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

by Edward E. Baptist

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy.

enslaved people’s resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

In 1782, Indians began to raid the settlements, taking slaves with them as they retreated.

Four of the first five presidents would be Virginia slaveholders. Eight of the first dozen owned people.

Slavery’s expansion soon yielded a more unified government and a stronger economy based on new nationwide capital markets.

A newly formed company—the Georgia-Mississippi Land Company—moved quickly to make a new deal. The roster of the company’s leaders included a justice of the US Supreme Court, a territorial governor, two congressmen, two senators (Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and James Gunn of Georgia), and

Wade Hampton of South Carolina, who was on his way to becoming the richest man in the country.

Ball was now becoming one moving part of something called a “coffle,” an African term derived from the Arabic word cafila: a chained slave caravan.

The coffle-chains enabled Georgia-men to turn feet against hearts, to make enslaved people work directly against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope.

In 1794, refugee sugar artisan Antoine Morin helped Etienne Boré become the first Louisiana planter to granulate sugar from cane.

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.

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

Baring Brothers, the massive London commercial bank that had financed the US purchase of Louisiana, and whose pressure had convinced American and British negotiators to swallow pride and sign the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814. Barings’ money allowed Nolte to accumulate huge piles of cotton on the levee after 1815, and by 1819 he was buying 20,000 to 40,000 bales per year—4 to 8 percent of US exports, and up to a quarter of what passed through New Orleans.

Credit is belief (the word comes from the Latin credere) that brings value today in exchange for a promise to pay in the future. Credit allowed entrepreneurs and others to spend tomorrow’s money today, accomplishing trades and investments that would (the borrower believed) make more wealth tomorrow.

Credit appeared to be turning enslavers’ Alabama dreams into reality. Alabama was already third in the United States in total cotton produced and first in per capita production.

Enslavers usually paid more for tall men than for short ones. Height was less important for shaping women’s prices, but age mattered for both men and women. Enslavers generally paid their highest prices for young men between eighteen and twenty-five, or for women between fifteen and twenty-two.

Auctioneers and bidders would turn a woman around, raise her skirt, slap “and plump her to show how fat she was.” William Johnson remembered that “bidders would come up and feel the women’s legs—lift up their [g]arments and examine their hips, feel their breast, and examine them to see if they could bear children.”

enslaver-generals took land from Indians, enslaver-politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand, and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and commodify “hands.”

In Virginia and Maryland, white people used cat-o’-nine-tails, short leather whips with multiple thongs. These were dangerous weapons, and Chesapeake enslavers were creative in developing a repertoire of torment to force people to do what they wanted. But this southwestern whip was far worse. In expert hands it ripped open the air with a sonic boom, tearing gashes through skin and flesh.

the pathological bullies that white supremacy bred in such high numbers preferred easier targets than someone as large and strong as Ball.

Out here hands were turning their own muscles into someone else’s cash.

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.

John Quincy Adams—a New Englander in a southern administration, trying to focus on his negotiations to acquire Florida from Spain—had assured an audience in the summer of 1819 that he believed the restriction of Missouri slavery was unconstitutional.

Blackface also became the archetypal model for how non-black performers would sell a long series of innovations created by enslaved migrants and their descendants—ragtime, jazz, blues, country, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, and hip-hop—to a white market.

Louisiana’s Napoleonic legal code, however, required notaries to keep a record of every local slave trade. Almost all the New Orleans ledger books have survived, and they are now stored in the city’s Notarial Archives on the fifth floor of the Amoco building on Poydras Street.

Slave buying and selling was no longer extraordinary, but ordinary, something businessmen did on business days. For despite Austin Woolfolk’s paternalistic act, his business was separating spouses and orphaning children.

For if you want to rule a person, steal the person. Steal him from his people and steal him from his own right hand, from everything he has grown up knowing. Take her to a place where you can steal everything else from her: her future, her creativity, her womb.

Back to the early nineteenth century, however, and to an encounter between a white man and Pompey, a black Methodist preacher in Mississippi. Why, asked the white man, did the enslaved man sing hymns all day? “It makes my soul so happy,” Pompey responded. “You simpleton,” replied the white man. “A negro has no soul.”

