The Northern Manufacturers of Southern Plantation Goods

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In the 1820s, Rhode Island brothers, Isaac Peace Hazard and Rowland Gibson Hazard, educated in Quaker schools, and with some limited experience in the textile industry via their father's wool carding mill, decided to open a business. First called IP and RG Hazard and then renamed RG Hazard and Company, their goal was, "to make cheap goods for the southern planters." They were far from alone. Many northern manufacturers began to produce goods, clothing, shoes and tools like axes and hoes, specifically for the plantation market. Owners of large plantations needed huge quantities of these items on a regular and predictable basis for their enslaved workers, and they desired low cost, low quality items that would yet be rugged enough to stand up to harsh conditions. For a long time, this market had been dominated by British imports, even after the Revolutionary War. By the 1780s though, manufacturers in Massachusetts started to sell shoes, called brogans, to southern markets. Cloth from Rhode Island, such as what the Hazards were providing, soon followed. Cloth manufacturing in the early 19th century didn't happen in the same kind of factory setting that we might picture in the 21st century. The Hazards were in some ways more contractors than what we might consider manufacturers. They would import wool, pay someone to sort and clean it, perhaps on the Hazards'machinery, contract with the local mill to spin the wool into yarn, and then hire local Rhode Island families to weave the yarn into fabric according to preset specifications, on hand looms in their own homes. If the order was for finished clothing, rather than just yards of cloth, the production of that clothing, the sewing of patterns, according to rough sizes, was also done in individual homes. It wasn't just cloth manufacturing that was done in individual northern homes. Massachusetts families produced russet brogans and palm leaf hats in their homes for enslaved workers they would never meet hundreds of miles away in the south. The production of some goods, especially those that required use of specialized machinery, though, moved quickly toward consolidation under one factory roof. In Connecticut, the Collins Company, which produced axes, hoes and sugar cane machetes for the plantation market, employed 300 workers by the early 1830s. The trade off, though, was that the paternalistic employers, the Collins Company, in this case, took their employees out of their own homes and tried to make the factory into the home, creating a factory town they creatively named Collinsville, with company owned housing. Collins then chased off the local taverns and prohibited among his employees and residents, "the daily and habitual practice of drinking spiritous liquors elsewhere." For the employers like Collins, the downside of bringing employees together was that they could collectively organize more easily than workers scattered in their own homes. Although general work stoppage was rare, Collins' workers did move to strike in both 1833 and 1846. Labor organizing wasn't enough to keep Collins employees from unsafe working conditions, though. The process of sharpening axes produced particles that entered the workers lungs and embedded there, causing an illness similar to consumption, and an early death. Samuel Collins was well aware of the problem, saying in 1830 that he hoped workers could, "grind nice, as long as they live." When New England workers began to refused to work altogether, Collins hired recent Irish immigrants rather than invest in safer machinery. Between the northern manufacturing and the southern plantations was a sales and distribution system in the middle. The total size of this trade is unknown. The federal government, at the time, attempted unsuccessfully to measure it. One Boston newspaper estimated that the trade in just northern boots and shoes sold to the south each year was 20 to $30 million to give a sense of the total scale. At its simplest, the middle man might be a single merchant who connected a manufacturer, say the Hazards in Rhode Island, with the large plantation owner in South Carolina who needed a large order of 1000s of yards of cloth. More typically, though, especially with much smaller orders, there might be several more transactions in the chain. A manufacturer might send their goods to a New York City Commission merchant like DW Ives on Pearl Street, which sold russet brogans, and then a southern merchant could purchase the brogans there and then sell to a smaller plantation, or several smaller plantations in the south. Most of this buying and selling operated on credit. And Northern businesses were dependent on the plantation schedule for payment. In some cases, the collateral on unpaid credit was the most liquid property of the plantation, that is the enslaved workers themselves. Those same enslaved workers were the final end consumers of these manufactured goods. On many large plantations, enslaved people received new clothing or cloth from which to make new clothing twice a year, woolen cloth or clothing for the winter months and cotton cloth or clothing for the summer months. When plantation owners ordered full sets of clothing, they may have expected that they would be saving labor, but they soon found that ready to wear, a fairly new concept in the 1830s, was often not so ready. Although the enslavers sent lists to the manufacturers with full measurements of each of their enslaved workers, the resulting clothing was patterned just on height, creating extra work for the women of the plantation, who then had to alter the clothes to actually fit the enslaved workers. Enslaved consumers, of course, had very limited choices. But in this case, the women on at least some of the plantations requested of their enslavers that they purchase cloth instead of the ready made clothing, and their enslavers agreed, demonstrating that these enslaved consumers had at least some small amount of agency in this process. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Seth Rockman, Associate Professor of History at Brown University and author of, "Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery," from which most of the information in this introduction has been drawn.

