In her presidential address at the 86th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Judith Shklar reminded her audience that the nation had “embarked on two experiments simultaneously: one in democracy, the other in tyranny,” and by tyranny she meant the “early and painless acceptance” of the “prevalence of chattel slavery long after it had disappeared in the rest of the European world.” She was insisting that slavery is a constitutive feature of “our political development” and thus imploring us to recover its intellectual importance for the study of American politics (Judith N. Shklar, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” American Political Science Review, 1991).

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told does just that, and more. It is a profound and erudite study of slavery from the American Revolution to the birth of the Civil War. Simply put, Baptist argues that slavery built the modern United States. But to see how, we have to refute two enduring assumptions. First is the idea that slavery was a “peculiar institution” that was incidental to the nation’s political development, and second is the view that slavery was antithetical to capitalism. Both assumptions originated with abolitionist critics of slavery, who singled out the institution’s political immorality; slavery’s ultimate crime was its denial of liberal rights and protections to enslaved African Americans. They thus depicted slavery in stark contrast to the nation’s supposed liberal and democratic institutions and values. From their political platform, abolitionists drew a weak economic conclusion: Slavery was unproductive, unprofitable, and inefficient. Slaveholders unwittingly agreed with their critics when they portrayed themselves as benevolent paternalists, rather than exploitative profit seekers. Handed down by historians, such rhetoric has hardened into truth. We, too, want to believe that free labor is more ethical and more efficient than slavery (p. 130).

“If slavery was outside of US history, for instance—if indeed it was a drag and not a rocket booster to American economic growth—then slavery was not implicated in US growth, success, power, and wealth,” Baptist writes (p. xix). To the contrary, he argues that slavery was essential to the economic and political development of the nation. And in seamless and convincing prose, he redirects larger political and economic observations to the micro level, to the phenomenological consequences experienced by enslaved African Americans. Baptist’s exhaustively researched work makes three claims in support of this argument.

The first is that slavery was a catalyst of state development, which, in turn, fueled the rapid expansion of slavery. In other words, it was slavery’s growth that linked the fragile nation together. Early presidents like Thomas Jefferson “helped shape the nation’s policy of geographic and economic growth around the expansion of slavery” because slavery’s “expansion yielded a more unified government and a stronger economy based on new nationwide capital markets” (p. 11). What is fresh is Baptist’s account of how investment companies—the North American Land Company; South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia Yazoo Companies; the Georgia-Mississippi Land Company—influenced early territorial expansion. For example, he shows how money influenced expansionary politics, such as when “congressmen examined their direct financial interests and chose to ensure that Mississippi became a slave state” (p. 29).

The state’s conquest, expulsion, and mass murder of Native-Americans made slavery’s frontier possible by yielding cheap land to be worked by enslaved African Americans. For example, General Andrew Jackson conquered the southwestern frontier, opening thousands of square miles: “The government protected the enslavers’ enterprise, and they, in turn, extended the power of the American state by occupying and developing territory” (p. 64). Slavery’s spread also “yoked together for a very long time” southern slaveholders and northern interest (p. 11). Many Northerners not only invested in slavery but also profited from transporting and trading the commodities that slaves created. The consequences for enslaved African Americans were devastating. Because slaves were chattel, families were ripped apart and sold piecemeal, children taken from mother, husband from wife, and sister from brother, each coffle chained to other pieces of human bondage and herded down to what was then the Southwest—the territory that became the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Such was the fate of 100,000 enslaved African Americans, who, in just four years (1815–19), were marched to Louisiana, Tennessee, and the area around Natchez, Mississippi (p. 93). The result was a new slavery in the southwest, one that made cotton king.

