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Edward E. BaptistThe Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Right Hand–1815-1819”
At the turn of the 19th century, a small number of countries, “beginning with Great Britain, [are] shifting onto a path of sustained economic expansion that […] produce[s] higher standards of living and vastly increased wealth for some—and poverty for others” (79). This shift is variously known as “modernization, the industrial revolution, the Great Divergence” (80). Cotton is at the heart of this shift. Cotton cloth had previously been a hand-woven luxury product but “mechanical innovations and a new division of labor” (80) swiftly turn it into a booming industry in 19th-century Britain. A “new class of factory-owning entrepreneurs” extract “massive profits” and “textile revenues” (80), significantly boosting the British economy. However, technical innovation counts for nothing if the machines do not have raw products to process, and the US is struggling to meet the growing demand. This begins to change in the early 19th century, when “the rapid expansion of Mississippi Valley slave labor camps […] enable[s] the United States to seize control of the world export market for cotton” (82), with cotton accounting for forty-two percent of the value of US exports by 1820.
New Orleans is central to this expanding industry and much of the trade is focused around Maspero’s, a “Coffee-House” that sells alcohol rather than coffee and in which the proprietor, Maspero, makes most of his money “providing a place for others to meet and speculate” (83). Soon, Maspero’s is “the first center of the New Orleans cotton trade” (87). However, it is “also the site around which another new market [is] coalescing” (87), a market that is key to the expanding cotton industry and the economic growth of the US: slavery. As it is for cotton, “Maspero’s [is] the pole around which the market in enslaved people orbit[s]” (88) and many of the clientele are involved in both trades. This clientele largely consists of a new breed of businessmen and entrepreneurs. One English visitor travelling down the Mississippi observes that “[i]n their occupations they are not confined to any one particular pursuit, the same person often being farmer, store and hotel-keeper, land-jobber, brewer, steam-boat owner, and slave dealer” (84-85). These “nonspecialized, flexible entrepreneurs” bring about “a massive increase in the global economy’s most important raw material,” cotton, and buy and sell “substantial numbers of slaves” (87). In doing so, they enable the slave market, like the cotton industry, to change and expand, and it will “continue to develop over the next four decades in dynamic relationship with the development of the cotton economy” (87).
This brings the entrepreneurs great wealth and what theologian Robert Farrar Capon later calls “right-handed power,” or “the strength to force an outcome” (90). They become “[m]embers of the new leading class” along with “the cotton-mill owners of Manchester, the merchants of New York, the bankers of London” (90) and others profiting from booming industries and modernized economies. The development of credit systems is key to this power and expansion, allowing “entrepreneurs and others to spend tomorrow’s money today, accomplishing trades and investments that [will] (the borrower believe[s]) make more wealth tomorrow” (91). Along with local banks, which “spr[ing] up like fungus” around this period, the Second Bank of the United States (B.U.S.) “allow[s] credit to slosh into every cranny of the expanding nation” (92). Land, in particular, is bought with credit notes, borrowed money “that [will] have to be repaid from sales of cotton not yet planted by slaves not yet bought” (93). In this way, credit allows the continued, rapid expansion of the United States. Once again, slavery is key to this, as it is slaves that “[clear] fields bought on spec, [grow] cotton to make interest payments and keep new loans flowing, and [serve] as collateral besides” (93).
Slaves are bought in both private “one-on-one negotiations” (97) and at auctions. Private sales sometimes give an enslaved person an opportunity to “size up his or her would-be consumer” (97) while auctions are “a place for finding out how malleable an enslaved person [will] be […], how well they suited the buyer’s schemes” (96). This is significant because, just as the slave trade is changing, the uses to which slaves are put and the qualities buyers look for in enslaved people are changing, too. In part, buyers look for certain physical qualities—male slaves are evaluated in terms of height, strength, age, and so forth, while “the forced sexualization of enslaved women’s bodies [is] most explicit” (99) during the sale. Prospective buyers will “feel the women’s legs—lift up their [g]arments and examine their hips, feel their breast, and examine them to see if they [can] bear children” (99). However, people buying slaves to work in the cotton fields also desire a certain blank uniformity in their purchases.
