100 Objects #12: "Negro Cloth"

Roman Mars and historian Seth Rockman trace the strange life of so-called "Negro cloth" — a textile category defined by nothing but who it was worn by.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 0:35Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation.

• 1:19Roman Mars?

  Just like museum designers, Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance.

• 1:49Roman Mars?

  Being 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.

• 2:16Roman Mars?

  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.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  They 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.

• 3:01Roman Mars?

  As a result, very little of the clothing that was worn on slave plantations lasted even into the 1870s.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  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. Right? Oh, look, I have a garment that an enslaved person wore. Great, come back when you have something that George Washington wore. Wouldn't be more likely what you'd hear. And so these goods would not be preserved in some of the collections.

• 3:36Roman Mars?

  In fact, the clothing that enslaved people wore is so rare that historians have been searching for it for years.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  So, for example, when Lonny 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. And he put at the top of that list slave clothing.

• 4:03Roman Mars?

  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 US 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.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  One of the pleasures of being a historian is reading people's mail from several hundred years ago. So 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, tri-folded. And so I'd be perhaps the first person to unfold some of these in maybe 100-plus years.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  So 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 2x2 square of fabric.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:43Roman Mars?

  This 2x2-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. Cloth 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.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 6:51Roman Mars?

  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.

• 7:24Roman Mars?

  There 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. It'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,

• 8:09Roman Mars?

  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.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  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. And 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

• 9:00Speaker 01

  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. And 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

• 9:44Speaker 01

  in the design of these particular textiles.

• 9:48Roman Mars?

  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.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  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? This 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

• 10:46Speaker 01

  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, we 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

• 11:26Speaker 01

  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, 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, this 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.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  It will allow you to present yourself as a benevolent provider to your people.

• 12:14Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:32Roman Mars?

  Right. 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.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  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, and

• 13:31Speaker 01

  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

• 14:14Speaker 01

  very tight relationship to slavery, even as their own communities and their own society became far more skeptical of that institution.

• 14:21Roman Mars?

  So 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?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  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, and that complicity as a kind of smoking gun, as a aha, gotcha kind of move, was not that edifying, when in actuality, we actually know this.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 16:35Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year: the first school drop-off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Being an Outsider. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds, because switching your home and auto insurance is better than

• 17:19Roman Mars?

  cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed-sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium

• 18:01Roman Mars?

  status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/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?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  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. So 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

• 19:18Speaker 01

  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. So 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.

• 19:49Roman Mars?

  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?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  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. And 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,

• 20:44Speaker 01

  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, 12 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.

• 21:29Roman Mars?

  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?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  It's a, it'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 race craft, a kind of sorcery that organizes American culture to talk about difference, to talk about difference, to talk about difference.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Race 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 to this or to that because black people have these kinds of feet or those kinds of feet. All of the goods that are manufactured for use on the plantation

• 23:06Speaker 01

  fit into this kind of discursive space, and they create a very robust conversation.

• 23:12Roman Mars?

  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?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  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. I'm like a modern day dorkus. 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 of ways where we can think about

• 24:06Speaker 01

  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 DC? And 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,

• 24:50Speaker 01

  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. They'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

• 25:33Speaker 01

  the ways in which New England labor is tied up with the expansion of plantation labor in the American South.

• 25:39Roman Mars?

  Yeah. And what about the businessmen? Like, what about the hazards themselves? Like, what did Roland Hazard think about slavery?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  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. There'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.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  And I think if we time traveled back to just 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'd be like, wait, wait, a philanthropist? Get out of here. A philanthropist? No. So you hear me out. I'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

• 27:13Speaker 01

  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. So all of a sudden, I'm simply easing the suffering of these people until the day can come in which they can be emancipated. But until that day comes, I will simply turn out yards and yards and yards of patented double curtsy cloth at an affordable price point of 45 cents a yard so that they can stay warmer and healthier than they might otherwise have been.

• 27:52Roman Mars?

  I'm curious about their argument about improving the standard of living in these small New England towns. Were they being sincere about that? Like, were these good jobs for the standards of the time?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And this is one of the things that I think allowed people like Isaac P. Hazard and his brother Roland Hazard to see themselves as doing something other than taking advantage of a corrupt system of human exploitation. They were able to significantly raise the material standards of living in these small rural communities where agricultural subsistence was sort of puttering along, but where rural poverty was really quite robust. And to that extent, the way you might compare the lives and livelihoods of small New England farming families in the 1790s to those of the 1840s, those in the 1840s would have more pairs of shoes,

• 28:46Speaker 01

  more silverware, more calories, precisely because they would have access, not to necessarily more farmland, but to an additional source of income that might use the surplus labor time of a daughter or a wife or a son to produce these goods for market. And so the plantation provisioning business, the plantation goods, we might call it ecosystem, made them, in effect,

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Aspiring middle-class Americans rather than hardscrabble farmers. And that was really important.

