The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Introduction-Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis Introduction Summary: “The Heart, 1937” In 1861, shortly after Virginia secedes from the United States in order to “protect slavery” (xvi), three enslaved men flee to Fortress Monroe, a Union fort in eastern Virginia. To create our... Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution—the nation’s original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America’s later success. First, cotton enjoyed unlimited demand as the prime raw material needed to feed Europe’s steam powered spinning and weaving machines. Accordingly, the Three-fifths Compromise, establishment of the Senate, First, he does a great job of showing the stark brutality and cruelty of slavery. Why We Need to Study Slavery in America Now. They were wrong. We learn: For those of you who have heard, and hated, the truism: "History is written by the victors," this is the perfect book for you. The saga of this remarkable book continues. gospel, soul, jazz, ragtime, blues, and bluegrass and were first heard in slave But mostly it was a comfort because it feels right. It was, in the 1850’s a megalith of economic power that produced 4 million cotton bales in 1860 and claimed constitutional protections that nearly put it beyond Washington’s ability to rein in. However, it is important to be critical of these claims because each historian has an incentive to claim their stuff is new and innovative. Having read the book, this feels very obvious to me now. The book very skillfully mixes a wrenching portrayal of individual human suffering, gleaned from oral histories of former slaves, with a solid economic history of the U.S. economy during the slave era. The Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and permitted enslavers to move into any area in the former Louisiana Purchase territory with their human property. took its place among economic powerhouses like Britain and France because it  The warm climate and vast unclaimed land needed to grow the crop was newly available in American South.  Not only plantation owners, but a host of American business-people, politicians, and consumers created a vast system that forced enslaved people to a life of unremitting toil in order to keep pace. It is an important theme of Baptist’s book that slavery, as practiced in the American Southwest, was no primitive agricultural practice, woefully inefficient and destined for extinction. 1: I would have never chosen to read, "The Half Has Never Been Told" by Edward Baptist if not for my involvement with the EmpowerWest coalition of black and white pastors and churches. slavery caucus. Still the book is probably. The other fault of this book is that there are digressions to the theme with is economics and capital. with guarantees. More than anything else, the book's instance on the human scale while telling a larger economic story is where its power lies. Many in the North and even worldwide were able to invest in slavery among them were the Rothschilds and the Principality of Monaco which was still trying to recover some of its losses as late as the 1940's. Between 1815 and 1819 New Orleans, strategically situated on salt water at the Mississippi’s delta, grew into America’s fourth largest city.  A necessary component of New Orleans’s vibrancy was its need for financial services.  Newcomers flooded the city.  Speculators and settlers needed credit to purchase land and slaves.  Cotton bales ready for shipping accumulated on the Mississippi’s levees.  Â. It's like he had heard thirdhand a description of new historicism and decided to write that way. The book covers a timeline from 1783 Jim Crow and the KKK plus a succession of disappointing political developments created a post war South that was a nightmare for its Black residents. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward E. Baptist. I saw The Color Purple. A final thought kept running through my mind as I worked through Baptist’s These digressions reveal more about slavery, but they don’t really advance the theme. propaganda designed to romanticize Southern culture and the practice of We didn’t hear this in Blacks would say that their picking ability resulted from being educated by the whip. With The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward E. Baptist, who teaches at Cornell University and is the author of the award-winning Creating an Old South, continues his valuable series of ele‐ gantly crafted studies of slavery’s impact on the United States and its economic development and prosperity. I teach about "othering" and the Noble Savage in my AP class. Baptist lays out on his last pages his main thesis, namely that slavery was a huge capitalist enterprise that lifted the United States into the industrial age. From the war’s end until about 1870 there was exhilarating progress for many of the 4 million who had been trapped in the vast southern labor camp. driving energy of the five string banjo, an instrument of African origin. Thank you Doug for your very informative summary. What you might not have taken away from the ensuing media storm is that "The Half Has Never Been Told" is quite a gripping read. But these books were also one of Tens of thousands did, many of whom joined ranks with the Union Army. Slavery, Baptist’s book emphasizes, thrived on expansion. If you know me, or have followed my reviews for a while, you'll know that I grew up and went to school in the south, specifically northern Florida (aka southern Georgia), and by now you should already have guessed that this meant that our State Sponsored Education regarding slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement (plus all other subjects) left a bit to be desired. Instead, it's a general history of slavery in the 19th century with a secondary focus on the economics of chattel slavery in the