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

by Edward E. Baptist

There are 1,760 yards in a mile—more than 2,000 steps. Forty thousand is a long day’s journey. Two hundred thousand is a hard week. For eighty years, from the 1780s until 1865, enslaved migrants walked for miles, days, and weeks. Driven south and west over flatlands and mountains, step after step they went farther from home. Stumbling with fatigue, staggering with whiskey, even sometimes stepping high on bright spring mornings when they refused to think of what weighed them down, many covered over 700 miles before stepping off the road their footsteps made. Seven hundred miles is a million and a half steps. After weeks of wading rivers, crossing state lines, and climbing mountain roads, and even boarding boats and ships and then disembarking, they had moved their bodies across the frontier between the old slavery and the new. Over the course of eighty years, almost 1 million people were herded down the road into the new slavery (see Table 1.1).