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:22  
Hi, Seth, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Seth Rockman  10:25  
Oh, this is a wonderful opportunity for me. Thank you for having me. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  10:28  
Yes. So, I want to start by asking, this is not your first book. I want to hear a little bit about what got you interested in writing this particular book.

Dr. Seth Rockman  10:39  
So I'm a labor historian by training and disposition, so most of my scholarship has been about people working and trying to think about the kinds of choices that they're making on job sites, and about the kind of survival strategies that workers in the American past have undertaken to make a go of it in a competitive economy. And so I'd written a first book about working people in Baltimore in the era of Frederick Douglass, a book called, "Scraping By," and that was a book that was very much about how workers sort of navigated slavery and capitalism simultaneously in one location. And coming off of that, it seemed like I'd like to continue to ask those kinds of questions about working people somehow tied to both slavery and capitalism. And it came to me that thinking about a seamstress in New England and a field worker in Mississippi and the ways in which material artifacts might tie their lives and livelihoods together would be a really compelling way to tell a national story about slavery and capitalism's simultaneity in American economic development.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:44  
Yeah. So talk to me then a little bit about the the kinds of sources that you're looking at in this book and and some about the way you decided to structure it. You're looking at, as you just said, a national story. This is a really kind of a big book. You're looking at a fairly long time span here, a national story, but you decide to do it as you I think you say at some point you're it's like a follow, follow-the-object kind of story. So tell me a little bit about the the way you decided to structure it. 

