STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Edward Baptist: Slavery gave big economic advantage to slaveowners, textile industry
- He says the human suffering it caused carries on into patterns of racism today
- The Economist panned Baptist's new book, then apologized for the review in face of criticism
- Baptist: It's not surprising that a magazine that exalts capitalism today would take that stand
Editor's note: Edward E. Baptist, an associate professor of history at Cornell University, is the author of "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," published by Basic Books. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
(CNN) -- One day two lifetimes ago, about 1825, a man from Maryland was standing outside a Methodist church after service, talking with his friends and fellow church members. William was enslaved. Parts of his life were very difficult. But he had also been able to create richness in other parts of his life. He probably had a family, and he was very active in the church. Yet as I explain in my new book "The Half Has Never Been Told," on that particular day everything suddenly changed for William.
William saw his owner approaching him with another white man. William might have never met this man before, but he had heard all about him. This was Austin Woolfolk, a slave trader who shipped hundreds of men, women, and children from Maryland down to New Orleans every year. And Woolfolk was carrying rope.
Woolfolk told William to stretch out his hands. William had been sold. He would be shipped or marched down to New Orleans, where Woolfolk would sell him again, probably to a cotton planter.
In Louisiana, or Mississippi, or Alabama, he'd have to learn a different kind of work, and build a new life -- if he survived the diseases and violence that shortened African-American lifespans in the cotton regions. Now his friends began to break down, weeping and screaming like people at a young person's funeral. They were watching yet another friend's life dissolve in front of their eyes.
Starting in the 1790s, slave owners began creating a huge cotton and slavery complex on the newest frontiers of the young United States. Cotton soon became the world's most important market commodity -- the Big Oil of the 19th century -- and the work of slaves like William was driving the industrial revolution.
We live today in an economy built in part on the foundations that people like William laid. That's what my book argues, and that's why I wasn't surprised that the British magazine The Economist wasn't happy with my book. The story of how slavery's expansion helped to shape the economy in which we all live isn't likely to please everybody at a publication that spends a lot of pages explaining why our current neoliberal economic order is the best possible one.
John Ridley on depicting slavery in film "12 years a slave"
But I was surprised by how old-fashioned the response was. It complained that in a book about the exploitation of the enslaved, slave owners came across as exploiters. It complained that in a book about the violent things done to people like William -- and how people like William survived -- the enslaved were "victims."
Hundreds of Internet commenters reacted to the review with fury. They pointed out the casual racism seemingly implied by the flippant caption under the picture of Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o -- "A valuable property." They mocked the reviewer for claiming that slaveholders would treat their slaves well. Some of the best parodies of the review -- which seemed to be complaining that I left out the less negative side of a profoundly evil system -- were collected on Twitter under the hashtag#economistbookreviews. {Please definitely review the comments press control click on this link-You will need more than one pass across the broad spectrum of potent and incisive remarks delivered by the readers of the Economist that lead to the withdrawal of the original book review.}
Even today, the discrepancy between the descendants of the enslaved and white Americans is huge...in terms of family wealth.
Bombarded by virtually unanimous disdain, The Economist quickly withdrew the review and offered an apology.
Back in 1825, however, William could see no way out of his quandary. As Woolfolk tied his hands in an expert set of knots, William told his wailing, devastated friends, "Don't cry for me," for he believed that "God is everywhere!"
Yet even if he hoped he could commune with them in prayer across the miles, William was not going to be able to tell his Maryland family about how he was doing. If he remarried after forced separation from his wife and children, he might raise more sons and daughters. But those children would never meet their family back in Maryland.
Because of decisions by white people like William's owner, today millions of African-Americans in Maryland or Virginia don't know their millions of Mississippi or Louisiana cousins, and vice versa. But the loss goes beyond the fact that family reunions are smaller than they should be.
Slavery systematically exploited, brutalized, and impoverished some people. [All of the people of color in whatever proportion –VM]. The forced movement of people to the cotton frontier made others wealthy and not just enslavers. Northerners and Europeans created a worldwide textile industry based on slave-made cotton. They lent money to slave owners to buy more Williams from more Woolfolks and took the profit.