growth of the U.S. leading up to the Civil War. This book is so beautifully written and so eye-opening. Baptist, who teaches at Cornell University, is the author of a well-­regarded study of slavery in Florida. was able to flood world markets with cheap cotton–all planted and picked by Based on thousands of slave narratives and plantation records, The Half Has Never Been Told offers not only a radical revision of the history of slavery but a disturbing new understanding of the origins of American power that compels listeners to reckon with the violence and subjugation at the root of American supremacy. The Half Has Never Been Told answers all. forth a monumental effort View and download The Half Has Never Been Told.pdf on DocDroid Good enough to read once. Legislators from the South First, the transatlantic slave trade moved, with great cruelty, captives into Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S. Second, the Haitian slave rebellion and revolution caused a beleaguered Napoleon to withdraw from French claims in the North American heartland and to sell the territory to the United States. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. America There is no great America without slavery and the enslaved people who built the country. Planters reacted to the abolitionist movement with a counter-movement of writing and by shoring up defenses against a violent revolt. Baptist sharply challenges what he claims are historians’ major assumptions about slavery’s role. Welcome back. The cotton produced by this army of laborers was America’s largest export and the 19th century’s key commodity which powered the industrial revolution and clothed the world. Just looked at the Columbia Law article. Guilt Loneliness, Exclusion, and Prejudice Expectations, Ambition, and Disappointment If you haven't read many books about slavery or 19th century America this is a good one to turn to. It withered wherever it settled down as a permanent part of life. The cotton industry was capitalist in every respect. people to finance a college education or a trip to Europe. White men of the South have long been sensitive to slights and put-downs. Her novel, a love story, bristles with passages that trot out the pro-slavery arguments that, until recently, dominated America’s collective memory of the nineteenth century South. So socially sanctioned rape joined honor-violence and greed as part of the degraded moral climate of frontier life in the cotton states.  Britain’s spinning and weaving factories had an insatiable demand for that most basic raw material in the textile industry: cotton.Â. Not surprisingly, the toll that this torture-based economy took from the enslaved workers was enormous. slavery. One of the best books I've read in a long time. But the book disappointed me on a couple of fronts. The Half Has Never Been Told's underlying argument is persuasive." tales. THE HALF HAS NOT BEEN TOLD “The Cradle” I Kings 10:1-10. This is not a question. Additionally, some chapters, like the "Right Hand," belabored the metaphor while others, like "Backs" seemed to abandon it altogether. But as tobacco returns shrank, cotton was entering its boom period. I read Beloved. This book is full of discoveries about slavery and american history. had mortgages taken out on them. In turn, the moral argument against the practice fizzled. Jan 28, 2021 at 10:43 PM #1 Driven by the whip, enslaved cotton pickers managed to increase their work output by 300% between 1800 and 1860. In other words, it carried the same DNA that made the Industrial Revolution great and brought the Internet to life. Slavery was not a relic of some other culture like plowing with Water Buffalo. Interesting to learn about the economics of American slavery. Groundbreaking, thoroughly researched, expansive, and provocative it will force scholars of slavery and its aftermath to reconsider long held assumptions about the 'peculiar institution's' relationship to American capitalism and contemporary issues of race and democracy. This book outlines the reasons why it is bullshit, and does it brilliantly. Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Themes All Themes Appearances vs. Disappearances Secrets, Lies, and Silence Innocence vs. But who bought all that cotton, who turned it into textiles, who profited from cheap cotton? Vikas Bajaj, New York Times "New books like Empire of Cotton and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist offer gripping and more nuanced stories of economic history." Baptist is the author of many articles and books including The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and the award-winning Creating an Old South. An in-depth look at how America became the great country that it is because of the worst institution ever created - slavery. Slavery and cotton were primarily responsible for the U.S. becoming the world's second. It's a powerful combination. I would summarize the Afterword as commentary on W.E.B. Caroline Lee Hentz’s 1854 novel, The Planter’s Northern Bride is typical of the effort to sanitize slavery.   