Dr. Seth Rockman  12:17  
Yeah, that's right. So I've used a methodology that that scholars working about the global supply chain today have been using for the last couple of decades, that they've been calling follow-the-goods, and to do so, one starts in the kinds of communities where goods are being produced, and moves along the distribution networks all the way into the communities where they are ultimately being used. And of course, these long supply chains and distribution chains and consumption chains can grow even longer. So for example, in a book that spends a good deal of time talking about textiles woven in New England for enslaved people in the American South to wear, I found a good deal of evidence that most of the wool that is being sourced for this manufacturing is actually coming from Smyrna in the eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire from Buenos Aires in the Spanish Empire. And to that extent, right? All of a sudden, an Ottoman rancher has something to do with the life of a New England weaver and the life of a Louisiana seamstress. And the stories just grow larger and larger. But the book begins in these New England communities, where entrepreneurs have these ideas that if they could make an indestructible hoe or a reliable pair of shoes, they will find a captive and remunerative market in the American South, where over several decades, if not centuries, provisioning expectations have been set so that enslaved people will receive new clothing, potentially new shoes, new tools, on a really regularized and predictable basis, most in most cases, twice a year. And so to tap that kind of market is a really exciting opportunity for some of the early republic's most entrepreneurial would be manufacturers who then mobilize communities in small towns in rural New England to weave cloth or to stitch shoes or to braid palm leaf hats, and in doing so, start this process that will then move through the hands of merchants in places like New York and Philadelphia and Charleston, and then ultimately into the possession of enslavers, who have their own vision of what they want these goods to do, both to accelerate the extraction of enslaved labor for the production of commodities, but also to cast themselves as humanitarian or as benevolent, which is a big part of sort of their fantasy, such that we can think about these New England manufacturers as selling forms of mastery to slaveholders 1000s of miles away. And then the book ends up with enslaved people as the end users, and tries to consider the kinds of ways in which they built a meaningful material culture atop kinds of textiles or kinds of shoes that they themselves did not, in fact, choose, but which they were able to modify and deploy in lots of interesting and surprising ways. One thing that I'll also add to that is that the archive for this book is in a surprising place, and it's not a place that most scholars working on American slavery have thought to look, because it's in New England, and if you're trying to write about what are the politics of enslaved people on the cotton frontier, you're not likely to go to the Rhode Island Historical Society, or to the Mass Historical Society, anything like that. But it turns out that these companies that are specializing in plantation goods, that is to say, the hats and hoes and shovels and shoes and boots made in New England for use in those markets, these companies have astounding archives, and they're archives that have 1000s of letters from slaveholders and from southern merchants, that have letters from traveling salesmen and have letters from the agents of these firms who often spend a good deal of time in the south doing what I call in the book plantation R and D, trying to gather information from enslaved people, among others, about what makes the right kind of axe, or what makes the best kind of fabric that will withstand the demands of the cotton fields. And so all of this information about what life looks like in the south actually comes filtered back to New England, and in these business records, I was able to find a good deal of new material that hasn't really figured very prominently in the history of American slavery. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:36  
So one thing we don't have much of in the archive, though, despite the fact that this is a story of material culture, is the materials themselves, right? This is not something that has largely survived. 

Dr. Seth Rockman  16:49  
Yes. So this is one of the impediments to writing a material culture of plantation slavery. Most of these goods were designed to be used into oblivion. Most of the textiles that were distributed to enslaved people were supposed to last about six months, and when they made it that far, they might be repurposed into rags or bandages or patches or quilt squares. But ultimately, most of this clothing does not exist, and when the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture was gathering its collections about 10 or so years ago, Lonnie Bunch, the director, was asked what he would really, really like to find, and he said, "workday clothing for enslaved people, and I know it doesn't exist," and that has basically been born out. So the same might apply for axes or hoes or shovels, which don't really change a great deal from, say, 1848 to 1868, so it's hard to sort of precisely date a particular model to the moment of slavery versus the moment of of cotton sharecropping on the other side of the Civil War. So I've had to make do with a couple of really sort of rare surviving artifacts that exist, again, not in the plantation south, but in New England. So for example, there's a small town in central Massachusetts called North Brookfield that was the home of an enormous shoe manufacturer who, in the 1890s set up a display at the Chicago World's Fair, and in that display, sent in shoes that they'd found in their plant dating back to the 1830s to sort of create the the company's history. And so, lo and behold, in a small museum in central Massachusetts, you can find the most outstanding example of slave brogans from the 1830s, and I'm able to talk about those and what went into making them. Likewise with the textiles, it's not a dress or a pair of pants that necessarily survives, but it might be a two inch by two inch square, a sample, that would be attached to a business letter from, say, a Charleston merchant saying, "This is the kind of fabric that my customers want. Can you make it?" Or a letter from a New England firm saying, "This is what next year's woolens, twill woven look like. How many yards would you like?" And in the sort of attached to paper, folded up and kept in in business records, these textile samples give us some of the most important evidence we have of what the world of cloth looked like in the 19th century for working people.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:29  
We can probably imagine that the Argentinian sheep herder didn't necessarily know what his wool was going to, but the certainly the people who were running the the factories, the textile mills in New England, absolutely knew what they were selling these textiles to, and the shoes too and the hoes and the axes. And as you talk about in the book, probably even the women who were weaving in their homes for these weaving mills knew where the cloth was going to. Could you talk some about that? You know, we have this sense, of course, looking back in history, that, like, the north was opposed to slavery, and the south accepted slavery, and that's not really the full picture of what's happening.

