Slavery You Never Learned

Edward Baptist's new book, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism", recently drew a lot of attention.

What you might not have taken away from the ensuing media storm is that "The Half Has Never Been Told" is quite a gripping read.

Here are five of his key arguments:

1) Slavery was a key driver of the formation of American wealth.

Baptist argues that our narrative of slavery generally goes something like this: it was a terrible thing, but it was an anomaly, a sort of feudal throwback within capitalism whose demise would inevitably come with the rise of wage labor.

By 1850, he writes, American slaves were worth $1.3 billion, one-fifth of the nation's wealth.

2) In its heyday, slavery was more efficient than free labor, contrary to the arguments made by some northerners at the time.

Drawing on cotton production data and firsthand accounts of slave owners and the formerly enslaved, Baptist finds that ever-increasing cotton picking quotas, enforced by brutal whippings, led slaves to reach picking speeds that stretched the limits of physical possibility.

3) Slavery didn't just enrich the South, but also drove the industrial boom in the North.

The steady stream of large quantities of cotton was the lifeblood of textile mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and generated wealth for the owners of those mills. By 1832, "Lowell consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people's labor every year," Baptist writes.

4) Slavery wasn't showing any signs of slowing down economically by the time the Civil War came around.

Slave-backed bonds "generated revenue for investors from en-slavers' repayments of mortgages on enslaved people," Baptist writes. "This meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by hands in the field.

5)The South seceded to guarantee the expansion of slavery.

There are many competing explanations for what moved the South to secede. Baptist argues that the main driving reason was an economic one: slavery had to keep expanding to remain profitable, and Southern politicians wanted to ensure that new western states would be slave-owning ones.