The Half Has Never Been Told

June 30, 2014
Cornell University historian Baptist (Creating an Old South) delivers an unapologetic, damning, and grisly account of slavery’s foundational place in the emergence of America as a global superpower, balancing the macro lens of statistics and national trends with intimate slave narratives. Delivered in a voice that fluidly incorporates both academic objectivity and coarse language, the book is organized into chapters named after a slave’s body parts (i.e., “Heads” and “Arms”), brutal images reinforced by the “metastatic rate” of the “endlessly expanding economy” of slavery in the U.S. in the first half of the 18th century. The “massive markets,” “accelerating growth,” and new economic institutions in America’s “nexus of cotton, slaves, and credit” lend credence to Baptist’s insistence that common conceptions of the slave South as economically doomed from the start are possible only in hindsight. At the dawn of the Civil War, he suggests, the South’s perception that it was a “highly successful, innovative sector,” was coupled with slave-owners’ belief that objections to slavery in the North rested not on moral concerns, but on fears of “political bullying” from the slave states. Baptist’s chronicle exposes the taint of blood in virtually all of the wealth that Americans have inherited from their forebears, making it a rewarding read for anyone interested in U.S.A.’s dark history.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
A dense, myth-busting work that pursues how the world profited from American slavery.The story of slavery in America is not static, as Baptist (History/Cornell Univ.; Creating an Old South: Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, 2001) points out in this exhaustive tome. It entailed wide-scale forced migrations from the lower East Coast to the South and West of the economically burgeoning United States. Following tobacco production along the Chesapeake Bay, slavery was embraced in the newly opened territories of Kentucky and Mississippi, where slaves were force-marched in coffles, separated from families, bought and sold to new owners, and then used to clear fields and plant indigo and the new cash crop, cotton. Although some advanced attempts to ban slavery-e.g., in the Northwest Ordinance-the newly hammered-out Constitution codified it by the Three-Fifths Compromise. In the name of unity, the delegates agreed with South Carolina's John Rutledge that "religion and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations." Using the metaphor of a trussed-up giant body a la Gulliver, Baptist divides his chapters by body parts, through which he viscerally delineates the effects of the violence of slavery-e.g., "Feet" encapsulates the experience of forced migration through intimate stories, while "Right Hand" and "Left Hand" explore the insidious methods of the "enslavers" to solidify their holdings. Baptist moves chronologically, though in a roundabout fashion, often backtracking and repeating, and thoroughly examines every area affected by slavery, from New Orleans to Boston, Kansas to Cuba. He challenges the comfortable myth of "Yankee ingenuity" as our founding growth principle, showing how cotton picking drove U.S. exports and finance from 1800 to 1860-as well as the expansion of Northern industry.Though some readers may find the narrative occasionally tedious, this is a complicated story involving staggering scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the history of the United States.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014

Baptist (Creating an Old South) has written a book that truly deepens and broadens our understanding of slavery. Through an incredible amount of detail and the use of an array of primary sources, the author argues that the South's use of slave labor in cotton production was the primary factor in the United States becoming a leading modern industrial nation. He tells his story more or less chronologically but structures each chapter around a theme derived from a part or aspect of the human body: blood, head, arms, breath, and so on. Made up of two distinct parts, the book opens with seven chapters that cover the period from 1783 to 1837 and focus on the growth of slavery, delineating what life was like for slaves during this period. The final four chapters, which run from 1836 through the aftermath of the Civil War, detail the entrenchment of slavery and the political struggles over its continuation and expansion--and consequently focus less on the lives of victims. VERDICT Professional historians and lay readers will pore over this book for years to come. Essential for all readers interested in American history and the history of slavery.--Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY

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Starred review from September 15, 2014
While Americans like to look at slavery as a pre-modern labor system, tinged by racist and moralistic perspectives, Baptist argues that slavery was the major economic engine that helped to propel the growth of the U.S. in the nineteenth century and eventually make it a world power. Baptist renders history and economics with the power of prose that seeks to tell a fuller story than has been told of American slavery, drawing on plantation records and the personal narratives of former slaves interviewed by Works Progress Administration workers. Riffing on Ralph Ellison's depiction of the African American body as the site of the American drama, Baptist offers chapters on head, feet, hands, tongues, arms, and backs to describe the aggressive push to maintain enslaved labor, the violence and power wielded to expand slavery, and the resistance of slaves and abolitionists. He details the significance of slavery to cotton cultivation and the significance of cotton in fueling the economy of the industrial North. As U.S. capitalism supported by slavery grew, so did the politics to support it, influencing the allocation of state representation and even the presidency for 70 years. An insightful look at U.S. slavery and its controversial role in the much-celebrated story of American capitalism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)