Dr. Seth Rockman  20:14  
Yeah, there's so many complications to this story, and you touch on a really important question that the book spends a good deal of time trying to answer, "What did people know and when did they know it?" And there are no great surprises for the people who are involved in the production side of these goods. We often think as as industrialization and mechanization transform the economy, and more and more goods are produced for distant consumers, that there's a kind of assumed anonymity. Oh, I don't know. I just produce it for something called the market, and they are distributed. And who ends up wearing these? Who could possibly know? But this is not the case in these New England communities, where it's very obvious that this particular variety of shoe, or this particular variety of hat or this particular weave of cloth is going to end up in plantation markets. The men who organize this business, who distribute the raw materials to household workers, or who gather young women and men into factories, there's no sort of mystery shrouding their markets. And whether they're making a product that is called the Kentucky axe, or whether they're making shoes that are called slave brogans, or whether they're producing a textile that traveled in the 19th century under the name of Negro cloth. No one would be in any way surprised. But the question for me then becomes, what do people do with this information? Right? So I try to imagine a farm woman in New England who is doing piece work sewing of jackets and dresses for enslaved people in Alabama. And is she thinking, "These people are the cause of my bloody fingers as I stitch my 11th dress of the day?" Is she thinking, "I am helping relieve the suffering of the downtrodden, because without my handiwork, they would be colder and exposed, and thus I'm contributing to their amelioration?? Is she humming a minstrel tune just to make the hours go by more quickly? And none of these questions are easily answered, but I try in the book to suggest there's a range of possibilities for northern workers in particular, to imagine their relationship to the wearers and users of their handicraft. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:32  
And it's a little bit more complex than for the owners of the factories or the mills, for instance, and some of them are explicitly trying to almost whitewash their reputations, right? They're, you know, on the one hand, obviously selling to plantation markets, but maybe also supporting abolition causes, and, you know, trying to sort of dance this really fine line.

Dr. Seth Rockman  22:59  
Yeah, it's not as straightforward as I certainly imagined it. I would have probably started out to say that if you are the northern manufacturer of slave shoes or hoes for plantation use, then you probably are interested in the perpetuation of slavery. You probably are going to vote against Abraham Lincoln in 1860. You're going to vote against him again in 1864 and it turns out not really true, that most of the manufacturers involved in this business rush into the Republican Party in the late 1850s. They do so because their commitment to business very much aligns with the Republican Party's platform, which grows out of the Whig party's platform a generation earlier towards national economic development, banking, infrastructure tariffs, right? And so these are business people who see this as for the greater good of the country, and they don't necessarily have to make an immediate sacrifice for two reasons. One, because when the Civil War begins, they repurpose their factories to making goods for the Union Army, so textiles that one year would have been sold as Negro cloth might the following year end up, you know, as as union blue. And the other thing is, they come to believe that with emancipation, they will have, in fact, greater market opportunity in the south by 1860 some northerners are talking about 4 million liberated consumers, and although they have a very dependable captive market in the south, when people are enslaved, they believe they will have an even greater market when enslaved people, as free people, will have consumer choice of a far greater scope.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:41  
So you mentioned tariffs just a little bit ago. I want to ask a little bit about tariffs. So this is tariffs are complicated all the time, but I think it's so much more global and interconnected than I think I realized that 19th century commerce was, and it plays out in the way that tariffs are  working, or perhaps not working, in the way that they might have hoped so the government might have been trying to protect, you know, northern whatever, factories of some sort. But if they had to import some of their raw materials from another country, then it, in fact, is not protecting them. So can you talk a little bit about the ways that we see tariffs playing out in this particular story, that you are looking at the way that tariffs are not working, and then sometimes it just sort of cancels itself out. And you know, by the time they figure out how to adapt to the market, the a new law is passed, and there's no tariff anymore, and then they're just trying to, always struggle, to sort of figure out how to work in the new reality they're in.

