“Have you been happier in slavery or free?” a
young Works Project Administration interviewer in 1937 asked Lorenzo Ivy, a
former slave, in Danville, Va. Ivy responded with a memory of seeing chained
African-Americans marching farther South to be sold.
“Truly, son, the half has never been told,”
he said.
This anecdote is how Edward E. Baptist opens
“The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” an
examination of both the economic innovations that grew out of the ever-shifting
institution of slavery and the suffering of generations of people who were
bought and sold.
Mr. Baptist, a history professor at Cornell,
said in an interview that his book represented his decade-long effort to blend
these two aspects. Published in September, “The Half” joins a new wave of
scholarship about the centrality of slavery — and the cotton picked by slaves —
to the country’s economic development.
Mr. Baptist shows the ways that new financial
products, bonds that used enslaved people as collateral and were sold to
bondholders in this country and abroad, enriched investors worldwide. He also
emphasizes viciously enforced slave labor and migration. The cotton boom led
planters to sell slaves — one million moved from old to new slave states from
the 1790s to the 1860s. Productivity, he argues, came through punishment.
Enslaved and formerly enslaved people like Ivy are at the center of this
sprawling story.
“I didn’t know how big the topic was going to
be,” Mr. Baptist, 44, said in a telephone interview from Ithaca, N.Y. “I was
most interested in looking at the experiences of people sold by slave
traders.”
Sometimes unfolding in a novelistic way, his
book casts unreimbursed labor as torture and Southern plantations as labor
camps. Mr. Baptist imagines the thoughts of a slave being put to death. He
quotes exchanges between planters about the sexual exploitation of enslaved
women. He describes a Maryland county in which about 10 percent of enslaved
people 16 to 25 were sold in an 18-month period.
Wading through the research, Mr. Baptist said
he realized that he had two big stories. “One is the expansion of American
capitalism on the backs of enslaved human beings,” said Mr. Baptist, who grew up
in Durham, N.C., the son of a librarian mother and a biochemist father. “And the
other is the way they had to move faster and faster and think harder and
harder,” he said of those slaves. “Historians have spent a lot of time talking
about whether African-Americans resisted. In forced migrations, survival was a
kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to
write stories about themselves to say: This is a crime.”
In his work, Mr. Baptist also followed the
money. “I started tracking the process of credit flow into the South, huge
amounts of money,” he said. “Southerners created numerous financial innovations
that were essential to the process of the domestic slave trade. Slave owners put
mortgages on slaves as they bought them. Britain had abolished slavery, but you
can essentially buy slaves by buying one of those bonds. It shows the
linkage.”
As he writes in the book: “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.”
Suresh Naidu, a Columbia University economist
who also studies slavery, said economists would call for even more quantitative
evidence for Mr. Baptist’s arguments but said his book was a “great
interpretation of slavery.” Economic historians have tended to focus on how
market forces blunted the worst aspects of slavery, Mr. Naidu said, but Mr.
Baptist demonstrates how the drive for profit exacerbated physical punishment
and forced migration.
Mr. Baptist’s work joins that of historians
like Walter Johnson at Harvard (“River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the
Cotton Kingdom”) and Craig Steven Wilder at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (“Ebony
& Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s
Universities”). Taken together, their books, both from 2013, connected the dots
among plantation labor, London bankers and Northeast factories, and the creation
of Ivy League universities.
“Empire of Cotton: A Global History,” by Sven
Beckert, a Harvard history professor, due out this year, looks at global
capitalism through the lens of the history of cotton. Daina Ramey Berry, a
historian at the University of Texas at Austin, is writing a book on the
monetary value of enslaved people from before conception (slaves were valued for
their reproductive abilities) to after death.
In an interview, Mr.
Johnson said “Half” had broken new ground in the way it explored the
relationship between slave markets and capital markets. In particular, he said,
Mr. Baptist shows how the Bank of the United States (in which federal funds were
deposited) was lending money to slave traders. Planters would mortgage their
slaves to raise money, and those mortgages were sold to investors. Mr. Johnson
also cited Mr. Baptist’s argument that huge increases in cotton-picking over the
course of the antebellum period were due almost entirely to violence against
slaves. Historians have often attributed that increase to the emergence of new,
easier-to-pick strains of cotton and the cotton gin, Mr. Johnson said.
Seth Rockman, a historian at Brown
University, himself at work on a book about how New England industries
manufactured plantation goods, said Mr. Baptist had advanced the story by
connecting “the day-to-day violence of plantation labor to the largest
macroeconomic questions of the West’s economic takeoff in the 19th
century.”
“The Half Has Never Been Told” entered the
Twittersphere when a review in The Economist in September took Mr. Baptist to
task for advocacy and for depicting most whites as villains and most blacks as
victims. That review was so derided by readers that the magazine withdrew it and
posted
an apology online. Other reviews, including those in The Wall Street Journal
and The Los Angeles Times have been far more positive. A
review in Daily Kos said Mr. Baptist “takes apart the myths that our society
has created to make us more comfortable with our slave-owning past.”
His own journey into that past was
intellectually satisfying but sometimes emotionally challenging, Mr. Baptist
said. He recalled reading an interview with a woman whose enslaved mother toiled
in the fields of a small Kentucky farm in the 1850s, sometimes returning home to
discover that another child of hers had been sold away.
“In 1850, people could have given up,” Mr.
Baptist said. “There was no reason to expect this would end anytime soon. That
was a moment, reading that interview, that brought home all the implications of
the history.”
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