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

by Edward E. Baptist

Free people of color in the United States were always a tiny minority who sided with the white majority during crises, in contrast to Saint-Domingue, where many had joined the rebellion.53

a merchant drifting down the river on a flatboat spied strange fruit growing. “Along between Cantrell and the Red Church I saw a number of Negro Heads sticking on Poles on the Levee,”

President James Madison had caved to pressure exerted by Republican congressmen and asked for a declaration of war. The most vehement congressmen were the so-called War Hawks, mostly young representatives from western states. They believed that now, while Britain’s fleets and armies were tied up in the struggle with Napoleon, was the time to finish dismembering the British Empire in North America by annexing Canada. (As it turned out, Canadians did not want that.)

Jackson called all Creek leaders—including the ones who had opposed the Red Sticks—to a meeting at Fort Jackson. There he bullied them into signing a treaty that conceded 23 million acres (36,000 square miles), an area as large as Indiana. The friendly Creeks protested, but he had the army, the victory, and the power. They signed away over half of their lands in Alabama, much of it on the rich black soil of the central part of the territory.

from the perspective of Britain, the Treaty of San Ildefonso was illegitimate, and therefore so was the Louisiana Purchase. Napoleon had no right to sell a territory to which he had no title.

Article IX of the Treaty of Ghent obligated the United States to return land taken from Britain’s Indian allies—who included the Red Stick Creeks. Thanks to Jackson’s victory, however, the United States was in no position to feel compelled to reverse the Treaty of Fort Jackson and remand 36,000 square miles to Creek custody.

BEFORE THE LATE EIGHTEENTH century, all societies’ economies were preindustrial. Almost all of their inhabitants were farmers or farm laborers. Whether European, Asian, American, or African, such economies rarely grew by as much as 1 percent per year. So it had been since women and men had invented agriculture ten millennia earlier.

People have called this incredible shift in human history by a variety of names: modernization, the industrial revolution, the Great Divergence.

Until late in the eighteenth century, cotton fabric had been a luxury good woven on handlooms in Indian villages. But by 1790, British inventors had begun to create new machines that spun cotton into thread at a rate that human hands could not approach. The machines were less expensive to acquire and operate than the human hands, too. Within seven decades, Manchester factory workers running the new machines could make cloth five or ten times faster than laborers alone working by hand.

jaconet

By the end of the nineteenth century, only half a dozen independent non-Western nations would survive on the globe as colonialism expanded.

All the new efficiencies, all the accelerating curves of growth, would have been short-circuited if embryo industries had run out of cotton fiber. And that nearly happened.

the Mississippian who wrote that New Orleans would be the “port of exit for the redundant produce of the upper country—its sugar, tobacco, cotton, hemp”—was typical before 1815 in thinking that cotton came in third. He imagined that Louisiana’s main function would be to replace Saint-Domingue in the world circuit of sucrose.

In 1802, cotton already accounted for 14 percent of the value of all US exports, but by 1820 it accounted for 42 percent—in an economy reliant on exports to acquire the goods and credit it needed for growth.

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abstemious

the new dynamic growth of Western capitalism was producing massive quantities of what the great twentieth-century theologian Robert Farrar Capon called “right-handed power”: the strength to force an outcome. Capon identified right-handed power as being like the idea of God held by many believers of many religions: a deity working in straight-line ways, exerting crushing force, throwing the wicked into the flames, drowning the sinful earth. Right-handed power is the power of domination, kings, weapons, and the letter of the law. In the early nineteenth century, those societies and individuals who were winning in the sorting-out of power and status accumulated unprecedented right-handed strength. They got more guns and bullets, more soldiers, the ability to knock down other peoples’ defenses and force them to trade on the terms most favorable to the West. They dominated other peoples to a degree unprecedented in human history, and within victorious new modernized nations, right-handed power was increasingly distributed in a lop-sided fashion.

In the short term, a runaway burst of prosperity silenced traditionalists, who warned that paper money and banks were scams. In April 1814, there were 38 flatboats from upriver tied up alongside the New Orleans levee; four years later, there were 340.

Private sales, made not in public auctions but in one-on-one negotiations, sometimes gave a person the chance to size up his or her would-be consumer. On the one hand, if the scuttlebutt in the warehouse told you a prospective buyer lived near the place where you had heard your wife or child or parent had been sold—well, then make yourself the brightest-eyed and most compliant in the bunch. On the other hand, you might not want to be noticed in some cases.