Dr. Seth Rockman  25:43  
The tariff debate, which many people might remember as the worst part of high school history, "Oh, my goodness. Something about John C. Calhoun and nullification and the tariff of abominations. I'm just going to tune out." And I certainly had tuned out for almost all of my life to such things, until I came to realize that pretty much at the core of the tariff debate is this question of whether it's going to be English and Scottish and Welsh weavers who are dressing American slaves, or whether it's going to be New England weavers who have this business. And moving into the 19th century, British manufacturers have the majority share of the American plantation goods market. They have a big head start on the United States in their manufacturing capacity, and they can produce goods quite cheaply. And of course, as consumers of slave grown commodities like cotton, the sort of trade networks are already there to return these goods in exchange for the raw materials. But American manufacturers see this as a place that they want to enter, particularly in the aftermath of the war of 1812 and this is a good market if you are trying to start an industrial economy. Why? Because you're producing goods that don't have to be very good. You don't have to be good at manufacturing, they tell themselves, to make low quality cloth or to make low quality tools, and the presumption of enslaved people as the users of these tools allows them to basically try to figure stuff out. And they use this space, this market segment, for a learning process, more or less, to figure out how to break various kinds of production bottlenecks, how to organize longer supply chains and so forth. And by the end of the 18 teens, the manufacturers in New England are seeking the assistance of the United States government to put up tariffs that will make it more expensive to import these kinds of goods from Europe. Of course, southern slaveholders are like, well, not so fast, right? We want this stuff to come in cheaply, and by making it more expensive through these tariffs, you New Englanders are basically stealing our money. You New Englanders, you know, seek to profit off of our slavery. And meanwhile, by the end of the 1820s and 1830s and you're blah blah blahing all the time about how slavery is bad, and yet you have access to our markets because of artificial protection that the government provides. This is not acceptable. And so the tariff debates really go back and forth about these kinds of questions, and southerners trying to sort of stifle New Englanders do things like, "Aha, well, if they think they can manufacture this cloth more cheaply, we will put a tariff on those raw materials so that you can't import cheap wool from Smyrna or from Buenos Aires," and therefore whatever gain New England manufacturers might get from higher prices on imported cloth will be offset by simply their own costs that they incur with with with more expensive raw materials. And it goes back and forth, back and forth, and it becomes very, very tiresome. Eventually they're able to work this out. But if you read the tariff debates, and I don't recommend you do, but were you to read the tariff debates, the term coarse woolens comes up all the time, and it occurred to me that if you just replaced coarse woolens with Negro cloth, then you really, really see, in very explicit ways, that all of this floor debate about the tariff is about slavery and is about the material provision of enslaved people. And that does make that debate way more interesting than it might appear at first glance, or that you remember from high school, because there are all these kinds of compromises, like, New Englanders say, like, "Fine, we'll get rid of almost all the tariffs on anything that is used for slaves, if you let us put tariffs on these kinds of other things," right? They call the question. They make it explicit. And sometimes southerners, southern congressmen will say, that's great, and other times they'll say, absolutely not. It's the principle. But all of these debates really do keep coming back to these kinds of manufactured goods and their ultimate use in the exploitation of Black labor on plantations. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:57  
And so eventually, the southerners start to think, "Well, what we should really do is be manufacturing these things ourselves in the south, like that's would be the ultimate way to make this work out for us." There's lots of complications to doing that, lots of ways that that wouldn't necessarily be more economical. The piece I found most interesting, though, was the how do you staff that? Do you have enslaved laborers in these factories? Do you have white laborers who, then maybe are agitating for better working conditions? Could you talk some about that in the the sort of weird working conditions that are set up in the south because of the ways that slavery is affecting capitalism?