Hentz was a New England-born school head mistress writing just before the Civil War. postponement of the ban on trans-Atlantic slave transport, the Missouri Baptist seems to have a few different goals in mind with this history of slavery. By laying out very carefully the flow of money, credit, land development and slave labor, from the late 18th to mid-19th century, Baptist leaves the reader with a very strong understanding of how all white Americans, not just those in the South, benefitted from the subjection of African Americans into slavery. financial assets than as human beings. The Half Has Never Been Told counters the massive propaganda Planting one crop season after season depleted the soil. genre of fiction. Reading this book now was a comfort, as counter-intuitive as it may seem. It was increasingly efficient and adaptive. Slaves and cotton mortgages were bundled and caused a crisis in the mid 1830's much like the housing crisis in 2007. Edward Baptist's new book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism", drew a lot of attention last month after the Economist said it was too hard on slave owners. "The Half Has Never Been Told is a true marvel. English Revised Version Cotton production benefited from several seemingly limitless resources, which converged to create a super-powered industry and export. The plan was to divide the island into three new slave states. These digressions reveal more about slavery, but they don’t really advance the theme. Â, The American South’s cotton production grew and created colossal wealth because it was embedded in the textile-centered Industrial Revolution. Several spinning and weaving innovations in England made it the world’sleader in textile output.  Additionally, England’s newly acquired ability to turn heat into movement through steam engines gave her a worldwide lead in textile production and shipping with steamships, steamboats, and locomotives. Still the book is probably worth your library card or at a discounted price. Some 70 years before, Danville had been a hub of Civil War activity. This willingness to fight for the United States became the number one rationale for the Fifteenth Amendment which granted African Americans the vote. Assumption #3: Cotton Gin, 1793 By 1800, the Cotton Gin revolutionizes the way cotton is grown, consumed, and marketed. Who benefitted most from cotton being produced by free labor? Authors put forth dramatic claims to new conclusions, topics, and evidence. Also, I’m not sure the book ever proves that slavery has impacted modern American capitalism. Slavery re-invented itself in the early 1800’s, then in t. The deepest gash in mid-century American politics was the division over cotton’s insatiable appetite for new territory. It was American, capitalist, efficiency-driven, and adaptive. There comes a point in every historical field when you can start to talk about over-saturation. Critics called it inefficient and destined for history’s dustbin. Chapter Four describes the “pushing system,” which was the systematic use of torture to increase cotton production mostly in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana between 1800 and 1860. Planters were perpetually yearning to expand onto new land further and further to the west during the King Cotton era. Following these interlocking events, America enjoyed an open door for the expansion of slavery into the foreseeable future. Where labor camps were plentiful there were also lots of guns and volunteers available to suppress any slave uprising. Slave-harvested crops used up the land. If you are living in America today you have been the beneficiary of an institution that allowed the United States to become a super power. to cover over slavery’s enormity and atrocities. It is a link to multiple blogposts of a professor of economics at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia who critiques. My family was military, so we were first generation Floridians with no southern heritage, and thankfully my mom has always been a very open-minded, intelligent, and fair person who, I like to think, passed on those traits to me. Never have I read a book that has touched me in such a powerful, visceral, and connecting way to the legacy of my ancesters and how they shapped the world. Lincoln, slavery’s most persuasive and wily opponent, honed his arguments against slavery in the Lincoln-Douglas debates which preceded Illinois’ senatorial election in 1858. In the process, he punctures many myths that have sought to downplay slavery's horrors or detach slavery from America's DNA. The authors are clear at the start that they do not doubt the horrific history of slavery recounted in Baptist and other NHC literature. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. One of the reasons a book like The Half Has Never Been Told needs to be read is to help the reader counter the massive propaganda campaign, well under way by the mid 1800’s, which  romanticized slavery and the society that profited from it. At the time of the Constitution, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia had western lands that were to become states in their own right.  For Kentucky, general agriculture, and for Alabama and Mississippi, cotton crops were greatly energized by the use of enslaved labor.  So as the profitability of crops on the Eastern seaboard declined, slaves were sold and marched West.  These treks called “coffles” consisted of captive men being manacled together and forced to walk hundreds of miles.Â. Also, as the “whipping machine” reached its zenith of cruelty and effeciency, cotton’s price in 1860 was 1/4 of its 1800 amount. Edward Baptist’s Eighth Chapter, “Blood 1836-1844,” in The Half Has Never Been Told revolves around the twin financial crashes in 1837 and 1839.  The early 1830’s saw great expansion in the cotton economy.  By 1836 the United States government had dumped 400 million dollars, a total that was approximately one third of the US economy, into cotton enterprises.  A quarter of a million slaves had been moved to the cotton Southwest and 48 million acres of public lands were sold.  Cotton output rocketed from 732,000 bales in 1830 to 1.5 million in 1936.Â, During the 1830’s, Texas, originally belonging to Mexico, became a big factor in the United States economy.  Andrew Jackson triggered the sequence of events that led to annexation and statehood for the Lone Star state.  But before Texas was part of the United States it proved very useful to cotton interests as an independent territory or country.  It was possible, for example for slaves to be delivered to Texas, which was exempt from the ban on the international slave trade.   Southern planters poured into Texas in search of new lands and shelter from US laws.  