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

by Edward E. Baptist

THE LOGS BOBBED AROUND the pilings of the customhouse. The hut stood on legs, a chicken up to its drumsticks in shallow water, besieged by a continent’s stew. Anything that could last a month in water ended up down here at the “Balize,” the flats at the Mississippi’s mouth: bark; sticks; whole trees, if they didn’t get hung up along a thousand miles of snags. Deer and drowned wild cattle didn’t make it; catfish and turtles ate them long before they could come this far. The heaviest load of all flowed under the rippling corduroy of forest waste: a mighty subsurface plume of water, fresh but not sweet, sagging with its load. Iron from the far north, silver from Rocky Mountain lodes, and most of all, dirt. Humus rinsed from the banks of ten thousand forest tributaries, tumbled past Jefferson’s would-be sixteen states, stirred with black soil from the delta. For an eon the river had piled up silt, marching its outlet southward on its own. But for the past decade, the runoff slurry had been thickening. Upriver, someone was plowing, planting, harvesting.