The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the
Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist
Hey, history buffs and political aficionados!
How much do you know about these seven presidents: William Henry Harrison, John
Tyler, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce
(relative of Barbara and George W. Bush), and James Buchanan? Nothing? Read The Half
Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist and you'll learn why.
This brilliant book demolishes most of the
conventional wisdom about American History between the War for Independence and
the Civil War, which was mostly, as Abraham Lincoln said, about the expansion
of slavery.
Along with history, this book destroys the
entire discipline of Economics by detailing the economic superiority of slavery
imposed by terror as compared to paying wages to free labor. So many myths about economic development are
refuted by irrefutable data that it’s no wonder Economics is the dismal science. This book cries out for a serious systematic
economic analysis of slave labor in general.
The reason we know nothing about the aforementioned
seven presidents is because the traditional narrative line of 1840 – 1860 makes
no sense. It is a fairy tale. Slavery was not on the point of collapse in
1860. On the contrary, it was wildly
profitable and the engine for the United States’ expansion and
industrialization. Everyone was getting rich, except, of course, the slaves.
Slavery was not in retreat in the 1850’s.
Like most powerful systems, it was brought low by its’ own arrogance and
overreaching. The Dred
Scott decision, which seemed like such a victory at the time, actually doomed
slavery because it held the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to be
unconstitutional. That’s when it became
obvious that the United States could not survive “half slave and half free.” It had to be one or the other.
But
the greatest contribution of The Half Has
Never Been Told is explaining and illustrating the social costs of slavery
to the slaves: the broken families, children sold away from their parents,
husbands sold away from their wives. The
slavery of the tobacco plantations of Virginia and Maryland were paradises
compared to the cotton plantations of Georgia, and Mississippi. By the 1840’s and 1850’s, the old slave
states of Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland were primarily engaged is
producing slaves for the cotton plantations of the west.
This
is a horrifying, brilliant and important book.
The Economics of Slavery (and therefore America) 101. In a throwaway at the end, Baptist explains
in one sentence why the slaves were never given the 40 acres and a mule.
This
and King Leopold’s Ghost are the
greatest books on Black History I have ever read. The overwhelming publicity given to the
revisionist and historically inaccurate film Selma should really go to The
Half Has Never Been Told. But that
kind of legerdemain is normal when it comes to Black History. I dare anyone who reads (or listens to, it is
available on CD) this book to the end to say, as Chief Justice of the United
States Supreme Court John Roberts had the gall to say, “The way to not
discriminate is not to discriminate.”
Race was a dominant factor in American law when it came to oppressing
black people for two centuries, but when it is time for them to try to gain
equality, suddenly the Constitution is color blind.
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