The push into Texas rankled Mexico, which under Santa Anna conducted his famous siege and slaughter at the Alamo.  Santa Anna was later defeated at the battle of San Jacinto, effectively freeing Texas for US annexation and an unhindered expansion of slavery.  Concurrent with the drama unfolding in Texas a full scale financial crash was developing in the United States.Â, Once Texas was declared independent of Mexico a financial bubble began to build.  In 1836 Andrew Jackson issued his specie circular order that mandated public lands purchases be made in gold or silver.  This brought to a virtual halt government land sales and triggered a financial liquidity crisis that coursed through the entire US economy, especially in the high-leveraged South.  The financial crises which continued into the 1840’s had an impact on not only business, but also social mores in the South.   Captive people were sold to raise cash for planters awash in debt.  In many instances, Southern debtors simply declined to pay creditors, or worse, they slipped away to Texas.   European financiers were furious with deadbeat southern borrowers, a factor that marred the South’s reputation as a reliable business culture.Â, Edward Baptist here offers several insights into divergent masculine ideals, one for White men, a second for Blacks.  White men devised schemes to evade debt or start afresh.  Black men continued to be reshuffled and separated from family.   Rebellion or retaliation was fundamentally out of reach for enslaved men, who needed to find dignified ways to endure their captivity.  One way was to cultivate what Baptist calls ‘ordinary virtues.”  These included self-forgeting care for those around and willingness to improvise with love relationships when families were repeatedly broken apart.  Specifically, this meant rearing someone else’s kids and “marrying” technically married partners.  The act of loving and rearing children with available partners in slave conditions can be seen as profoundly hopeful endeavors. Â, The chapter ends with a brief survey of president John Tyler’s Secretary of State, John C. Calhoun’s maneuvers to extend slavery and insure its unlimited survival.  Most notably, Calhoun knew how to leverage popular American anti-British sentiment to secure a voting block which allowed not only acquisition of Texas but other territories in the Pacific Northwest. Â, By 1850, slavery had intertwined itself in the economic and political life of an expanding United States.  The twin crashes of 1837 and 1839 left the Southern planter economy in disarray and revealed New England industries to be rapidly catching up with the previously prosperous South.Â, Britain was a quarter century ahead of the American Northeast in industrialization.  Nevertheless, investment cash and the example of British innovation enabled Yankee factory owners to build and compete with textile mills across the Atlantic.  Cheap slave-produced cotton fostered a virtuous cycle of investment capital, factory building, worker employment, consumer demand for goods, a secondary growth of workshops and businesses, and an influx of immigrants providing cheap factory labor enabled the Northern states to catch-up economically speaking with its agricultural southern states.  Northerners also incorporated innovations in their factories, notably the use of steam power to drive machinery and a knack for tweaking British designed machinery for even greater output.Â, While Northern hubris drove many to denigrate the South, economically disabled in the late 1830’s and 40’s, cotton still drove about half of the US economy in 1836.  Northern States’ population was also swelling from immigration bringing their representation in Congress to 2/3 of the House of Representatives.Â, Through the 1840’s disagreements began to split the country, a process that culminated with the Civil War.  Abolitionists began to find their voices and appealed to the American conscience about the moral problems with buying, selling, and driving human beings.  Proud Northerners, newly prosperous in their diversified industrial economy wrongly began to criticize their southern counterparts for what they saw as inefficient and unsustainable economic practices.  This Yankee pride was probably hypocritical owing to the fact that the Northern economy was largely powered by the mass of cheaply produced exportable cotton.Â, The deepest gash in mid-century American politics was the division over cotton’s insatiable appetite for new territory.  Huge expanses of land were being appropriated by the US with the help is its army.  The entire southwest part of the country and even places like Hawaii seemed promising for slavery-based agriculture.  But if slavery expanded into all of the yet-to-be admitted states and territories, the resulting country would be a giant labor camp.Â, In addition to insisting on unlimited expansion, slave interests inspired by John C. Calhoun seized upon an idea called “substantive due process.”  This was a robust idea of property rights, allegedly implied in the US Constitution, that insisted that property, read slaves, could not be seized by the government without due process which meant a jury trial.  This idea was designed as a work-around the idea that the national government could designate new territory slave or free.  Substantive due process protected the “right” of an enslaver to move with human property into any US territory and not have his property seized.Â, In the 1840’s both Northern and Southern partisans felt disempowered by the other.  In many ways, the South had the upper hand and held the country hostage with the idea that “a slave West was the price of union.”   Northerners also felt disempowered by fugitive slave laws which required runaways to be considered property and returnable to their masters.  