'The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism'

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SUN SEP 21, 2014 AT 12:40 PM PDT

'The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism'

bySusan GrigsbyFollowforDaily Kos

 
 
• 217 Comments / 217 New

attribution: Library of Congress

On Sept. 4, The Economist published a book review, for which it apologized, retracted, and then posted on the web. It created no end of furor and discussion about whether the book, or the review, was racist. The anonymous reviewer accused the author of not giving slave owners any credit for their "better treatment" of the slaves which may have been the reason that cotton production increased. He also found that "Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains." Since the book concerned slavery in America, Twitter went delightfully mad with #economistbookreviews.

It seemed to me that the Economist review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism was wildly successful. Because while we were all busy smirking, grinning and even laughing at the reviewer, the conversation that the book should have provoked, that The Economist wanted at all costs to avoid, was never discussed. What did The Economist want to avoid talking about?

Back wages, perhaps?

Or perhaps what caused the Panic of 1837?

Or the ingenuity and perseverance of those whose misfortune it was to be enslaved?

Or perhaps it was this:

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

More truth is below the fold.

The Half Has Never Been Told:

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
By Edward E. Baptist
Published by Basic Books
September 9, 2014
528 pages

In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptist, author, historian and Cornell University associate professor, artfully combines the individual voices of an enslaved population within a broader discussion of the economic and geographic growth of America in the nineteenth century. But mostly, he paints a picture of unrestrained, laissez-faire capitalism. A form of capitalism undreamt of by any but the most ardent Ayn Rand fans. It is this picture of capitalism unbound that The Economist likely does not want us to discuss.

In this story of American slavery, and its intimate connection to American capitalism, Baptist demonstrates how the availability of cheap land, slave labor and a government willing to support it can create huge amounts of wealth. Enough wealth to help fund an industrial revolution.

Using thousands of WPA-era interviews and hundreds of post-Civil War memoirs and autobiographies written by former slaves, he brings to life the giant that he uses as his metaphor and organizing tool. The image of this giant comes from an essay written by Ralph Ellison:

"On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds."

Baptist takes apart the myths that our society has created to make us more comfortable with our slave-owning past. He begins with the biggest myth of all, that slavery was unprofitable, inefficient, and would eventually die off as it would be unable to adapt and to compete with industrialization.

Sure.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no evidence that it was either inefficient or that it was dying out. On the contrary, the cheap and ready availability of stolen lands and easy credit due to creative financial instruments, combined with the slave labor that the laws allowed, encouraged and protected, led to a boom in cotton production that showed little signs of slowing by 1860.

In 1860, the Southern slave labor camps provided 88 percent of the cotton used in Great Britain's cotton mills. Cotton had become the number one trading commodity of the entire world. It fueled the industrial revolution, feeding not just the cotton mills of Britain, but also the ones in towns like Lowell, Massachusetts. The cotton mills of Lowell were built with the profits made from the unpaid labor of African Americans in the slave labor camps. Cotton went from 14 percent of the total American exports in 1802 to 61 percent by 1860. The United States share of the worldwide cotton market climbed from one percent in 1801 to 66 percent by 1860.

As new lands were opened by the Louisiana Purchase and the forced eviction of almost 50,000 Native Americans from the lands to which they held title, slavery moved from the coastal states of the Old South to the new Southwest. Foreclosed from importing new slaves to work the new land by the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, slave traders forced the migration of one million slaves:

From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa.

On the eve of the Civil War, the enslavers were eyeing land in Texas, California, and even Cuba to further the expansion of the slave labor camps. The number of slaves had increased five-fold over what it was in the 1790s.

Slaves Waiting for Sale: Richmond, Virginia
Eyre Crowe Painting from sketch of 1853

In the vernacular of the African American, this forced migration, this tearing apart of families and homes, was called stealing. A man was "stole" from his home in a Virginia slave labor camp, and shipped down the river to New Orleans to be sold. In calling this a theft, the African American community was identifying the criminal nature of slavery and building a common story of themselves, as a people.

The crop of cotton in 1859 was astonishing— almost 2 billion pounds of clean fiber in 4 million bales. Slavery’s productivity was higher than ever— some 700 pounds per enslaved man, woman, and child in the cotton country, twenty-two times the rate in 1790.

The astounding increase in productivity was due to the ingenuity of the African American slaves; not because they were treated so well by their enslavers, but because they faced whippings, and worse, should they fail to meet their quotas. So they found ways to pick cotton with both hands, to pick it faster and to waste less motion in order to avoid the whip's lash. The quotas were increased regularly, creating a push system of labor, requiring ever-increasing productivity from the enslaved.

And thus untold amounts of mental labor, unknown breakthroughs of human creativity, were the keys to an astonishing increase in cotton production that required no machinery— save the whipping-machine, of course. With it, enslavers looted the riches of black folk’s minds, stole days and months and years and lifetimes, turned sweat, blood, and flesh into gold.