Even today, the discrepancy between the descendants of the enslaved and white Americans is huge: In terms of family wealth, white households have almost $15 for every dollar held by African-American ones. The justifications enslavers and their allies offered for what they were doing -- claims that African-Americans were subhuman, that they were lazy, or that they were violent and needed to be "controlled" to prevent black men from rampant anti-white violence -- are still being tossed around in our society.
These kinds of racism are sometimes used to justify exclusions that make it harder for black families to close that wealth gap. Sometimes they are used to justify shooting even unarmed African-Americans. And that points to another important reason to understand slavery's legacy. Facing up to the history of what happened to William, and millions of other people, would help us all -- maybe even reviewers at the Economist -- to take seriously the possibility that slavery's legacy is still destroying lives.
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How slaves built American capitalism
Sep 6th 2014 | From the print edition
Apology: In our review of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist, we said: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil. We regret having published this and apologize for having done so. We are therefore withdrawing the review but in the interests of transparency, anybody who wants to see the withdrawn review can click here.
Original review:
“FOR sale: a coloured girl, of very superior qualifications…a bright mulatto, fine figure, straight, black hair, and very black eyes; very neat and cleanly in her dress and person.” Such accounts of people being marketed like livestock punctuate Edward Baptist’s grim history of the business of slavery.
Although the import of African slaves into the United States was stopped in 1807, the country’s internal slave trade continued to prosper and expand for a long time afterwards. Right up until the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, the American-born children and grandchildren of enslaved Africans were bought cheap in Virginia and Maryland to be sold dear in private deals and public auctions to cotton planters in the deep South.
Tall men commanded higher prices than short ones. Women went for less than men. The best bids were for men aged 18 to 25 and for women aged 15 to 22. One slave recalled buyers passing up and down the lines at a Virginia slave auction, asking, “What can you do? Are you a good cook? Seamstress? Dairy maid?” and to the men, “Can you plough? Are you a blacksmith?” Slaves who gave surly answers risked a whipping from their masters.
Raw cotton was America’s most valuable export. It was grown and picked by black slaves. So Mr Baptist, an historian at Cornell University, is not being especially contentious when he says that America owed much of its early growth to the foreign exchange, cheaper raw materials and expanding markets provided by a slave-produced commodity. But he overstates his case when he dismisses “the traditional explanations” for America’s success: its individualistic culture, Puritanism, the lure of open land and high wages, Yankee ingenuity and government policies.
Take, for example, the astonishing increases he cites in both cotton productivity and cotton production. In 1860 a typical slave picked at least three times as much cotton a day as in 1800. In the 1850s cotton production in the southern states doubled to 4m bales and satisfied two-thirds of world consumption. By 1860 the four wealthiest states in the United States, ranked in terms of wealth per white person, were all southern: South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.[These are ill gotten gains- from the exploitation of people who were considered sub-human and designated a 3/5 of white human being in the US Constitution –In fact the wealth of these States and the USA as whole would have been far higher if the Africans who were brought here and their descendants were paid the same wage as hired hand a had freedom of movement before and after the Civil War. Their Consumption and increased productivity which could be incentivized by working and living conditions that motivated the hired hands of the day VM]
Mr Baptist cites the testimony of a few slaves to support his view that these rises in productivity were achieved by pickers being driven to work ever harder by a system of “calibrated pain”. The complication here was noted by Hugh Thomas in 1997 in his definitive history, “The Slave Trade”; an historian cannot know whether these few spokesmen adequately speak for all.
Another unexamined factor may also have contributed to rises in productivity. Slaves were valuable property, and much harder and, thanks to the decline in supply from Africa, costlier to replace than, say, the Irish peasants that the iron-masters imported into south Wales in the 19th century. Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their “hands” ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment. Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy. [This review deservedly bit the dust ended on the trash heap of history –VM]
Book Review: 'The Half Has Never Been Told' by Edward E. Baptist
In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time.