Under the old system of slavery, further east and north, slaves “rose in status by learning trades” (103) and acquiring “[s]kills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past” (104). Now, however, “[e]nslavers [want] to buy people who [have] no claim to a special status” (102). Slaves advertised as having particular skills are subsequently sold as unskilled “field hands” (101). This shift is so extensive that “[o]nly 1.5 percent of the bills of sale for enslaved people shipped from Norfolk and sold in New Orleans in 1815 to 1820 list a skill” (104).
Ultimately, with the growth of the cotton industry comes the growth of a new slavery, in which enslavers no longer desire individuals with skills, histories, families, or trades. Instead, they want blank slates, slaves they can turn “into money” (102) or into “a commodity: alienable, easily sold, and in important ways, rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation” (101). They want only “disembodied hands” (103) who can be traded and used as laboring tools in the expanding cotton fields.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Left Hand–1805-1861”
Charles Ball, having been sold on by the Georgia-men, is sold again to a new enslaver who makes him run alongside his “stylish horse-drawn chaise” (111) all the way to his South Carolina plantation. The night before, another enslaved man had told him that, contrary to rumors, he would not “have to eat cottonseed instead of food” but warned him that “his work in the cotton fields would be more difficult and draining than the long hours of labor he had served in Maryland” (112).
The type of slavery that Ball is about to enter is not only new to him, it is “inherently new” (112). Not only is it happening on “an unprecedented geographic scale” with “whole armies of slaves […] being moved to new soil” on “the South’s new frontiers” (112), but it is also developing new forms, structures, and systems. In older forms of slavery, “‘left-handed’ power: the strength of the poor and the weak, the secret way of seemingly passive resistance to evil” (112) played a role in moderating the amount of work expected of slaves. This ensured that tasks were achievable, did not necessarily work the slaves to the point of absolute exhaustion, and sometimes even included positive incentives for enslaved people to finish work early, such as the opportunity to rest. When enslavers “tried to increase customary tasking levels and limit free time [they] faced direct or covert resistance” (116). However, in the “new system of enslaved labor” (115) developing in the South, “[e]nslavers [are] finding ways to turn the left hand against the enslaved […] by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture” (113).
The invention of the cotton gin “allow[s] enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they [can] grow and harvest” (116). However, historians fail to ask how “enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin [can] clean” (116). The answer is through “a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people [call] ‘the pushing system’” (116). There are several elements to the pushing system, “tricks that [fill] every minute of daylight with money-making labor” (118). For example, the slaves are made to work as soon as it is light enough to see “until it [is] too dark to tell cotton from weed” (118), with the barest minimum of carefully-regimented pauses to drink water or eat an inadequate meal. Additionally, while under old slavery regimes, “slave quarters had large numbers of nonworking children and old people […] cotton entrepreneurs [work] men, women, and older children together for most of the year at jobs that [are] identical” (119).
Techniques like this help enslavers increase productivity. However, it is “[i]nnovation in violence […] [that is] the foundation of the widely shared pushing system” (117). At the end of Ball’s first day at the cotton plantation, a woman carrying a baby arrives back at the slave cabins just after the overseer finishes his role call. She weeps and promises that “I shall never do it again” (119) but the overseer doesn’t listen. Instead, he “pull[s] up her torn shift, exposing her buttocks and back” and draws out a whip, “ten feet of plaited cowhide […] [that] Ball realize[s] [is] ‘different from all other whips that I have ever seen’” (120). He whips the woman until “[b]lood roll[s] off her back” (120). Whipping is more common and far more brutal in the South and “[s]urvivors of southwestern torture [say] their experiences [are] so horrific that they made any previous [whippings] seem like nothing” (120). Slaves tortured in this way cannot “speak in sentence or think coherently. They “danc[e],” “trembl[e], babbl[e], [lose] control of their bodies” (121). Ultimately, they “abandon hope of successful resistance to the pushing system’s demands” (121).
