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Without understanding the past, it is difficult to grapple with the present. This became quite clear in the wake of the tragic attack in Charleston, when public dialogue swirled with myths, wishful thinking and deeply ideological readings of history, all too often camouflaged as solid historical analysis. Now, 150 years after emancipation, it is high time to confront the legacy of slavery. No one alive today was enslaved or enslaved others, and no one bears personal responsibility for the brutal institution-but we live in its shadow, and contemporary debates on race relations cannot proceed without first acknowledging that.

Indeed, without understanding slavery, it is impossible to understand the history of the United States. Over the course of more than two centuries, millions of Americans were enslaved, producing most of the commodities-from tobacco to rice, sugar to cotton-that established America on the world scene. As I write in my book, Empire of Cotton , American slavery (and the cotton it produced) was crucial to the development of global capitalism. Slavery transformed the nation's politics, too, eventually resulting in a devastating civil war-the most deadly war in the history of the United States. As we know, slavery left a deep legacy of inequality and racism, one that is still visible today a century and a half after emancipation. But the struggle against slavery also inspired some of the finest values and politics in American history, from Republican Thaddeus Stevens' determined fight for emancipation to Frederick Douglass' eloquent appeal to the enlightenment tradition of equality.

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Considering the importance of "the peculiar institution" to the United States, it is not surprising that the writing on the history of slavery is rich-it is, in fact among the best researched stories of the American past. American historians have been at the forefront of disentangling slavery's history, producing some of the most original, important and freshest historical works of the past century. These works all emphasize the centrality of slavery to the American experience, show that slavery needs to be understood as the national story that it was, describe in harrowing detail the unfathomable violence that descended upon enslaved African Americans, and demonstrate conclusively how the theft of enslaved workers' labor and a sharpening racism has affected the nation's society, politics and economy.

It is almost impossible to identify just 10 "must read" books-there are scores of indispensable studies-but to understand the impact of slavery on the economy, politics and society of the United States and its colonial antecedents, the following books are crucial. They take the reader into the slave quarters of Virginia and onto the cotton plantations of South Carolina, explore the most intimate gender relations within plantation households and the broader political struggles in the halls of power in Washington D.C., and illuminate the role of American slavery in the global economy as well as its role in creating some of the nation's most cherished institutions.

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . A survey of slavery's very long history in North America, showing how the institution changed over time and how it differed from state to state.

Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South explores the world of enslaved women, and, as the title suggests, focuses on their ability to resist the enormous oppression they lived under. From sewing fancy dresses to putting up a picture of Abraham Lincoln, enslaved women tried to maintain some of their dignity and push back against the overwhelming power of their captors.

Drew Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery . A careful study of one of South Carolina's most important planters, the man who declared that cotton was "king," this book pays close attention both to life on the plantation and Hammond's pro-slavery politics.

Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy . Foner examines the aftermath of emancipation, showing how the struggle for freedom unfolded on plantations, in state houses and within the federal government, and how formerly enslaved workers pushed for a capacious understanding of freedom that included social, political and economic rights..

Thavolia Glymph's Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household is a brilliant analysis of the relations between black and white women, enslaved and free, in the plantation households of the South, a relationship full of violence.

Steven Hahn's Pulitzer-Prize winning A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration charts the long-term history of African-American politics and how that politics emerged during the era of slavery. It's an extraordinarily creative reading of political life on the plantation, and beyond.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market . An examination of the heart of slavery-the slave market-that provides a wrenching analysis of the processes through which millions of people were made into commodities.

Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina focuses on slave owners' political mission to create a state whose central duty was the defense of slavery. Sinha shows that nowhere did the politics of slavery take on a more radical and anti-democratic form than in antebellum South Carolina.

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 is a dazzling (and Pulitzer Prize winning) account of the politics of slavery in Virginia in the age of revolution. Moving effortlessly from the plantation to global politics, Taylor shows how enslaved workers played an important role in the struggle with the British, and how important slavery was to both the creation of the American republic and the fault lines that would eventually result in a war between the states.

Craig Wilder's Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities addresses slavery's impact in a place few have looked before-the nation's institutions of higher learning. He shows how enslaved workers helped build the nation's most elite universities and how these institutions all too often defended the interests of powerful slaveholders and gave "scientific" legitimacy to racism.

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Without understanding the past, it is difficult to grapple with the present. This became quite clear in the wake of the tragic attack in Charleston, when public dialogue swirled with myths, wishful thinking and deeply ideological readings of history, all too often camouflaged as solid historical analysis.

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FREDERICK DOUGLASS: THE LAST DAYS OF SLAVERY by William Miller, illustrated by Cedric Lucas (Sagebrush Bound, 1999) CHRISTMAS IN THE BIG HOUSE, CHRISTMAS IN THE QUARTERS by Patricia McKissack, et al. (Scholastic Paperbacks, re-print edition 2002) LEST WE FORGET: THE PASSAGE FROM AFRICA TO SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION: A THREE-DIMENSIONAL INTERACTIVE BOOK WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND DOCUMENTS FROM THE BLACK HOLOCAUST EXHIBIT by Velma Maia Thomas (Crown Publishing Group, 1997) Books For Elementary School Students

AUNT HARRIET'S UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN THE SKY by Faith Ringgold (Dragonfly Books, 1995)
This creative book tells the story of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Ringgold imagines Tubman's story as a fantastic nighttime flight and supports rich language with magical illustrations.

In this award-winning book, the author describes Frederick Douglass' life as a young plantation slave and reveals the courage Douglass exhibited by challenging his enslavement.

NETTIE'S TRIP SOUTH by Anne Turner (Aladdin, re-print edition 1995)
Nettie, a Northern girl traveling through the Antebellum South, shares her observations about slavery in this collection of fictional letters.

Books For Middle School Students

BULL RUN by Paul Fleischman (HarperTrophy, 1995)
Fleischman's award-winning fictional tale of a Civil War battle is told from sixteen different points of view.

This book contrasts the lives of 19th century Virginia slaves and their masters as they prepare for the Christmas season.

DAILY LIFE ON A SOUTHERN PLANTATION 1853 by Paul Erickson (Bound to Stay Bound, 2001)
The author begins with a historical overview of slavery. He uses the rest of the book to create a picture of a Southern plantation on the eve of Civil War as seen through the eyes of both slaveholders and slaves.

I THOUGHT MY SOUL WOULD RISE AND FLY: THE DIARY OF PATSY, A FREED GIRL (DEAR AMERICA) by Joyce Hanson (Scholastic Press, 2003)
This fictional diary written from the point of view of a 12-year-old former slave describes how the narrator adjusts to her life as a free person in the Reconstruction South.

Thomas' book uses the idea of a multimedia exhibit to create a moving picture of antebellum slave life through interactive pages.

FREEDOM'S CHILDREN: THE PASSAGE FROM EMANCIPATION TO THE GREAT MIGRATION by Velma Maia Thomas (Crown Publishing Group, 2000)
The sequel to LEST WE FORGET describes the simultaneous excitement and terror felt by newly freed slaves.

MANY THOUSANDS GONE: AFRICAN AMERICANS FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM by Virginia Hamilton et al. (Knopf, 1993) AMISTAD: A LONG ROAD TO FREEDOM by Walter Dean Myers (Puffin Books, 2001)

This book provides an overview of the history of slavery interwoven with stories relaying the life experiences of individual slaves.

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE: WHITE SHIPS, BLACK CARGO by Tom Feelings (Dial Books, 1995)
Powerful imagery is accompanied by a concise narrative in this book which tells the story of the transatlantic voyage that brought Africans to America, and to slavery.

TO BE A SLAVE by Julius Lester (Puffin Books, 2000)
The author uses writings by and interviews with slaves to tell the harrowing stories of Southern slavery.

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Raymond Bial (Houghton Mifflin, re-print edition 1999)
The author includes photos he took of Underground Railroad escape routes to support first-hand accounts of slaves who escaped through the Underground Railroad and stories of the people that helped them along the way.

WAR COMES TO WILLY FREEMAN (THE ARABUS FAMILY SAGA) by James and Christopher Collier (Yearling Books, re-issue ed., 1987)
This book tells the story of a free girl living in Connecticut who faces the possibility of enslavement after her father is killed in the Revolutionary war.

JUMP SHIP TO FREEDOM
Also check out the second book in the Arabus series, the story of a teenage slave and his pursuit of freedom.

Books For Middle to High School Students

The slave ship Amistad was grounded on the Northeastern coast of America after captured Africans aboard the ship took control. Myers' book uses archival documents to explore the social and legal ramifications of this event.

BOUND FOR AMERICA: THE FORCED MIGRATION OF AFRICANS TO THE NEW WORLD by James Haskins (HarperCollins, 1999)
The eighteen brief chapters in this book recount the plight of Africans forced into slavery with abundant use of primary documents and artwork.

BRADY by Jean Fritz (Putnam, re-print edition 1987)
This book tells the story of Brady, a white teenager living in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. When Brady stumbles upon an Underground Railroad station he struggles to define his beliefs about slavery.

BREAKING THE CHAINS: AFRICAN AMERICAN SLAVE RESISTANCE by William Loren Katz (Sagebrush Bound, 1999) This book examines both active and passive survival strategies used by black men and women as they confronted the hardships of slave life.

SARNY: A LIFE REMEMBERED by Gary Paulsen (Laurel Leaf, 1999) Paulsen's tale chronicles the life of a woman named Sarny as she becomes a free woman and searches for the children who were taken away from her and sold before the Civil War.

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Slavery and the Making of America . Resources . Books for Kids | PBS

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FREDERICK DOUGLASS: THE LAST DAYS OF SLAVERY by William Miller, illustrated by Cedric Lucas (Sagebrush Bound, 1999) CHRISTMAS IN THE BIG HOUSE, CHRISTMAS IN THE QUARTERS by Patricia McKissack, et al.

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Booklists - Fiction about Slavery in Early American History for 4th -10th Grades

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Connecting people with the world of ideas and information.

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On January 19th, Claire Fallon, a Books and Culture Writer at The Huffington Post, wrote an article called 13 Honest Books About Slavery Young People Should Actually Read. The piece was a response to the news about Scholastic pulling the publication of A Birthday Cake for George Washington and got shared hither and thither and yon (mostly yon). It's not a bad list by any means, but looking at it I was struck by how old the titles were. Nightjohn is from 1993. The Glory Field from 1994. Even the most recent title on the list, Never Forgotten by Patricia McKissack, originally dates to 2011.

I love older books, but there's nothing wrong with including recent titles as well. With that in mind, here is a companion list of thirteen books about slavery for young people published in the last five years.
The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch By Chris Barton, illustrated by Don Tate
Best dang book about Reconstruction you'll ever read to a kid. I find that when I try to sell this book to adults their eyes glaze over at the word "Reconstruction". Kids don't know anything about it so they're a bit less prejudiced in that respect. A great story about a great man. As Barton puts it, "It's the story of a guy who in ten years went from teenage field slave to U.S. Congressman."
Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Long before she'd win a Newbery Honor for The War That Saved My Life, Ms. Bradley was earning my respect with a book that dared to delve into the lives of Thomas Jefferson's enslaved children. It's an issue complicated enough for adult readers, but Baker managed to make it understandable to a middle grade audience. I thought she'd get some award recognition for her efforts. Not that time around, but the awards would certainly get her in the end.
Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass by Lesa Cline-Ransome, illustrated by James E. Ransome
Lesa and James are a husband and wife team that just keep on producing great book after great book to too little fanfare. Their take on Douglass's life comes after James did meticulous historical research to get the clothing and dress of the time period exactly right. A very well done bio of a famous figure in his youth.
Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad by Monica Edinger, illustrated by Robert Byrd
One of those books that should really be better known. You may think you know the story of The Amistad but boy howdy you'd be wrong. Monica's book follows the true story of Magulu, one of the children taken on the boat, and it is just one of the best pieces of writing and research on the topic you will find. Plus the story is engrossing. That doesn't hurt.
Underground: Finding the Light to Freedom by Shane W. Evans
As you read the story, pay close attention to what's going on in the art. Though it's not obvious, there's a subplot about one of the pregnant slaves running away and the baby she gives birth to in the middle of her escape.
I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery by Cynthia Grady, illustrated by Michele Wood
Not many books of poetry out there about slavery these days. Make sure you pull out this book not just for Black History Month but in April for Poetry Month as well.
The Underground Abductor by Nathan Hale
If you haven't read this by now then you are seriously missing out. Absolutely, without a doubt, a nail-biting tale and all true true true. Again, I thought I knew Harriet Tubman's life. I could not have been more wrong. If you read no other book on this list, read this one.
All Different Now: Juneteenth, the First Day of Freedom by Angela Johnson, illustrated by E.B. Lewis
When I lived in New York I lived in Harlem. Each and every year on Juneteenth there would be a great big street fair in celebration going down 116th Street. A friend of mine visited one Juneteenth and had never heard of the celebration before. Can you think of a better reason for Johnson and Lewis's book to gain a little more attention?