Fergus M. Bordewich
Sept. 5, 2014 5:28 p.m. ET
Slavery's defenders often portrayed the South's "peculiar institution" as the antithesis of money-grubbing Yankee capitalism, rooted in an idealized agrarian hierarchy of white master and enslaved African that had been ordained for all time by God and natural law. Indeed, they often insisted that it was a supremely charitable endeavor that saved the slave from his own innate barbarism, asserting, for example, that they had to provide for elderly, infirm and immature slaves whether they were productive or not, as if they were members of their own family—albeit of a very inferior sort. As the wealthy South Carolina planter and politician James H. Hammond condescendingly put it in 1845, in a truculent rebuttal to attacks on slavery made by a British abolitionist: "We must therefore content ourselves with our dear labor under the consoling reflection that what is lost to us is gained to humanity." Abolitionists were contemptuous of such self-serving nonsense, but they too tended to see slavery as an economically inefficient, and morally reprehensible, hangover from the pre-modern past.
In "The Half Has Never Been Told," Edward E. Baptist takes passionate issue with such assumptions. He asserts that slavery was neither inherently inefficient nor a counterpoint to capitalism. Rather, he says, it was woven inextricably into the transnational fabric of early 19th-century capitalism. Banks and financiers fed it with the investment it needed to continue expanding and were rewarded with handsome profits from the labor of enslaved millions. Although crashes, depressions and market fluctuations inevitably affected the slave-based economy, large-scale investors in slavery consistently earned handsome profits, at least in the rich cotton-growing regions of the Deep South.
The morality of slavery rarely if ever entered into the business equation. As the number of slaves in the U.S. swelled from just under one million at the dawn of the century to about four million at the time of the Civil War, investors consistently demonstrated their confidence in slavery's profitability. As the historian Walter Johnson has eloquently put it, slaves represented "a congealed form of the capital upon which the commercial development of the [Mississippi River] Valley depended. . . . The cords of credit and debt—of advance and obligation—that cinched the Atlantic economy together were anchored with the mutually defining values of land and slaves: without land and slaves, there was no credit, and without slaves, land itself was valueless." The value of the dollar, Mr. Johnson adds, "as often as not . . . turned out to be backed by flesh rather than gold."
As early as the 1820s, says Mr. Baptist, slave owners commanded the biggest pool of collateral in the United States: two million slaves worth more than $1 billion. "Not only was that almost 20 percent of all the wealth owned by all US citizens," Mr. Baptist writes, "but it was the most liquid part of that wealth, thanks to the efficiency of markets manned by professional slave traders." It was also the third of all the wealth of the USA.
Slaves were a uniquely flexible commodity: There was a ready market for them everywhere in the South; they could be either sold or leased; they could be moved from place to place under their own power; and unlike tools and buildings, they naturally reproduced, adding to the value of their master's investment.
As the native Indian tribes were removed from their land—either by treaty or at gunpoint—investment capital gushed in. In just eight years, from 1824 to 1832, the Philadelphia-based Bank of the United States, the banker for the federal government, multiplied the amount of its loans to Mississippi Valley slave owners 16 times over. By 1832, according to Mr. Baptist, at least one-third of the entire bank's capital had been allocated to planters, slave traders, merchants and local banks on the "slave frontier" of the southwestern states. The depth of the bank's commitment, in turn, gave European investors the confidence to lavishly inject their own currency into American slavery.
For example, the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana—a local bank chartered in 1827—enjoyed a lucrative relationship with Baring Brothers of London, a firm that lobbied successfully to persuade the Louisiana legislature to back the association's bonds with public credit. Thus if the association failed to pay off its bonds, Louisiana's taxpayers would be liable for the debt. Baring would eventually handle some $2.5 million in bond sales for the association, marketing to clients in Britain as well as the European continent.
Mr. Baptist writes most effectively about the cotton-growing states of the Mississippi River Valley. During the boom years of the 1830s, the region transformed itself from a frontier backwater into the wealthiest and most productive agricultural region in the United States. Andrew Jackson's termination of the Bank of the United States, in 1836, created new opportunities for buccaneer financiers. A multitude of thinly capitalized and virtually unregulated banks flooded the region with unbacked paper money. In Louisiana alone, the number of such "mushroom banks" quadrupled from four to 16 in just a few years, while the total amount of capital authorized by the state legislature exploded from $9 million to $46 million, giving rise to speculation that New Orleans might soon become America's financial capital.
