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

After the financial crash of 1837, northerners begin to view slavery as “a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy” (312), and this understanding continues to the present day. However, during the decades leading up to the Civil War, slavery is actually a modernizing institution that fundamentally shapes the modern world. Perhaps the most central aspect of this is the role slavery plays in industrialization. In the 19th century, cotton is “the global economy’s most important raw material” (87). It feeds the cotton mills of the north of England, allowing for ever-increasing industrialization in this sector characterized by “mechanical innovations and a new division of labor” (80). The economic stimuli this provides, along with the technological advances and changes to labor practices, quickly spread to other sectors and industries, allowing further industrialization. As such, slave-grown cotton is the fuel of Britain’s industrial revolution. It does something much the same in the American North. By 1820, cotton is “the dominant driver of US economic growth” (83) bringing huge profits for the South and the North. The North “reinvest[s] profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy” (312), stimulating both growth and industrialization. In this way, slavery also “enable[s] the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution” (312). Moreover, the modernization does not only affect industrialization. Economics is modernized by slavery, too, with everything from the development of innovative financial apparatus like “slave bonds” (254) to the creation of “a national financial market for land speculation” (18) coming as a result of the expansion of slavery. Slavery even helps to modernize the legal system, with the foundational arguments of what will later become known as “the doctrine of substantive due process” (329)first being introduced with regards to the South’s “right” to own slaves. This due process “shaped (and continues to shape) the political economy of the United States in enduring ways” (330).

Many historians have argued that slavery’s increasing efficiency can be explained by “bioengineering”—new breeds of cotton, especially the ‘Petit Gulf’” (127) that make picking easier and produce greater harvests. However, “picking totals [rise] continuously. They [rise] before Petit Gulf. They [rise] after it” (127). These facts argues against this explanation, as does the fact that free labor after the Civil War does “not produce the same amount of cotton per hour of picking as slave labor had” (130).

Instead, Baptist insists that slavery’s “continuous increase in productivity” (127) is the result of “a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people [call] ‘the pushing system’” (116). The pushing system includes a variety of “tricks that [fill] every minute of daylight with money-making labor” (118), including the reduction of enslaved people to interchangeable “hands” all working the same tasks. However, it is ultimately “[i]nnovation in violence […] [that is] the foundation of the widely shared pushing system” (117). When enslaved people do not meet their ever-growing quotas, then “the whip [will] balance the account” (133). This threat of extreme violence and even death keeps enslaved people picking at a rate that matches the demand of the heavily-industrialized, technologically-efficient textile industry. While this is sometimes presented as “discipline” and “punishment,” Baptist insists that “we should call torture by its name” (139).

Popular understandings of slavery often present it as a solely southern institution to which the North was bitterly opposed. However, Baptist shows that the North is actually complicit in southern slavery and benefits hugely from transporting the commodities generated by slavery’s growth” (11). Indeed, for the most part, in both the North and South “[s]lavery’s expansion [is] one topic in which political leaders from all sides [can] find common interest” (29). Almost exclusively, when northerners do question slavery or the expansion of the slave frontier, they are not acting from a moral objection of slavery or from anti-racist sentiment but from concern over the “ever-growing weight of [southern] slave owners’ political power” (154), which they see as undermining their own influence.

However, even this rarely outweighs the massive gains the North receives from southern slavery so, for the first several decades of American independence, Northerners are mostly content not to interfere too drastically in the slave South. This begins to change after the economic crash of 1837. Because the North has moved away from the “cotton margin” upon which the South is still reliant, replacing it with “an industrial margin” (323) by “reinvest[ing] profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a diversified regional economy” (312), it is able to recover from the crash more quickly than the South. This encourages them to view slavery as “a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy,” and convinces them that the South’s slave-reliant economy is holding them back, despite the fact it was slavery that “enabled the free states to create the world’s second industrial revolution” (312). Fueled by this, the North grows increasingly “less likely to act like southerners’ dependents in politics” (324) and begins to more earnestly try to prevent the expansion of the slave frontier. The South, perceiving this as the North “trying to strangle the constitutional rights of the South” (330-31), declares that “a slave West [is] the price of union” (333), setting the stage for the Civil War. 

The slave frontier is profoundly shaped by white men’s “ideas about what [makes] them men” (217). This finds expression in numerous ways. Contests between men are extremely common and range from political clashes to “violent conflicts over status, reputation, and pride of membership, access, and recognition” (221) that create a white-on-white murder rate that is far higher than anywhere else in the nation. Sexual violence is also rife. Rape is widespread and the buying and selling of “fancy girls”—“a young woman, usually light-skinned, sold at a high price explicitly linked to her sexual availability and attractiveness” (240)—is increasingly normalized. New slavery actually “brand[s] and market[s] the ability to coerce sexuality, priming white entrepreneurs to believe that the purchase of enslaved-people-as-commodities offer[s] white men freedoms not found in ordinary life” (243) and many move to the slave frontier “with the idea in their heads that slavery’s frontier [is] a white man’s sexual playground” (238).

This sexualized violence shapes “masculine” interactions, with successful businessmen being seen as “metaphorically raping [their] competitors” (243). These ideas and understandings help turn the South into a “world where white men [see] their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved, feminized” (243). However, many African-American men develop healthier, less-destructive models of masculinity. Although “[c]aring is not central to most definitions of masculinity” (282), many enslaved men embrace it, making “ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that [tells] them that as men they [have] failed” (282). In doing so, they not only help keep their communities alive but also fundamentally challenge “southern white and Western definitions of manhood” (284).