African Americans sent to New Orleans came to Maspero’s with individual job-related identities. But they came out with those skills erased,

Only 1.5 percent of the bills of sale for enslaved people shipped from Norfolk and sold in New Orleans in 1815 to 1820 list a skill. The other 98.5 percent might not have come from the fields, but field hands they now were.

between 1815 and 1820 only 8 women of 2,567 were sold with their husbands, and only 3 with both husband and child. Clearly, more than 1 percent of all the enslaved women over twenty, whether in Louisiana or throughout the South, were married with children.

From 1815 to 1820, in fact, New Orleans saw 2,646 sales of children under the age of thirteen, of whom 1,001 were sold separately from any family member. Their average age was nine. Many were younger—some much younger.

Enslavers were finding ways to turn the left hand against the enslaved. Entrepreneurs redirected left-handed power by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture. All of this repeatedly accomplished enslavers’ ongoing goal of forcing enslaved people to invent, over and over, ways to make their own labor more efficient and profitable for their owners.

Cotton was the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created our modern world economy. By 1820, the ability of enslaved people in southwestern frontier fields to produce more cotton of a higher quality for less drove most other producing regions out of the world market. Enslaved African Americans were the world’s most efficient producers of cotton. And they got more efficient every year, which is why the real price of the most important raw material of the industrial revolution declined by 1860 to 15 percent of its 1790 cost, even as demand for it increased by 500 percent

gloaming.

a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called “the pushing system.” This system increased the number of acres each captive was supposed to cultivate. As of 1805, enslavers like Hampton figured that each “hand” could tend and keep free of weeds five acres of cotton per year. Half a century later, that rule of thumb had increased to ten acres “to the hand.

the world cotton market was an example of what economists call perfect competition.

economist Alfred Marshall discovered the famous concepts of supply-and-demand curves. The market was so big that no individual producer could control even 1 percent of the total. This meant that individual producers had no reason to hoard innovations in the extraction of labor from neighbors, for a neighbor’s increase in production did not change the price the innovator received by a visible amount.

The rate of infant mortality in the new slave labor camps was extraordinary: one of every four children born died before reaching his or her first birthday.

now the plants were “laid by”—tall enough to shade the rows and keep down the growth of weeds.

white people began to dole out pennies to slaves in exchange for baskets woven by firelight.

As early as 1800, enslavers deploying the pushing system could make their captives raise more acres of cotton than they could harvest between the time the bolls opened and the time one had to begin planting again. Picking was now the bottleneck: the part of the cotton production process that took the most labor, and the part that determined how much money enslavers would make.

the amount of cotton that enslaved people picked increased dramatically over time. From 1805, when Charles Ball first dragged his cotton sack down a Congaree row, to 1860 in Mississippi, the amount of cotton the typical “hand” harvested during a typical day increased three, four, six, or even more times over.

Almost as remarkable as this dramatic rise in productivity is the fact that the history of the modern world, of industrialization and great divergences, of escape from the Malthusian trap, has almost never noticed it.

To replace the fiber it imported from American slave labor camps with an equivalent amount of wool, Britain in 1830 would have had to devote 23 million acres to sheep pasture—more than the sum total of the island’s agricultural land.

between 1790 and 1860, there was no mechanical innovation of any kind to speed up the harvesting of cotton.

after the Civil War, when many cotton planters would pay pickers by the pound at the end of a day’s work, free labor motivated by a wage did not produce the same amount of cotton per hour of picking as slave labor had.

Enslavers used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity and thus push through the picking bottleneck.

his daily minimum was one hundred pounds—and that on this day he would “have as many lashes as there were pounds short

“Gross has killed Sook’s youngest child,” wrote a white woman to her slave-trader cousin. “He took the child out to work (it was between one year and eighteen months old) & because it would not do its work to please him he first whipt it & then held its head in the [creek] branch to make it hush crying.”

hackles,

singletrees,

steel...

mite

the first waves of slavery’s expansion were creating tremendous gains for white Americans.

Since Jefferson’s victory in 1800, an alliance between northern and southern pro-expansion white politicians who simply referred to themselves as “Republicans” had dominated American politics.

kick the beam.

The part of the country where the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Ohio mingle the waters of half a continent and head south toward New Orleans rests on a major geological fault line, which in 1811 shifted, and destroyed the important Mississippi River port of New Madrid.

To the northeast lay the new state of Illinois, ostensibly free by virtue of its inclusion in the 1780s-era Northwest Territory, but in reality settled in part by southerners, who used a loophole in the state’s law to hold African Americans in slavery.