The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

“The coffle-chains enable Georgia-men to turn feet against hearts, to make enslaved people work directly against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope.” 

The coffle-chains that linked enslaved men together for their forced marches into new territories did more than prevent the slaves from running away or fighting back. They took away all autonomy, forcing slaves to betray all they held dear, and beginning the process of reducing them to objectified “hands.” 

“The Chesapeake enslavers were bound by many different considerations when it came to buying or selling human beings: family ties between enslaved people that were important to other whites, fear of angry slaves, fear of one’s evangelized conscience, fear of foreign criticism of the land of the free.” 

Slavery in the northeast in the early years of American independence was shaped by restrictions emerging from public scrutiny in the early states and from slaves’ relative autonomy. One of the key aspects of the “new slavery” was that forced migration moved slaves into new territories away, from scrutiny, and used the pushing system to obliterate their hopes of resistance. 

“Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery.” 

As by far the most successful slave revolt, the Haitian Revolution was, on one level, a hugely significant blow to the institution of slavery, one that established an independent state and declared people of color to be full citizens. However, by destroying the French Republic’s armies, the rebel forces of Saint-Dominique effectively forced the desperate empire to sell New Orleans and its surrounds to the US, providing them with the territory they needed to expand slavery. 

“Federal troops were key to suppressing the 1811 revolt. The government protected the enslaver’s enterprises, and they, in turn, extended the power of the American state by occupying and developing territory.” 

It is critical to realize that the US government was central to the maintenance and expansion of slavery. In order to continue profiting from slavery, it was more than willing to employ federal forces to ensure that there would be no repeat of the Haitian Revolution on US soil.

“Skills meant that one could claim some authority over a task and tools, a kind of capital accumulated during a unique past. African Americans sent to New Orleans came to Maspero’s with individual job-related identities. But they came out with those skills erased.” 

While under earlier models of slavery enslaved people were valued more for the unique skills they developed, new slavery required only blank slates, interchangeable “hands” who could be forced to labor on plantations or be sold on as required. Indeed, this shift was so absolute that even those originally recorded as skilled laborers are marked as unskilled by the time they have been sold. 

“But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean?” 

Revisionist histories overlook the crucial role violence and torture played in increasing the speed at which enslaved people grew and picked cotton. The failure to ask how enslavers coerced enslaved people into keeping up with the demands of the cotton gin is an expression of this, masking enslavers’ violence by presenting increasing efficiency as the result of technological innovation. 

“Whites were open with those whom they beat about the whip’s purpose. Its point was the way it asserted dominance so ‘educationally’ that the enslaved would abandon hope of successful resistance to the pushing system’s demands.”

Earlier models of slavery left some space for the “left-handed power” (112) of enslaved people to ensure that their workloads were at least not always utterly exhausting, and sometimes even contained rewards for work completed early. However, new slavery, with its torture-reliant pushing system, eroded this dynamic, using whips and beatings to demand ever-increasing yields of cotton.

“Picking all day long until late at night, […] they had to dissociate their minds from pain […] from thirst, hunger, blurred vision, and anxiety about the whip behind and before them. One had to separate mind from hand—to become, for a time, little more than a hand.” 

Exposed constantly to the torture of the pushing system, the transformation into a “hand” was almost unavoidable. Disassociating from one’s suffering body and from the fear, the monotony, the pain, and the privation was both a coping mechanism and a necessity.  

“People from different origins, collected together in a system designed to pit them against each other even when they were working the same field, could have chosen not to help each other. Some at Congaree were selfish and grasping. But more saw that survival required them to make a new and different kind of family.” 

Forced migration separated families and communities and often gave enslaved people little reason to trust their fellows, with whom they might not even share a common tongue. Despite this, at a time when white people were fixated on seeking private gain, many enslaved people sought out community and solidarity with their fellows, seeing cooperation and sharing with those with whom they shared a common experience as key to their individual and collective futures. 

“On such occasions—and perhaps even more so on Saturday nights when whites weren’t watching—people animated by music and by each other thought and acted and rediscovered themselves as truly alive, as people who mattered for their unique abilities and contributions, as people in a common situation who celebrate their own individuality together.” 

The brutal reality of life under the pushing system of new slavery was immensely destructive, reducing people to objectified “hands” or withdrawn, soul-dead “zombies.” However, music allowed them to once again experience a full range of emotions, to feel and move and use their bodies for their own benefit. By developing their skills as singers and musicians, they reclaimed their humanity and strengthened their communities.  

“Slave buying and selling was no longer extraordinary, but ordinary, something businessmen did in business days.” 

Under older models of slavery, enslavers only sold slaves on exceptional days. However, as new slavery became increasingly modernized and professionalized, this changed, and soon the buying and selling of human beings became an entirely normal business transaction. 

“Traders calibrated their innovations not only for southwestern entrepreneurs who wanted hands, but also to provide a highly useful service to southeastern white folks—the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice.” 

In the new model of slavery spreading through the South, enslavers no longer looked for slaves with particular skills or knowledge. Instead, they wanted interchangeable, unskilled objects. In part, this represented the type of work expected of the slaves but it also represented the increased focus on slaves as commodities as something tradable, saleable, and reducible to money. 

