This is not a fun topic. But at
least I can promise there will be some sex in my talk.
I would like to
begin with an
epigraph Ð a quote, like you find at the beginning of a book.
This book actually doesn't have one, so I'll supply it, appropriately
from a Mississippi writer Ð William Faulkner: ÒThe past is never dead.
ItÕs not even past.Ó
Some people do say that
slavery was in the past, so itÕs no longer relevant. But others consider it
highly relevant.
The book is
titled, The Half Has Never Been Told:
Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward Baptist. (By the way, I wasnÕt sure thatÕs really how his
name is pronounced. So I e-mailed him, and asked him.)
IÕd also like to make a disclosure:
I am white. Though Robinson is a common name among African-Americans, my
familyÕs name was probably not Robinson when they came off the boat. They were
European Jews, who suffered some bad stuff of their own, so I donÕt feel I bear
any inherited responsibility for slavery, even if it were true that the sins of
the fathers are visited upon the sons. I feel I can be objective about this
subject.
And, since IÕm sure the
question occurs to you, the author of the book, Edward Baptist, is also white. I
asked him that too.
Now, that
slavery continues to be a relevant issue, that still engenders arguments, is
exemplified by this book. When Mr. Skinner telephoned me, and told me what
book he was asking me to review, I said, ÒOhhhh, that one.Ó Because as a devoted reader
of The Economist magazine (which I
recommend highly), I very well remembered The
EconomistÕs review of this book. When I read that review, my reaction was,
ÒWow!Ó Ð especially at the reviewÕs final comments, which IÕll quote:
ÒMr. Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the
blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not
history, it is advocacy.Ó As I said: Wow.
I also very well remembered
what happened next. A short time later, I saw something I had never seen before
in The Economist. They published an
ÒeditorÕs noteÓ apologizing for Ð and withdrawing Ð that review.
Particularly with respect to those final lines which I quoted, the editor said
there had been widespread criticism, and rightly so. The editor said that the
great majority of slaveryÕs victims had
been blacks, Òand the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing
participants and beneficiaries of that evil.Ó
So the subject of slavery is
still quite capable of engendering controversy. The past is not dead; it is not
even past.
In fact, weÕre still not sure
how to talk about it (which this book is partly about). For those of you who
want to stay up to date, the word ÒslaveÓ is no longer politically correct. The
preferred term is now Òenslaved person.Ó I guess the difference is that the
word ÒslaveÓ might suggest that that is the personÕs essential characteristic; whereas Òenslaved personÓ instead suggests that weÕre
talking about a person, and that
enslavement was something that happened to that person. Fair enough.
In this book, the author does
use ÒenslavementÓ language a lot of the time, but in a lot of places that would
just be clumsy, and he does use the word Òslave.Ó YouÕll forgive me for doing
likewise.
So what is the real point of this
book? What is the author trying to accomplish? Of course there have been many
books about slavery. But Baptist is trying to make a particular point about the
history of slavery which he considers misunderstood
yet crucial to a larger understanding of how America got to be what it is. HeÕs
trying to refute what he sees as conventional wisdom that compartmentalizes
slavery from the rest of AmericaÕs development, as sort of a side story. That
is, the idea that while the rest of America was building a modern industrial
economic system, the South with itÕs so-called Òpeculiar institutionÓ of
slavery was a land apart; and besides, slavery wasnÕt really economically
viable in the long run; and even if there hadnÕt been a civil war, slavery
could not have persisted indefinitely. This narrative is what Baptist is trying
to refute. The Òhalf that has never been toldÓ of his title is the story of how
American slavery changed and grew over time, and how it was (he argues) crucial
to making America into an economic power.
This fits the narrative of
slavery being AmericaÕs Òoriginal sin;Ó as something that still stains us;
perhaps relevant to the issue of reparations for slavery, which some continue
to advocate. (Though of course, if
you want to use the language of Òsin,Ó the Bible is clear that slavery is
perfectly okay.)
