A reading of American history gives an idea of how slow social change can be. For slavery to end, we all know it took a bloody civil war. But after two-and-a-half centuries of unthinkable brutality, it could have taken even longer.
Abraham Lincoln, himself a moderate abolitionist, felt that slavery must gradually be eliminated. Likening it to a “metastatic cancer in a man’s neck,” he argued that one can’t just cut it out, lest one bleed to death. Southern slave states should be contained, he proposed, allowing slaveholders to eventually come to their good senses.
It was only at the instigation of the southern states that the war began. Without the South’s brazen miscalculation, there was no guarantee that slavery would have ended prior to the 20th century. The economic impact – the potential loss of $1.3 billion in human property – was just too great.
As Edward Baptist argues in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, slavery was key to generating American wealth. Cotton was the white gold of the 19th century, and there was no substitute for human labour in the fields.
The purpose of Baptist’s book is two-fold: To tell a history of slavery from a non-white perspective – many of his stories were based on the preserved interviews of African Americans who were once enslaved – and to combat an enduring theory that slavery was actually a hindrance to the American economy. This revisionist history downplayed the crucial role African Americans played in the development of their nation, while portraying slave owners as “gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a non-profit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.”
Baptist shows instead how slavery propelled the South into an economic powerhouse. He details how cotton production per slave nearly doubled from 1800 to the 1850s without the help of any new technology. Through the unrelenting physical abuse of slave owners, what he calls the “whipping machine,” harvest production rose to levels once thought not humanly possible. To provide some context, in the 1930s, paid farm labourers picked 100-120 pounds of cotton per day; under slave labourers in the 1850s, the average peaked at 200 pounds.
The growth of the cotton industry breathed new life into the slave trade beginning in 1800. It tore apart enslaved families as young men and women (even the pregnant) were forced to walk over 500 miles in chains to new labour camps in Georgia. Sold in a moment, they were given little forewarning to prevent their protest.
The slave trade and cotton industry played a crucial role in America’s westward expansion, feeding the textile industry in Britain while undercutting other producers in price until the beginning of the war.
Even after the civil war, with Lincoln assassinated and his vice president an “alcoholic racist bent on undermining emancipation,” southern Confederates continued to send representatives to Washington to reclaim their low-cost means of production. If not for the Republican “radicals” of the north who took control over reconstruction, the civil war may have been for naught.
Yet it seems white northerners were more passionate about halting the growing arrogance and political clout of southerners than actually ending slavery. As Baptist notes, it was both the white children of Union and Confederate soldiers who united against African-American civil equality in later years to bring about segregation and the disenfranchisement of African-American citizens.
It took a hundred more years for the Civil Rights movement to unfold. Once again, a humble reminder of how slow social progress can be.
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