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans
by Kadir Nelson

Since this book encompasses a great deal of African-American history, not just slavery, I wondered if I should include it here. But then looking back at it and remembering how well Nelson encapsulates everything from the tale of one of George Washington's slaves to the free men who fought for the Union side during the Civil War . . . well, it would be ridiculous not to include it.
Hand in Hand: Ten Black Men Who Changed America by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by J. Brian Pinkney
Again, not including this book on this list would leave a gap a mile wide. Andrea Davis Pinkey, let us remember, is a killer writer. This book was released in a rather silent, sly way. A lot of year end Best Of lists missed it. Make sure you don't miss it yourself. Some of the biographies here are the best you'll ever find for a young audience.
The Other Side of Free by Krista Russell
Remember, you must never ever judge a book by its cover? It applies here. I described the book in my review this way: "We've all heard of how slaves would escape to the North when they wished to escape for good. But travel a bit farther back in time to the early 18th century and the tale is a little different. At that point in history slaves didn't flee north but south to Spain's territories. There, the Spanish king promised freedom for those slaves that swore fidelity to the Spanish crown and fought on his behalf against the English. 13-year-old Jem is one of those escaped slaves, but his life at Fort Mose is hardly stimulating. Kept under the yoke of a hard woman named Phaedra, Jem longs to fight for the king and to join in the battles. But when at last the fighting comes to him, it isn't at all what he thought it would be."
Brick by Brick by Charles R. Smith Jr., illustrated by Floyd Cooper
The first book I read for kids that really delved deeply into the fact that the White House was built on the backs of slaves. Smith and Cooper make for a winning team.
Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Take a good long look at this 2016 release. You're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the months to come.

Seeking out some recent titles about African-Americans, not just slaves, in children's literature? Check out last year's African-American Experience Children's Literary Reference Guide (2010-2015). I'll be updating it to be 2011-2016 in February.

And do you want a particularly amazing list? Check out this one from Teaching for Change. It includes a lot of middle school and YA selections as well. Thanks to Trevor Ingerson for the link!

And finally, in related news, the Delaware House recently passed an official apology for slavery. Thanks to @debraj112 for the alert.

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Slightly More Recent Books on Slavery for Young People

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On January 19th, Claire Fallon, a Books and Culture Writer at The Huffington Post, wrote an article called 13 Honest Books About Slavery Young People Should Actually Read. The piece was a response to the news about Scholastic pulling the publication of A Birthday Cake for George Washington and got shared hither and thither and yon (mostly yon).

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Slavery in YA & Middle Grade Historical Fiction

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71 books based on 22 votes: Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson, Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper, Sugar by Jewe...

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This week, after severe criticism, Scholastic pulled a newly published picture book entitled ﻿A Birthday Cake for Mr. Washington. The book, which was written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, focused on George Washington's enslaved cook, Hercules, and his daughter Delia, as the two overcome obstacles to make a cake for Washington's birthday.

Many critics argued that it displayed an overly rosy view of a slave's life, and the book was deluged with one-star on Amazon reviews.

The book's publication was a surprising misstep coming from an author/illustrator team of two women of color. Experienced illustrator Brantley-Newton, in particular, has a long resumé working on projects with a strong basis in black history and culture. What's more, the book's editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, is a Coretta Scott King Award-winner in her own right, as well as the founder of Jump at the Sun, an African-American-focused children's book imprint at Hyperion.

It's not the first such misstep in recent months, however; last fall, McGraw-Hill apologized after a Texas mother, Roni Dean-Burren, publicly criticized her son's World Geography textbook for euphemistically describing Africans brought to America in the slave trade as "workers." Another picture book, A Fine Dessert, drew critiques for author Emily Jenkins and illustrator Sophie Blackall (both white) for including a seemingly cheerful slave mother and daughter making blackberry fool and serving it to the family of their master.

Though Ganeshram defended A Birthday Cake for Mr. Washington as portraying the ingenuity of slaves who were able to attain better treatment through their skills and closeness to their owners, context matters. While the writer-illustrator-editor team who worked on this book come from diverse backgrounds and are steeped in historically accurate renditions of black history, the fact remains that too many Americans -- particularly white Americans -- don't grasp, or prefer not to grasp, the depth and breadth of slavery's horrors.

It's not uncommon to see clueless social media posts or read obtuse comments by politicians arguing that slavery ultimately benefited African-Americans because it brought them to America, or that they were better off under slavery than they are now. Remember, for example, rebellious Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy's assertion that black Americans were "better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things," or conservative politicos including Michele Bachmann signing a pro-family pledge reminiscing fondly about the intact family lives of slaves.

Many children, and, sadly, their parents, still need to learn that slavery wasn't idyllic, a boon to their family lives, or an improvement over remaining in their homelands. In fact, slavery was often brutal and dehumanizing even when owners exhibited basic kindness. Slaves were often sold away from their families and loved ones with no notice, destroying what little domestic life they were allowed to have; and the severing of black Americans from their ancestors and heritage in Africa is an irreversible trauma.

These are tough facts to confront kids with, especially young kids, but it's better to start with small doses of truth rather than sowing the seeds for "smiling slave" mythologies. Here are 13 (mostly) honest books for young readers that will help them confront the unpalatable truth of slavery, and celebrate the ingenuity and strength of those who resisted, escaped and survived.

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13 Honest Books About Slavery Young People Should Actually Read

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This week, after severe criticism, Scholastic pulled a newly published picture book entitled ﻿A Birthday Cake for Mr. Washington . The book, which was written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, focused on George Washington's enslaved cook, Hercules, and his daughter Delia, as the two overcome obstacles to make a cake for Washington's birthday.

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Slaves of the State: Infrastructure and Governance through Slavery in the Antebellum South

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The slaveholder Norborne Powell's frustrations were public knowledge around Macon, Georgia, in April 1832. As the spring days warmed and lengthened, Peter Johns

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During the middle of the 1800s, cotton became the world's largest commodity. The cheapest and best cotton came from the southern United States.

Edward Baptist argues in his new book, " The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields was integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power.

"Slavery continues to have an impact on America in the most basic economic sense," Baptist told s Jeremy Hobson. "We don't want to hear that at its root, the economic growth depends to a large extent on slavery."

Book Excerpt: 'The Half Has Never Been Told'

Introduction: The Heart

1937

A beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States. Claude Anderson parks his car on the side of Holbrook Street in Danville. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.

Danville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. When they got to Danville, they didn't find the fugitive rebel. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. They had been prisoners for far longer.

In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Anderson, an African-American master's student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, would hire him. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans-like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer Anderson's knock.

Anderson had found Ivy's name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton-just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.

After that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.

By the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South Carolina's rude exit from the Union. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the Union's last toehold in eastern Virginia. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fort's landward approaches. Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegers' cannon. But late this night, Union sentries on the fort's seaward side saw a small skiff emerging slowly from the darkness. Frank Baker and Townshend rowed with muffled oars. Sheppard Mallory held the tiller. They were setting themselves free.

A few days later, Charles Mallory showed up at the gates of the Union fort. He demanded that the commanding federal officer, Benjamin Butler, return his property. Butler, a politician from Massachusetts, was an incompetent battlefield commander, but a clever lawyer. He replied that if the men were Mallory's property, and he was using them to wage war against the US government, then logically the men were therefore contraband of war.

Those first three "contrabands" struck a crack in slavery's centuries-old wall. Over the next four years, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people widened the crack into a gaping breach by escaping to Union lines. Their movement weakened the Confederate war effort and made it easier for the United States and its president to avow mass emancipation as a tool of war. Eventually the Union Army began to welcome formerly enslaved men into its ranks, turning refugee camps into recruiting stations-and those African-American soldiers would make the difference between victory and defeat for the North, which by late 1863 was exhausted and uncertain.

After the war, Union officer Samuel Armstrong organized literacy programs that had sprung up in the refugee camp at Old Point Comfort to form Hampton Institute. In 1875, Lorenzo Ivy traveled down to study there, on the ground zero of African-American history. At Hampton, he acquired an education that enabled him to return to Danville as a trained schoolteacher. He educated generations of African-American children. He built the house on Holbrook Street with his own Hampton-trained hands, and there he sheltered his father, his brother, his sister-in-law, and his nieces and nephews. In April 1937, Ivy opened the door he'd made with hands and saw and plane, and it swung clear for Claude Anderson without rubbing the frame.1

Anderson's notepads, however, were accumulating evidence of two very different stories of the American past-halves that did not fit together neatly. And he was about to hear more. Somewhere in the midst of the notepads was a typed list of questions supplied by the WPA. Questions often reveal the desired answer. By the 1930s, most white Americans had been demanding for decades that they hear only a sanitized version of the past into which Lorenzo Ivy had been born. This might seem strange. In the middle of the nineteenth century, white Americans had gone to war with each other over the future of slavery in their country, and slavery had lost. Indeed, for a few years after 1865, many white northerners celebrated emancipation as one of their collective triumphs. Yet whites' belief in the emancipation made permanent by the Thirteenth Amendment, much less in the race-neutral citizenship that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had written into the Constitution, was never that deep. Many northerners had only supported Benjamin Butler and Abraham Lincoln's moves against slavery because they hated the arrogance of slaveholders like Charles Mallory. And after 1876, northern allies abandoned southern black voters.

Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against African-American political and civil equality. This compact of white supremacy enabled southern whites to impose Jim Crow segregation on public space, disfranchise African-American citizens by barring them from the polls, and use the lynch-mob noose to enforce black compliance. White Americans imposed increased white supremacy outside the South, too. In non-Confederate states, many restaurants wouldn't serve black customers. Stores and factories refused to hire African Americans. Hundreds of midwestern communities forcibly evicted African-American residents and became "sundown towns" ("Don't let the sun set on you in this town"). Most whites, meanwhile, believed that science proved that there were biologically distinct human races, and that Europeans were members of the superior one. Anglo-Americans even believed that they were distinct from and superior to the Jews from Russia, Italians, Greeks, Slavs, and others who flooded Ellis Island and changed the culture of northern urban centers.

By the early twentieth century, America's first generation of professional historians were justifying the exclusions of Jim Crow and disfranchisement by telling a story about the nation's past of slavery and civil war that seemed to confirm, for many white Americans, that white supremacy was just and necessary. Above all, the historians of a reunified white nation insisted that slavery was a premodern institution that was not committed to profit-seeking. In so doing, historians were to some extent only repeating pre-Civil War debates: abolitionists had depicted slavery not only as a psychopathic realm of whipping, rape, and family separation, but also as a flawed economic system that was inherently less efficient than the free-labor capitalism developing in the North. Proslavery writers disagreed about the psychopathy, but by the 1850s they agreed that enslavers were first and foremost not profit-seekers. For them, planters were caring masters who considered their slaves to be inferior family members. So although anti- and proslavery conclusions about slavery's morality were different, their premises about slavery-as-a-business-model matched. Both agreed that slavery was inherently unprofitable. It was an old, static system that belonged to an earlier time. Slave labor was inefficient to begin with, slave productivity did not increase to keep pace with industrialization, and enslavers did not act like modern profit-seeking businessmen. As a system, slavery had never adapted or changed to thrive in the new industrial economy-let alone to play a premier role as a driver of economic expansion-and had been little more than a drag on the explosive growth that had built the modern United States. In fact, during the Civil War, northerners were so convinced of these points that they believed that shifting from slave labor to free labor would dramatically increase cotton productivity.

It didn't. But even though the data of declining productivity over the ensuing three score and ten years suggested that slavery might have been the most efficient way to produce the world's most important crop, no one let empirical tests change their minds. Instead, historians of Woodrow Wilson's generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. After all, it did not rely upon ever-more efficient machine labor. Its unprofitable economic structures supposedly produced antique social arrangements, and the industrializing, urbanizing world looked back toward them with contempt-or, increasingly, nostalgia. Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to a past when African Americans had been governed with whips and chains. Granted, slavery as an economic system was not modern, they said, and had neither changed to adapt to the modern economy nor contributed to economic expansion. But to an openly racist historical profession-and a white history-reading, history-thinking public obsessed with all kinds of race control-the white South's desire to white-wash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people.

Such stories about slavery shaped the questions Claude Anderson was to ask in the 1930s, because you could find openly racist versions of it baked into the recipe of every American textbook. You could find it in popular novels, politicians' speeches, plantation-nostalgia advertising, and even the first blockbuster American film: B irth of a Nation. As president, Woodrow Wilson-a southern-born history professor- called this paean to white supremacy "history written with lightning," and screened it at the White House. Such ideas became soaked into the way America publicly depicted slavery. Even many of those who believed that they rejected overt racism depicted the era before emancipation as a plantation idyll of happy slaves and paternalist masters. Abolitionists were snakes in the garden, responsible for a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of white people died. Maybe the end of slavery had to come for the South to achieve economic modernity, but it didn't have to come that way, they said.

The way that Americans remember slavery has changed dramatically since then. In tandem with widespread desegregation of public spaces and the assertion of black cultural power in the years between World War II and the

1990s came a new understanding of the experience of slavery. No longer did academic historians describe slavery as a school in which patient masters and mistresses trained irresponsible savages for futures of perpetual servitude.

Slavery's denial of rights now prefigured Jim Crow, while enslaved people's resistance predicted the collective self-assertion that developed into first the civil rights movement and later, Black Power.