Baptist’s second claim is that in the southwestern United States, capitalist slaveowners and traders transformed cotton production and also created a new, far more punishing form of slavery. Southwestern slaveholders were, above all, “entrepreneurs,” rapacious capitalists, who transformed the economics of slavery and in doing so established themselves as a powerful force in the modern world that “cotton was making” (p. 78). Cotton was the most important commodity in the global economy; it was “the cheap oil of the nineteenth century” (p. 108). By 1820, southern cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity, accounting for 42% of U.S. export; by 1836, $600 million, or almost half of the U.S. economy, was based in cotton produced by slaves (p. 322); and by 1850, cotton production in the South had “doubled from 2 million to 4 million bales” (p. 350). Cotton was not only booming; it was the American economy. And all of this was made on the backs of a million odd slaves—only 6% of the nation’s population—which raises the following question: How was that possible if, indeed, slave labor was unproductive, inefficient, and unprofitable?

The key to cotton “was flesh” (p. 84). To meet the global demand for cotton, southwestern slaveholders not only created and supported a domestic slave market but also transformed slavery itself, creating a second slavery. This new slavery ran on torture. But since torture is as old as slavery itself, torture cannot distinguish southwestern slavery as new and exceptionally terrible. What was different was that capitalist-enslavers, whom Baptist likes to call “enslaver entrepreneurs,” were innovators at fine-tuning surveillance and violence so as to maximize labor production. These were not men motivated merely by a desire for honor, recognition, and personal mastery; they craved profit and wealth. Southwestern labor camps—most use the euphemism “plantations”—took the “pushing system” to a whole new level. The pushing system used daily quotas, raised over time, to extract the maximum amount of labor possible. Slaveholders “used measurement to calibrate torture in order to force cotton pickers to figure out how to increase their own productivity” (p. 130). Baptist then makes a very strong causal claim. The “continuous process of innovation” in violence was “the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton” (p. 130). Torture is why total gain in productivity per slave from 1800 to 1860 was almost 400% (p. 128). In 1801, the average slave picked 28 pounds of cotton per day in several South Carolina labor camps, but by the 1850s, enslavers were demanding 200 to 250 pounds on some plantations (pp. 126–34). As Baptist puts it, “the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain” (p. 121).

Given this situation, what forms of resistance were available to enslaved African Americans? There was little meaningful resistance beyond surviving and creating the bonds for solidarity. Baptist asks an obvious though often-overlooked question: If enslavers were motivated by profit and if resistance derailed productivity and thus profits, then surely they would have invented strategies for maximizing production under conditions where small-scale resistance was a possibility. The “pushing system” redirected the slave’s resistance “by measuring work, implementing continuous surveillance of labor, and calibrating time and torture. All of this repeatedly accomplished enslavers’ ongoing goal of forcing enslaved people to invent, over and over, ways to make their own labor more efficient and profitable for their owners” (p. 113). When the cotton sacks were weighed at day’s end, the slave was going to pay either way—with exhaustion, blistered hands, and an aching back or with flesh, taken at the whipping post.

Baptist’s third claim is that from the 1820s to the 1840s, these slaveholders became pivotal players in the global economy by using their slaves as collateral to create new credit, bonds, and securities markets that would enrich investors from New York to London and beyond. But they also gave birth to a boom-and-bust economy that not only generated incredible profits but also caused devastating economic crises. This is the book’s central contribution to the scholarship on slavery and the study of capitalism in nineteenth-century America. Baptist tells us that the “link between the cotton field and politics can be found in the strange alchemy of banks” (p. 229). And he shows that in the 1820s, southwestern slave interest chartered new banks, stock companies, and crediting agencies for the purpose of financing slavery. Southwestern states began issuing “bonds that turned slave mortgages into securities that could be marketed to investors around the Western world. This helped pump credit onto slavery’s frontier, where it was used to purchase large numbers of enslaved people from the southeast” (p. 247). Because the bank bonds were “securitized,” the debt from many borrowers was pooled so that it could be “sold off in uniform chunks, reducing the risks inherent in lending to one person at a time” (p. 247). Slaveholders were therefore encouraged to use their slaves for collateral on loans with relatively low interest rates and little risk to themselves. Slavery grew exponentially because there was a large margin between anticipated returns from slaves bought with loans and the loans’ low interest rates: “Owning more slaves enabled planters to repay debts, take profits, and gain property that could be collateral for even more borrowing” (p. 245). And this practice had global reach. Alabama, for example, “funded its banking system with bonds, selling most to the Rothschilds of Paris, Europe’s most powerful bankers” (p. 255).

