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

by Edward E. Baptist

Yet Calhoun did not trust either Taylor or the party system. In January 1849, he and four other southerners in Congress issued a printed “Address”: it warned that if the North’s anti-southern attitudes continued to grow, and the South did not respond, slavery’s expansion—and slavery itself—would end. A Congress dominated by the likes of John Palfrey the younger would ban the interstate slave trade. Then there would be no injections of new capital, and no stick to hold over enslaved people’s heads. An expanding black population would demographically drown whites, and forced emancipation would follow. After that, interfering northern whites would demand for ex-slaves “the right of voting and holding public office,” resulting in “the prostration of the white race”—political servility and forced interracial marriage