But perhaps the changes were not so great as they seemed on the surface. The focus on showing African Americans as assertive rebels, for instance, implied an uncomfortable corollary. If one should be impressed by those who rebelled, because they resisted, one should not be proud of those who did not. And there were very few rebellions in the history of slavery in the United States. Some scholars tried to backfill against this quandary by arguing that all African Americans together created a culture of resistance, especially in slave quarters and other spaces outside of white observation. Yet the insistence that assertive resistance undermined enslavers' power, and a focus on the development of an independent black culture, led some to believe that enslaved people actually managed to prevent whites from successfully exploiting their labor. This idea, in turn, created a quasi-symmetry with post- Civil War plantation memoirs that portrayed gentle masters, who maintained slavery as a nonprofit endeavor aimed at civilizing Africans.

Thus, even after historians of the civil rights, Black Power, and multicultural eras rewrote segregationists' stories about gentlemen and belles and grateful darkies, historians were still telling the half that has ever been told. For some fundamental assumptions about the history of slavery and the history of the United States remain strangely unchanged. The first major assumption is that, as an economic system-a way of producing and trading commodities-American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. Stories about industrialization emphasize white immigrants and clever inventors, but they leave out cotton fields and slave labor. This perspective implies not only that slavery didn't change, but that slavery and enslaved African Americans had little long-term influence on the rise of the United States during the nineteenth century, a period in which the nation went from being a minor European trading partner to becoming the world's largest economy-one of the central stories of American history.

The second major assumption is that slavery in the United States was fundamentally in contradiction with the political and economic systems of the liberal republic, and that inevitably that contradiction would be resolved in favor of the free-labor North. Sooner or later, slavery would have ended by the operation of historical forces; thus, slavery is a story without suspense. And a story with a predetermined outcome isn't a story at all.

Third, the worst thing about slavery as an experience, one is told, was that it denied enslaved African Americans the liberal rights and liberal subjectivity of modern citizens. It did those things as a matter of course, and as injustice, that denial ranks with the greatest in modern history. But slavery also killed people, in large numbers. From those who survived, it stole everything. Yet the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire-this vanished in the story of a slavery that was supposedly focused primarily not on producing profit but on maintaining its status as a quasi-feudal elite, or producing modern ideas about race in order to maintain white unity and elite power. And once the violence of slavery was minimized, another voice could whisper, saying that African Americans, both before and after emancipation, were denied the rights of citizens because they would not fight for them.

All these assumptions lead to still more implications, ones that shape attitudes, identities, and debates about policy. 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. Therefore none of the massive quantities of wealth and treasure piled by that economic growth is owed to African Americans. Ideas about slavery's history determine the ways in which Americans hope to resolve the long contradiction between the claims of the United States to be a nation of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unfreedom, the unequal treatment, and the opportunity denied that for most of American history have been the reality faced by people of African descent. Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen-even elect one of them president-to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Slavery's story gets told in ways that reinforce all these assumptions. Textbooks segregate twenty-five decades of enslavement into one chapter, painting a static picture. Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. All this is the "symbolic annihilation" of enslaved people, as two scholars of those weird places put it.2 Meanwhile, at other points we tell slavery's story by heaping praise on those who escaped it through flight or death in rebellion, leaving the listener to wonder if those who didn't flee or die somehow "accepted" slavery. And everyone who teaches about slavery knows a little dirty secret that reveals historians' collective failure: many African-American students struggle with a sense of shame that most of their ancestors could not escape the suffering they experienced.

The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials-some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning. He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. "Did slaves mind being called 'nigger'?" "What did slaves call master or mistress?" "Have you been happier in slavery or free?" "Was the mansion house pretty?" Escaping from chains is very difficult, however, so Anderson dutifully asked the prescribed questions and poised his pencil to take notes.

Ivy listened politely. He sat still. Then he began to speak: "My mother's master was named William Tunstall. He was a mean man. There was only one good thing he did, and I don't reckon he intended to do that. He sold our family to my father's master George H. Gilman."

Perhaps the wind blowing through the window changed as a cloud moved across the spring sun: "Old Tunstall caught the 'cotton fever.' There was a fever going round, leastways it was like a fever. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives. One woman had twelve children. Yessir. Took 'em all down south with him to Georgia and Alabama."

Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. Next time it could've been his mother. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. No, this wasn't the story the books told.

So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson tried to blame King George III for using the Atlantic slave trade to impose slavery on the colonies. In historians' tellings, the 1808 abolition of the Atlantic trade brought stability to slavery, ringing in the "Old South," as it has been called since before the Civil War. Of course, one might wonder how something that was brand new, created after a revolution, and growing more rapidly than any other commodity-producing economy in history before then could be considered "old." But never mind. Historians depicted slave trading after 1808 as irrelevant to what slavery was in the "Old South," and to how America as a whole was shaped. America's modernization was about entrepreneurs, creativity, invention, markets, movement, and change. Slavery was not about any of these things-not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton. Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other.

But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. "They sold slaves here and everywhere. I've seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he's got in it. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. They walk 'em here to the railroad and shipped 'em south like cattle."

Then Lorenzo Ivy said this: "Truly, son, the half has never been told."

To this, day, it still has not. For the other half is the story of how slavery changed and moved and grew over time: Lorenzo Ivy's time, and that of his parents and grandparents. In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire. Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized-also by force-from their Native American inhabitants. 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. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world's most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery's expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation-not only increasing its power and size, but also, eventually, dividing US politics, differentiating regional identities and interests, and helping to make civil war possible.

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. And that truth was the half of the story that survived mostly in the custodianship of those who survived slavery's expansion-whether they had been taken over the hill, or left behind. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. But what survivors experienced, analyzed, and named was a slavery that didn't fit the comfortable boxes into which other Americans have been trying to fit it ever since it ended.

I read Lorenzo Ivy's words, and they left me uneasy. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history-not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world. Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre-Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

For a long time I wasn't sure how to tell the story of this muscular, dynamic process in a single book. The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States. Enslavers' surviving papers showed calculations of returns from slave sales and purchases as well as the costs of establishing new slave labor camps in the cotton states. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The accounts of northern merchants and bankers and factory owners showed that they invested in slavery, bought from and sold to slaveholders, and took slices of profit out of slavery's expansion. Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states' rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery's expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.

The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond. From the 1790s to the 1860s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in 1790 to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in 1860. Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa. And could one book do Lorenzo Ivy's insight justice? It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics-here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story. For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them-and what people chose to do in response.

No, this had to be a story, and one couldn't tell it solely from the perspective of powerful actors. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself. But when one takes Lorenzo Ivy's words as a starting point, the whole history of the United States comes walking over the hill behind a line of people in chains. Changes that reshaped the entire world began on the auction block where enslaved migrants stood or in the frontier cotton fields where they toiled. Their individual drama was a struggle to survive. Their reward was to endure a brutal transition to new ways of labor that made them reinvent themselves every day. Enslaved people's creativity enabled their survival, but, stolen from them in the form of ever-growing cotton productivity, their creativity also expanded the slaveholding South at an unprecedented rate. Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.

One day I found a metaphor that helped. It came from the great African-American author Ralph Ellison. You might know his novel Invisible Man. But in the 1950s, Ellison also produced incredible essays. In one of them he wrote, "On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds."3

The image fit the story that Ivy's words raised above the watery surface of buried years. The only problem was that Ellison's image implied a stationary giant. In the old myth, the stationary, quintessentially unchanging plantation was the site and the story of African-American life from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. But Lorenzo Ivy had described a world in motion. After the American Revolution-which seemed at the time to portend slavery's imminent demise-a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery's giant body had begun instead. From the exploitation, commodification, and torture of enslaved people's bodies, enslavers and other free people gained new kinds of modern power. The sweat and blood of the growing system, a network of individuals and families and labor camps that grew bigger with each passing year, fueled massive economic change. Enslaved people, meanwhile, transported and tortured, had to find ways to survive, resist, or endure. And over time the question of their freedom or bondage came to occupy the center of US politics.

This trussed-up giant, stretched out on the rack of America's torture zone, actually grew, like a person passing through ordeals to new maturity. I have divided the chapters of this book with Ellison's imagined giant in mind, a structure that has allowed the story to take as its center point the experience of enslaved African Americans themselves. Before we pass through the door that Lorenzo Ivy opened, here are the chapters' names. The first is "Feet," for the story begins with unfree movement on paths to enslaved frontiers that were laid down between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the early 1800s. "Heads" is the title of the second chapter, which covers America's acquisition of the key points of the Mississippi Valley by violence, a gain that also consolidated the enslavers' hold on the frontier. Then come the "Right Hand" and the "Left Hand" (Chapters 3 and 4). They reveal the inner secrets of enslavers' power, secrets which made the entire world of white people wealthy.

"Tongues" (Chapter 5) and "Breath" (Chapter 6) follow. They describe how, by the mid-1820s, enslavers had not only found ways to silence the tongues of their critics, but had built a system of slave trading that served as expansion's lungs. Most forms of resistance were impossible to carry out successfully. So a question hung in the air. Would the spirit in the tied-down body die, leaving enslaved people to live on like undead zombies serving their captors? Or would the body live, and rise? Every transported soul, finding his or her old life killed off, faced this question on the individual level as well: whether to work with fellow captives or scrabble against them in a quest for individualistic subsistence. Enslaved African Americans chose many things. But perhaps most importantly, they chose survival, and true survival in such circumstances required solidarity. Solidarity allowed them to see their common experience, to light their own way by building a critique of enslavers' power that was an alternative story about what things were and what they meant.

This story draws on thousands of personal narratives like the one that Lorenzo Ivy told Claude Anderson. Slavery has existed in many societies, but no other population of formerly enslaved people has been able to record the testimonies of its members like those who survived slavery in the United States. The narratives began with those who escaped slavery's expansion in the nineteenth century as fugitives. Over one hundred of those survivors published their autobiographies during the nineteenth century. As time went on, such memoirs found a market, in no small part because escapees from southern captivity were changing the minds of some of the northern whites about what the expansion of slavery meant for them. Then, during the 1930s, people like Claude Anderson conducted about 2,300 interviews with the ex-slaves who had lived into that decade. Because the interviews often allowed old people to tell about the things they had seen for themselves and the things they heard from their elders in the years before the Civil War, they take us back into the world of explanation and storytelling that grew up around fires and on porches and between cotton rows. No one autobiography or interview is pure and objective as an account of all that the history books left untold. But read them all, and each one adds to a more detailed, clearer picture of the whole. One story fills in gaps left by another, allowing one to read between the lines.4

Understanding something of what it felt like to suffer, and what it cost to endure that suffering, is crucial to understanding the course of US history. For what enslaved people made together-new ties to each other, new ways of understanding their world-had the potential to help them survive in mind and body. And ultimately, their spirit and their speaking would enable them to call new allies into being in the form of an abolitionist movement that helped to destabilize the mighty enslavers who held millions captive. But the road on which enslaved people were being driven was long. It led through the hell described by "Seed" (Chapter 7), which tells of the horrific near-decade from 1829 to 1837. In these years entrepreneurs ran wild on slavery's frontier. Their acts created the political and economic dynamics that carried enslavers to their greatest height of power. Facing challenges from other white men who wanted to assert their masculine equality through political democracy, clever entrepreneurs found ways to leverage not just that desire, but other desires as well. With the creation of innovative financial tools, more and more of the Western world was able to invest directly in slavery's expansion. Such creativity multiplied the incredible productivity and profitability of enslaved people's labor and allowed enslavers to turn bodies into commodities with which they changed the financial history of the Western world.

Enslavers, along with common white voters, investors, and the enslaved, made the 1830s the hinge of US history. On one side lay the world of the industrial revolution and the initial innovations that launched the modern world. On the other lay modern America. For in 1837, enslavers' exuberant success led to a massive economic crash. This self-inflicted devastation, covered in Chapter 8, "Blood," posed new challenges to slaveholders' power, led to human destruction for the enslaved, and created confusion and discord in white families. When southern political actors tried to use war with Mexico to restart their expansion, they encountered new opposition on the part of increasingly assertive northerners. As Chapter 9, "Backs," explains, by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet, although all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery's expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation's hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition.

Of course, in return for the benefits they received from slavery's expansion, plenty of northerners were still willing to enable enslavers' disproportionate power. With the help of such allies, as "Arms" (Chapter 10) details, slavery continued to expand in the decade after the Compromise of 1850. For now, however, it had to do so within potentially closed borders. That is why southern whites now launched an aggressive campaign of advocacy, insisting on policies and constitutional interpretations that would commit the entire United States to the further geographic expansion of slavery. The entire country would become slavery's next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit-like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other.

Yet even as southern whites seceded, claiming that they would set up an independent nation, shelling Fort Sumter, and provoking the Union's president, Abraham Lincoln, to call out 100,000 militia, many white Americans wanted to keep the stakes of this dispute as limited as possible. A majority of northern Unionists opposed emancipation. Perhaps white Americans' battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. So it was that as Frank Baker, Townshend, and Sheppard Mallory crept across the dark James River waters that had washed so many hulls bearing human bodies, the future stood poised, uncertain between alternative paths. Yet those three men carried something powerful: the same half of the story that Lorenzo Ivy could tell. All they had learned from it would help to push the future onto a path that led to freedom. Their story can do so for us as well. To hear it, we must stand as Lorenzo Ivy had stood as a boy in Danville-watching the chained lines going over the hills, or as Frank Baker and others had stood, watching the ships going down the James from the Richmond docks, bound for the Mississippi. Then turn and go with the marching feet, and listen for the breath of the half that has never been told.
Excerpted from the book THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD by Edward Baptist. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Baptist. Reprinted with permission of Basic Books.

