The half has never been told : slavery and the making of American capitalism

A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slaves

Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told , the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy.

Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Author Notes

Edward E. Baptist is a professor of history at Cornell University. Author of the award-winning Creating an Old South , he lives in Ithaca, New York.

Reviews (6)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Cornell University historian Baptist (Creating an Old South) delivers an unapologetic, damning, and grisly account of slavery's foundational place in the emergence of America as a global superpower, balancing the macro lens of statistics and national trends with intimate slave narratives. Delivered in a voice that fluidly incorporates both academic objectivity and coarse language, the book is organized into chapters named after a slave's body parts (i.e., "Heads" and "Arms"), brutal images reinforced by the "metastatic rate" of the "endlessly expanding economy" of slavery in the U.S. in the first half of the 18th century. The "massive markets," "accelerating growth," and new economic institutions in America's "nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit" lend credence to Baptist's insistence that common conceptions of the slave South as economically doomed from the start are possible only in hindsight. At the dawn of the Civil War, he suggests, the South's perception that it was a "highly successful, innovative sector," was coupled with slave-owners' belief that objections to slavery in the North rested not on moral concerns, but on fears of "political bullying" from the slave states. Baptist's chronicle exposes the taint of blood in virtually all of the wealth that Americans have inherited from their forebears, making it a rewarding read for anyone interested in U.S.A.'s dark history. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

A dense, myth-busting work that pursues how the world profited from American slavery.The story of slavery in America is not static, as Baptist (History/Cornell Univ.;Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, 2001) points out in this exhaustive tome. It entailed wide-scale forced migrations from the lower East Coast to the South and West of the economically burgeoning United States. Following tobacco production along the Chesapeake Bay, slavery was embraced in the newly opened territories of Kentucky and Mississippi, where slaves were force-marched in coffles, separated from families, bought and sold to new owners, and then used to clear fields and plant indigo and the new cash crop, cotton. Although some advanced attempts to ban slaverye.g., in the Northwest Ordinancethe newly hammered-out Constitution codified it by the Three-Fifths Compromise. In the name of unity, the delegates agreed with South Carolinas John Rutledge that religion and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations. Using the metaphor of a trussed-up giant body la Gulliver, Baptist divides his chapters by body parts, through which he viscerally delineates the effects of the violence of slaverye.g., Feet encapsulates the experience of forced migration through intimate stories, while Right Hand and Left Hand explore the insidious methods of the enslavers to solidify their holdings. Baptist moves chronologically, though in a roundabout fashion, often backtracking and repeating, and thoroughly examines every area affected by slavery, from New Orleans to Boston, Kansas to Cuba. He challenges the comfortable myth of Yankee ingenuity as our founding growth principle, showing how cotton picking drove U.S. exports and finance from 1800 to 1860as well as the expansion of Northern industry.Though some readers may find the narrative occasionally tedious, this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* While Americans like to look at slavery as a pre-modern labor system, tinged by racist and moralistic perspectives, Baptist argues that slavery was the major economic engine that helped to propel the growth of the U.S. in the nineteenth century and eventually make it a world power. Baptist renders history and economics with the power of prose that seeks to tell a fuller story than has been told of American slavery, drawing on plantation records and the personal narratives of former slaves interviewed by Works Progress Administration workers. Riffing on Ralph Ellison's depiction of the African American body as the site of the American drama, Baptist offers chapters on head, feet, hands, tongues, arms, and backs to describe the aggressive push to maintain enslaved labor, the violence and power wielded to expand slavery, and the resistance of slaves and abolitionists. He details the significance of slavery to cotton cultivation and the significance of cotton in fueling the economy of the industrial North. As U.S. capitalism supported by slavery grew, so did the politics to support it, influencing the allocation of state representation and even the presidency for 70 years. An insightful look at U.S. slavery and its controversial role in the much-celebrated story of American capitalism.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

