William Grimes tried to break his own leg with an axe.” “A man or woman who discovered he was being taken south might be desperate enough to do anything,” Baptist writes. Word quickly spread among the slaves that punishing working conditions awaited them, Baptist writes. Baptist’s description of them is harrowing and based on testimonies of slaves themselves.

These forced marches were a common sight in the first half of the 19th century. Chained together in “coffles,” groups of newly purchased slaves walked hundreds of miles to their new workplaces. To pick all that cotton, landowners in the old southwest purchased and transported large numbers of slaves from Virginia and Maryland, Baptist writes. The growing demand for cotton in the first decades of the 19th century fueled a land grab in what was then the southwest of the United States (the territories that would become Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana). “In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation…” “The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy,” Baptist writes. But with the spread of the Industrial Revolution, cotton became the world’s most traded commodity. The cotton boom that started just after 1800 changed the American economy, Baptist argues. This ambitious new economic and social history of antebellum America suggests that the bondage of African Americans is just another chapter in the rise of the global economy. Plantations (“slave labor camps,” he calls them) were run with the ruthless efficiency of your average sweatshop. Baptist makes a persuasive case that slavery wasn’t like that at all.

In “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” Cornell professor Edward E. Being lord of the manor was its own reward.

For slave owners, profit was a secondary concern. Slavery was an economically inefficient institution, they argued. Life on the antebellum plantation, they led us to believe, was as languid as a slow-moving river winding through magnolia trees.Īt about the same time, American historians were writing the first analyses of slave-centered Southern society. The image of the genteel, benevolent Southern slave owner was the creation of early 20th century artists and writers like D.W.

Edward baptist the half was never told