Book Review

Forged in Slavery

Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 512 pages.

Review by Tyler D. Parry

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism presents a sweeping critique of how the United States obtained significant economic power in the nineteenth century. Baptist organizes his chapters as body parts, symbolically demonstrating how American slavery expanded through the hands, feet, blood, and arms of slaves and slaveholders, “twinned bodies who spread across a subcontinent in a vast embrace of suffering and power” (395). The Half Has Never Been Told provides a critical intervention in the historiography of American slavery by synthesizing previous works and asserting its own unique, nuanced arguments about the expansion of cotton in the geopolitics of the American nation state. This book is densely researched, and presents an inconvenient history for those who maintain that “freedom” was the foundational theme of the United States following the Revolutionary War. On the contrary, it was slavery that formed the backbone of economic power in the emerging nation. Far from just a southern problem, Baptist shows how slavery molded American Capitalism, linking the cotton empire of the US South with industrial regions in the North and Great Britain.

This work emerges out of a historiographical trajectory dubbed “the second slavery”, in which scholars like Sven Beckert, Anthony E. Kaye, and Joshua D. Rothman examine how slave regimes in the nineteenth century expanded through technological innovation and investment in world markets. Eventually, these slave societies morphed into “modern” economic systems that were immensely profitable. In this regard, Baptist provides two necessary interjections that would interest intellectual historians. First, he demolishes the popular notion that slaveholders were pre-capitalist, feudal lords who refused to modernize their system. On the contrary, evidence suggests that slave owners were highly creative in using technology to maximize the output of their labor force, and this is what made them so dangerous politically and economically. Secondly, he challenges the idea that slavery neverbeentoldbecame unprofitable and was nearing its end by the inception of the Civil War. Combining qualitative evidence alongside quantitative data, Baptist cogently argues that the cotton crop of 1859, for instance, was “astonishing” and “slavery’s productivity was higher than ever” (386). Such exhaustive research will prove difficult to refute for future contrarians.

Attempting to narrow this work into a specific historical genre is a fruitless exercise, as it intersects with various scholarly trajectories in American slave studies. Baptist’s work is simultaneously political, intellectual, economic, and social history, examining the ramifications of how northern politicians, proslavery ideologues, and African Americans were wrapped within a system that not only refused to die, but expanded at an extraordinary rate. The book’s main strength is its balance. Economic and political histories are often criticized for the “top-down” approach, as they ignore the voices of countless laborers and slaves who literally sacrificed their bodies to make a few rich. However, Baptist equalizes each chapter with enslaved and free voices, showing how each person who lived in the United States from 1790-1865 was impacted by slavery’s westward expansion. One emerges from this book as familiar with the enslaved as they are with Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln.

Slavery was a violent system and Baptist withholds nothing in this work, not even language. In one chapter titled “Seed” he provides a masterful description of the word “fuck” in both literal and metaphorical terms. The word has multiple layers of applicability for antebellum slavery, as Baptist notes that it emerges from an ancient word meaning “to plow”, and then adopted in Old English to mean “to strike, to beat”. The southern system was predicated upon both concepts, and Baptist encapsulates this argument in a haunting passage of how the entire region, both its black people and its cotton, were “fucked”, explaining

When the enslaved men broke it [the soil] open for the entrepreneur, he fucked this dirt with them as his tool. He fucked this field. He might fuck their wives out in the woods, or in the corn when it is high. Or their daughter in the kitchen. Then the next girl he buys at New Orleans. But he fucks the men, too…He breaks open the skin on their backs with his fucking lash, striking their lives with his power, marking them and their world with his desire (217).

In this passage, Baptist is describing the Jacksonian period, in which a rough and tumble culture shaped white masculinity at the expense of red, brown, and black bodies who occupied the same rural landscape. Few histories have pushed this far, but thankfully this one did. For if The Half is ever to be told, we must constantly reckon with the notion that violence, sex, slavery, and murder were equally as prominent as the concepts of freedom, democracy, and civility that remain so popular in American nostalgia.

Forgoing a traditional conclusion, Baptist wisely closes the book with an epilogue that challenges readers to reconsider how slavery standardized racial discrimination following the Civil War. In this section Baptist inches toward the reparations debate, though it is never suggested explicitly. Perhaps it should be. Baptist laid a solid foundation to build upon the excellent scholarship produced from Caribbean historian Hilary Beckles, whose work Britain’s Black Debt exposes how slavery and colonialism ensured that black-majority territories remained underdeveloped, while the descendants of white British slave owners remained wealthy. Equally, African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published a lengthy article “The Case for Reparations” in the June 2014 issue of The Atlantic. Tracing the legacy of racial oppression through slavery, Jim Crow, discriminatory housing policies, and the prison system Coates makes a persuasive case that, even if one does not believe allotting reparations is a plausible economic solution, the connections between race, poverty, and power were critical to the nation’s founding and cannot be ignored.

To be sure, Baptist notes that survivors of slavery held little material wealth to pass to their descendants, for “so much had been stolen from them” (417), but then directs the book’s conclusion to discuss how African Americans forged a culture that continually influences the world. This is true, but for a book that was so overtly critical of American capitalist development it may have been more opportune in this section to direct the reader to reconsider the reparation’s debate in light of the immense wealth that slavery generated for American development; wealth that African Americans never reaped. Similarly, Baptist largely obscures his initial discussions of the “technologies of exploitation” (147). Referencing a contraption, largely metaphorical, called the “whipping machine”, one reads that the cotton kingdom used “torture as its central technology” (142). But “technology” is vague in this passage, and it is never fully explained throughout the work. This is a bit frustrating since the word is used quite frequently when the author describes modes of slave punishment in the mid-nineteenth century.