The pushing system, and the brutal violence that enforces it, certainly increases the productivity of slaves growing cotton. However, it is perhaps even more significant in the harvesting of cotton fibers. With increased productivity at the growing stage and increased mechanized processing, “[p]icking [is] now the bottleneck” (126) in the production process. Despite this, between 1810 and 1860, productivity in harvesting increases dramatically, in some cases even showing “a total productivity increase of 361 percent” (126) over the fifty-year period. In fact, harvesting is even able to keep pace with the rapidly-increasing productivity of the British cloth factories, which are spurred on by technological innovation. However, as there will be “no mechanical cotton picker until the late 1930s” (128), technological innovation cannot explain the increase in productivity in the cotton fields. Although some suggest “bioengineering”—new breeds of cotton, especially the ‘Petit Gulf’” (127) as an explanation, “picking totals [rise] continuously. They [rise] before Petit Gulf. They [rise] after it” (127). Accordingly, “something that cannot be explained by the seeds happen[s] to produce a continuous increase in productivity” (127).
There is “a point of dogma” that insists that “slave labor [is] less efficient that free labor” (128-129). However, among other evidence contradicting this, there is the fact that, “after the Civil War, when many cotton planters […] pay pickers by the pound at the end of a day’s work, free labor motivated by a wage [does] not produce the same amount of cotton per hour of picking as slave labor had” (130). The evidence suggests that the “continuous increase in productivity” (127) is the result of the change made by the pushing system and the violence that enforces it. Where previously slaves had been set tasks of a uniform scale, under new slavery, for the first time, “each person [is] given a unique, individual quota, rather than a limit of work fixed by general custom” (133). If they fall short of their target, they are subjected to floggings and other violence. As such, a slave must “improve his or her ‘capacity for picking,’ or the whip [will] balance the account” (133).
These quotas change frequently, with the previous day’s targets being replaced with “new and higher minimums” (134). That is to say, if a slave does not meet their quota, they are viciously beaten. However, as soon as they do reach their quota, the target is increased again and the slaves must learn to reach this new target or be whipped again. If and when they do reach it, the quota is simply increased once more. This treatment is often described as “discipline” or “punishment” but “we should call torture by its name” (139) and acknowledge that it is by “[u]sing torture [that] slavery’s entrepreneurs [extract] an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world” (140). It is this that keeps those mills fed by maintaining the constant flow of cotton, “the most important raw material of the industrial revolution that created the modern world economy” (113).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Slavery as a modern and modernizing institution becomes a more pronounced theme at this stage of the book. Britain undergoes the Industrial Revolution and its labor arrangements, living conditions, social organization, and economy are industrialized and modernized as it moves “onto a path of sustained economic expansion” (79). While “mechanical innovations and a new division of labor” (80) play key roles in this modernization, the cotton-cloth industry in the north of England, which kick-starts these remarkable changes, is nothing without the vast supply of raw cotton that is the product of “the rapid expansion of Mississippi Valley slave labor camps” (82). In this sense, Britain’s Industrial Revolution, arguably the catalyst for all future industrialization, is dependent on slave labor and slavery can be said to be a truly modernizing force.