• 29:18Roman Mars?

  Were the hazards ever really confronted with the idea that producing plantation goods was morally problematic and that they shouldn't be profiting off of slavery?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I think they they were quite aware of this. Within local communities throughout New England, people were constantly bringing this to attention, not necessarily to drive them out of polite society, not necessarily to stimulate abolitionism, but in some ways, simply to acknowledge the reality. The best example of this actually comes from a small town in central Massachusetts called North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where a minister named Thomas Snell has been the town's congregational minister since the 1790s. And in the 1850s, he decides to write a town history because he's been there for 50-plus years.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And in his town's history, he says, look, when I took the pulpit here, this was a complete hellhole. This was like the worst place on earth. Everyone was poor. Everyone was drunk. No one went to church. Everyone was a blasphemer. It was misery everywhere you turned. Look at us now, 50 years later. We have seven Bible societies, six abolition societies, four lyceums. We don't have anyone who's drunk. We have no one who's living on the street. Our children are well-clothed. They all go to school. They all look good. We have nicer houses. We have nicer things. Why is this? And then he says, the answer everyone knows is slave shoes and that not $1.50 passes

• 30:55Speaker 01

  through the hands of the town people through a source other than slave shoes. But then he goes on to explain, this doesn't make slavery right and it doesn't make shoemaking wrong. It's simply a fact that we have to acknowledge about our prosperity. Snell is someone who hates abolitionism, who thinks that people like William Lloyd Garrison are the worst and far more dangerous to American society than slaveholders. So it's not part of simply an abolitionist critique. It's simply a discussion of acknowledging the fact that New England prosperity goes hand in hand with Southern slavery. And to deny that is to deny a very basic reality.

• 31:35Roman Mars?

  This equilibrium is disrupted when the Civil War breaks out. What happens to the hazards and where do their allegiances lie?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  So much to my surprise, most of the New England manufacturers of plantation goods are not dragged kicking and screaming into the Civil War. This is, as they see it, not the worst thing that could ever happen to them. And the reason, there are a couple of reasons for this. One, they have a particular soft landing. Why? Because now there is a huge demand for low-quality cloth, low-quality shoes, low-quality hats through the US Army. The mobilization of the Union Army creates opportunities for cloth that last year was called Negro cloth, this year to be called infantry man blue, or whatever it might be.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  And so they don't basically suffer a great deal from the loss of their Southern markets. But perhaps more importantly, they have this fantasy, and that attests to, I think, what we might see as their more general anti-slavery commitments, that in freedom, black people in the South are going to be far better consumers than they could ever be as slaves or that their enslavers could ever be as consumers. And that the ability of 4 million freed people creates 4 million liberated consumers who are going to have money in their pockets through wage labor that they can then spend on a second dress for their wife or a pair of shoes for their children.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And that this is going to be a source of tremendous prosperity for New England manufacturers in the decades to come. Now, they are sadly wrong about this. The violence of Reconstruction and the violence of sharecropping, particularly its system of debt peonage, means that black Southerners in freedom do not become significant consumers. They do not become a market.

• 33:31Roman Mars?

  I mean, it is amazing to me that the hazard genuinely believed that Reconstruction might create a class of free black workers with enough money in their pocket to buy a new shirt every year. Like, that is, it strikes me as hopelessly naive.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  It didn't work out that way. And it didn't work out that way for reasons that we in the United States still don't have a full accounting of. Our ignorance collectively about the violence of Reconstruction and about the ways in which white supremacy was reestablished in the South and the ways in which the largest slaveholders were once again back on top of an economic system that devoted ever more amounts of Southern labor, black and white, to the cultivation of cotton. We need that story. We need to recognize, for example, that the American South remained the world's most important producer of cotton for the industrialized economies of places like Britain and the American North.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  It did so not because ending slavery created a free labor paradise in which everyone can simply earn abundant wages set by the market for spending hours in a cotton field, but through vigilante violence, through debt peonage, through the inability of people to move for higher wages at risk of getting shot. And that's, that's really important here.

