The way entrepreneurs assimilated that environment’s values and came to see those values as normal reveals much about why they devoted their lives to creating an “extended commerce” in the southwestern United States. They spoke as if their own bodies were doing the things that their deals—sales of cotton, purchases of land or slaves, payments of money on the other side of the ocean—made happen. Yet not their whole bodies. There was one specific part of the body they talked as if they were using. They wrote notes and letters that informed their correspondents that they held slaves “on hand” and money “in hand.” Important letters “came to hand.” They got cotton “off [their] hands” and into the market. In 1815, waiting for prices to rise, John Richards offered the Bank of the State of Mississippi a note to ensure that he would not yet have to sell “the cotton that I now have in hand.” Individual promises-to-pay that drew upon credit with other merchants were “notes of hand.”26 Few parts of the body have a more intimate and direct connection to the mind than the hands, and when entrepreneurs used words to grasp the control ropes of the new economy, they described the sensation as if the new world’s powers were held in their own like puppet strings. They produced concrete results at distance, using words that their hands wrote on pieces of paper. The fingers at the end of the writer’s arm might not actually hold the material thing—the bales of cotton, the stacks of coin, the ship whose captain and crew were directed to carry them—that the figurative language of trade said it grasped. But in a very real sense, the writer controlled these things, these people. — 132: 2019-2032
local prime-age men and women available to meet — 141: 2152-2153
historians have repeatedly confused “manhood” and “resistance” when they have written about slavery.43 Joe Kilpatrick was no hero. He could not construct his life as he would have done in freedom. He was not willing to die just to show he had the freedom to die. Yet he did make choices, and the ones he made were important both for the beliefs about manhood they reveal and for what they did for George Jones, for Lettice, and for Nelly. Instead of honor, Kilpatrick chose what Todorov called “ordinary virtues.” Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings—even at the cost of lowering their own chances—they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.44 In the slave labor camps of the Southwest, an adult man’s commitment to ordinary as opposed to heroic virtues could mean the difference between life and death for children like George Jones. Such choices could have the same result for the men themselves. Rebuilt blood ties could provide a reason not to die fighting in one’s chains. Amid the disruptions and dangers of the 1830s, enslaved men frequently became caretakers of others. Caring is not central to most definitions of masculinity. But just as the kindness of enslaved men had breathed life back into Lucy Thurston’s soul when her spirit was as dead as a zombie in that Louisiana cotton field, the kindness of men like Joe Kilpatrick led them to create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them. Because these choices placed them in relationships as husbands or lovers, fathers or brothers, these men often made ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that told them that as men they had failed. And perhaps—perhaps—a man who lived in that way also undermined the white ideal of the man as vengeful hero. — 370: 5670-5686
Being a husband or father mattered because enslaved men who wanted to live in a way defined by moral choice rather than fear had to turn to the long view, to thinking of the people who would one day be left behind them. — 372: 5693-5694