“Talk about ‘stealing’ forces a focus on the slave trade, on the expansion of slavery, on the right hand in the market, on the left picking ever faster in the cotton fields. In this story there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner, only the ability of the strong to take from others. Stealing can never be an orderly system undergirded by property rights, cushioned by family-like relationships.” 

Enslavers often presented the buying and selling of enslaved people as simple business transactions, legally recognized and morally sound. Some even deluded themselves that they were playing a paternal role, looking after the benighted African Americans in their “care.” By beginning to share their own stories and explicitly reframing the act of selling slaves as an act of theft, enslaved people worked to undermine this thin veneer of respectability. 

“God had created some people unfit for freedom. Slavery was God’s will. To worry about slavery was to doubt God. To oppose it was heresy.” 

When enslaved people embraced evangelical Protestantism, they gained relief and a form of escape from the harshness of their lives, while white Christians gained aspects of African religious practices that profoundly shaped evangelical ceremonies. However, it did not take long for white society to grow suspicious of black Christianity and begin to use it as another form of social control. 

“White men’s code of masculinity shaped all lives on slavery’s frontier: shaped the costs of being black, the benefits of being white, the costs of being female.” 

White men’s ideas of what it means to be a man were woven into many aspects of life in the southwest. From white-on-white murder to the fevered pursuit of credit to the rape of enslaved women, efforts to display and prove masculinity had far-reaching, devastating consequences. 

“Sometimes he had sex publicly, in front of other enslaved people, demonstrating his dominance over all of them.” 

White men’s sexual violence was not only intended to prove their “masculine” domination of the women they raped but of their dominion over all enslaved people. Reminding enslaved people that they could do nothing to stop these white men reinforced the idea that enslavers were in absolute control. 

“Many migrant whites came with the idea in their heads that slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground.”

Although the idea that white men had the right to rape enslaved women had always been a part of slavery in America and beyond, it increased dramatically under new slavery. The sexualization of enslaved women became more overt and explicit, and the sale of “fancy girls” for the sexual use of white men became widespread. 

“To understand why a slave trader would call himself a one-eyed man, one must view him in the context of a slave-frontier world where white men saw their contests with other people as rendering the winner manly and the loser emasculated, enslaved [and] feminized.” 

In calling themselves “one-eyed men”—a crude reference to penises and masculinity—enslavers were not only celebrating their own virility and sexuality. They were flaunting a form of manhood focused on sexualized domination in many areas: the domination of women, of slaves, of business rivals, of anyone who could be “conquered” and emasculated by a “real man.” 

“Because these choices placed them in relationships as husbands or lovers, fathers or brothers, these men often made ordinary virtues central to their own identities, despite all the cultural noise that told them that as men they had failed.” 

While white men were constructing models of masculinity centered on sexual violence, conflict, and conquest, many enslaved men chose to build their masculine identities around caring for others. In doing so, they not only played a vital role in helping their communities survive but also challenged limited and limiting ideas of what it means to be a man. 

“Now, having built a brave new world on the product of the cotton fields, northerners […] were convincing themselves that slavery was a premodern, inefficient drain on the national economy.” 

The North profited hugely from southern slavery and it was these profits that allowed them to undergo an industrial revolution like that of Britain, another great slave-profiteering nation. However, after the economic panic of 1837, when the North’s industrialized economy recovered more quickly than the South’s, northerners quickly “forgot” the wealth slavery had brought them and began to distance themselves from the institution.  

“To cite again the words of the white abolitionist and orator Wendell Phillips, the South was a Troy destined to fall. Which then raises the question: What sort of madness would prompt supposedly conservative planters to start a war that would hasten the collapse of their own walls?” 

The North’s presentation of the South’s slave economy as premodern and inefficient was so effective that it is an understanding that prevails today, with many still holding to the dogma that slavery was inherently inefficient. However, in reality, slavery still produced huge profits and, if spared the North’s interference, could still expand into fresh territories. Recognizing this reality, the South was prepared to go to war to maintain its profits and power.

“Ever since the end of the Civil War, Confederate apologists have put out the lie that the southern states seceded and southerners fought to defend an abstract constitutional principle of ‘states’ rights.’ That falsehood attempts to sanitize the past. Every convention’s participants made it explicit: they are seceding because they thought secession would protect the future of slavery.” 

The South’s secession was the product of numerous state conferences, in which southerners voted to leave the union. While revisionist histories present this as an heroic stand for the rights of the individual against a repressive government, the reality is that southerners voted to secede precisely because they wanted to keep expanding the slave frontier and profiting from the labor of enslaved African Americans. 

“They signed contracts to pay workers by the month, only to find that at the end of 1862, half of the cotton was rotting in the fields—cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed. Unwilling to admit that wage labor might not be as efficient in all cases as slave, some experimented with paying pickers by the pound, withholding monthly wages until the end of the harvest, or haranguing the workers—telling them that if they failed to work well, ‘I shall report them to Massa Lincoln as too lazy to be free.’” 

When the Union claimed prime cotton territory from the retreating Confederacy, some entrepreneurs claimed that they could produce more cotton with free labor than with slave labor. This reflects a widespread, and still existing, misconception that slave labor is inherently inefficient. However, they soon discovered that, without the terror and torture of the whip, workers were not prepared to pick at the psychologically- and physically-damaging rate previously demanded by enslavers.