FOR RESIDENTS OF the world's pre-eminent capitalist nation, American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States. This situation was exacerbated in the 1970s, when economic history began to migrate from history to economics departments, where it too often became an exercise in scouring the past for numerical data to plug into computerized models of the economy. Recently, however, the history of American capitalism has emerged as a thriving cottage industry. This new work portrays capitalism not as a given (something that "came in the first ships," as the historian Carl Degler once wrote) but as a system that developed over time, has been constantly evolving and penetrates all aspects of society. Slavery plays a crucial role in this literature. For decades, historians depicted the institution as unprofitable and on its way to extinction before the Civil War (a conflict that was therefore unnecessary). Recently, historians like Sven Beckert, Robin Blackburn and Walter Johnson have emphasized that cotton, the raw material of the early Industrial Revolution, was by far the most important commodity in 19th-century international trade and that capital accumulated through slave labor flowed into the coffers of Northern and British bankers, merchants and manufacturers. And far from being economically backward, slave owners pioneered advances in modern accounting and finance. Edward E. Baptist situates "The Half Has Never Been Told" squarely within this context. Baptist, who teaches at Cornell University, is the author of a well-regarded study of slavery in Florida. Now he expands his purview to the entire cotton kingdom, the heartland of 19th-century American slavery. (Unfortunately, slavery in the Upper South, where cotton was not an economic staple, is barely discussed, even though as late as 1860 more slaves lived in Virginia than any other state.) In keeping with the approach of the new historians of capitalism, the book covers a great deal of ground - not only economic enterprise but religion, ideas of masculinity and gender, and national and Southern politics. Baptist's work is a valuable addition to the growing literature on slavery and American development. Where Baptist breaks new ground is in his emphasis on the centrality of the interstate trade in slaves to the regional and national economies and his treatment of the role of extreme violence in the workings of the slave system. After the legal importation of slaves from outside the country ended in 1808, the spread of slavery into the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico would not have been possible without the enormous uprooting of people from Maryland and Virginia. Almost one million slaves, Baptist estimates, were transported to the cotton fields from the Upper South in the decades before the Civil War. The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph. For African-Americans, its results were devastating. Since buyers preferred young workers "with no attachments," the separation of husbands from wives and parents from children was intrinsic to its operation, not, as many historians have claimed, a regrettable side effect. Baptist shows how slaves struggled to recreate a sense of community in the face of this disaster. The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation "families," but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders - the middlemen - they excelled at maximizing profits. They not only emphasized the labor abilities of those for sale (reinforced by humiliating public inspections of their bodies), but appealed to buyers' salacious fantasies. In the 1830s, the term "fancy girl" began to appear in slave-trade notices to describe young women who fetched high prices because of their physical attractiveness. "Slavery's frontier," Baptist writes, "was a white man's sexual playground." The cotton kingdom that arose in the Deep South was incredibly brutal. Violence against Native Americans who originally owned the land, competing imperial powers like Spain and Britain and slave rebels solidified American control of the Gulf states. Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation. Planters called their method of labor control the "pushing system." Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it "the 'whipping-machine' system." In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is "torture." To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time - sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, "white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed." When Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans in his Second Inaugural Address of the 250 years of "blood drawn with the lash" that preceded the Civil War, he was making a similar point: Violence did not begin in the United States with the firing on Fort Sumter. Baptist has a knack for explaining complex financial matters in lucid prose. He relates how in the 1830s Southern banks developed new financial instruments, bonds with slaves as collateral, that enabled planters to borrow enormous amounts of money to acquire new land, and how lawmakers backed these bonds with the state's credit. A speculative bubble ensued, and when it collapsed, taxpayers were left to foot the bill. But rather than bailing out Northern and European bondholders, several states simply defaulted on their debts. Many planters fled with their slaves to Texas, until 1845 an independent republic, to avoid creditors. "Honor," a key element in Southern notions of masculinity, went only so far. By the 1850s, prosperity returned to the cotton economy, and planters had no difficulty obtaining loans in financial markets. As the railroad opened new areas to cultivation and cotton output soared, slave owners saw themselves as a modern, successful part of the world capitalist economy. They claimed the right to bring their slaves into all the nation's territories, and indeed into free states. These demands aroused intense opposition in the North, leading to Lincoln's election, secession and civil war. Baptist clearly hopes his findings will reach a readership beyond academe - a worthy ambition. He pursues this goal, however, in ways that sometimes undermine the book's coherence. The chapter titles, which refer to parts of the body, often have little connection to the content that follows. Presumably to avoid sounding academic, he sprinkles the text with anachronistic colloquialisms ("the president was all in" is how he describes Franklin Pierce's embrace of the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854) and with telegraphic sentences more appropriate for Twitter. Occasionally, he deploys four-letter words that cannot be reproduced in these pages. This is unnecessary - his story does not require additional shock value. It is hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded in our nation's history. But many Americans still see it as essentially a footnote, an exception to a dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent. If the various elements of "The Half Has Never Been Told" are not entirely pulled together, its underlying argument is persuasive: Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live. The domestic slave trade was highly efficient. For the slaves, its results were devastating. ERIC FONER, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia, won a Pulitzer Prize for "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery." His next book, "Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad," will appear in January.

Choice Review

Historian Baptist (Cornell) provides a vibrantly and powerfully written survey of the economic powerhouse combination of slavery and cotton and their centrality to the rapid growth of the US economy from the Revolution to the Civil War. Slavery had a pervasive influence in shaping society, culture, politics, finance, and international trade as the number of enslaved people and their productivity continued to increase. Drawing upon impressive archival research, slave narratives, and newspaper accounts, Baptist's vignettes vividly portray enslaved peoples' lives, work, and culture. He depicts the dehumanizing slave trade from the upper South to the expanding cotton regions in the southeast and then southwest as Native Americans were pushed from that region. Baptist masterfully presents slaveholders' efforts to maximize cotton production though mental and physical torture and the financial methods used to purchase more slaves and land. Though some believed slavery was inefficient, the expansion of land and production belies this notion: this economic juggernaut accelerated US capitalism as it supplied cotton to New England and British textile mills and dominated world trade in this commodity. This study should prompt scholars to reconsider the importance of slavery to US development in the antebellum period. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Raymond M. Hyser, James Madison University

Library Journal Review

Baptist argues that this country's success in the global marketplace stems directly from the brutal efficiency of slavery and that in that system cruelty and capitalism went hand in hand. (LJ 8/14) (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Available:*

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary