100 Objects #12: "Negro Cloth"

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1:24Being a historian is sort of like being a detective. You hunt around for little scraps of information, clues you can use to try to piece together a more complete story of the past. You dig through old meeting minutes, receipts, and business transactions. You read old diaries and leaf through old letters. and when you can, you try to get your hands on actual physical objects from history. This part can prove particularly difficult because the materials of everyday life are usually lost to the sands of time. Seth Rockman is a professor of history at Brown University and recently he was looking for clothes that were worn by enslaved people in the American South, which was proving impossible because those items just didn't survive.

2:14They didn't survive because, of course, in most cases they were used into oblivion through hard labor or through various forms of recycling. A garment that had worn out might be ripped into shreds and some of it stuffed into holes in a wall to insulate or stuffed into the toe of a shoe or made into a bandage. As a result, very little of the clothing that was worn on slave plantations lasted even into the 1870s. And even if it had, we'd still be unlikely to find it because many of the cultural institutions that have been devoted to preserving the American past, their collection practices in the late 19th and early 20th century would have had no interest in this.

2:56Right. Oh, look, I have a garment that an enslaved person wore. great, come back when you have something that George Washington wore, would be more likely what you'd hear. And so these goods would not be preserved in some of the collections. In fact, the clothing that enslaved people wore is so rare that historians have been searching for it for years. So, for example, when Lonnie Bunch, who was the inaugural director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, was going about trying to build his collection in the early 20-teens, he was interviewed about the kind of things he was most hoping to find and also least likely to find.

3:35And he put at the top of that list, slave clothing. Seth Rockman was looking for this clothing as part of the research for a book called Plantation Goods, A Material History of American Slavery. It's about all the objects that made slavery possible, the hose, shovels, boots, and clothes that were used on plantations throughout the U.S. South. Rockman was not able to find any pants or shirts, but he was able to find a piece of fabric. It happened one day when he was in the archive looking through the mail. One of the pleasures of being a historian is reading people's mail from several hundred years ago.

4:12So as I was beginning this project, naturally I went to the archive and called up the records of some of these firms that were engaged in making plantation goods. And I opened up the folders and was very surprised to find that many of these letters were actually not laid flat in typical archival practice, but in fact were still folded, trifolded. And so I'd be perhaps the first person to unfold some of these in maybe a hundred plus years.

4:42So as I'm unfolding these letters from merchants in Savannah, merchants in Charleston, slaveholders in Louisiana, all of a sudden I'm very surprised to see straight pinned to the top of one of these letters a two by two square of fabric. And then a letter that describes this is the kind of fabric we want. This is what it should look like. And to recognize all of a sudden there in the paper archive was a material cultural artifact that in fact would be better and would exceed anything that I might be able to find presently in a museum. This two-by-two-inch square had been mailed from a plantation owner to a textile manufacturer as a way of saying, make us some more fabric like this.

5:27Claw squares like this one were sent in the other direction too, as a way to advertise the types of material that textile companies were planning to sell for the following year, almost like a sample of fabric that you might get in the mail when you order a couch. These little swatches of fabric are all that remains of what was once an entire category of textile. And for your listeners, I would say we have to recognize that the trade name that affixed to this quality of fabrics is a racial term that is discordant to contemporary ears, if not offensive. It is not the most offensive of terms that affixes to race in American culture, but the term is Negro cloth.

6:10And again, this is a term that 19th century Americans, black and white, enslaved and free, North and South would have been quite familiar with. But to us, it presents a whole series of mysteries because it's not actually a thing. From 99 % Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, this little scrap of so-called Negro cloth shows how the plantation economy touched nearly every aspect of American society, and how businesses, consumers, and ordinary people rationalized their involvement in slavery.

6:58There is a lot to say about this little scrap of fabric that Seth Rockman found. And much of that conversation springs from the fact of where it was made. Because the story we're going to tell starts not in the South, but in Rhode Island. It's 1821. It's been 45 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. and it'll be another 40 years before the Civil War rips the country in two. In the South, slave plantations form the basis of an agricultural economy, while in the North, the very first mills and factories are popping up, an early sign of the Industrial Revolution that is to come.

