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Edward E. Baptist's The Half That Has Never Been Told: Built On Slavery

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Edward E. Baptist wrote The Half That Has Never Been Told to show readers that American capitalism was built on slavery through focusing on the first eight decades following American Independence. He describes how the Southern United states started as small tobacco plantations along the east coast and eventually became the worlds biggest cotton producer. Baptist tells the story in chapters that are primarily named after body parts, starting with “Feet” and ending with “Arms”. He starts with the foundation of slavery after the American Revolution; then talks about expansion to Mississippi and the tragedies it brought Native Americans. After describing how settlers conquered the south, Edward Baptist writes about the power structure between plantation …show more content…

Edward E. Baptist states, “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth”. In the beginning, the colonies profited off of the slaves that worked tobacco plantations along the eastern coast of the United States. As land was taken from the Native Americans, it was the productivity of the people who inhabited the land that brought wealth to the country, not the land itself. Leading up to the American Revolution, the United States increased cotton production, calling for more slaves, “By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies’ 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves, about the same as the number of slaves then alive in the British Caribbean colonies. Slave labor was crucial to the North American colonies”. This number was only to grow as the United States gained its independence from Great Britain. America won its independence 11 years before the creation of the cotton gin. If independence was the green light to expand westward, the cotton gin was the incentive. As slavery became more profitable, population of enslaved people rose and the United States economy grew. Baptist writes, “From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation”. The United States economic growth was dependent upon the slaves who drove the economy by cultivating the crops that America

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He also shows how they took something like slavery and blew the other forms of providing revenue out of the water! The slave revenue exceeded well over the industrial, mechanical, and farming numbers and even though it was a southern dominated aspect of life, it even funded the northern part of the country. Baptist drives home his thoughts and provides facts in key areas such as: economic thought when it comes to production output, transportation of slaves and its impact on the local and national economies, and the interaction of the northern and southern economies. Baptist demonstrates very soundly that both wage capitalism in the North and slave capitalism in the South interacted

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The increase in profits led to the demand for more slaves to help plant and harvest the cotton. The slaves were no longer needed in the removal of seeds from cotton but were needed in increase numbers for planting and harvesting. There was a direct correlation between the increase in cotton production and the increase in slave populations

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Looking back at this time period we know that slavery wrong, but during this time it was the easiest way to gain profit through all avenues. From textile industry such as cotton, or farmed goods like tobacco, corn, and

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W. Craft offers a detailed explanation of his personal experiences while under slavery laws in the State of Georgia. His stories are personable and they also reflect the suffering his family bore throughout the years as slaves. Unlike a philosopher or a historian, Craft experienced first hand the aftermath of the slavery system in the United States. Through his own viewpoint, he described the various aspects of slavery and how he dealt with its issues throughout the years he lived under such regime. I had a moment of reflection when I read his explanation on how race and color had perhaps nothing to do with slavery.

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Even today the Americas are known for rich farmlands and efficient farming. The issue was that the demand for American silver and crops meant slaves were made to work harder, which would shorten their lifespan. This, in turn, prompted Europeans to search for even more slaves across the ocean, which would spark the whole cycle again like a warped perpetual motion

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“I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.” He believes that the use of slaves is what made our nation wealthy and civilized. He makes the claim that all wealthy and civilized societies were developed to be the way they are because they were founded on the basis of slavery. 3. “forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.

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Pinckney argues that slavery is, in fact, the force that unites the nation financially as, “an annual income of at least forty millions of dollars will be lost to your citizens, the loss of which will not alone be felt by the non-slaveholding states, but by the whole Union” (Document 2). On top of the moral concern of slavery, Pinckney also argues that the union only functions prosperously with the labor of slaves. The economic concern is true because of the industrial development of United States during the early 19th century. The first and largest industries developed in the North East focused around textiles and the production of finished clothing which would be less profitable and less incentivized without the active labor force of slavery providing the raw materials for industrial expansion through

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The American Revolution caused racist ideas towards African Americans. After the revolution had started, many African Americans and slaves ran away, in hopes of gaining freedom behind British lines. Furthermore, slaves who stayed with their masters blackmailed them in order for better conditions, or buying themselves out (“American Revolution”). However, despite this, these actions would backfire. After America had won the war, the “absence of British restraint on occupying Indian lands in the old Southwest cleared the path for a rapid expansion of slavery: as early as 1790, the slave population of 698,000 considerably exceeded that of the 1770s...

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It was more as if things were profitable the prices of slaves were judged by what was earned. Even though slavery in certain areas was flourishing slavery was not incompatible to industrial

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No matter your stance at the time, one thing became clear: socially, politically and economically, slavery was the fabric of American success and gave birth to the Old South as we know it today. At the center of the entire institution of slavery, and central to its defense, was the economic domination it provided a young country in international markets. In the early 19th century, cotton was a popular commodity and overtook sugar as the main crop produced by slave labor. The production of cotton became the nation’s top priority; America supplied ¾ of the cotton supply to the entire world.

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