According to Baptist, during the Civil War, when demand for cotton far exceeded the supply, the federal government leased land on South Carolina's Sea Islands to northern entrepreneurs who would attempt to grow cotton using employees who were paid for their labor. Despite the experiments that included monthly wages and wages paid per pound of cotton picked, they were unable to achieve anything near the productivity of the slave labor camps.

The Half Has Never Been Told is a story that covers an immense amount of territory. Baptist includes the individual narratives of the enslaved people and letters from those whose wealth depended on the slave trade or slave labor. It is from one of those letters that we learn of the casualness with which women's sexual slavery is discussed. "Fancy" girls were sold for a price directly related to her light skin and sexual attractiveness.

Baptist also examines the tendency toward violence that was preval‎ent in the South as white men, in order to prove they were superior to the enslaved men, took offense at the any perceived slight to their honor. Duels to defend that honor distinguished them from the African American who, of course, was not allowed to defend himself or his loved ones.

He draws other parallels to today while exploring the causes of the Panic of 1837, including the lessening of financial regulations, the creation of new financial instruments and the belief that cotton prices must always rise in defiance of the laws of supply and demand.

An excerpt from The Half Has Never Been Told was published by Salon, and can be foundonline.

If unregulated capitalism succeeds wildly only through theft and torture, should we not be regulating it more closely? Should we not take steps to insure that the theft of wages is never again allowed to happen?

And if the Koch brothers, and the Waltons, and so many other Americans can live off of the wealth created by their ancestors, isn't something owing to the heirs of the African Americans who created the wealth of this nation?

Perhaps this is what The Economist is hoping we won't talk about, being distracted as we are, by a review that suggests that reality has a liberal bias.

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO DAILY KOS ON SUN SEP 21, 2014 AT 12:40 PM PDT.

ALSO REPUBLISHED BY BLACK KOS COMMUNITY.

TAGS

• Capitalism
• Civil Rights
• Economy
• Edward E. Baptist
• History
• Slavery
• The Half Has Never Been Told
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WEEKEND EDITION SEPTEMBER 26-28, 2014

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Edward E. Baptist’s "The Half Has Never Been Told"

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

by CHARLES R. LARSON

During the 1930s, the WPA sent out workers to interview men and women who had been slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. It was 72 years after slavery had been abolished and the interviewees were old but their memories were still vivid. When probed by an interviewee, Lorenzo Ivy responded, “Truly, son, the half has never been told.” After the Civil War, black life during slavery was sanitized, deodorized and, above all, reported by Caucasians—not by the people who had toiled under the murderous system. To a certain extent, that one-sided view has persisted. Historians of the South—largely while men—continued the subterfuge. And even recent attempts to set the record straight have followed in the steps of their predecessors: a chapter on families, one on women, etc., looking at groups instead of individuals.

Hence, the need for Edward E. Baptist’s monumental examination of slavery, presented in an entirely new way, extensively through the voices of the slaves themselves.  Baptist has not simply read the WPA interviews but, apparently, every other account of what happened, particularly the many slave narratives published before and after the end of slavery. And, then—what is most original here—he has organized his own account by using parts of the body; for slavery was, above all, an affront to the basic dignity of the corporal body. These are the chapter titles: “Feet,” “Heads,” “Right Hand,” “Left Hand,” “Tongues,” “Breath,” “Seed,” “Blood,” “Backs,” and “Arms”—largely parts of the body. The Introduction (“The Heart”) and the Afterword (“The Corpse”) complete the picture.

The first chapter (“Feet”) begins,

“Not long after they heard the first clink of iron, the boys and girls in the cornfield would have been able to smell the grownups’ bodies, perhaps even before they saw the double line coming around the bend. Hurrying in locked step, the thirty-old men came down the dirt road like a giant machine. Each hauled twenty pounds of iron, chains that draped from neck to neck and wrist-to-wrist, binding them all together. Ragged strips flapped stiffly from their clothes like dead-air pennants. On the men’s heads, hair stood out in growing dreads or lay in dust-caked mats. As they moved, some looked down like catatonics. Others stared at something a thousand yards ahead. And now, behind the clanking men, followed a marching crowd of women loosely roped, the same vacancy in their expressions, endurance standing out in the rigid strings of muscle that had replaced their calves in the weeks since they left Maryland. Behind them all swayed a white man on a gray walking horse.”

The men (often with a thousand pounds of iron connecting them) were part of a coffle, enslaved migrants walking seven or eight hundred miles, chattel property, being moved from the north to the south because the profits when they were sold to their new owners were one hundred percent. The slave trade in Africa no longer mattered because slaves in the more northern states (Virginia, especially, but also Maryland) were reproducing so quickly that they created an entire new source of labor. Baptist gives the year as 1805, and states that eventually a million slaves were herded this way to the South. Tobacco farming in the North was less profitable than cotton farming in the South. “The coffle chained the early American republic together.” Slaves walked and walked for five or six weeks, performing their ablutions as they moved. There wasn’t an iota of dignity for the men. Baptist refers to the entire procedure as a “pattern of political compromise” between the North and the South and notes that eight of the first twelve Presidents of the United States were slave owners.

