantations.

So what most likely happened to your ancestors is that their owner(s) in
North Carolina needed cash and sold them, and the dealer who picked them up sold
them in Texas where slave-holding was expanding and there was a seller's market
in slaves.

As a check on the previous paragraph, do you know when your ancestors were
brought to Texas?  It was probably not during the period of the Republic of
Texas, as its finances were in such bad shape that it couldn't pay for imports
(the Texas dollar bottomed out at 2 cents US).  Possibly it was before 1836, but
I would guess the 1850's as more likely, and most likely during the Panic of
1857, when a lot of plantation owners found themselves short of money and
called in the slave dealers.

[footnotes on request]

    - James A. Landau