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

by Edward E. Baptist

From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.

As of 1807, four out of every five people who came from the Old World to the New had come from Africa, not Europe; chained in the belly of a ship, not free on its deck.

On island after island, Europeans and their pathogens killed the natives, slave ships appeared on the horizon, and cane sprouted in the fields.

Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery. The great continent would incubate a second slavery exponentially greater in economic power than the first.

No single man was more influential in shaping the New Orleans cotton trade into the world’s biggest one than Vincent Nolte.

In the real history of the real modern world, change has been jolted forward again and again by people like Nolte, who in their dice-rolling bids to make massive profits disturb existing equilibriums by introducing new elements. The new elements they introduce as levers of dominance might be technological innovations, but entrepreneurs rarely create these innovations themselves. Instead, they figure out how to reap their benefits in order to rip market share and profits away from other capitalists who are invested in status-quo technologies and staler business models. They are architects of the dynamic of “creative destruction” that iconoclastic economist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the core engine of capitalism’s growth.

The best-known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians have been concerned, the gin is where the study of innovation in the production of cotton ends—at least until the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the 1930s, which ended the sharecropping regime. But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean? For once the gin shattered the processing bottleneck, other limits on production and expansion were cast into new relief. For instance, one constraint was the amount of cheap, fertile land. Another was the lack of labor on the frontier. So 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.” And, given a finite number of captives in their own control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called “the pushing system.”

white people fought and killed each other in the old slaveholding states to prove that they were not slaves.

These elites had used popular anger to turn the power of the state into a shield against foreclosures—but at the cost of losing future control over their own credit.

Common white southerners, who had not experienced the boom of the 1830s in the same way as their self-appointed “betters,” cared little about all that, but credit would shape their futures, too.

If the South had acquired Cuba, the history of the expansion of slavery in the United States, including the history of investment in the expansion of slavery, would surely not have ended in 1865.

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.

At the same time, Lincoln warned, “The certain ills you fly to, are greater than all the real ones you fly from.”