The movement of such huge numbers of slaves to the part of the country that could more productively use them was a “forced migration” grounded on “forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.” Equally disturbing—and this is the thesis of Baptist’s magnificent book—“all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people.” Thus, there are no chapters on the African slave trade or the Middle Passage here, but a focus instead on what might be called the second stage of slavery in America. The movement to the deep South would continue for years because of increased productivity of the slaves themselves. In the North, one hand usually sufficed for their work (the dominant hand) but cotton picking required the complicated dexterity of both hands working together.

Moreover, as the country expanded, Southerners made certain that many of the new states further west became slave states where cotton production could continue. So Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia were soon augmented by Texas, Arkansas, and eventually Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona, Union territories permitting slavery. It was a nasty balance but it permitted the growth of cotton plantations across the country as well as the steadily increasing cotton industry throughout the entire world (“massive profits from textile manufacturing”—not just in the United States.) Cotton became the “global economy’s most important raw material.”

The plantation owners developed something known as the “pushing system,” forcing the cotton pickers to increase productivity. There were quotas and severe punishments for those who failed, and if a slave had a day when he (or she) picked more than any other day, that became his (or her) new daily quota. Torture for failed quotas was endemic.  All white people in the country benefitted, even though some northerners insisted they were no part of it.

Baptist is not afraid to refer to the entire system as “stealing.”  “If you want to rule a person, steal the person. Steal him from his people and steal him from his own right hand, from everything he has grown up knowing. Take her to a place where you can steal everything else from her: her future, her creativity, her womb.” In such a system there can be no good slave owners, only bad ones. “Stealing can never be an orderly system undergirded by property rights, cushioned by family-like relationships. There is no balance between contradictory elements. There is only chaos and violence.”

Fortunately, by the 1820s, there were increasing pronouncements from white Americans that slavery had to end. And there were increasing narratives published by slaves who had escaped that showed their limited number of readers just how appalling the entire system was.  As I said earlier, Baptist relies on these accounts extensively, plus the isolated reports of a number of attempted revolts such as Nat Turner’s. Christianity was also added to the fray, both as a justification of slavery, by some, and hope for many slaves who had been converted.

In spite of the enormous profits from cotton, it was not an uninterrupted trajectory of economic stability. Banks often lent out more money than they should have, using slaves as collateral. There was often economic turmoil. By the late 1830s, “In response to these clear incentives, enslavers created still more ways to leverage slaves into still more leverage. They mortgaged the same collateral from multiple lenders. They used slaves bought with long-term mortgages to bluff lenders into granting unsecured commercial loans. Above all, they kept buying more slaves on credit. Even if they ran into problems, they figured they would still win, because they could sell their assets. For the slave prices were still rising.”

Inevitably there were panics, collapses, including one that began in Texas, in 1837. Then things bounced back again. Half of the country’s economic activity was related to slavery. By 1850, there were three million slaves in the country. There were years of bitter arguments in Congress about the viability of the entire system. The Compromise of 1850 (another further balancing of slave areas with non-slave areas) simply continued the precarious holding pattern. There were major compromises over runaway slaves, the famous Lincoln/Douglas Debates, John Brown’s execution—dark days for the country. Then in 1860, Lincoln won the election and southern states began to secede. Baptist remarks, “The South did not believe that the North would fight.”

Most of the rest of the story is familiar, as grim as what happened before the end of the Civil War. Black soldiers had pushed the balance. “Their service in battle had saved the nation,” though not necessarily to the benefit they had anticipated. It wasn’t long before the South began imposing major restrictions on black people, the insidious “Jim Crow” laws. Other than a brief period immediately after the war, almost all black people were “shut out of the political system.” Baptist observes, “Slavery and its expansion had built enduring patterns of poverty and exploitation. This legacy was certainly crystal clear in [the] early twentieth-century South. African-American households had virtually no wealth, for instance, while a substantial portion of the wealth held by white households, even after emancipation, could be traced to revenue generated by enslaved labor and financing leveraged out of their bodies before 1861.”

When you consider the long-term effects of slavery, reaching into our world today, it is possible to say that the lives of African-Americans are substantially better than they have ever been before, but when you examine the actual economics impacting black people’s lives, you see a much different picture. Numerous articles in the press during the past few years provide a bleak picture of black people’s living situations. The gap among races widened during the recent economic recession. According to an article in The New York Times in August of this year, “The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid.” That’s as damning an indictment of the long-term results of slavery in America as possible and something to consider when reflecting on the half-assed analyses of the recent riots in Ferguson, Missouri.

Edward E. Baptist’s brilliant book, The Half Has Never Been Told, soars because of the author’s decision to root his analysis in the human dimension. The book transcends anything that has previously been written about slavery. Dozens of individual slaves are named in the study and their lives successfully worked into the lengthy narration of the legacy of slavery in our country. In short, Baptist has humanized the lives of American slaves, liberated them from one of the most inhumane systems mankind ever devised.  The entire country needs to do the same.

Edward E. Baptist: The Half  Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Basic Books, 498 pp., $35.00

Charles R. Larson is Emeritus Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C.  Email: clarson@american.edu.