7:35It's against this backdrop that two brothers in Rhode Island, named Isaac and Roland Hazard, start a textile company. They know how to make fabric, but they don't know where to sell it. And as they're getting their business off the ground, they get a tip about a lucrative captive market. They're producing woolen textiles and writing to merchants in Boston, merchants in Philadelphia, merchants in New York saying, do you anticipate a market for these kinds of textiles? And it is a merchant in Philadelphia who says, you know, many of the southern buyers are in the city this season and they seem to take a great liking to this as a Negro cloth.

8:15And all of a sudden, the hazards come to be the leading American manufacturers of woolen textiles that will move from north to south under the name of Negro cloth. It turns out that the hazards have a series of connections through their family to Charleston. And Charleston merchants and then Savannah merchants begin to tell them how desirable their goods are for enslaved people to wear. and invite them to come tour the plantation, see how it works, and learn more about the qualities that make for a desirable Negro cloth. And so beginning in the early 1820s, one of the two brothers will spend about half of each year either on the eastern seaboard in the Carolinas and Georgia or traveling all the way to New Orleans and then setting out on marketing tours up the Mississippi and even over into Arkansas and Texas.

9:06And in doing so, they will gather a huge amount of information. And one of the things that is truly surprising here is the role that enslaved people themselves will play as informants in the design of these particular textiles. So as the Hazards are making these research trips to the South, they would actually get enslaved people's perspectives on the clothing. And I guess, given the inherent cruelty of slavery, it is a little surprising to me that enslaved people would have any influence at all over the clothes they wore. It's a really sort of complicated dance that only makes sense if we recognize the tremendous terrain of violence on which it is taking place, right?

9:51This is not a situation in which a group of workers have the capacity to negotiate freely with their employers and if they don't like it to go on strike or to leave, right? This is a system of tremendous labor exploitation predicated on horrific forms of violence, both physical and psychological. recognizing that enslaved people like working people everywhere sought to carve out various kinds of possibilities that might not augur the end of slavery, but that might lessen some of the simply misery of everyday life. So if we think about this as an analogy of workers who are trying to get a five-minute water break as opposed to a four-minute water break, or workers who are trying to get 15 minutes for lunch rather than 12 minutes for lunch.

10:38We might think in a comparable way, enslaved workers could say, you know, if you outfit us in this kind of performance wear, if you outfit us in these textiles that are of the color or of the cut or of the composition that we desire, you know what? We're going to be less likely to cut off your heads in the middle of the night. And also we might pick cotton more quickly, or we might not die as frequently from respiratory infections due to morning mists in the fields. And slaveholders are very responsive to this. This is some, in some ways for them, a very easy concession to make. And they are sold on these possibilities largely by New England manufacturers who tell them, No, no, no.

11:25This isn't just a woolen cotton fabric that's 32 inches wide and 14 ounces to the yard. It is Negro cloth. It will provide protection to your investments in human property. It will accelerate the rate of cotton picking in the fields. It will meet your price point. It will allow you to present yourself as a benevolent provider to your people. None of this is actually true, but it becomes part of the sort of marketing pitch and slaveholders who have their own anxieties and their own political needs and their own psychodrama to work out in terms of their exploitation of other human beings respond very positively to this.

12:07Right. It's interesting, this sort of economic interdependence that was developing. Like the North outsourced the agricultural labor and the South outsourced the manufacturing of these plantation goods. And, you know, it's become sort of this interdependent system. That's right. We typically think about the divergence of North and South because the Civil War sits on the timeline of American history as this sort of giant black hole with gravitational pull that makes everything that happened before simply road to the Civil War. Well, rather than thinking about all of the inherent antagonisms between North and South in the 50 years preceding the 1860s, what I've tried to do is show many of the kinds of synergies between these two economies, looking at, as you say, the interdependencies of a Southern mode of production that outsources the production of its important inputs and a New England economy that is more than happy to jump into that void as a provider.

