From the American Revolution to the Civil War, How Did Slavery Drive the Growth of Capitalism?

This book gives the fullest and most powerful account of how slavery changed between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Baptist's telling is eloquent, humane, and impassioned; anyone studying American slavery needs it. — Edward Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and winner of the Bancroft Prize

Author bio:

Edward E. Baptist is a professor of history at Cornell University. In 2014 his book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism won him the Avery O. Craven Award and then the Sidney Hillman Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. Another of his award-winning books is Creating an Old South.

Translator bio:

Chen Zhijie is a professor in the English department of the School of Foreign Languages at Tianjin Normal University and a supervisor of master's students. He holds a master's degree in English language and literature and a doctorate in history, and works mainly on American history and culture. He led the translation and publication of the four-volume A History of the United States (Peking University Press, 2018).

Book excerpt:

Introduction: Heart, 1937 (excerpt)

People do not like to hear this: that commodification, suffering and torment, and the enslavement of Black Americans made the United States rich and strong. And yet that is what happened. The truth of the other half of the story rests with the survivors of slavery's expansion — some of them carried over that hill, some left behind. Forced migration governed their lives, and shaped how they saw their lives and their age. They fought to stay alive in that violent time, and in their own way told the half of the story no one had heard. Ever since slavery ended, Americans have tried to describe it in gentle terms — terms that do not match the bondage those survivors lived through and described.

I felt that history had not recovered the truth: American history had not told it, and neither had the history of slavery. So I went looking for this other half of the story — how slavery kept growing, changing, and remaking the modern world; how it kept modernizing inside modernization itself; and what it meant to the people who lived through slavery's astonishing expansion. Once I started looking, I found traces of the other half everywhere. The cotton boom did not touch only white entrepreneurs. It split Black husbands from wives and parents from children; left and right each took their own side; news of the boom turns up all through the letters, newspapers, and court records of the years before the Civil War. Most of all, that untold half was cut deep — like the layer of iridium left behind after an asteroid struck the earth and killed the dinosaurs — running through every line of testimony that people like Lorenzo Ivy, who had been enslaved, left in the record, and forming a long epic of forced separation, violence, and a new kind of labor.

For a long time I did not know how to fit this tense, shifting, growing process into one book. In many ways slavery's expansion shaped every part of America before the Civil War, and the hardest task was simply to tell that. Some of the papers slaveholders left behind record what it cost to throw up temporary cabins for enslaved workers in the cotton districts, and what the buying and selling of enslaved people earned. The newspapers of the day were just as full of it: investment in land and labor, the goods those people produced, how much money was being made and how the making of it was changing, and the violence that came with the change. The account books of Northern merchants, bankers, and mill owners show us the money they put into buying and selling enslaved people from slaveholders, and the share of the profits of expansion they took. Some scholars and students describe the politics of the period as a war over states' rights and republican principle; from another angle, the fight between the states over slavery turned on how to divide the profits of slavery's expansion, and on whether that expansion should go on.

The story is so complicated that many versions of it exist. Even Ivy did not know quite how to describe those chained columns moving southwest, toward the hills and the wide empty country beyond. Between the 1790s and the 1860s, slaveholders moved a million enslaved people out of the old slave states and into new ground. In 1790 they had not yet begun to grow cotton; by 1860 the crop came to 2 billion pounds. Reaching out from the slaveholding South, the story takes in not only politicians in Washington and American voters but factories in Connecticut, banks in London, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. Can one book set out everything Lorenzo Ivy saw? This book tries to avoid the stock phrases, and tries not to break the story into pieces — a chapter on slave resistance here, a chapter on women and slavery there — because those abstract categories miss what the story is about. The untold half is a process of movement, change, and uncertainty, in which everything has a cause and a consequence, and what people did about what happened shaped what happened next.

But it still has to be a story, and it cannot be told only from the point of view of its powerful figures. Politicians, planters, and bankers did play a decisive part in shaping policy, the movement of enslaved people, the cotton trade, even the remaking of the land itself. Yet if you begin where Lorenzo Ivy begins, American history opens at the moment those people in chains walked over the hill. From then on, the auction blocks and the frontier cotton fields where they toiled kept changing, and those changes remade the world. Their story is a story of the struggle to survive. The "reward" they got was having to adapt fast to a new way of working, remaking themselves in the labor of each day. Enslaved people's own ingenuity kept them alive — and that ingenuity was spent on ever-larger cotton crops, which let slavery in the South spread faster than it ever had. It was these enslaved Black people who made modern America, and the modern world with it, in ways seen and unseen.

Then one day I found the right image. It came from the great Black writer Ralph Ellison, whose novel Invisible Man you have probably heard of. In the 1950s Ellison also wrote some remarkable essays. In one of them he wrote: "I believe that American life is, in the moral sense, a drama enacted upon the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds."

The image fit what Ivy had said exactly. The only trouble was that Ellison's giant lay still. In the histories written before, Black Americans from the seventeenth century to the twentieth seemed to live on farms that never changed. But Lorenzo Ivy described a world in constant motion. The War of Independence had seemed to promise the end of slavery; what actually followed the war was the remaking of the giant. Slaveholders and other free people drew a new, modern kind of power out of exploiting, commodifying, and abusing enslaved people. The blood and sweat slavery produced, and the web of relations formed by individuals, families, and slave labor camps that grew larger every year, together drove an enormous economic transformation. The enslaved suffered every kind of torment and were dragged from place to place; they had to find a way to live, by resisting or by enduring. In time, the question of Black bondage and Black freedom moved to the center of American politics.

The giant that had lain bound on this ground of suffering did grow up, the way a person grows up through hardship. Following Ellison's image, I have divided this book into chapters built around the experience of enslaved Black people. Before we walk through the door Ivy opened, a word about what the chapters are called.