The first enslaved persons
were brought to America, to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. For another century
or so, the influx was more or less a trickle, but then in the 1700s it became a
flood. And then, between the Revolution and the Civil War, AmericaÕs enslaved
population increased five-fold. At the time of the Revolution, AmericaÕs white
population was basically just confined to a narrow coastal strip; by the Civil
War, a vast inland territory was occupied, with slavery in much of it.
Now, when the Constitution
was promulgated, slavery was already a divisive issue. You all know about
counting slaves as 3/5 of a person. This is very much misunderstood. In fact,
it was the slave holders who wanted slaves to count as
full persons. Why? Because representation in Congress was based on population.
The Northerners felt that to fully count slaves would unreasonably inflate the
congressional clout of the Southerners. So they compromised: slaves would count
as 3/5. Why not simply half? I donÕt know. It was a politically negotiated
compromise.
Another thing they
compromised about was the slave trade. Perhaps recalling Saint Augustine who
said, ÒLord, make me chaste, but not yet,Ó they agreed to ban the African slave
trade, but not for twenty years. However, when the twenty years were up, it was
no longer necessary to import fresh slaves from Africa because the large
existing slave populations were rapidly reproducing, creating plenty of surplus
slaves that could be sold.
And slave owners helped this production
process along. If youÕve watched some of Henry Louis GatesÕs
genealogy programs on PBS, you know there really arenÕt any pure African
Americans, practically all having major admixtures of white genes, and of
course a lot of that came from slave owners impregnating their slaves.
This was not an incidental
point. It was in fact central to the institution of slavery. ItÕs something we
donÕt talk much about, but Baptist is very clear about it in the book. Why did
men buy and use slaves? To get rich. Why do men want
to get rich? Let me quote something Aristotle Onassis once said: Òall the money
in the world would be meaningless if women did not exist.Ó Now, riches can buy
you a lot of the amenities of life, and sex comes very high on that list. Men
would buy field hands to work their plantations so that they could get the
money to also buy women, and it wasnÕt just for their cooking skills. The highest
prices fetched by slaves were not for the best field hands but for the best
looking women.
Of course, this is not a
phenomenon that has disappeared from the world. Look at ISIS selling captive
women as so-called wives. ItÕs much the same thing.
All right. ThatÕs the sex
part of this talk I promised you. Maybe not so titillating.
As IÕve mentioned there was a
vast expansion of settlement, accompanied by slavery, deep into the American
interior, to places like Mississippi and Alabama, and a lot of the surplus
slaves from the upper south were sold into that new territory. How were they
transported? This is the subject of BaptistÕs first chapter, aptly titled,
ÒFeet.Ó They walked. Usually heavily and tightly chained together in sizeable groups,
called Òcoffles,Ó on forced marches, often hundreds of miles, barefoot. Imagine
it; not a pleasant stroll.
Have you ever wondered how
much a slave cost? The answer falls roughly between about $500 and $1000-plus
for a prime quality slave. In todayÕs money that equates to
something on the order of ten to thirty thousand dollars. This was a
gigantic investment at a time when the overall living standard and real-dollar
income level was greatly lower than todayÕs. So considering how valuable a
slave was, you can understand why extraordinary measures were taken to keep
them from escaping. On the other hand, a dead slave was worthless, so you might
wonder at how brutally they were treated. Slaves were frequently punished with
severe violence. The reason is that slave holders were
terrified of their slaves. Jefferson likened slavery to holding a wolf by the
ears Ð hard to hold on, but you dare not let go. Slave rebellions in
America were actually quite rare, mainly because the severity and violence of
the slave regime did successfully deter rebellion. But American slavers were very
mindful of the revolt in Haiti around 1800, which overthrew white rule and
entailed enormous slaughter. So slavery was a reign of terror for blacks and
whites alike.
Incidentally, the Haiti
revolt has great further significance for American history. Haiti was French,
and the French debacle in Haiti paved the way for their decision to sell us the
Louisiana territory. And that, as Baptist emphasizes, opened the way for a
further vast expansion of slavery.
He sees the slavery of the 19th
century as different from what had come before. Up until that time, everywhere,
the economy was almost entirely agriculture. This was the Malthusian world in which most of the
population worked on farms to produce enough food, which they could barely do.