13:06And one might argue an economy that has functionally offshored its slavery, right? As its legal regime has declared slavery no longer viable, as its moral sort of sentiment has turned against slavery as a legitimate form of organizing society, nonetheless, New England capital has simply moved into other territories and other legal regimes where slavery is A-OK. And like firms that offshore money or offshore production today, precisely because there are legal regimes or tax codes or labor regulations that are more permissive to the money they want to make. So, too, were New England manufacturers able to maintain a very tight relationship to slavery, even as their own communities and their own society became far more skeptical of that institution.

13:56So is the goal here to show how complicit the North was in the system of plantation slavery? Or is that even the right question to be asking? In some ways, it is an intuitive response to this. Wow, the North's hands were just as dirty as anyone else's. They were up to their eyebrows in slavery, even as they were denouncing it. What hypocrites. And I suppose when I started this project, that's sort of what I expected to end up with, with a kind of set of smoking guns showing exactly how deep New England's economy was in the expansion of plantation slavery. But as I went down the road of this project, it also seemed to me that was too easy.

14:38And that complicity as a kind of smoking gun, as an aha, gotcha kind of move, was not that edifying when in actuality, we actually know this. And it seemed to me that it was more interesting as a historian to take complicity for granted. That is to say, take complicity as inherent to the human condition for the last 500 years, as global integration has tied people in one place to people in other places through all sorts of commercial exchange. And to ask, how did people live within these structures of complicity? How did people make sense of it? How did people square those circles? And that created a much more interesting, and I would argue complicated way of thinking about economic entanglements, not only in the past, but certainly in the present that we currently inhabit.

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18:51slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Okay, so getting back to the hazard story specifically, they do all this research on plantations and they bring this information back with them to Rhode Island and they use it to make a product. What did the production of the hazard's negro cloth look like? So one of the remarkable things about this business is how much of it doesn't take place in a modern factory space, but rather how much of it integrates certain aspects of factory production with many more traditional holdovers of household production or what would be called outwork.

19:37So, for example, the hazards could have their yarn spun in a mill, but then they could take skeins of that yarn and deliver it to countless rural families in their community with specific instructions about how to weave it on a household loom and then come back at the end of the month to collect 100 yards, 500 yards, 1 ,000 yards from a given family that might have devoted the extra labor of a daughter or the evening time labor of a husband or wife into the production. of this good that the hazards would then bring back to a factory where they might use mechanized machinery in order to finish or full or teasel the fabric to prepare it to send to the South.

20:20So it is a sort of a strange mode of economic development in which the factory and the household aren't in opposition to one another, but rather working in tandem to produce these goods. Yeah, I want to talk about this sort of just the material itself. Like how different was so-called Negro cloth from fabrics worn by, you know, white manual laborers at the time? This is the remarkable thing. There is a category of goods that everyone knows as Negro cloth. And it is also not a real thing because the same fabric that when it is marketed to Irish canal diggers in upstate New York might be called Kentucky jeans.

21:01And when it's marketed to Ohio farmers, it might be called Welsh Plains. But when it's marketed to slaveholders in the South, magically it becomes Negro cloth. But Negro cloth is a term that captures within it a bunch of different kinds of very specific things. So if you were to walk into a store, a dry goods store in Charleston or Savannah or Mobile or New Orleans in 1840 and say, please show me your Negro cloth. they would say, well, where to even begin? Do you want it all wool? Do you want it cotton wool? Do you want it linen wool? Do you want it plain woven or twill woven? Do you want it 10 ounces to the yard?

21:4312 ounces to the yard? 16 ounces to the yard? Do you want it 28 inches wide, 32 inches wide? 36 inches wide. Do you want it finished fine? Or do you want it finished rough? Do you want it dyed blue? Do you want it striped? Do you want it plaid? Infinite possibility. So there is no one thing called Negro cloth. There are many different kinds of fabrics that travel under that umbrella and are defined solely by the fact that they can be marketed as performance wear for slaves. You know, what do you make of that? Like, like that? It's much like all things having to do with race. It means everything and nothing at the same time.

22:20It's a strange phenomenon, but it is very much part of the ways in which race and material culture have been very tightly wound with one another in American history. And the ability to label certain kinds of consumer goods as black or as white has done some of the work of creating an ongoing conversation about difference, particularly for white Americans. talking about the difference between cloth and Negro cloth becomes a way of talking about the difference between Black people and white people. And two of my favorite scholars, Barbara and Karen Fields, talked about this as a kind of racecraft, a kind of sorcery that organizes American culture to talk about difference, to talk about difference, to talk about difference.