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Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Without Slavery, Would The U.S. Be The Leading Economic Power?

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During the middle of the 1800s, cotton became the world's largest commodity. The cheapest and best cotton came from the southern United States. Edward Baptist argues in his new book, " The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism," that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields was integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power.

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Resources and Readings
Christy Clark-Pujara
References:

Robert Champlin, A Rhode Island slaver; trade book of the sloop Adventure, 1773-1774

Rhode Island Historical Society, Christopher Champlin Papers

History Channel, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive patent for blue jeans

Washington Post, In search of slave clothes: A museum director's hunt for a painful symbol ("Negro cloth")

Library of Congress, The African American Odyssey: Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period

National Park Service, Lowell's (Mass.) Southern Connection

Harvard Business School, Lehman Brothers

Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Understanding and Teaching American Slavery

Teaching Tolerance, What Learning About Slavery Can Teach Us About Ourselves

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Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My people are from Kelly, Georgia, which is a little more than an hour's drive east of Atlanta. There they experienced the horror of enslavement and the joy of emancipation. My great-grandfather was born there around 1870. He was the first in my family born free on American soil, and I was born a century later, a world away in Brooklyn, New York.

Growing up in Brooklyn, all of the family members I knew lived in and around New York. And while I did think about the enslavement of my ancestors, I didn't dwell on slavery itself. Just about everything I had been taught in school about the peculiar institution focused on the cotton-producing South. And every time I checked, there weren't any cotton fields in New York City. But I began to think differently when I enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

At Morehouse, my dorm room could have easily been mistaken for a shrine to New York. Together with my roommate, who also hailed from the city, every inch of every wall was plastered with reminders of the Big Apple. There was a poster for Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee joint, pennants for the Mets and the Yankees. I was a Mets fan, of course, and he was the Yankees fan. And even a New York City street sign, but don't ask us how we got that.

And much to the chagrin of my professors, I didn't confine my New York nationalism to my dorm room. I freely shared it in the classroom including during discussions about slavery in America. I don't remember exactly what I said in my freshman history class about American slavery that day, but it was some wisecrack about slavery being basically a Southern thing. I do remember exactly how Dr. Windham responded. "Brother," he said, "you got a lot to learn." And he was right.

So I did what many people believe is impossible for New Yorkers to do. I shut up, I listened and I learned. I learned about the practice of slavery in the North, about the critical role that the region played in maintaining the institution, first by financing the transatlantic slave trade and then by fueling demand for products produced by enslaved people. I learned that slavery was anything but a Southern thing.

At the end of my freshman year, I drove with my uncle out to Kelly, Georgia, and visited the gravesite of my great-grandfather for the first time. As my uncle and I stood quietly by ourselves in a dense thicket of underbrush, he began to tell me about our family's post-slavery history, from Georgia to Ohio to New Jersey and to New York. It was an extension of the lessons on slavery that Dr. Windham had taught me all year, that colonies and states like Georgia and New York were interconnected and interdependent from slavery onward. Thinking back on it, I find it more than a little ironic that I had to go south to learn about the North.

I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It's a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides an in-depth look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. In this episode, we're going to confront and challenge the notion that slavery was simply a Southern institution. Historian Christy Clark-Pujara will explain how commerce in the North was integral to perpetuating slavery, and how the Northern economy was in many ways built on its active participation in the institution. She'll share a framework for exploring these connections in the classroom, along with several rich examples.

And understanding the role of slavery in the Northern economy ultimately raises important questions for students about how to understand America and its economy today. I'll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Christy Clark-Pujara: We misunderstand the institution of slavery when we only locate it on the plantation. We misunderstand the history of the United States as a whole when we do not acknowledge that the institution of slavery was national, rather than regional. Moreover, when we don't acknowledge the role that Northern colonist and citizens played in the maintenance of the institution of slavery, we misunderstand the institution.

Slave plantations did not exist in isolation. It's the people outside the plantation that bring the captives, that bring food, clothing, wood and other basic necessity. It's the people outside of the plantation that transport the goods produced by captive workers. They were dependent upon the activities of people outside of the plantation for those places to thrive and exist.

When we think of slavery as simply a Southern institution, rather than a national one, the erasure or marginalization of the Northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the Northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction: that the North has no history of racism to overcome. It also feeds into a false narrative that black people were not part of the founding of the Northern colonies, and they were.

We think that the North has no need to redress institutional racism or work toward reconciliation. In other words, that contemporary racial disparities are not grounded in history, but are rather a reflection of poor personal choices or even worse, innate inferiority. So understanding, fully understanding, how and why the institution of slavery is central to understanding American history shapes how we see ourselves today.

The business of slavery, as all economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, foods and goods that made plantations possible. How did enslaved people get brought to the plantation? How were they fed? How were they clothed? Where did the seeds come from? Where did the money come from to invest in those places? Where do the products leave from and how do they leave?

Understanding that the plantation didn't exist in isolation; the business of slavery was essential to the institution of slavery. Our understanding of slavery has grown tremendously in the last several decades, but our understanding has been dominated by a few particular visions of enslaved people, particularly the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, and people toiling under the threat of the lash in the hot sun.

These depictions are accurate. However, they are not solitary. Enslaved people labored in small households throughout the Northeast. Enslaved people labored on docks. Enslaved people labored on slave ships. Examining the business of slavery allows for a fuller picture of the economic systems that sustained and maintained race-based slavery throughout the Americas. It was the business of slavery that allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a single staple or cash crop.

Furthermore, enslaved and free black people called the Northern colonies and states home, and the history of those places remain incomplete without a full accounting of the experiences of black people in those places. Without a full accounting of the role that enslaved and free black people played and the centrality of the business of slavery in the founding, the maintenance and the economic ascent of the United States, objections to righting the wrongs of the nation's past will remain.

Whether it is Affirmative Action at our institutions of higher education or addressing racial disparities in mass incarceration, we must remember that our interpretations of the past shape who we think of as worthy, contributing members of our nation. In many ways, slavery, the stalled emancipation process and circumscribed black freedom cast people of African descent as apart from the nation, even though their labors were central to its creation. A lack of understanding of how race-based slavery and its legacies marginalized an entire race of people for centuries serves to further ostracize people of African descent today.

So I'm going to give three examples of the business of slavery in the North. The first is the West Indian trade, the second is the Atlantic slave trade. And the final example is going to be about the modern economy in the 19th century and the textile industry, particularly around the commodity of cotton.

First, the West Indian trade. Sugar production forever changed the Western diet and waistline. The first plantations in the Americas began operating in the 17th century. And in the Americas, sugar was cultivated in the Caribbean. As the demand for sugar grew and becomes insatiable, just as it is now, these plantations would become increasingly dependent on Northern American colonist.

Most of the land in the Caribbean is going to be used for sugar production, so they imported all of their food and their necessities. And New England farmers and merchants acted as the grocers and the big box stores for the West Indian sugar plantations. There's this constant demand for sugar, and so all the arable land is being used for sugar. That means you need to import all of your food. It means you need to import wood because you have to boil sugar at the end of the production process. It means that you import candles because these sugar mills are running 24 hours a day, and you also need candles to light your home. It means that you are importing clothing. It means you're importing all the basic necessities of life.

And New Englanders provided those necessities. New Englanders supplied enslavers in the West Indies, "the West Indies" and "the Caribbean" are used interchangeably, with captive laborers, with livestock, with dairy products, with fish, with candles and lumber. The plantations cannot run without these imports from the outside because plantations do not exist in isolation.

In return, New Englanders received molasses, which is a byproduct of sugar production, it's the runoff, which they distilled into rum. Rum becomes a major export out of New England. In Rhode Island, it's the number one export. In the city of Newport alone, there were 16 distilleries. And in the 18th century, rum becomes its own form of currency. Then and now, liquor always has a market. But in a place like Rhode Island, the connections were even more salient. And I'll just give you an example of what I mean.

Local slave labor played a key role in the growth of commerce. Moreover, the abundant plantations of the West Indies provided farmers and merchants with a market for their slave-produced products. And so, farmers in the Narragansett country, this is the southern half of Rhode Island, put thousands of enslaved men, women and children to work producing foodstuffs and raising livestock for the West Indian trade. You have enslaved people in southern Rhode Island growing foodstuffs for enslaved people in the West Indies.

Merchants in Newport and Providence transported local agriculture, especially livestock and cheese, to the sugar plantations in the West Indies in exchange for molasses. The same merchants then brought back molasses to Rhode Island and sold it to local distillers, who then used it to make rum, the colony's number one export. And so, this bilateral trade was the cornerstone of the economy in Rhode Island.

Now, I'd like to move on to the Atlantic slave trade, which complemented the West Indian trade. I'll start with the story of a slave ship. In 1773, the sloop sailed out of Newport, Rhode Island. The ship was owned by Christopher and George Champlin. In addition to the captain and officers, there were 11 sailors aboard the ship. The bulk of the departing cargo consisted of local products.

The Adventure was outfitted with handcuffs and shackles made by local blacksmiths, 26 gallons of vinegar, pork, beef, sugar, molasses, wine, beans, tobacco, butter, bread and flour. This food was to feed the crew and enslaved people on the return voyage. But the vast majority of the cargo space was reserved for locally distilled rum-24,380 gallons of rum-which was enough to purchase several dozen enslaved captives. Enslaved women cost an average of 190 gallons, and men averaged 220 gallons.

The Adventure reached Africa in five weeks. It took the captain four months of cruising along the coast to acquire 62 slaves, along with rice, pepper, palm oil and gold dust. Fifty-eight captives survived, and they were sold in Granada for between 35 and 39 pounds. The ship's owners received a 5 percent return on their investment. Such voyages were common in Rhode Island. Slave-trading voyages produced profits from 2 to 10 percent. Most voyages yielded returns of 5 or 6 percent. And while these profit margins may seem low by contemporary investment standards, investments in the Atlantic slave trade were less risky and more liquid and needed less time to garner returns than all other forms of possible investment in the 18th century.

But it isn't just the transfer of captives from Point A to Point B. The Atlantic slave trade creates a whole other economy within itself, and especially in relation to the bilateral trade between the Northern colonies and the West Indies. It's important that we think about the wider implications of the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades.

Shipbuilders, sailors, corkers, sailmakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, stevedores were all employed by the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades. Coopers made barrels that stored the rum which was exchanged for enslaved people, who were sold throughout the Americas. Clerks, scribes and warehouse overseers conducted the business of the trade. Outfitting even the smallest ship required a small army of tradesmen.

African slave-trading voyages also required additional crew to control and manage the human captives, usually twice as many than a commodity's trade. Merchants, many of whom were slave traders, paid significant taxes to the cities for public works. For example, the duties collected on the purchase and sale of enslaved people in Rhode Island were used to pave the streets of Newport. So whether or not you owned a slave, you benefited from the business of slavery.

In the classroom, I've given my students the bare-bones information about the sloop Adventure. And then I ask them, "What else can we learn about how the economy and society functioned in order for this transaction to have taken place?" And for the most part, students get it almost immediately. They say, "Well, somebody had to build the ship." Okay, so we've got shipbuilders and carpenters and they're like, "Well, someone had to load the ship." And where did they get the stuff from that was on the ship? So that's local farmers.

And then they think about, "Well, where did we get the rum from?" Well, the rum came from local distilleries. And then, they begin to start to understand that an entire economy was caught up on that ship, from tradesmen to distillers, to merchants, to farmers. And then, they start thinking about, "Okay, who's on that ship and what kind of food are they eating, and is this a food they're familiar with?"

"And then, they get sold to a place that they know nothing about, to do work they've never done before. And then that ship comes back home to Rhode Island to do it all over again." Something that a student pointed out to me once was that he tended to think about a profession like a blacksmith in a rather benign way. These ships are outfitted with dozens and dozens of shackles. And when you examine how the sloop Adventure made its money, shackles become incredibly important. That's how you kept the people bound who were later sold.

So I give them the bare bones and then ask them, "What does it tell us about our society? What does this tell us about our economy?" And they also get the social component of it; that this is a place where holding certain people as property is normative, acknowledged and respected. Slave traders were not maligned. They were elites, and so it tells us a lot about how a society functioned.

There was slave labor in the North from the colonial period through the American Revolution. Slaveholding was socially acceptable, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. But after the American Revolution, slavery, as an institution, slaveholding as a practice, begins to fall apart in the North. Slavery dies out in these places. The primary reason is the business of slavery was always more important in the North than slave labor itself, and most Northerners are opposed to slavery's expansion, not its existence.

Moving on to the modern economy, and cotton in the 19th century and how it transforms the U.S. economy really is the engine behind the U.S. economic ascent in the 19th century, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse in the world. The history of slavery isn't something that we cannot connect with. In fact, I'm willing to bet that every person listening has a direct connection to slavery that they just don't know about.