Dr. Seth Rockman  30:47  
Yeah, that is a really, sort of fascinating set of debates. You have all of these southern entrepreneurs who hear southern politicians say, "We are being rendered colonial dependants on the north and they're stealing our money." And southern entrepreneurs say, "Well, we should just build the factories here, and we can do that." And they oftentimes write to New England to seek technical assistance. Can you send me some operatives? Can you send me a technician? And oftentimes this happens. So there are a good number of New Englanders who are actually in the communities where the first southern textile mills are being built, in South Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere. But one of the questions, as you note, is, who is going to provide the labor for these textile endeavors? And southern white southerners can really not agree, but they see this as a solution to various kinds of problems. So some are like, "We absolutely should use enslaved labor to do this," and at moments when cotton prices decline and it seems less lucrative to exploit Black labor in the fields, you'll have southern entrepreneurs who argue to bring Black labor indoors and put people to work in factories. But then you'll have other white southerners who say, "I don't think that's a very good idea, because we've been making this argument that Black people as workers can't do that kind of work. They can only do agricultural field labor, and we kind of built this whole system of exploitation on this notion of Black inferiority. So if we bring them into factories, we might be exposing ourselves and undermining our commitments to white supremacy, or the plausibility of our white supremacy." And so there's some pushback there. And yet others will come and say, "You know what? This will allow us to solve a big social problem." That big social problem is a white majority in the south that doesn't own slaves, and that by the 1830s and 1840s is decreasingly likely to own slaves, because the cost of enslaved people goes up and up and up and for white slaveholders in the south, there's some notion that we're sitting on top of not only a captive population that would like to liberate itself, but we're sitting on top of a white majority that might one day overthrow us, and we need their votes. We need them to elect us to office. We need them to form, to serve, to uphold our system. And a number of southern manufacturers come to say, like, if we could employ these people in cotton mills, they too can reap the benefits of our system. They too will experience a rising standard of living. They will stop having to be sort of hard scrabble back country farmers, but they will come to look like, you know, the upstanding citizens of Lowell, Massachusetts, something like that. And so there are all these kinds of fantasies. There is incarcerated labor. Louisiana devotes a huge amount of the state's budget to building a penitentiary in Baton Rouge that they then lease out to private manufacturers to turn the incarcerated population into the producers of yet more slave clothing, and to them, that's a wonderful solution to the budgetary pressures of having a prison population. So there's so many possibilities. No one version sticks, but throughout it all, an increasing percentage of white southerners, particularly slave holding southerners, come to believe that manufacturing is the thing that they will ultimately need to do if they're ever going to liberate themselves from those dastardly northern abolitionists who critique them all day, and yet, at the same time, are very happy to carry their money to the bank and cash those checks.

Kelly Therese Pollock  34:20  
When we get to the final place that the these end products are getting to, the end consumer here is enslaved right? These are ultimately getting to enslaved people. And as with every time I do an episode that involves enslaved people, we are encountered with the fact that enslaved people are people right. Are complex. They are not just slaves. They are, in fact, people with opinions and they they like things and don't like things. And you know, in the case of these clothing, this clothing that is supposed to be quote, unquote, ready to wear. It, in fact, doesn't always fit them, because they don't just come in different heights, but are all the sizes that people are. And so could you talk a little bit about that complexity and the ways that it plays out as they receive these goods, especially the clothing that they receive and you know, and how the the enslavers have to deal with this as they feel that they're being benevolent and giving out these twice a year, these packages of clothing, you know, as these benevolent masters, but that are not always well received by the people that they are giving them to.