Despite these minor concerns regarding ideology and description, this book will remain a staple in the historiography of American slavery. Out of a complex and emotionally charged subject, Baptist produces accessible history. Both lay readers and professional historians will find the work interesting. Exhaustively researched and cogently written, The Half Has Never Been Told is a timely contribution to the history of American slavery.

Parry Faculty Profile Photo

Tyler D. Parry is Assistant Professor African American Studies Department at California State University, Fullerton. He is currently revising his manuscript entitled “Love and Marriage: Domestic Relations and Matrimonial Strategies among the Enslaved in the Atlantic World.”

2 Thoughts on this Post

S-USIH Comment Policy

We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.

  1. The subject is violence. The predicate is force. The verb is torture. The object is a slave. Every sentence in this book is constructed from the bloodiest raw material imaginable in order to build a pornographic edifice of violence and brutality.

    There are no limits to force in Edward Baptist’s Old South, and no limits to the rhetoric he will employ to describe it. There are no plantations, only “slave labor camps.” There are no planters, only “enslavers.” Slaves themselves are called “enslaved people” as if the word “people” needed to be attached in case we forgot. Each word in this book was chosen to remind us that slavery was ugly, violent, deadly—and profitable.

    Edward Baptist would have us believe that brute force alone drove the political economy of the slave south. But can it be called a “political economy” if it runs on force alone?

    As difficult as Baptist’s language is, the absurdity of his underlying premise is more disturbing. We are asked to believe that “Hard forced labor multiplied US cotton production to 130 times its 1800 level by 1860” (142). That is not a misquote.
    It is certainly a mistake (one so obvious it’s hard to believe it made it through the first draft, much less the editing process) but, innumerate as it is, this sentence expresses, better, more precisely and completely, everything Baptist wants us to take from this book: that “hard forced labor” alone drove productivity in the slave south.

    He does not say that force was “sometimes,” “occasionally,” or even “often” used to increase output. He does not say—indeed he goes rhetorical miles out of his way NOT to say—that violence was used as “discipline.” In fact, Baptist does not use the word “discipline” once in this book. Consistent with his bloody rhetoric he uses “torture” where every other historian has used “discipline” or “punishment”; and that is the only word he uses. Baptist insists that planters multiplied cotton production by means of torture alone.

    To compound the absurdity Baptist insists that these ‘enslaver” sadists were also gifted and creative capitalists. According to Baptist, torture was the technology the slaveholders employed in the service of greater production and efficiency. When he describes the planters as creative or innovative in order to demonstrate that they were just as capable as any other capitalist of the day, he is talking about their imaginative uses of violence to torture people into working harder:

    “Using torture, slavery’s entrepreneurs extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world.” (140)

    Of course the ‘numerical measure” Baptist refers to here is his earlier ”130 times” multiplier. But no matter, his point is clear: Slaveholding capitalists were just as good at making money as any Yankee or English capitalists with all their fancy industrial technology.

    Because when it comes to technology, slaveholders are as open to mechanization as any modern mill owner: “ . . . [a] Louisiana owner had once possessed a machine which by his account made cotton cultivation and harvesting mechanical, rapid and efficient. This contraption was a ‘big wooden wheel with a treadle on it, and when you tromp on the treadle the big wheel go round. On that wheel was four or five leather straps with holes cut in them to make blisters, and you lay the negro down on his face on a bench and tie him to it’ When the operator pumped the treadle to turn the wheel, the straps thrashed the back of the man or woman tied to the bench into blistered, bloody jelly. According to Clay the mere threat of this whipping- machine was enough to speed his own hands.” (141)

    “When the operator pumped the treadle . . . .” These are Baptist’s words, not his subject’s. The “whipping machine” introduced here is referred to again and again throughout the rest of the book as a metaphor for the slaveholders mechanical remove and techno-sadistic drive to extract more value from black bodies.

    In Baptist’s view Henry Ford’s $5 a day and Wade Hampton’s bull whip were not only employed for the same purpose, they were exactly the same thing employed by the same mind for the same purpose. And of course like all good capitalists, slaveholders embraced any technology (what is the whipping machine but an early form of assembly line after all) that enhanced efficiency and increased profit.

    Baptist insists that slaveholders were capitalists and slavery an iteration of capitalism in every sense. But, being Devils and all, capitalists are known to be creative; open minded you might say, when it comes to exploiting labor. Baptist’s slaveholders didn’t do anything to enhance productivity except beat the living shit out of everybody.

    I can’t help but think of the concentration camp analogy in Stanley M. Elkins’ discussion of slaveholders’ “absolute power.” The horrifying difference between Elkins and Baptist is that Elkins deployed the analogy in an attempt to examine the consequences of such power—which he (in)famously described as an infantilizing (“Sambo”) effect on the slaves—while Baptist doesn’t concern himself with consequences at all, so what we are left with is, ironically, half a story.

    For all his methodological deficiencies and political idiocies, Eugene Genovese was driven by the evidence to write about the world the slaves made. What would that world look like from the standpoint Edward Baptist has established? Could there even be such a place?

Comments are closed.