Just to give you an example, if you own a pair of jeans, if you've ever worn a pair of jeans, if you've ever bought a pair of jeans, you are intimately connected to the history of slavery in this country. Levi Strauss buys its patent from a textile mill in Rhode Island after the American Civil War. The mill was no longer manufacturing slave clothing, but the patent that was bought was a patent that had manufactured slave clothing. It was called " Negro cloth." It was a course cotton wool material made especially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved people in the American South. It was tough. It was durable, it washed well and it was designed for enslaved people on America's plantations.

Enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States produced the bulk of the world's cotton and almost all of the cotton consumed by the U.S. textile industry during the antebellum era. Northerners, especially New Yorkers, were buying, selling and shipping it. By 1860, cotton represented more than half of all of U.S. exports, and lower Manhattan was populated with cotton brokers, bankers, merchants, shippers, auctioneers and insurers who profited from that export. Only New York banks were big enough to extend a massive lines of credit to plantation owners so they could buy seed, farming equipment and people. New York was also home to the water- and rail- transportation companies that shipped cotton from the South to the North.

When we think about the Industrial Revolution, when we think about public investment in rail lines and shipping industry, we often don't think about it in conjunction with the institution of slavery. But it was the institution of slavery and cotton that was the impetus for it all. Over the 19th century, the textile industry transformed Northern towns. By 1852, the industry employed 14 percent of the labor force, and by 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills.

These textile factories were often the sole employers in towns throughout the region. And they were a direct link between Northern advancement and wealth, and Southern slavery. Textile mills are just one example. Manufacturing plants throughout the North, and in New England in particular, that produced farming implements, who are they selling those farming implements to? Southern plantation owners to be used by enslaved people.

Factories that produced shoes were often making shoes for enslaved people who wore them out in the fields. So the manufacturing industry, as it existed in the 19th century, was directly connected to the American plantation. Rhode Island, again, provides a salient example of the connection between Northern investment and Southern slaveholding.

Between 1800 and 1860, more than 80 Negro cloth mills opened in Rhode Island. Twenty-two Rhode Island towns and cities manufactured Negro cloth for over 60 years. More than 80 Rhode Island families owned part of a Negro cloth mill at some point in the 19th century. By mid-century, 79 percent of all Rhode Island textile mills manufactured slave clothing. In the famed Lowell Mills, about a third of all textiles produced were destined for Southern markets, plantations in particular.

The look and feel of a city like New York was transformed by those who were invested in cotton, invested in the business of slavery. The now-infamous Lehman Brothers began as cotton brokers. The first Morgan fortune was made by Charles Morgan, who was a steamship captain and merchant whose shipping line dominated the Gulf coastline, transporting enslaved captives from the upper South to the deep South. So enslaved people were sold by the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands, the estimate is over a million enslaved people were sold from the upper South, the Chesapeake, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware to the new South or the deep South to grow cotton in places like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Some of them walked through forced migrations, others went by water. Charles Morgan transported people by water from the upper South to New Orleans to Galveston, Texas. That's how the Morgan fortune was first built. You also have people like Alexander Stewart who was a cotton merchant who opened the United States' first department store in New York City in 1848. New York remains a fashion capital of the world and its first department store was opened with investments in slave-picked cotton.

When I teach these connections and the bright line starts showing up for students, what most really begin to grapple with is the understanding that the sin of slavery is national. That whether or not you ever owned a slave, you benefited from slavery if you live and function in this country. And that is a difficult pill for many of my students to swallow: that we all have benefited from slavery because the United States became what it was through the exploitation of millions of people of African descent. To understand that when people say slavery built the United States, that it's not hyperbole or just something you say to be sensational, but just a reflection of the truth and what that means for racial disparities today.

But then the next thing I see is a realization that people of African descent are an essential part of this place, that it's not an add-on. I teach African-American history classes and what I am most trying to do is to get students to understand that African-American history isn't an additive. It's central to understanding American history. You don't know who you are as an American unless you know the story of slavery.

History at its best is not about the past. It's about the present and how we function in the present. And when students begin to understand that slavery is central to the history of the United States, current conflicts and debates about race in this country will have real meaning to them because they'll understand that the stakes are not about what's happening right now, but what's been happening since 1607, and why we have such racial disparities and divides. These are not a function of the last 50 years or hundred years. They're a function of hundreds of years.

And if we're going to really understand who we are as a nation-who contributed, who built, who belongs, who's a part of-we have to reckon with this history. The most common response I get from students is, "Why didn't I know this? Why don't we talk about these things?" And the fact of the matter is our students are going to have to exist and function in an increasingly multiracial, multi-country and global world, and we do them a grave disservice when we let our discomfort in talking about race shape how we teach and what we teach. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our students and we owe it to our nation to tell the most complete, honest picture of how we got to where we are.

They turn on the news, they see the headlines. We have an opportunity to provide them with the proper context to understand that. And more importantly, we can provide them with the proper contacts to act differently, to speak differently, to get involved in local, to get involved with local initiatives and community service. A lot is at stake. This is not academic. It's not just about changing what's in a history book. It's about how we function in the world, how we talk to each other, how we interact with people we work with, how we include or exclude groups of people in our neighborhood. It's about our very humanity.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christy Clark-Pujara is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the department of Afro-Americans Studies. She's the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, and is currently working on a book about black people in the Wisconsin territory from the French colonial period through the American Civil War. Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They're the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery.

In each episode, we're featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We've also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials available at tolerance.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find those resources online at tolerance.org.

Thanks to Dr. Clark-Pujara for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford with production assistance from Tori Marlin and David Macasaet at L & S Learning Support Services at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Our theme song is "Kerr's Negro Jig" by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series.

And if you like what we're doing, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a minute to review and rate us on iTunes. We appreciate the feedback and it helps us get more visibility among potential listeners. I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host. You've been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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Restraints are on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. This type of restraint was used in the slave trade. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

As the New York Times noted recently in a blockbuster issue of its magazine, African slavery started in America in 1619. That's true, but only if you ignore a significant chapter of American history: the Spanish-Afro-American historical experience in Florida.

In many parts of the United States, including Florida, Texas and New Mexico, Spanish speakers arrived first. That matters not just for historical accuracy. It also helps reframe the current rhetorical and political upheaval that surrounds immigration from Spanish-speaking nations to the United States, by reminding us how Spanish-speaking black slaves helped build the nation that we now have.

There is a tendency of many people who write the history of America to have a view of the world centered on Jamestown and the Anglo American experience. When history fixates on the 13 original American colonies, the rest of the map, including Florida, seems to fall away. But it's worth expanding that picture to include Spanish-occupied territory in what is now the United States.

When we consider those lands, we see that slavery actually dates back a full century before 1619. Slavery in Florida reveals how a multinational slave trade built on personal greed and white supremacy forced Africans and African Americans to build North American wealth in which they would not be able to share. Then, adding insult to injury, these early black slaves were erased from the standard narrative of American history.

In 1511 Spain's King Ferdinand instructed his subjects in the New World to " get gold, humanely, if you can, but at all hazards, [to] get gold." Spanish explorers heeded their king's call. Florida was named by Juan Ponce de León, who claimed it for Spain in 1513 when he was searching in vain for the Fountain of Youth and gold.

Spanish empire-building in the era was driven in part by desire for greater territory. Conquests in Mexico by Hernan Cortés in 1521 and in Peru by Francisco Pizarro between 1531 and 1534 had also produced an insatiable lust for gold that fueled the treasure hunt in the New World. Ponce de León, however, had to settle for merely claiming the land of Florida for Spain, since there was neither gold nor mythical fountains to be found.

On the heels of Ponce de León's claiming Florida, the Spanish empire tried to create settlements in its new territory. For example, in 1526 another Spanish explorer, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, tried to establish a Spanish settlement at San Miguel de Gualdape in what was then La Florida (the current Georgia or South Carolina coast.) The Ayllón group included both Spaniards and African slaves who were brought as mining and agricultural laborers. But the settlement collapsed. First, some of the Spaniards mutinied against Ayllón. Then the African slaves burned down the mutineers' housing and went to live with Native Americans in the area.

While the historical record on early slavery in Florida is thin, scholars have uncovered the ways in which it was endorsed and exploited by the Spanish crown, while being challenged and resisted by the very slaves forcibly brought across the Atlantic through the slave trade. In 1539, slavery arrived in present-day Florida when the slave trader and Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto attempted to establish a permanent settlement and claim more territory for Spain.

We know very little about the black slaves with DeSoto. A letter from Spain's King Charles V dated April 20, 1537, gave DeSoto permission to take 50 Africans, a third of them female, to Florida. According to historian Jane Landers, DeSoto's slaves included both Moors from Northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africans. Many of them deserted him to live with the Native Americans in Florida. We know that DeSoto abandoned some black slaves during his expeditions, including two with known names. One named Robles, who apparently was Christian, was left at Coosa, Ala., because he was too ill to walk. And another slave named Johan Biscayan was left at Ulibahali in present-day Georgia.

Over the succeeding decades, black slaves helped build the Spanish colonial infrastructure, including most notably St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565, the oldest city in the United States. As historian Edwin Williams reported in a 1949 article that uncovered this history, "Negro slavery was first introduced into what is now the United States . . . many years before the 'first' Negroes were landed at Jamestown, Virginia."

The history of slavery was shaped by the battle between Spanish authorities keen on exploiting African labor and African resistance, resulting in documented episodes of fleeing and arson like the ones noted above.

But there were also short periods in which Spanish authorities offered slaves freedom if they professed the Catholic faith. During the mid-1700s the Spanish king allowed a town of freed blacks to flourish outside of St. Augustine as part of the struggle against Protestantism in the New World. This town was sometimes referred to as Pueblo de Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, Fort Moosa or the Negro Fort. It existed from 1738 until 1763, when the British took over Florida and all of the black free residents of Fort Moosa fled, mostly to Cuba. Today known as Fort Mose, it is part of a historic state park.

Florida came under British rule thanks to the treaty ending the French and Indian War. And it was then that the plantation slavery of the American colonial South began to take root. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, the population in Florida was roughly 1,000 white people and 3,000 black slaves. Spanish rule returned over the period from 1784 to 1821 as the result of battles during the American Revolution that allowed Spain to recapture territory.

The United States purchased Florida in 1821. By the time it became a state in 1845, roughly half its population was black and enslaved, though there were a few hundred free blacks as well. The 1845 Florida constitution ensured that emancipation would remain illegal, even giving the state the power to forbid the entrance of new free blacks from other states.

While this history has largely been lost, American abolitionists certainly did not ignore slavery in Florida. In 1844, abolitionist Johnathan Walker was caught trying to free seven slaves from Florida. He was convicted and sentenced to stand in the pillory and to be branded on the hand with the letters S.S. (for slave stealer). Similarly, according to Julia Floyd Smith, in 1848 a group of "slave stealers" was caught in Tallahassee and hanged.

Sometimes Florida slaves would steal themselves, as Frederick Douglass once put it. In a daring escape in 1854, 12 slaves escaped Florida by boat, making it to the Bahamas. This fight over slavery would continue over the next two decades, with newspapers routinely promising bounties for the return of runaway Florida slaves.

The New York Times did a great service in placing black history in a central place in our narrative of the past. But it left out a chapter. The year 1619 is certainly important. But so too is the more complicated historical narrative of slavery in Florida that predates it, and that the state of Florida officially recognized only in 2008.

Just like the British colonists to the north, the Spanish imperial project also fed the demand for forced labor with Africans, though with the carrot dangled that they might gain freedom by adopting the king's religion. Perhaps a greater appreciation of this history of cultural and racial complexity, which includes blacks and whites speaking English, Spanish and other languages as America was developed and explored, would assist us in having a more nuanced discussion about it means to be an "American" today - because from the start, America was multiracial and polyglot.

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Perspective | Everyone is talking about 1619. But that's not actually when slavery in America started.

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As the New York Times noted recently in a blockbuster issue of its magazine, African slavery started in America in 1619. That's true, but only if you ignore a significant chapter of American history: the Spanish-Afro-American historical experience in Florida. In many parts of the United States, including Florida, Texas and New Mexico, Spanish speakers arrived first.

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"African American and Hispanic American workers on strike against Kellwood, wearing placards that encourage support for better wages." International Ladies Garment Workers Union Photographs. Photo credit: Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. Cornell University ILR. By Asha Banerjee and Cameron Johnson
Black labor has been foundational to the growth of America and our economy. Enslaved people built the country's early infrastructure and produced lucrative commodities such as cotton and tobacco. After emancipation, African American labor was crucial in industry, agriculture, and service. Yet the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which was established in 1884, only started gathering consistent data on African American workers in 1972. For nearly a century, African American workers did not appear even as data points let alone in meaningful policies or labor legislation.

This Black History Month, we celebrate Black workers, their achievements, and their dedication to work (a trait often attributed to white workers). We also must consider the steep challenges and structural inequities Black workers continue to face. Understanding that history contextualizes today's fight to improve and expand African Americans' access to higher paying jobs and economic success.