Remarked one observer in 1835: "People here are run mad with speculation. They do business in . . . a kind of phrenzy." Mr. Baptist notes that since large-scale slave owners commonly included judges, politicians and state officials—that is, the same men who controlled banking policy and debt collection—elite borrowers were rarely foreclosed, even if they fell behind on payments: "As enslavers multiplied their leverage, they multiplied their revenue without increasing their individual risk."
By 1837, the total amount of bank loans available to southwestern borrowers had grown to $80 million from $40 million in 1832—one-third of the national total, Mr. Baptist says, and more than any other region of the United States. Although investment was also made in infrastructure, such as railroads, Mr. Baptist maintains that the major purpose of the loans was to expand the region's agriculture, which meant borrowing to purchase the "tools of the trade"—slaves and more slaves. Companies like Franklin & Armfield were ready to meet the demand.
Mr. Baptist's fine-grained profile of Franklin & Armfield is sadly illuminating. The firm rode rising demand to become the biggest slave-trading company in the United States, moving many thousands of "surplus" slaves from the Upper South to the plantations of what was then called the "Southwest." To finance its activities, Franklin & Armfield drew up to $40,000 at a time from the Bank of the United States to buy slaves for the Mississippi Valley markets. According to Mr. Baptist, about 5% of all the commercial credit handled by the bank in 1831-32 passed at some point through the hands of that single slave-trading company.
Although the vast majority of the company's "human stock" would wind up in the cotton fields, many females, attractive mulattoes in particular, were destined for prostitution. In one of several letters that Mr. Baptist quotes, a company senior partner suggests matter-of-factly that two women he had recently purchased "could soon pay for themselves by keeping a whore house . . . for the Exclusive benefit of the concern and its allied agents."
Considering his subject matter, Mr. Baptist writes with verve and a good eye for the dramatic. This virtue is also the book's greatest shortcoming, however. In an effort to humanize the often forgotten slaves whose lives were, after all, at the heart of the global economic forces that drove the cotton economy, he resorts too often to novelistic devices that undermine the reader's patience and trust. Describing the execution of a rebellious slave named Amar, Mr. Baptist writes: "In his head, as he slumped and fell, were 50 billion neurons. They held the secrets of turning sugarcane sap into white crystals . . . they held the cunning with which he sought out his lover's desires. . . . The dancing electrons in Amar's brain caressed forty-five years of words, pictures, feelings, the village imam with his old book, his mother calling him from the door of a mud-brick house." Elsewhere Mr. Baptist writes of an unnamed man en route to the slave market in New Orleans: "He heard the women on the other deck crying for a dying baby or sister; heard them fight as the sailors took them into the crew's quarters one by one, to be raped. He saw them drag out men who had gone stiff and grinning. The angel's fingers clawed at him too." Is this slave a real person? A composite? Wholly imagined? Mr. Baptist doesn't tell us.
Anyone averse to such squishy stuff will find a penetrating discussion of many the same topics in Walter Johnson's often beautifully written (if sometimes confusingly organized) "River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom" (2013). That work places antebellum slave-owning in a broad context of proslavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets and Southern schemes for global ascendancy. Like Mr. Baptist, Mr. Johnson argues that abstracting slavery from industrial development in the U.S.—or, for that matter, in Britain—is fundamentally ahistorical. Mississippi, he rightly says, does not have to look like Manchester, England, or Lowell, Mass., to make it an engine of capitalism.
Slavery weathered the Panic of 1837, which ruined many of the "mushroom banks" and debtors who lacked helpful friends in the local courthouse. In the 1850s, the slave-based economy experienced a dramatic resurgence when a new wave of "Negro fever" doubled the price of slaves in relation to that of other goods. On the cusp of the Civil War, slavery showed no sign of dying a natural death, except in parts of Maryland and Delaware. Slavery remained, Mr. Baptist says, "both modernizing and modern" and its growth "muscular, dynamic."
In his January 1861 State of the Union address, the pro-Southern president, James Buchanan, spent less time addressing the secession crisis in South Carolina than he did expressing his hope of acquiring Cuba for the United States—a longtime goal of slave owners and investors who saw it as the best opportunity for extending the reach of American slavery. Only civil war and hundreds of thousands of lives would finally put an end to the lucrative partnership between the cruel machine of Southern slavery and the roaring engines of capitalism.
—Mr. Bordewich’s most recent book is "America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union."