Slavery was mostly about the production of sugar in the Caribbean, and
foodstuffs in America (also tobacco). But now came a great revolution Ð
the Industrial Revolution Ð wherein the production of not food, but goods, exploded in importance. What was
truly revolutionary was that humanity could now harness energy, to get more product out of a given amount of labor, and
that meant something new on this earth Ð economic growth. This was our
escape from the Malthusian trap, and bare subsistence. Now we could rise from almost universal
and unrelieved squalor to prosperity and affluence.
In those early factories, the
main product being manufactured was clothing. And the main raw material for
that was cotton. Before, slaves had toiled primarily to produce food. Now it
was mainly cotton. And the main part of the labor was picking the cotton. Which, let me tell you, was nasty hard work.
Central to BaptistÕs argument
is that cotton productivity per picker rose by 400% from 1800 to 1860. And,
contrary to most models of economic development, which attribute that kind of
productivity growth to technological improvements, Baptist contends that the
real source here was that cotton planters over time refined their methods for
squeezing more labor out of every slave. They were made to work as long and
hard and fast as possible, not by carrots and sticks, but sticks
alone; that is, whips. The book is very graphic about what it was like to be
whipped. And whipping was not an
occasional thing. Frequent whipping was integral to the system. This reality
leads Baptist to emphatically reject the common idea that slave labor was less
efficient than free wage labor. Whipping was more effective than money at
making people work to the utmost. Likewise, Baptist disputes the idea that
slavery was somehow doomed to die of its own accord. In his picture, slavery
became economically very efficient indeed.
As I mentioned, The EconomistÕs withdrawn review charged
Baptist with producing advocacy, not history. He does use some loaded,
inflammatory language. Plantations Baptist sometimes calls Òslave labor camps.Ó
Which he says employed Òtorture.Ó This is indeed very tough language, but I
would call it honest and accurate language. They were slave labor camps, and it was
torture.
The standard system was to
assign each slave a quota of pounds of cotton to be picked in a day. After the
nightly weighing, those slaves who failed to make their quota would receive a
number of lashes determined by the shortfall.
Baptist mentions the
invention of a whipping machine to automate the penalty. Apparently the machine
wasnÕt widely used, and manual whipping was the norm. However, the author
sometimes refers to the entire system as the Òwhipping machine,Ó a machine for
producing ever greater amounts of cotton. This too is
very tough, loaded language. But again itÕs actually accurate.
In the run-up to the Civil
War Ð and by the way, the book is actually really very good in
chronicling and illuminating this history -- the big divisive issue was whether
to allow slavery in the new western states and territories. Why were the southerners so keen on this? It
wasnÕt some messianic belief in slavery. It was self-interest. They feared that
if slavery were geographically confined, then over time, the slave population
would grow out of control, and youÕd have a Haiti situation. Allowing slavery
in new territories would provide an outlet, a safety valve, for that excess
slave population.
Many people see great
historical currents as inevitabilities, and that certainly applies here. The
Civil War, and the ending of slavery, in our hindsight, certainly do have a feel of inevitability. But as a student of
history, I am a strong believer in the concept of contingency Ð that
nothing is foretold, and that everything is always up for grabs; that small
causes can make big differences. Edward Baptist does make a strong case that
slavery was not a doomed system whose
demise was inevitable. To the contrary, slavery was so deeply entrenched,
economically and politically, that the only possible way it could have been
ended was by war. And that war was not inevitable either. The Southerners who
started the war were blinded by cocksure arrogance, failing to realize how
unnecessarily they were risking everything. Had cooler heads prevailed in 1861,
and had the Southerners drawn back from the brink, it is again hard to see how
slavery could ever have been ended. Outrageous though this may seem to our
modern sensibilities, it is not inconceivable that slavery would have continued
for a very long time.
But the concluding lines of that
Economist review I do agree were out
of line. This is a history book. No
one could write an objective book about slavery without making slaves look like
victims, and the whites in the story like victimizers. Is Baptist judgmental?