Black workers have endured a long history of discrimination, including restrictions from unions. Companies used Black workers as strike breakers to misdirect white workers' anger and frustration. New Deal programs excluded Black agricultural and domestic workers. And 1930s "progressive" public benefits legislation such as the Social Security Act was actually pro- white legislation that neglects Black workers, especially women.

Historically, African Americans-especially women-have propped up the labor market, despite discrimination and hostility. As far back as 1870, 50 percent of Black women were in the labor force compared to just 16.5 percent of white women. Therefore, the famous wave of women entering the workforce in the 1970s applied only to white women. Black women who've always worked have been invisible to policymakers.

Black workers' high labor force participation has propelled American economic growth, often at extremely low pay. As the 1619 Project documents, Black slaves enduring brutal conditions for two centuries in Southern plantation and Northern industries to build the booming American economy. In the early 1900s, over one million African Americans joined the "Great Migration" to fill jobs in the steel, automobile, shipbuilding, and other heavy industries. W.E.B. DuBois described this pivotal moment of American capitalism: The giant forces of water and of steam were harnessed to do the world's work, and the black workers of America bent at the bottom of a growing pyramid of commerce and industry. White employers underpaid and segregated Black workers, subjecting them to discrimination and hostility. We must recognize their labor-whether caring for children or turning out machines in a factory-as important parts of America's growth.

So where are we today? Black workers make up a larger part of the workforce and face record-low unemployment. Yet this is not the whole story. Black workers still face persistent employment barriers. Over the last decades, many jobs have moved away from metropolitan areas to suburbs and exurbs that are inaccessible to Black workers. The racially segregated parts of the city where Black workers live offer severely limited employment options.

Racial disparities persist. Black graduates are nearly 10 percentage points likelier to be employed in an occupation not requiring a college degree than their white peers. Staggering numbers of African American workers experience workplace discrimination, and Black women are less likely to be promoted than men or other women. This leads to troubling outcomes: In 2017, Black men's wages were 69.7 percent of white men's, while Black women's wages were 60.8 percent. Despite broad historical gains in labor force participation and educational attainment, our country still has a long way to go.

Black workers have also been at the forefront of resistance, agency, change, and solidarity with other workers. While history books and the BLS may not have covered these events, African Americans have led countless powerful moments of labor activism: the 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen Strike, the 1955-6 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the 2019 UAW General Motors strike.

As policymakers, advocates, and workers rally for a more inclusive and accessible workplace, we must recognize the immense structural discrimination and barriers that Black workers face. At the same time, we celebrate the deep contributions of Black workers to the foundation of America, its infrastructure and economy-from the first enslaved Africans to those workers and activists fighting for positive change today.

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Black labor has been foundational to the growth of America and our economy. Enslaved people built the country's early infrastructure and produced lucrative commodities such as cotton and tobacco. After emancipation, African American labor was crucial in industry, agriculture, and service. This Black History Month, we celebrate Black workers, their achievements, and their dedication to work.

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Was America Built By Slaves? - The American Interest

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Historians today say "yes." But free men and women would have built it better and made it richer.

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American Capitalism Is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. (Published 2019)

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Slavery helped turn America into a financial colossus. And our economy is still shaped by management practices invented by enslavers and overseers.

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The ties between slavery and capitalism in the United States weren't always crystal clear in our history books. For a long time, historians mostly depicted slavery as a regional institution of cruelty in the South, and certainly not the driver of broader American economic prosperity.

Now 16 scholars are helping to set the record straight by exploring the true ties between 19th century economic development and a brutal system of human bondage in the 2016 book Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development.

Contrary to popular belief, the small farmers of New England weren't alone responsible for establishing America's economic position as capitalism expanded. Rather, the hard labor of slaves in places like Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi needs to be kept in view as well. In fact, more than half of the nation's exports in the first six decades of the 19th century consisted of raw cotton, almost all of it grown by slaves, according to the book, which was edited by Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University and visiting professor at HBS, as well as Seth Rockman, Associate Professor of History at Brown University.

The slave economy of the southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire U.S. economy, with plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities-and enjoying plenty of riches as a result.

"In the decades between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery-as a source of the cotton that fed Rhode Island's mills, as a source of the wealth that filled New York's banks, as a source of the markets that inspired Massachusetts manufacturers-proved indispensable to national economic development," Beckert and Rockman write in the introduction to the book. "... Cotton offered a reason for entrepreneurs and inventors to build manufactories in such places as Lowell, Pawtucket, and Paterson, thereby connecting New England's Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier of the Deep South. And financing cotton growing, as well as marketing and transporting the crop, was a source of great wealth for the nation's merchants and banks."

We asked Beckert-who researches and teaches the history of US capitalism in the 19th century-to discuss the book and to talk about what lessons today's business leaders can learn from the past.

Dina Gerdeman: The book makes note of the fact that a myth existed for many years: that slavery was "merely a regional institution, surely indispensable for understanding the South, but a geographically confined system of negligible importance to the nation as a whole." Why do you think for so many years historians made slavery out to be a "southern problem" and didn't seem to make a strong connection between slavery and things like innovation, entrepreneurship, and finance, which are at the heart of American capitalism?

Sven Beckert: This is an excellent question, and indeed, as you note, quite puzzling. It is puzzling for three reasons: For one, into the early years of the 19th century, slavery was a national institution, and while slavery was never as predominate a system of labor in the North as it was in the South, it was still important.

Second, there were a vast number of very obvious economic links between the slave plantations of the southern states and enterprises as well as other institutions in the northern states: Just think of all these New York and Boston merchants who traded in slave-grown goods. Or the textile industrialists of New England who processed vast quantities of slave-grown cotton. Or the bankers who financed the expansion of the plantation complex.

And third, both the abolitionists as well as pro-slavery advocates talked over and over about the deep links between the southern slave economy and the national economy.

Why did these insights get lost? I think the main reason is ideological and political. For a long time after the Civil War, the nation really did not want to be reminded of either the war or the institution that lay at its root-slavery. A country that saw itself as uniquely invested in human freedom had a hard time coming to terms with the centuries' long history of enslaving so many of its people.

When slavery became more important to our historical memory, especially in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the work of reconciling the history of freedom and the history of enslavement involved quarantining the history of slavery to one section of the nation only. That allowed for doing two things simultaneously: It allowed for the belated acknowledgement of the importance, barbarity, and longevity of slavery in the United States. But it also allowed for a continued telling of the story of freedom, since the national story could be told as one in which one section of the United States, the North, fought hard to overcome the retrograde, coercive, and inhumane system of slavery in the other section.

Of course, this story is not completely wrong. Yet what it effectively did was to insulate the national story from the problem of slavery. A focus on the economic links generated around slavery, the story that our book charts, brings the story of enslavement squarely back into the center of the national history as a whole. And this is where it belongs.

Gerdeman: The book says "the relationship of slavery to American capitalism rightfully begins on the plantation." Can you explain how the North benefited from the slave-grown cotton in the South? And how did this "empire of cotton" help create modern capitalism?

Beckert: There are very many economic links between the southern plantation complex and the development of American and global capitalism, involving trade, industry, banking, insurance, shipping, and other industries. The most prominent link developed around cotton.

As you know, the cotton industry was crucial to the world-altering Industrial Revolution as it first unfolded in Great Britain and then spread from there to other parts of the world, including the northern states of the Union. Until 1861, until the American Civil War, almost all cotton used in industrial production was grown by enslaved workers in the southern parts of the United States. Slavery thus played a very important role in supplying an essential raw material for industrial production.

Yet there were further links: British and later U.S. capital financed the expansion of the slavery complex in the American South. Advancing credit was essential for southern planters to be able to purchase land and labor. Northern merchants, moreover, organized the shipment of cotton into global markets.

And of course northern manufacturers, along with their European counterparts, supplied plantations in the South with tools, textiles, and other goods that were necessary to maintain the plantation regime. Plantation slavery, far from being a retrograde system on its way to being ousted by industrial capitalism, saw a second flourishing in the 19th century in the wake of the industrial revolution. And in the United States, cotton was central to that "second slavery."

Gerdeman: Some argued that with the abolition of slavery, the North was poised to "kill the goose that has laid their golden egg." Can you explain why that wasn't the case?

Beckert: Slavery was important to a particular moment in the history of capitalism. But there were also severe tensions between the deepening and spread of capitalism and slavery.

For one, slavery was quite unstable. Slaves resisted their enslavements, and slave owners needed to deploy a lot of violence, coercion, and oversight to ensure the stability of the plantation and slave society more broadly. Moreover, slavery did not satisfy the labor needs that emerged in modern industrial enterprises; very little slave labor was used there.

And last but not least, slave owners had a very definite idea about the political economy of the United States, focused on the export of agricultural commodities to world markets, free trade, and the territorial expansion of the slave regime into the American West. That was quite distinct from the increasingly urgent and also powerful political needs of northern industrialists and bankers. They wanted tariff protection and the expansion of free labor into the American West. Both these political economies depended on the control of the federal government.

With the advent of the Republican Party and then especially with the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, that control became uncertain. As a result, southerners struck out on their own, provoking a violent Civil War that was won by the forces opposed to slavery.

Gerdeman: Do you think today's business executives could learn any important lessons from this new understanding of the connection between slavery and the American market?

Beckert: Yes, definitely. The most important lesson this history provides is that business leaders whose companies' history goes back into the antebellum era need to be proactively researching this history and confronting it. No one alive today is responsible for slavery-a crime against humanity. But we all need to face our histories and then try to move forward from that acknowledgement of the past.

More generally, it is crucially important that companies have a full understanding of their supply chains and of the labor conditions that are to be found throughout these chains. If they violate fundamental human rights, companies have the responsibility and also the ability to act.

There were powerful business interests in the 19th century who worked diligently against slavery. Just think of the Tappan brothers of New York, merchants who combined their business with anti-slavery activism. And then there were also entrepreneurs who refused to process slave-grown cotton. These people can serve as examples of what is possible. They show that to have a full understanding of all aspects of one's business and to aggressively enforce fundamental human norms and rights is possible and necessary.

When you read the letters of businessmen of the 1840s and 1850s, you see numerous efforts to separate business and morality into distinct realms. Merchants and manufacturers in the past did know that slavery was a moral problem, but then they tried to say that such moral considerations were extraneous to the concerns of business. In retrospect we can all agree that these claims are preposterous. Such observations should make everyone today acutely conscious about making rationalizations that seek to insulate business from moral responsibility. History (and historians) don't look kindly on this.

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The Clear Connection Between Slavery And American Capitalism

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The slave economy of the southern states had ripple effects throughout the entire US economy, with plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston, and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities-and enjoying plenty of riches as a result.

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BACKGROUND

Although the twenty Africans brought into Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 arrived by virtue of the slave trade, they actually became indentured servants, Thus, they eventually gained their freedom, and some later actually owned slaves themselves. By the 1640s, however, the practices of enslaving Africans for life and hereditary servitude (the permanent enslavement of the children of slaves) had been established in Virginia and, within the following two decades, had achieved legal recognition. The increased importation of tobacco by the English, as their appetite for this commodity soared, facilitated the rise of a large scale tobacco plantation system in Virginia, and by the 1690s most of Virginia's slaves were being imported directly from Africa, With the introduction and legalization of slavery in 1750 in Georgia, a system of black bondage became common to all of the thirteen colonies.

Although a few native American groups were enslaved in colonial America (especially between the 1670s and the early 1700s in Carolina, where predatory raids victimized the Timucas, Guaus, and Apalachees), Africans, for several reasons, became America's prime bondsmen. Indians were familiar with the terrain and could thus easily run away, and there was fear that their enslavement would bring about continual warfare and also disrupt the lucrative fur trade. Europeans, because of their color, could escape and be mistaken easily as free persons.

Because the climate and soil of the South were suitable for the cultivation of commercial (plantation) crops such as tobacco, rice, and indigo, slavery developed in the southern colonies on a much larger scale than in the northern colonies; the latter's labor needs were met primarily through the use of European immigrants, who usually served indentures of seven years at the most. In fact, throughout the colonial period, Virginia had the largest slave population, followed by Maryland. In South Carolina (Carolina was divided in 1663 into the North Carolina region and South Carolina region and into two colonies in 1701), however, slaves constituted a larger proportion of the total population than in any other colony-sixty percent of the population in 1765.

In general, the conditions of slavery in the northern colonies, where slaves were engaged more in nonagricultural pursuits (such as mining, maritime, and domestic work), were less severe and harsh than in the southern colonies, where most were used on plantations. Also there could be found in the northern colonies several influential religious groups that had moral precepts that encouraged them to practice a more benign form of slavery. The Quakers, the first organized group in the colonies to speak out against slavery, serve as the best example.

During the colonial period slaves resisted their bondage in various ways. Their forms of protest included the murder of their owners, sabotage (of crops, animals, and tools), suicide, and running away. Some of the runaways in Georgia and South Carolina formed maroon communities that often raided nearby plantations for food. Rebellions constituted an additional form of protest. The larger slave popu- lation in the South made the fear of insurrection greater there. In fact, the largest slave rebellion of the colonial period, involving about one hundred slaves, occurred in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739: approximately twenty-five whites and fifty slaves were killed in the Course of the uprising or its suppression. In order to control slaves' behavior and minimize the possibilities of uprisings, slaves codes ( black codes) were established in most of the colonies, Virginia established the first of these during the .1660s, and it served as a model. Under the codes slaves were forbidden to travel without the written permission of their owner and to congregate in large numbers without the presence of whites. Slaves found guilty of murder or rape were to be hanged; for petty offenses slaves were to be whipped, maimed, or branded.