The US also experiences modernization. A thriving new industry of cotton export businesses develops around New Orleans, and with it, “another new market” (87) that plays a key role in economic modernization: slavery. These markets are marked by a new breed of businessmen, “nonspecialized, flexible entrepreneurs” (87) who are involved in various trades including the buying and selling of cotton and slaves. With these new entrepreneurs comes the new credit system that places slavery in a key role in a new, modernized international economy that includes “the cotton-mill owners of Manchester, the merchants of New York, the bankers of London” (90). The credit system allows “entrepreneurs and others to spend tomorrow’s money today, accomplishing trades and investments that [will] (the borrower believe[s]) make more wealth tomorrow” (91), enabling further rapid expansion of the slave and cotton trades. This drives a new economic infrastructure in which local banks “spr[ing] up like fungus” while the well-established B.U.S “allow[s] credit to slosh into every cranny of the expanding nation” (92). This, in turn, creates the modern market of land speculation by allowing land to be bought with credit notes that will “be repaid from sales of cotton not yet planted by slaves not yet bought” (93).
Underpinning this modernization is the reality of new slavery for enslaved people and this, too, is changing rapidly. A symbolically-significant part of this is the shift towards describing slaves as “hands.” While in earlier models of slavery, enslaved people “rose in status by learning trades” (103) and acquiring “[s]kills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past” (104), enslavers are now only interested in unskilled, interchangeable “field hands” (101). Becoming a “hand” means, in effect, becoming only a pair of “disembodied hands” (103). That is, it means being evaluated on one’s ability to pick cotton without consideration for other skills, personal history, or individuality. In the new cotton economy, “[e]nslavers [want] to buy people who [have] no claim to a special status” (102), who can be used interchangeably. Moreover, they are not only used for labor. Ultimately, the reduction of enslaved people to uniform, interchangeable hands is part of the modernization of the economy because it means reducing people not only to laborers but to tradable objects and collateral. In the modernized slave trade in a modernized economy, enslavers can turn slaves “into money” (102) or into “a commodity: alienable, easily sold, and in important ways, rendered effectively identical for white entrepreneurs’ direct manipulation” (101).
A key part of the process of turning enslaved people into the “hands” required by new slavery and the modernized economy is the suppression of slaves’ solidarity and resistance, another of the book’s key themes. In earlier models of slavery, slaves were able to use passive resistance and other techniques to ensure that the tasks they were assigned did at least not work them to the point of total exhaustion and might even include “rewards” for completing work quickly and efficiently. However, new slavery worked hard to erode this dynamic “by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture” (113). This last point, the routine use of violence and torture, is both particularly significant and yet another of the book’s central themes.
Many historians argue that advances in “bioengineering”—new breeds of cotton, especially the ‘Petit Gulf’” (127) explain the ever-growing efficiency of the cotton industry. However, the fact that cotton yields were already increasing before the introduction of Petit Gulf and continue on this trajectory afterwards suggests that this is not the case, especially when considered with the fact that cotton picking with free labor after the Civil War produced a marked drop in productivity. Instead, the constant increase in cotton yields must be considered the product of the “complex of labor control practices” known as “the pushing system” (116). The pushing system includes various “tricks that [fill] every minute of daylight with money-making labor” (118), including working “men, women, and older children together for most of the year at jobs that [are] identical” (119), a key part of enslaved people’s reduction to interchangeable “hands.” However, it is “[i]nnovation in violence […] [that is] the foundation of the […] pushing system” (117) and key to its increases in efficiency.
Ball’s story helps demonstrate this with his recollection of seeing a woman tortured with a whip “different from all other whips that [he had] ever seen” comprised of “ten feet of plaited cowhide” (120). Such whippings are key to maintaining picking rates because they cause enslaved people to “abandon hope of successful resistance to the pushing system’s demands” (121). This violence is combined with a new “modernized” system, one in which slaves are assigned personal picking quotas each day. Each time they reach their quota then the next day it will be higher and if they fail they will be whipped to “balance the account” (133). Because of this, “fearing punishment or even death, [slaves’] minds scrambl[e] to come up with ways to speed hands” (136) allowing new slavery’s picking rates to keep with the cotton cloth industry, extracting “an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world” (140). Baptist further highlights how violent this process is by insisting that “we should call torture by its name” (139).
