The Half Has Never Been Told:
The Second Middle Passage
With yet another murderous attack by a white man on black men and women (Jacksonville, FL, August 26, 2023) it is vital to not let “one-off,” or “mentally disturbed individual” be the accepted meme of the story. The wish for, and often the reality of, white subjugation of black people has a long history in the United States, and prior, in the colonies. The brutality and ubiquity of this domination ideology is detailed in Edward E Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told. What follows is a clip of a longer review I wrote, pre-substack. (It can be found here: https://www.allinoneboat.org/the-half-thats-never-been-told-slavery-and-the-making-of-american-capitalism-edward-e-baptist/ )
“Some one million slaves were force-marched in coffles, necks and wrists chained, from the southern coastal American states to the interior, between 1809 and 1865. This second middle passage, as it is now called, and the wealth it brought to great cotton plantation owners, professional slave-traders, and all the trade that depended on it –sailing ship, river boats, guards, store owners– is the story told by Edward E Baptist in his excruciating and vitally important The Half Has Never Been Told (2014) . In fact, it might have been titled, the one millionth that’s never been told.
To read it is to be astounded, and shamed; shamed because it makes the contemporary feeling that slavery was a crime seem like a pleasant camouflage against the actual reality. I had no idea of the details. Inside the monster of American Slavery were so many moving parts, so much cruelty, in so many forms, so much greed and self-serving behavior, extending from south to north, all scuttling under the cloak of Christianity that, even with Baptist’s help it is hard to conceive. Further, as it seems to this reader, while slavery in its historical form is unlikely to reappear, the same forces which brought it into being continue in strength: greed, self-interest above all, the willingness to force labor by punishment, the manipulation of laws and morals to confound their intentions.
The Half Has Never Been Told is astounding not only for the research into economic archives and slave stories but for its construction. Using the parts of the body as his chapter titles – Feet, Hands, Breath, Blood– he organizes the material into not only a history of the expansion of slavery but a course in economics with many, concise, useful and appalling tables.
Cotton Production in the United States 1791 – 1860
Comparative Infant Death Rates
The Average Price of Slaves
Slaves Imported to Louisiana, 1809-1811
We get a short course in financial tools: calculations made by enslavers as to return-on-investment for a young field hand; the use of slaves as collateral for loans; the creation of bonds backed by the full “faith and credit” of the State of Louisiana; securitized bonds very similar to those which led to the 2008 financial collapse, except the 1830 bonds were based on slave-backed mortgages, bought and sold in stock markets around the world.
“Thus … even as Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire, a British bank could now sell an investor an completely commodified slave…”
American history, so often told from the ramparts of courage, intelligence, inventiveness and good intentions (if only sometimes gone astray,) grows in Baptist’s hands from the deeper roots of what actually went on, excavated from the documents and testimonies of the times.”
(Full review here: https://www.allinoneboat.org/the-half-thats-never-been-told-slavery-and-the-making-of-american-capitalism-edward-e-baptist/)