Dr. Seth Rockman  35:42  
No, that's right. And one of the things I try to do as we finally reach the end users of these goods in the final chapters of the book, is to talk about enslaved people as consumers and people like as consumers. How can that be? Because enslaved people themselves are property in the legal system of the 19th century United States, but scholars writing about consumption in human history have devoted a good deal of attention to the ways in which even people who don't have full agency in choosing their material culture nonetheless have any number of opportunities and capacities to intervene in that material culture, whether that's to make their preferences known through various kinds of pressure, or whether it's through the modification, adaptation, transformation of what they've been issued into other kinds of things. And I try to pay attention to both of those elements in thinking through how enslaved people dealt with both yards of cloth that were woven in the north or ready made clothing that had been stitched in the north and ultimately was distributed to them. And in both cases, one of the things that that I found In this New England archive is the incredibly frequent reference to enslaved people's discontent with the clothing that had been issued to them. And this becomes an interesting interpretive problem for a historian, right? What do you do with a letter from a slave holder in Louisiana to a manufacturer in New England? And the letter says, you know, "Dear Sir, We bought 500 yards of your fabric last year. By Christmas, it was in tatters. My people were discontented. They prefer blue and they prefer all wool. Please send next year's order as such." And so you're like, well, that's kind of amazing, right? On the one hand, yes, in all likelihood, the slaveholder is ventriloquising the people over whom he claims ownership, and perhaps using their voice in order to get a better deal or to sort of manipulate a northern manufacturer who he might presume has some sympathy for the slave and will, in fact, send better goods the following year. But I don't want to just assume that this is all invented or contrived. I'd like to imagine, and I think the evidence sort of sustains this, that we should take seriously this notion of people dissatisfied and discontented, and to think about the ways in which enslaved people could make that felt, and to think about the ways and reasons why slaveholders would want to respond to that. So you imagine an enslaved person coming up to an enslaver and saying, "You know, I was just down on the Jones plantation next door, and all his people have new shoes. Jones must be doing pretty good this year." Well, when you introduce that piece of information into a sort of hyper competitive, masculine honor culture, right? That doesn't just sit there. That makes the person who owns you perhaps say, I'm not going to be shown up by Jones. And next thing you know, perhaps better shoes have arrived. Now, that doesn't happen very often, and that's not exactly a way in which enslaved people it's not the only tool, I should say, by which enslaved people can try to pivot slaveholders buying choices towards their own preferences. But it's not a bad tool, and I see it used with some frequency. The number of times in which you'll see an order that says, I would like 50 suits for my men, but please only send cloth for the women. They would prefer to make their own dresses, right? That's another example of like, well, okay, what is why that preference? Well, of course, because they don't want to wear clothes that someone 3000 miles away has made for them, who doesn't know their bodies, who doesn't know the needs of their work lives. They want to develop and design and execute dresses in their own esthetic sense, and to that extent we can imagine, enslaved people then in a more active kind of consumer way, even as that consumption or the consumer choice then leads to more kind of work. Yes, I have the cloth. But now I need to stitch it. But when I stitch it myself, I get to cut it in the way that I want it. I get to keep the remnants which might be useful as bandages, which might be useful for other kinds of purposes. And this becomes far more advantageous. So that got me thinking more about enslaved people as makers, and the ways in which, for example, the act of transforming the material world, making something out of something else, is, I think, across human history, an incredibly empowering kind of act. And for people who have very little control over so much of their lives, the ability to transform cloth into clothing, to transform other kinds of things, you know, wood into an ergonomically useful handle that allows you to do your work more easily, to take shoes that don't necessarily have much bend to them, but use knowledge that you've developed about what kind of fats and what kind of oils and what kind of muds and clays can soften that leather or make it last longer that the interaction of people with things, I think, becomes an important space for enslaved people to assert some sense of control over lives that don't leave much other kind of space. And ultimately, I wanted to think, and I don't have a very good answer for this, but I wanted to imagine an enslaved seamstress on a Mississippi plantation who is tasked with making all of the clothing for the 99 other people who live in the quarters, people who are her kinfolk, people who are her neighbors, people who are our parents, children, aunts, uncles, people who she has known for years, and people that perhaps she has only just met. Could you imagine a world in which that woman is standing on her porch and looking out at all of her neighbors in her handiwork and for one second feeling a modicum of pride? And again, this is not the kind of thing that we can easily answer, but I think it's the kind of question that we must pose for precisely the reasons that you've alluded to earlier, that as we try to understand enslaved people in the vast complexity of humanity, that of course, pride and pleasure are present, and none of that is meant to in any way downplay the brutality and violence and horrors of the plantation. But human beings cope, human beings adapt, human beings find ways of surviving. And I think historians have to be attentive to that. And in my discussion of enslaved people's material culture, I try to gesture in those directions.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:35  
Seth, can you please tell the listeners how they can get a copy of your book? 