Southerners were economically hobbled and nervous that their slave populations got too large that bloody rebellion was inevitable.  Southern leaders, even in the late 1840’s began to long for a national life that permitted unlimited expansion of slavery unmolested by Washington.Â. Refresh and try again. For example, the old East Coast tobacco farms grew unprofitable with time. It's a powerful combination. The book also tells the personal stories of several slaves throughout the years. These musical forms include September 9th 2014 The first historical reality Baptist deals with is Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, whose immediate impact was to grant explicit official permission for enslaved people to leave their toil. THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD: Summary and Notes. Thus following emancipation, came a series of laws in the South which blocked voting and office holding, created hair-trigger arrests for vagrancy and other trivial offences, and utilized public policy to force Blacks into a subservient state that was as close to slavery as possible. An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Slavery and cotton were primarily responsible for the U.S. becoming the world's second largest industrial economy by the late 1850's. society that profited from it. But the texts I've been reading are revelatory, beginning with James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. So did huge expanses of free land, perfectly suited for cotton growth, which had been stolen from Native Americans or annexed from Spain, Britain and France. …Without Lincoln and a bloody civil war, slavery would have engulfed North America and lasted for decades beyond the 1860’s. They did this by changing crops, transferring captives, reselling slaves, and reviving forced labor for even greater profit elsewhere. And it is difficult to justify a rating of less than five stars, even though I have some issues with the book. Slavery in the United States is described with an emphasis on its effects on the economy. This chapter tells how the Mississippi Valley opened to the unlimited expansion of slavery. cabins, fields, and later in slums and night clubs. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality study guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics. Fascinating, heart breaking, and beautifully written. “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. …Slavery, as practiced in the American Southwest, was no primitive agricultural relic. Many in the North and even worldwide were able to invest in slavery among them were the Rothschilds and the Principality of Monaco which was still trying to recover some of its losses as late as the 1940's. What makes this book unique…..and outstanding….is the thoroughness with which Baptist explains the daisy-chain of economic motivations that led to the expansion of slavery from Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina at the end of the Revolutionary War into the then western states and how those motivations conspired to rebrutalize slavery in order to establish and then perpetuate economic gain. But the texts I've been reading are revelatory, beginning with James Baldwi. Slavers and others yearned to wrest Cuba from Spain’s control either by purchase or conquest. It was increasingly efficient and adaptive. The author appeared to want to write with nuance and style but instead ended up with something difficult to fol. Throughout the 19th century, the wholesale theft of human lives, the separation of children from parents, the use of torture to extract unrelenting toil from human bodies met very little moral hesitation. Ed Baptist is aiming to correct this record. Following the war, the interviewee, Lorenzo Ivy, trained to be a school teacher. I struggled getting through this one. Baptist argues that without Lincoln and a bloody civil war, slavery would have engulfed North America and lasted for decades beyond the  1860’s. A social and economic history of the rise of slavery and cotton growing in the South. Another feature of frontier masculinity was the planters’ shameless use of enslaved women as sexual partners. Many, however, expressed their humanity by bestowing tiny favors on one another in the few hours available at night in their cabins.  From this slave cabin culture emerged some of the most distinct forms of Black culture including the Black English Dialect, free-form dancing, and several new musical forms.  The banjo, as it turns out, is not a uniquely American instrument, but an import from Africa, which has gone on to become a beloved American tradition.    Much the same can be said of the Blues, Jazz, Soul, Rap, Ragtime, and other distinctly African American innovations. The most striking and controversial of those named in Baptist’s book was David Walker, who wrote An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.   This book, which called for a violent slave uprising, activated the paranoia of enslavers across the South. The value of the 4 million captives themselves was the was the largest single category of capital in the country. I think I've always known what most people know. This should be required reading of every high school student in America without regards to ethnicity or socio-economic status. First, pugnacious White masculinity emerged from the cotton frontier. school. Yet it is the truth.”, “Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. I teach about "othering" and the Noble Savage in my AP class. Slavery in the United States is described with an emphasis on its effects on the economy. The writing is mostly readable though there are times where the writing becomes inexplicably lyrical. With Robert Potter’s serving as an example, Baptist introduces Andrew Jackson as an example of southern masculinity and frontier values. Chapter 7 is entitled ‘Seed’, again with multiple meanings.
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