23:06Race becomes real as lived. And so plantation goods do very important work within this discourse in the 19th century at a moment when white Americans, particularly in New England, are having new conversations about difference. When they're beginning to say, oh, maybe slavery is not right, or maybe all humans are of one blood rather than of separate creation. And to that extent, the interjection of opinions about, oh, this cloth is only suitable for Black people, or this axe isn't the kind of axe that a white person would want to use, or these shoes are inappropriate for Black people because they are too this or too that because Black people have these kinds of feet or those kinds of feet.

23:48All of the goods that are manufactured for use on the plantation fit into this kind of discursive space, and they create a very robust conversation. And what did the people who were involved in making these plantation goods, what did they think about the morality of what they were doing? That's one of the most difficult questions to answer. And of course, it was the question that I was most hoping to answer, right? You're a farm girl in Southern Rhode Island. It's 1828. You're spending your fifth hour of the evening sitting at a loom. Are you thinking, my goodness, I'm fulfilling the biblical cause to dress the naked.

24:25I'm like a modern day Dorcas. Or are you humming a minstrel tune and engaging in the racist popular culture of your society? All of these things are possible. And all of these things are almost impossible to determine with any kind of accuracy. I mean, if we found one diary of one New England farm girl, we'd have an N of one, and that might not be particularly telling. There are a couple ways where we can think about the relationship of these New England workers to, for example, abolitionism. How many of them would have signed a petition calling for, say, the end of the slave trade in Washington, D.C.?

25:01And those do exist for many of the communities where this labor is taking place. And one of the things I tried to do was to match names on payrolls with names on petitions, and I didn't find too much overlap. So it did seem like in a small community like South Kingstown, Rhode Island, the women who were joining the abolitionist society were not the women making textiles for slaves. But that is also telling in the fact that there is an abolitionist society in this small town in Southern Rhode Island, which means that the kind of families and the kind of people who are making this clothing aren't doing so with no knowledge that slavery is controversial.

25:44They're not doing so with no awareness that this is a hot button political issue. I imagine, you know, the farm girl carrying her 50 vests that she's made over the last month back to the center of town to turn in for store credits, encountering someone that she knows from Sunday school saying, hey, would you like to sign this petition? Or hey, do you want to come to this meeting this evening? And the fact that this is also in the realm of the possible makes us recognize that this is not an unthinking decision, but this is a conscious decision to see or to not see the ways in which New England labor is tied up with the expansion of plantation labor in the American South.

26:23Yeah. And what about the businessmen? Like, what about the Hazards themselves? Like, what did Roland Hazard think about slavery? Yes. Roland Hazard and his brother Isaac would have described themselves as being against slavery. And that will seem very surprising to the extent that they are running a business for 40 years that's about provisioning slave plantations with clothing. But what they would say is that slavery is not the future, that the world would probably be better without slavery, but we also have very little possibility of ending slavery. It would be too hard. It would be too complicated.

26:58There's nothing really we can do. We just have to hope. It's sort of a thoughts and prayers approach to being anti-slavery. But I'll say one other thing about the hazards that I think sort of explains to me how they make sense of the world. And I think if we time traveled back to talk to Roland Gibson Hazard and said, Mr. Hazard, isn't it true that you have for your entire career skimmed profit off of a corrupt system of human exploitation? We'd say, what are you talking about? I'm a philanthropist. You're like, wait, wait, a philanthropist? Get out of here. A philanthropist? No. He's like, hear me out.

27:35I'm a philanthropist because, okay, look around South Kingstown, Rhode Island. All these families surrounding us used to be dirt poor. Their kids didn't have shoes. Nobody went to church. This was a real backwater. Look at these families now. They have a higher material standard of living. They can send their children to school. I have, through this business, tremendously improved my community for the well-being of the inhabitants, but also for the glory of God. And meanwhile, look in the South. Those suffering slaves, if I didn't make warm and durable clothing for the slaves, the slaves would be naked and that would be worse.