Dr. Seth Rockman  42:40  
Sure. So "Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery," is published by University of Chicago Press. And you would be welcome to use the University of Chicago Press website, and in fact, to use the code u c p n e w, that's UCPNEW, or UCP NEW for 30% off of the order, which I believe brings the price of the book to a mere $24.50. The book will also be sent out by Amazon in the coming weeks, and additionally, it is available at bookstores across the country. And of course, when all is said and done, I encourage listeners to seek to purchase the book in a brick and mortar space and to support small and local businesses.

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:30  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about?

Dr. Seth Rockman  43:34  
Well, I think there is something else I'd like to talk about, which is like, why, you know, what do we take away from this history? Why? Why should we study this or talk about this? And in many ways, right? This is a book that will inform you a great deal about 19th century American history, and I like that, but I think it is also a book that speaks to many of the kinds of dilemmas that people in the affluent west or global north are spending their time confronting now, whether we're talking about our carbon footprints, whether we're talking on college campuses about the degree to which our endowments entangle us with climate change or entangle us with, you know, foreign policy across the globe, whether we're thinking about in our daily shopping, the sweatshop free sweatshirt we buy in the college bookstore, or the fair trade coffee we get someplace else, that we are spending a great deal of time thinking about the long distance relationship of consumers and producers, and we're spending a good deal of time recognizing that decisions made in one place have real ramifications for decisions and lives lived in others. And although I think most people in societies like ours don't want to spend too much time thinking about the child labor mining rare earth minerals that makes their iPhone possible, every once in a while, those things percolate to the surface, and we have to confront them. Yeah, and one of the things that this book does, I think, is to help us realize that we are not the first, that these kinds of questions about these long distance entanglements and their political meanings and their moral implications are things that have been struggles in the west for the last four or 500 years. And I would argue, in fact, that they are sort of the emblematic struggle of western modernity coming out of global integration in the early modern period. And although very few people in the book have the answers to these dilemmas, I think it's so useful to us to recognize that this is not something that we are the first to confront, and that by thinking about how people in the past might have at least articulated these dilemmas or sought various kinds of short term solutions, or by being able to see the ways in which people turned a blind eye or overlooked certain kind of things that were right in front of their faces, can only help us see better the degree to which we too are making choices about what to see and what not to see and how to live what I described in the book with complicity. That is to say, not trying to say you are or aren't complicit, not trying to say that the book is going to provide us with evidence that the North is complicit in slavery, or that this town and these workers are complicit with slavery, but rather to say complicity is endemic in complicity is something that is unavoidable. So why don't we take complicity as a given, assume that it is always there in some fashion or another, and then look for the ways in which people in the past, in order to perhaps better understand people in the present, make sense of complicity, live with complicity, choose to embrace it or deny it. And to me, that's interesting, both as a historical question, but also as a set of challenges for us as we think about the ever more entangled world that we occupy today. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  46:57  
More than once, I wrote in the margins of the book, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Dr. Seth Rockman  47:04  
So yes, that could be the outcome of reading this book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  47:10  
Well, Seth, thank you so much. It was a pleasure to read your book, and I really enjoyed this conversation.

Dr. Seth Rockman  47:16  
Thank you so much, Kelly, it's it's been a wonderful opportunity for me to share this book with you and your listeners and again, thank you.

Teddy  47:24  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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