By the end of the colonial period, blacks numbered about five hundred thousand and constituted their largest proportion of the total American population ever, nearly 20 percent. Also, since most were native-born Americans, many by this time had become hyphenated Americans in the true sense of the word. In varying degrees in different parts of the colonies, they had undergone an acculturative process that had created a new cultural group of people: African Americans. This process involved the melding of the different traditional African cultures into a pan-African culture and the retention of some aspects of this culture. Among the areas in which Africanisms or African survivals were most conspicuous were religion, music, dance, and foodways. This process also involved the adoption by slaves of the manners and customs of their land of enslavement. For example, slaves learned to speak English and other European languages (such as Dutch). Still, it should be understood that the process of cultural change did not move solely in one direction, and slaves influenced the behavior of whites in some cultural areas as well, for example, that pertaining to foodways.

As evidence of the acculturative process, blacks by the end of the colonial period had created institutions and organizations of a non-African nature and character. The most prevalent of these were churches, stemming in large part from the revivalistic spirit of the Great Awakening, which lasting roughly from 1740 to 1790, witnessed the conversion of large numbers of blacks to Christianity. Black Baptist congregations, for example, appeared in 1756 in Lunenberg, Virginia; in 1773 in Silver Bluff, South Carolina; and in 1776 in Williamsburg, Virginia. The Silver Bluff congregation was perhaps the most significant, since it is linked to several early black missionaries who established Baptists churches elsewhere. The first of these missionaries was David George. After the American recapture of Savannah in 1782, which followed the flight of Silver Bluff congregants from Savannah to take refuge behind the British lines, George sailed with the British to Nova Scotia, where he established his first church. Ten years later, he emigrated to Sierra Leone and founded a second congregation.

Another Silver Bluff exporter was George Leile, who, when the British evacuated Savannah, accompanied those who went to Jamaica. There he established the first Baptist church in Kingston. Before leaving Savannah, however, Leile converted a slave named Andrew Bryan, who established the First African Baptist Church of Savannah in 1788. In addition to these Baptists, Harry Hosier ("Black Harry"), the constant companion of the English evangelist Francis Asbury, the person most responsible for spreading Methodism in the colonies, was an outstanding pre-Revolutionary War black missionary.

Aiding the acculturative process was the emergence by the end of the colonial period of the key African American social institution: the family. It is believed that between 1720 and 1740, with the increased arrival of fresh slaves from Africa, slaves had started to reproduce themselves in significant numbers, a process enhanced when the next generation of these slaves produced a greater balance in the sexes. By the end of the colonial period this process had given rise to several generations of American born blacks who were connected by blood and had developed an affinity based on an awareness of common descent. These early black families also began the process of serving as socializing agents, helping younger generations acquire the adaptive mechanisms that would facilitate their survival in the face of the stresses and strains of bondage.

While it is possible that black slaves were on New Jersey soil as early as the 1620s, certainly slavery was encouraged by the colony's first constitution, the Concessions and Agreement of 1664/1665. It provided additional land for those bringing servants or slaves into the colony. The earliest known record of slaves in New Jersey dates to 1680, when Colonel Lewis Morris of Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, is identified as owning approximately sixty to seventy slaves.

Slavery was more prevalent in East Jersey, which originally included the present counties of Bergen, Essex, Middlesex, and Monmouth and whose primary slave-importing port was Perth Amboy. The Passaic and Raritan river valleys, populated mainly by Dutch farmers who had a long history of slave ownership, were in fact the sites of considerable holdings of slaves, In West Jersey (Burlington, Gloucester, Salem, and Cape May counties), where Cooper's Ferry (Camden) was the principal port of entry for slaves, both the presence of a significant number of Quakers with antislavery sentiments and a tendency to rely on white immigrants for the area's labor needs lessened the development of slavery.

Since most slaves in New Jersey worked on small farms that had about three bondsmen, they generally experienced a milder form of bondage than their counterparts in the South, Also, as in other northern colonies, more slaves in New Jersey were used in nonagricultural pursuits than in the South. They were, for example, employed in Charles Read's ironworks in Burlington County, in copper mining on the Schuyler family lands in Bergen County, and in the skilled trades. Still, New Jersey was one of the few northern colonies where slave conspiracies occurred. Perhaps the most significant was discovered in Somerville in 1734; as a result of that discovery thirty blacks were apprehended, one hanged, several had ears cut off, and others whipped. Subsequent slave plots surfaced in 1741 in Hackensack, for which two slaves were executed by burning, in 1772 in Perth Amboy, and in 1779 in Elizabethtown. Some whites also voiced protest against slavery in New Jersey, as in many of the other colonies by the time of the American Revolution, The Quaker John Woolman of Mount Holly, as reflected in his 1754 publication, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, was one of the earliest of these.

CORE LESSON

Theme

The enslavement of Africans in colonial America, emanating from the arrival in 1619 of twenty slaves in Jamestown, Virginia, encompassed all of the colonies. The scope and nature of slavery in the northern colonies, however, differed considerably from the institution in the southern colonies, the former generally being milder than the latter.

Materials and Preparation

Students should read either chapters 6, 10, and 11 in The African American Experience: A History ("Africans in the Thirteen Colonies, 1619-1760," "The Tyranny of Slavery, 1619-1860," and "Armed Resistance to Slavery, 1658-1860") or chapters 5-8 in African American History ("How Africans Came to America," "Slaves in the New World," "Slavery and the Law," and "Slave Revolts").

Students should study Map #4 of the original thirteen colonies and read the "Runaway Slave Notices".

Students and the teacher should read pages 18-23 in Afro-Americans in New Jersey: A Short History. They should also read Larry A. Greene, "A History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey," The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries( June, 1994), for information on blacks in New Jersey in the colonial period and later.

The teacher should read chapter 4 in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans ("Colonial Slavery").

Time Period

Each of the activities that follow will take one class period.

ACTIVITY 1

1. Compare and contrast the scope and nature of slavery in the northern colonies with that in southern colonies.Using Map #4, explain to the class that slavery evolved in different ways in the regions of the North and South. Explain, for example, that the towns, cities, and small farms in the North did not quite require the labor of large numbers of slaves as did the plantations in the South. Divide the class into two groups, one representing northern slaves and the other those in the South. Ask each group to explain its preference for its particular region. Slavery in the South might be favored because the larger holdings permitted greater social interaction among slaves and better conditions for maintaining African cultural traditions. The North might be preferred for its generally milder form of bondage.

2. Evaluation: Have the students write a short play in which the main characters are escaped slaves, one from New Jersey and one from South Carolina, who meet in Philadelphia. Have these fugitives, both field hands, compare the difficulties they experienced under slavery. Ask students to include such factors as the climate, nature of the work performed, and degree of contact with their owner.

ACTIVITY 2

1. Analyze a historical document as a primary source of information about colonial slaves.

2. Discuss running away as a common form of slave protest and the importance of runaway slave notices. Explain that these notices are primary source documents, often containing considerable information about their subjects. Divide the class into groups and assign each group a notice. Have each group analyze its notice and then indicate what it learned from the notice about runaway slaves and slavery in general (for example, some slaves had markings indicating their ethnic group, some could read and write, women were among runaways, some runaways were skilled workers, some spoke several languages, some had African names). Ask students to discuss whether the information found in these runaway notices is likely to be accurate.

3. Evaluation: Have the students prepare a runaway slave notice. These notices should reflect accurately what we know about colonial slaves (such as names, occupations, African origins).

Supplemental Activities

1. Visit Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg, which features the most ambitious living history portrayal of slavery during the colonial period.

2. Visit the graves of two colonial New Jersey slaves and read the tombstone inscriptions. These will provide particulars concerning these slaves. The fact that they were buried in the family plot of their owner should also be noted. One grave is that of Ambo, Rahway Cemetery, Rahway, and the other is that of Caesar, Scotch Plains Baptist Church Cemetery, Scotch Plains.

Key Persons

Andrew Bryan. An early black Baptist minister who in 1788 organized the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, perhaps the nation's oldest continuous black congregation.

David George. One of the black missionaries associated with the early black Baptist church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. He later organized churches in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

Harry Hosier ("Black Harry"). An early black Methodist evangelist who accompanied Francis Asbury in spreading Methodism and was highly regarded for his preaching talents.

George Leile. An exhorter also associated with the Silver Bluff, South Carolina, black Baptist church. He later organized the first Baptist church in Jamaica.

John Woolman. A Mount Holly Quaker whose 1754 Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes was one of the earliest antislavery documents in the colonies.

Annotated Bibliography and Suggested Reading

FOR TEACHERS

Cooley, Henry S. 1896. Slavery in New Jersey.

One of the first scholarly studies of New Jersey slavery, covering its beginning in the colonial era to its abolition in the early nineteenth century. Despite the study's age, it contains valuable information about slavery's legal history in New Jersey.

Greene, Lorenzo Johnson. 1942. The Negro in Colonial New England.

Time has not diminished this study as the most comprehensive work on blacks in colonial New England. It is most informative in illustrating the regional differences between slavery in the South and New England.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana.

Explores the development of an Afro-Creole culture in the eighteenth century, with an emphasis on the dynamic impact of African demographics on African cultural retention in America.

MacManus, Edward. 1973, Black Bondage In the North.

A comprehensive state-by-state analysis of the origins and development of slavery in the northern colonies and states. The work contains important information on slavery in New Jersey.

Morgan, Edmund. 1975. American Slavery, American Freedom.

An award-winning work by a premier historian of early American history. It explores the simultaneous development of freedom for whites and the institution of slavery for blacks in the colonial and national eras.

Mullin, Michael. 1992. Africa in America.

A comparative study of slave acculturation and resistance in the American South (especially Virginia and the Carolinas) and British Caribbean Jamaica and Barbados).

Nash, Gary. 1974 Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America.

A valuable study of the cultural interactions of the three major groups in colonial America - European, Native American, and African.

Price, Clement Alexander 1980. Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey.

Included in this excellent collection of documents relating to New Jersey's black history are those from the colonial and revolutionary eras. These are most useful in demonstrating the origins and constraints of slavery in New Jersey.

Sobel, Mechal. 1987. The World they Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth Century Virginia.

An innovative work that examines the process by which black and white societies shaped, transformed, and shared each others' values despite the harsh and oppressed conditions of black slaves.

Tate, Jr., Thad. 1965. The Negro in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg.

The author traces the development of slavery in Virginia from its legal origins to its economic role in the South's largest colony.

Wood, Peter. 1974. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion.

A remarkable book, not only because it provides a history of blacks in colonial South Carolina, but because it explores the rich African contribution to South Carolina's economy and culture, Blacks, even under slavery, are shown not to be passive victims, but a people seeking to carve out as much individual dignity and freedom as possible.

FOR STUDENTS

Piersen, Willaim. 1988. Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-Amercian Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England.

This book argues that eighteenth-century black New Englanders, in their religious beliefs, work habits, style of dress, music, dance, physical postures, and folk medicine, revealed African values and approaches to life.

MATERIALS

Table of Contents | Unit 4

Digitized by Deborah Mercer and Edith Beckett of the New Jersey State Library.
Copyright 2003 by the New Jersey Historical Commission,
New Jersey Department of State.
All rights reserved.
Please direct questions and comments to Deborah Mercer.
Updated:Wednesday, April 23, 2003

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Unit 3 African American Slavery in the Colonial Era, 1619-1775 | New Jersey State Library

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Although the twenty Africans brought into Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 arrived by virtue of the slave trade, they actually became indentured servants, Thus, they eventually gained their freedom, and some later actually owned slaves themselves.

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In the 1600s, Great Britain began in Jamestown, Virginia with their colonization of America. The British colonization of the Americas caused disturbance through military force, cultural manipulation and the introduction of diseases. The indigenous civilizations, even with their fast and furious warrior class, was no match for the colonial-style warfare of the British. However, trade remained an important part of the relationship between the natives and the British. The Americas remained colonized by the British until the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783.

Similarly to the Americas, the Europeans interest in Africa began in the late 18 th century. Christian missionaries helped to spread Christianity and formal colonial conquest. Great Britain abolished the slave trade, but the transition from slave trade to commerce trade was not smooth for Africans. The Europeans thrived and their influence increased. By the 1900s, only Liberia and Ethiopia were not colonized. France and Britain colonized most of Africa. But Germany, Portugal, Belgium, Spain, and Italy also participated in the colonization.

In the 19 th century, the Europeans developed a great interest in Cameroon. The coastal region of feared that the more interior regions would start direct trading with the Europeans, which would weaken the coast's power intermediary status. The chiefs of the coastal regions wanted to strike a deal with the British. But Britain's delay to send a representative to compromise with Cameroon forced the chiefs to turn to Germany instead. Despite the diversity of the ethnic groups with distinct cultures, histories, and governments, and traditions, Germany colonized present-day Cameroon as Kamerun. Germany's intent was to build the colony's infrastructure and combine its rule by expanding into the interior and taking control of tribal strongholds. Germany's plan was falling into place, until their defeat in World War 1 stopped any plans Germany may have had for the colony. Germany had to surrender its oversea colonies. France assumed control of 80% of the colony, while Britain gained the remainder. French and British rule of Cameroon lasted until after World War 2.