Chapter 1 is "Feet," because the story begins with Black people in chains walking the road, heading for the western frontier in the years between the end of the War of Independence in 1783 and the early nineteenth century. "Heads" is the title of Chapter 2, which is mostly about the violent American seizure of the Mississippi Valley, an event that tightened slaveholders' grip on the frontier. Chapters 3 and 4 are "Right Hand" and "Left Hand"; they expose the secret of how slaveholders came to power — the same secret that made white people around the world rich.

Chapters 5 and 6 are "Tongues" and "Breath." They describe how, in the mid-1820s, slaveholders quieted public criticism of themselves and built a slave trade fitted to this new stage of expansion. When most resistance came to nothing, a question stood before us: would the souls bound inside those bodies be destroyed, leaving only walking husks to work for slaveholders — or would the bodies stay alive and rise? Every enslaved person shipped here had to say goodbye to the life they had known, and to face the same question: work alongside their fellows, or struggle alone to survive? Enslaved Black people made many different choices. Above all, they chose to live — and living, in any real sense, took solidarity. Solidarity let them see what they had in common, and it shaped a shared criticism of slaveholders' power, and out of that came their own way of seeing things — their own view of right and wrong.

This book rests on the accounts of thousands of people, among them what Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson about his own life. Slavery has existed in many kinds of society, but no other country's enslaved people recorded what they went through the way those freed from American slavery did. The story starts with the experience of runaways during slavery's nineteenth-century expansion. Over that century about a hundred of those fugitives published autobiographies. In time this kind of memoir found a sizable market, largely because the people who had escaped Southern plantations were changing the minds of many Northern whites, making them see how slavery's expansion touched their own lives. In the 1930s there were many people like Claude Anderson, who together conducted some 2,300 interviews with men and women who had once been enslaved. In them the old recounted what they had seen and heard, and what they had heard from their elders about the years before the Civil War — accounts that set us down beside the fire, on the porch, in the cotton fields of that time. Like the histories that leave these stories out, the autobiographies and interviews are not wholly objective, free of any feeling. But read them all and you learn far more detail, and build a fuller picture in your mind. The stories fill one another in, and let you hear what is meant but not said.

Understanding what people suffered then, and what it cost them, is essential to understanding the course of American history, because enslaved people built new bonds together and found new ways to understand their world, and that helped free their minds and their bodies. In the end that spirit and that demand found them new allies, set off the abolition movement, and stopped slaveholders who commanded millions of people from doing whatever they pleased. But the road of their bondage was still long. Chapter 7, "Seeds," calls the place that road led to hell, and covers the nearly ten years of panic between 1829 and 1837. In those years slaveholders in the slave regions did as they liked, making political and economic life feverish and bringing themselves unprecedented power. These entrepreneurs also faced pressure from other whites, who wanted to use political democracy to claim equal rights of their own; the shrewd ones found ways to use that desire, and others like it. As new financial instruments were invented, more and more Westerners could invest directly in slavery's expansion. The innovation raised productivity sharply and widened profits, and it let slaveholders turn human muscle into a commodity — rewriting the history of Western finance in the process.

Slaveholders, ordinary white voters, investors, and enslaved people together made the 1830s a hinge in American history. On one side of the world stood the Industrial Revolution and the inventions that made the modern world; on the other stood a modern America. In 1837 the glory slaveholders had built produced an enormous economic collapse. Chapter 8, "Blood," shows how this self-made disaster brought new challenges to slaveholders' power, catastrophe to enslaved people, and trouble and confusion to ordinary white families. Some Southern political organizers tried to use the war with Mexico to restart expansion, and met increasingly firm opposition from the North. Chapter 9, "Backs," shows that by the 1840s Northerners, relying on the high returns of Black cotton labor, had built a complicated industrial economy on the backs of the enslaved. Even though further exploitation of enslaved people brought Northern whites plenty of benefits, they still wanted political means to oppose slavery's further expansion. And the people who escaped that expansion carried the slaveholders' ambitious talk outward, making it a key tool for sharpening the growing opposition.

Of course, many Northerners profited from slavery's expansion and were willing, in return, to acknowledge slaveholders' power. Chapter 10, "Arms," shows how, with these allies' help, slavery expanded further after the Compromise of 1850. But that expansion could only run inside a frontier that was closing. This is why Southern whites pushed so hard a campaign to have policy, and constitutional interpretation, open the whole United States to slavery. By then slavery would have covered the entire country. Their allies complained that this constant pressing and coercion — the demand that allies submit like slaves — only bred more resistance, and in the end set white Americans against one another.

In the end Southerners left the Union, declared an independent country, and shelled Fort Sumter. That enraged President Abraham Lincoln, who sent 100,000 militia to fight. Even then, many white Americans hoped to keep the risks of the quarrel as low as possible, and most Northern Unionists opposed freeing enslaved people. Perhaps the quarrel among white Americans was not about differing principles at all, but about how to keep cotton production and cotton profits going: hold slavery's present borders, or push them further out? But as the shelling spread, people had to make a harder choice at once — keep slavery forever, or end it now. When Frank Baker, Townsend, and Shepard Mallory rowed across the James, a river once crossed by countless boats full of passengers, the future seemed poised between two uncertain roads. All three men carried a force of the kind in the other half of the story Lorenzo Ivy told, and what they learned from it would lead the way toward freedom. Their story can lead us still. To listen to it we have to stand, as the boy Lorenzo Ivy stood, in Danville, watching people in chains cross the hill; or stand, as Frank Baker and his companions stood, on the Richmond docks, watching the boats run down the James toward the Mississippi — and then turn and follow the column, and listen to this other half of the story that has never been told.

Cover image: a still from the film 12 Years a Slave. Source: Douban.