In 1821, one Georgia slave wrote a letter to a white preacher. “If I understand the white people,” he wrote, “they are praying for more religion in the world.” Well then, “If god sent you to preach to sinners did he direct you to keep your face to the white people constantly or is it because they give you money?” “We are carried to market and sold to the highest bidder,” and whites “never once inquire whither you are sold, to a heathen or a Christian?” Yet enslaved people continued to flock to churches, even if ministers turned their backs on them, and to hold their own religious meetings as well.

Many Christian slaves believed that God had commanded them to put violent vengeance aside, if only for their own souls’ sake.

For two days, they dropped and strangled black preachers and worshippers from a pole between two high Y-shaped posts.

Fuck. From an Old English word meaning: to strike, to beat. Before that, in an even older language: to plow. To tear open.

Enslaved men were not allowed to defend their pride, their manhood, or anything else. They had to endure the penetration of their skin, their lives, their families. Therefore, the best way to insult a white man was to treat him like a black man, as if he could not strike back, and the best way to disprove that was to strike back.

But more importantly, bank-created money has to be paper (or mere numbers on paper) because only then can money be created out of nothing. And thus only paper money can lead to real economic growth. Imagine an economy that uses only gold and silver, also known as “specie.” A bank in such an economy could lend no more than it received in deposits, and that bank would simply be a glorified mattress. It would actually reduce the amount of money in circulation. If the money supply depended on the total amount of gold and silver dug out of the ground, the money supply would not increase as rapidly as the amount of goods and services being produced. The price of goods would drop, and the price of loans would rise, disincentivizing investment in new production.

When researchers expose men to images of attractive, presumably available women, their propensity to take financial risks increases dramatically. (When women see pictures of attractive men, they tend to use strategies to present themselves as selfless caretakers.)

Owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be collateral for even more borrowing.

Whites subjected boys to incessant behavioral modification techniques: making them watch whippings, scaling up physical pain for even the smallest evidence of resistant behavior. Then, when as a man someone tried to run away, the first things the trackers did once the dogs caught him was to re-inoculate him against the disease of self-assertion:

“If I had my life to live over . . . I would die fighting rather than be a slave again,” Robert Falls asserted, looking back across a whole century on Earth.

Her owner dragged her back home behind his horse and tied her to the bedstead. The next morning he tried to cut off her breasts. Then he rammed a hot iron poker down her throat. Survivors of these East Texas camps remembered that out there on that frontier, one could always “hear the whip a-poppin’.”87

Enslaver-politicians had long used their power in Congress to expand unfree territory, steer northern capital south, shut off discussion, destroy monetary systems so that enslavers wouldn’t have to repay their creditors, and tear down tariff protections for the northern industrial sector.

About the only thing upon which Calhoun and Palfrey could agree was that all of Mexico was too much. “We have never dreamed of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race,” Calhoun proclaimed. “More than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. . . . Ours, sir, is the government of the white race.” Palfrey also thought that Mexico’s “nameless and mongrel breeds” would fit poorly into the United States.35

the 3.2 million people enslaved in the United States had a market value of $1.3 billion in 1850—one-fifth of the nation’s wealth and almost equal to the entire gross national product. They were more liquid than other forms of American property, even if an acre of land couldn’t run away or kill an overseer with an axe.

During 1859, Louisiana enslavers raised $25.7 million, 75 percent of the value of cotton produced in the state that year, by mortgaging slaves.

in 1839, fifty-three recently enslaved Africans had overthrown the white crew of the Cuban slave-ship Amistad as they were being transported from Havana to the island’s eastern sugar frontier. Trying to sail to Africa, the rebels made an accidental landfall on the Connecticut coast.

Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of “states’ rights.” That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they were seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery.

the federal judiciary took the Calhounian argument for the independence of slave property from majority control and made it, in the form of the so-called Lochner Doctrine, a defense of rampant industrial power in the face of attempts to regulate workers’ safety, consumer health, and environmental impact.

the unbending anger of former Confederates against Reconstruction morphed into their grandchildren’s suspicion of the New Deal, and the insistence on the part of white southern Democrats that measures against the Depression could do nothing to alleviate black poverty or lessen white supremacy.