By definition is a system under which people are treated as property. Slaves can be bought, sold, and traded. Slaves can be held from the time of their capture, purchase or birth. Slaves are deprived of the right to leave, option to work, and/or deprived compensation. Slavery is wrong, no matter who is being enslaved. Nobody deserves to be taken as collateral. The treatment of enslaved people was horrendous. No person has the authority to dictate another person's action. Africans were enslaved and used throughout centuries. Africans should have never relied on slavery as a form of commerce. A person has never, and will never have equal value to any tangible goods. Colonization is like enslaving an entire area. Colonization settles a group and establishes political control over it. Europeans, and others who colonized, believed that they were more powerful therefore gaining the right to take possession of any area. Forcing the native civilizations of an area to merge takes away from the culture and uniqueness of the region. Individuals lose their identity from being colonized. Using violence, guns, and other weapons as a way to intimidate civilizations to comply with rules of colonization is unfair. Everybody has a decision on how to live their life, having that decision stripped from you due to colonization is not right. Even when nations thought they were helping, they left regions in a poor state; often in poverty, famine, and war. The Scramble for Africa should have never taken place. Whether the colonizing country was peaceful or violent, no country should be granted the right to seize and restrict a region. Europeans crippled the rich native African civilizations for their own political and economic gain. No matter the reason, no intelligence, knowledge, or technology permits one country to be able to overtake another.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Colonization, history, slavery. Bookmark the permalink.

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In the 1600s, Great Britain began in Jamestown, Virginia with their colonization of America. The British colonization of the Americas caused disturbance through military force, cultural manipulation and the introduction of diseases. The indigenous civilizations, even with their fast and furious warrior class, was no match for the colonial-style warfare of the British.

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(Photo: Diego Cambiaso/Flickr)

When Michelle Obama said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves," she no doubt meant to inspire and unify the audience by emphasizing the progress the nation has made.

And, judging by social media and the DNC crowd reaction, it did. But there was also a visceral response voiced by many others. Some people, like media personality Bill O'Reilly, rushed to deny or downplay the role of slavery in the White House's construction and the level of brutality and exploitation involved in forced labor. The facts, substantiated by the National Archives, speak for themselves. But the real puzzle is why the First Lady's herald of the contributions of enslaved people sent so many people reeling one way or the other at all. And, more importantly, why was there even a need to fact check something that we should already know: Through forced labor and their very existence, generations of enslaved Africans played an integral part in building the land of freedom and opportunity.

Chattel slavery is such a painful part of American history that we have yet to give the subject proper airtime in our national conversations and classrooms. Some of us would rather forgo authentic discussions and suppress scholarship about the sins of our forefathers to avoid inciting feelings of guilt and obligation. There are other folks who claim there is a finite breach between that woeful 250-year expanse in our nation's childhood and a period that forged a global role model for democracy and economic growth. Silence and half-truths work to protect a national secret and a false image. And, like all horrible secrets, the power to perpetuate shame and guilt is diminished with release of the truth.

The real story - the one we Americans don't advertise - is that we didn't emerge from the ashes of the early 20th-century conflicts as a superpower. Nor did we build our might solely from the muscles of Ellis Island. By the beginning of the 19th century, enslaved labor had systematically both directly and indirectly turned the United States into one of the top two economic powers in the world. Later, despite the ravages of the Civil War, the capital and infrastructure extracted from the souls, sweat, and blood of enslaved African Americans positioned a former backwater colony to navigate the Industrial Revolution. In 1880 - not 1917 or 1945 - the U.S. began to supersede its much older and more established rival, Great Britain. The shores of the U.S., in the following decades, became a global beacon for economic opportunity and freedom to over 12 million new arrivals.

If we gave the two-and-a-half centuries of U.S. slavery the same scholarly attention as European feudalism and the Industrial Revolution, we could talk today about important threads running through our national and world history. And if those conversations could explore the economic facets of slavery, we could see that slavery was a critical factor in the economic growth of the U.S. and the rise of global capitalism.

Unfortunately, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery in the Americas are, however, not taught and studied as an integral part of world economic history. These historic systems are often erroneously reduced to a social institution that benefited only a few inhumane families in the Mississippi Valley, and thereby accredited to a small part largely culminating with the the Civil War.

U.S. slavery was not a Southern gentlemen's perk. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his article "The Case for Reparations" in The Atlantic, "by 1840, cotton produced by slave labor constituted 59 percent of the country's exports." The economic contribution of enslaved Americans, nonetheless, did not begin and end with King Cotton in the South. Northern colonies benefited from the slave trade, too, beginning with the Puritans. Slavery and the commerce activity brought by the slave ships passing through New England ports in early America grew the region's nascent economy and, ultimately, advanced the spread of North American colonization beyond the earliest settlements.

There is another rarely discussed aspect of slavery that helped form our nation's global economic footprint. The estimated market value of the enslaved population by 1860 had reached seven times the value of currency in circulation. When a slaveholder needed cash, he had three options: 1) rent out the labor of a person he held in bondage; 2) sell that enslaved person to someone else; or 3) maximize profits by leveraging the enslaved person as highly liquid collateral against loans to finance wealth-increasing activities. Enslaved humans, therefore, boosted the economy not only with their labor, but by living and breathing as relatively liquid assets. Businesses were established and goods were made using people in bondage as collateral. So even when Great Emancipation came, the formerly enslaved still maintained a stake in the economy that was purchased with their very lives.

The value of human collateral wasn't only exploited by plantation owners and farmers; institutions that control our markets and society to this day, such as banks like J.P. Morgan Chase and Ivy League universities like Yale, profited handsomely. Collateral could create new money through the issuance of loans. Collateral (and slave labor, of course) could make new construction happen before there was cash in hand. Furthermore, the need to protect human capital-based wealth, according to Columbia University Professor Suresh Naidu, helped to give rise "to a modern and sophisticated system of property rights and financial contracts." Thus, the legal frameworks of capitalism as it exists in the U.S. came out of the interests of those who held people in bondage for profit.

The White House is the cherry at the top of a long list of iconic symbols of U.S. political, cultural, and economic dominance created with enslaved labor. In the National Archives in the Library of Congress, there are receipts to show that 400 enslaved workers, on loan from plantations in surrounding areas, worked on the construction team for the Capitol. Smithsonian Castle was erected with rock liberated from the Earth by enslaved hands. The institution's administrators still try to downplay this fact with coded language to this day. It is no wonder then, that a black American first lady's attempt to re-claim this part of her heritage, our heritage, was met with outrage from some.

Again, as with the flow of human capital, the imprint of enslaved labor on national landmarks and public works extended far above the Mason Dixon line. New York City, the center of the U.S. slavery economy for over 200 years and still the financial epicenter of the world, was built up from the ground with labor, money, and human collateral from slavery. Enslaved people worked to create places tied to our financial history like Wall Street and South Street Seaport (which served as a slave trading market). And Trinity Church, a symbol of freedom and hope since September 11, was constructed, like the White House, by enslaved workers.

Bluntly, in our fascination with the mythology of bootstrapping heroes, it's too jarring to acknowledge that millions of enslaved black Americans were the boots and the strap of our economic system. We want to avert our eyes from this aspect of our history; but perhaps we know in our collective subconscious we cannot separate our proclaimed status as the greatest nation in the world from a long relationship with human bondage. The shiny, bright symbols of democracy are stained by some of the worst oppression the human race has ever known. This fact is gut-wrenching and it should be.

But when we make space to finally unpack this story, we engage in a truth-telling that enlightens all of us. We can pay back the debt first by restoring an esteemed heritage to a people and their ancestors. And then we can join FLOTUS in acknowledging that the benefits, resources, and privileges that we, the people of the U.S., now enjoy were purchased at a steep cost by people we have no right to forget.

In an episode of The Sopranos, the main character Tony Soprano takes a break from a Department of Housing and Urban Development scam to exploit poverty-ridden black and Latino neighborhoods to admire the stone masonry of a local church. He proudly tells his son that their immigrant ancestors constructed the chapel, leaving a legacy to be cherished for generations. The story of how people from other lands shaped and formed the U.S. with their hands has been embraced repeatedly by our society's storytelling institutions. And it's time for enslaved African Americans to claim their rightful place in that narrative.

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When Michelle Obama said in her speech at the Democratic National Convention, "I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves," she no doubt meant to inspire and unify the audience by emphasizing the progress the nation has made. And, judging by social media and the DNC crowd reaction, it did.

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Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called Capitalism and Slavery. Its author, Eric Williams, later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe's rise to global economic dominance. He maintained that Europeans' conquest and settlement of the New World depended on the enslavement of millions of black slaves, who helped amass the capital that financed the industrial revolution. Europe's economic progress, he insisted, came at the expense of black slaves whose labor built the foundations of modern capitalism.

In addition, Williams contended that it was economic self-interest, and not moral convictions, that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. It was only after slavery came to be regarded as an impediment to industrial progress that abolitionists in Europe and the United States succeeded in suppressing the slave trade and abolishing slavery.

Did slavery create the capital that financed the industrial revolution?

The answer is "no"; slavery did not create a major share of the capital that financed the European industrial revolution. The combined profits of the slave trade and West Indian plantations did not add up to five percent of Britain's national income at the time of the industrial revolution.

Nevertheless, slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.

In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

Was the abolitionist crusade against slavery the product of a belief that slavery was an impediment to economic development?

Not in any simple sense. Williams was wrong to think that by the mid-nineteenth century slavery was a declining institution. Slavery was an economically efficient system of production, adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture to mining, construction, and factory work. Furthermore, slavery was capable of producing enormous amounts of wealth. On the eve of the Civil War, the slave South had achieved a level of per capita wealth not matched by Spain or Italy until the eve of World War II or by Mexico or India until 1960. As late as the 1850s, the slave system in the United States was expanding and slave owners were confident about the future.

And yet, there can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the South's "peculiar institution," as an obstacle to economic growth. Despite clear evidence that slavery was profitable, abolitionists--and many people who were not abolitionists--felt strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization, thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free labor, and commercial and economic growth.

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historical context: was slavery the engine of american economic growth? | few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called capitalism and slavery. its author

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later the prime minister of trinidad and tabago

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charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled europe's rise to global economic dominance. | few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called capitalism and slavery. its author

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
later the prime minister of trinidad and tabago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled europe's rise to global economic dominance. he maintained that europeans' conquest and settlement of the new world depended on the enslavement of millions of black slaves

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
who helped amass the capital that financed the industrial revolution. europe's economic progress

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came at the expense of black slaves whose labor built the foundations of modern capitalism.in addition

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
williams contended that it was economic self-interest

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that ultimately led to the abolition of slavery. it was only after slavery came to be regarded as an impediment to industrial progress that abolitionists in europe and the united states succeeded in suppressing the slave trade and abolishing slavery.

did slavery create the capital that financed the industrial revolution?
the answer is "no"; slavery did not create a major share of the capital that financed the european industrial revolution. the combined profits of the slave trade and west indian plantations did not add up to five percent of britain's national income at the time of the industrial revolution.nevertheless

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
slavery was indispensable to european development of the new world. it is inconceivable that european colonists could have settled and developed north and south america and the caribbean without slave labor. moreover

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee

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and tobacco.in the pre-civil war united states

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. one crop

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
provided over half of all us export earnings. by 1840

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the south grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the british textile industry. thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and manufactured goods that laid the basis for american economic growth. in addition

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precisely because the south specialized in cotton production

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the north developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave south

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and cotton brokers.

was the abolitionist crusade against slavery the product of a belief that slavery was an impediment to economic development?
not in any simple sense. williams was wrong to think that by the mid-nineteenth century slavery was a declining institution. slavery was an economically efficient system of production

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
adaptable to tasks ranging from agriculture to mining

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
slavery was capable of producing enormous amounts of wealth. on the eve of the civil war

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the slave south had achieved a level of per capita wealth not matched by spain or italy until the eve of world war ii or by mexico or india until 1960. as late as the 1850s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the slave system in the united states was expanding and slave owners were confident about the future.and yet

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
there can be no doubt that opponents of slavery had come to view the south's "peculiar institution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
" as an obstacle to economic growth. despite clear evidence that slavery was profitable

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
abolitionists--and many people who were not abolitionists--felt strongly that slavery degraded labor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and associated slavery with economic backwardness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
and economic and social stagnation. when the north waged war on slavery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
it was not because it had overcome racism; rather

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
it was because northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation

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Historical Context: Was Slavery the Engine of American Economic Growth?

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Historical Context: Was Slavery the Engine of American Economic Growth? | Few works of history have exerted as powerful an influence as a book published in 1944 called Capitalism and Slavery. Its author, Eric Williams, later the prime minister of Trinidad and Tabago, charged that black slavery was the engine that propelled Europe's rise to global economic dominance.