A Brutal Process
'The Half Has Never Been Told,' by Edward E. Baptist
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 HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
By Edward E. Baptist
Illustrated. 498 pp. Basic Books. $35.
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