Since the securities market spread risk away from individual lenders, however, it also encouraged overinvestments in slavery. This meant that the investor was at the mercy of the global cotton economy. The North’s economy, which was more diverse, was less vulnerable to a crisis in the cotton economy, though the financial panics of 1837 and 1839 proved that these dangers were real. Ironically, those warnings seemed to encourage more risky investing. Start-up firms like Lehman Brothers of Mobile, Alabama, had moved to the South in the wake of the 1839 panic in order to “lend money to enslavers on the security of ensuring crops and mortgages on slaves” (p. 352). But slaveholders had to repay their loans, which “only accelerated the whipping-machine, collectively forcing the total picking that hands could accomplish just a little higher each day” (p. 271).

Despite its virtues, this book raises a few questions. Social scientists, in particular, will find problematic Baptist’s argument that torture was the primary cause of the rapid increase in cotton production. Yes, slaveowners believed that torture was the fuel of production and thus torture became ubiquitous. And, yes, torture, increases in quotas, and total cotton production were strongly correlated. But other variables may be causally significant, such as different strains of seeds that yielded larger bolls and thus faster picking rates. To be clear, I do not doubt the prevalence of violence and oppression on cotton plantations. Just because slave owners thought that their whip was as important to the production of cotton as the soil and the sun does not mean it was in fact so. I am only suggesting that the increases in cotton production may have resulted from a combination of torture, new seeds, and evolution in farming and harvesting practices. Only by carefully excluding other potential causes of increased production rates can one say with absolute certainty that torture “was the ultimate cause of the massive increase in the production of high-quality, cheap cotton” (p. 130). But it is important to remember that Baptist is not a social scientist offering a causal model, even when he is implicitly making causal arguments. To judge him for failing to do what he never intended would be unfair. He should be praised for drawing attention to a set of fascinating questions. We, of course, may want to use different methods and tools in answering those questions.

Some will find Baptist’s style off-putting, starting with the heavily descriptive and detailed prose, which at times narrates slaves’ thoughts, ideas, and emotions. This will lead some to question whether the author is bending his sources toward his own ends. Nowhere in the book could I find an instance in which he was unfaithful to the spirit of the source. I do, however, wish that he would have included the following remarks in the body of the book, rather than in a footnote: “[S]ome of the vignettes told from the perspective of enslaved people incorporate not only the specific content of the historical documents cited, but also details from other sources, as is the custom with evocative history,” which, he adds, allows for “a richer description of the landscape, work practices, and cultural practices of the time and a more intimate portrait of the enslaved African Americans whose experience is the center of this story” (p. 428, n.1).

The book’s unsettling images and blunt prose are jolting. But to conclude that Baptist chooses such images and words for shock value is shortsighted. He has probably spent at least a decade in the archives, reading the horrors of slavery, day after day. I suspect that he wants his readers to experience how unnerving and appalling slavery was. Baptist is doing something very important, choosing language that suits the subject. It was torture, not punishment; they were enslavers, not employers; enslaved women were raped by their captors—they did not have “affairs.” Moreover, enslavers were entrepreneurs, insatiable capitalists who calibrated power and domination to achieve their ultimate goal: profits, ever more profits.

When we rely on stock phrases and euphemisms we do more than get slavery wrong; we deny that we, contemporary Americans, continue to benefit from slavery, from an “economy whose bottom gear was torture” (p. 139). The Half Has Never Been Told reminds us of our awful inheritance.