• 34:48Roman Mars?

  Yeah. Ultimately, look, what do you want people to take away from this study of plantation goods?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, as a historian, I want people to know some new things about the United States in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. But let's be honest, this book is not just a book about the past. This is a book that is very much about our present and the ways in which the long-distance entanglements of consumers and producers create all sorts of ethical, environmental, moral, political dilemmas that we find ourselves very much in. And I would say that the evolution of this book, for me, went hand in hand with things in our society around, say, trying to establish our carbon footprints and to lessen them,

• 35:40Speaker 01

  or going to the university bookstore and finding out how much of that branded, logoed merch is now declaring itself to be sweatshop-free, or trying to buy fair-trade coffee, or thinking about where our university endowments are tied up in weapons production or other kinds of economic pursuits that we find unsavory. And this has been one of those places where I feel like my students in particular have pushed me so hard on this, to look at the ways in which we are all tied into these economic relationships, but also to be cognizant of the great difficulty of extracting ourselves,

• 36:25Speaker 01

  particularly as we think about the trade-offs, right? Oh, I'm very much interested in lessening carbon outputs and my own dependency on carbon-based fuels, so I'm going to move to an electric car. Oh, well, wait, haven't you thought about the violent production of rare-earth mineral materials in West Africa? Aren't you then complicit in that kind of exploitation? Oh, how wonderful that you're using a paper straw. Yes, I know, but I'm doing it on an airplane that I'm flying to California to see my family. And so I've sort of, you know, obliterated any kind of good.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Don't you care? We exercise a good deal of consumer agency in the global North, but it is not a consumer agency that, at present, is really tilting the scales in ways that create a more just and more fair society or planet. And so what I want for people who read this book is to say, these dilemmas are in fact not new. We are not the first people who are challenged by an integrated global economy. A globalization was not invented with the WTO in the 1990s, right?

• 37:38Roman Mars?

  I mean, you know, as we're talking about the sort of offshoring of misery, basically, that feeds this economy, the offshoring of misery is getting further and further away from us. The mechanisms are more obfuscated. They're more abstract. Is this an excuse? Is this just means we have to dig deeper? Is this, is this something that we have to contend with in a different way?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I wish I had a good answer for that question, and I'm afraid I don't. It does seem to me that an awareness simply of these kinds of entanglements, an awareness of global supply chains, a commitment to writing more people's experiences into the ways in which goods come to exist within our lives in the privileged West. But the erasure of all that, right, is so fundamental to capitalism, is so fundamental to what Marx had called the commodity fetish, right? It is all about erasing the prehistory. And so it does seem to me that there is a political project that you and your podcast

• 38:46Speaker 01

  are engaged in, your listeners are certainly engaged in, to basically pull back that veil, to open that black box and to say that things don't come into the world fully formed as commodities. They come into the world and become commodities through knowable historical processes that often involve individual or social decision-making that involve the deployment of all sorts of power, personal and state, and also involve a great deal of cultural work to then invisibilize all of the things that go into making the world look the way that it does.

• 39:23Roman Mars?

  Well, Seth Rockman, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I really enjoy your work. I really enjoyed the book. I really appreciate your time.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Thank you, Roman. My pleasure to be with you today.

• 39:41Roman Mars?

  Seth Rockman is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University. He is the author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

• 40:10Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Emmett Fitzgerald. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright.

• 40:54Roman Mars?

  Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 41:47Roman Mars?

  This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful lounges. Onboard, savour menus created by renowned French chefs, paired with wines and champagne selected by sommelier. Stay connected with free high-speed Wi-Fi, then unwind in a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with a mattress topper developed with Sofitel My Bed, a signature touch of French hospitality. The art of travel, elevated. Because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Want more cash? You can get a $450 bonus after your first 45 deliveries with Uber Eats. That's a $450 bonus for Samantha, who delivers by bike. $450 for Omar, who only delivers on weekends. And $450 for Joe, who's got other apps on her delivery roster. Don't worry, Joe. We're not the jealous type. No matter how you deliver, you can get a $450 bonus after your first 45 deliveries with Uber Eats. Sign up now. Complete within 14 days of signup ends 11/1. Terms apply. See out for details.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Pandora makes it easy for you to find your favorite music. Discover new artists and genres by selecting any song or album, and we'll make you a personalized station for free. Download on the Apple App Store or Google Play and enjoy the soundtrack to your life.