Sure; how could one not be. But he is writing history
and by and large lets the facts speak for themselves.
On the other hand, I feel
that the title (and especially the subtitle), and the bookÕs ostensible agenda,
are somewhat misleading. Baptist is not telling the
half thatÕs never been told. I reckon itÕs more like 5%. That again is his
argument that slavery was the engine originally behind AmericaÕs emergence as
an economic power. He actually does not devote very much of the book to making
that case, and I donÕt find it persuasive. While it is true that slavery and
cotton produced great riches for a relatively small number of planters in a few
southern states, that was far from the whole story of
AmericaÕs economy in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. In fact, if
Baptist were actually right about the economic importance of cotton, the South
should have won the war. It did not, for the main reason that it was totally
outgunned economically by the industrial North. And it was really only after
the Civil War, with the SouthÕs cotton economy in ruins, that
America exploded as an economic powerhouse. That story was built on
manufacturing, and also on incredibly productive agriculture growing food crops
Ð not cotton, and without slavery.
Now, Baptist does say, Òthe
main reason for the NorthÕs quicker recovery was that northerners had
reinvested profit generated from the backs of the enslaved in creating a
diversified regional economy.Ó In short, slavery supplied the seed money. But
the book does not show this; there is just no data tracing flows of investment in northern
industries, or Western agriculture, back to cotton profits. There is no
evidence that cotton planters plowed their profits into such investments, to
any appreciable degree.
But anyhow, that issue again concerns
only a small part of the book, whereas 95% of it is the story of slavery that
has been told again and again. Indeed, any idea that America has endeavored to
whitewash its past and bury the ugly truth about slavery is simply nonsense.
From BaptistÕs book I may have learned some details I didnÕt know before, but
the basic picture of slavery that emerges is one that was amply familiar to me
from numerous other sources Ð without, by the way, having had any special
interest in this particular subject.
While it is true that
Southern apologists have always tried to portray slavery as a benevolent system
in which darkies were contented or even cheerful, the larger society has long
since rejected that picture as nothing but a cruel joke that adds insult to
injury.
I think America is actually
uniquely honest with itself about blemishes on its record like slavery. Compare
Japan, which to this day refuses to accept responsibility for its misdeeds in
World War II, or Turkey, where you can be jailed for mentioning the Armenian
genocide.
Slavery was a very great
crime. But for those who, as IÕve mentioned, say that crime still stains
America, it might be pointed out that the crime was expiated with blood. This
nation, after all, fought a war to free the slaves. It might not have started
out that way, but in the end it was a war to free the slaves. And free them we
did. It is true that the social and economic system, that followed slavery, in
the American South, was for many decades still pretty awful, and some might
call it slavery in a different guise. But Edward Baptist is clear eyed about
what was importantly different: no
whipping.
And black people did have the
freedom to move out of the South. Which millions did.
There is a wonderful book about that migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, which I highly
recommend.
Meantime, in the South, it
took another century before blacks effectively and universally got the vote.
And for those cynics who doubt that voting matters, or think democracy is a
sham, it was in fact the vote, by blacks, that really finally transformed the
social landscape of the South. Today, the state with the most
black elected officials is Mississippi.
A final
comment. There are indeed cynics
who do not believe humanity has made moral progress. I remember one speaker
right here who expressed that view. And I have previously stood here refuting
it. Well, when I think about slavery, I say to myself, ÒWhat made those folks
think it was OK to go to Africa, and round up human beings as though they were
animals, and subject them to merciless brutality?Ó But we have to understand
that people at that time had a mentality very different from our own. Indeed,
they did see black Africans as no different from animals. That today we find
that attitude abhorrent, indeed incomprehensible, shows how much moral progress
there has been.
So have we arrived at
perfection? Of course not. In fact, slavery still
exists, literal slavery, in parts of the world. Civilization remains a work in
progress. Moral advancement is continuing. And, though IÕm frankly no
vegetarian, yet I sometimes wonder whether people in another hundred years might
say to themselves, ÒWhat made those folks think it was OK to round up animals
and eat them?Ó