Sentence of a Different Dave

Now that we no longer have the daily distraction of Dave's sentences/book reports, we turn to other sources for our bibliographical updates. Today, our man in the OBX wants us to learn some hard stuff. 

I love my country as much as the next person. I wish that collectively we were a little less grabby, a little more compassionate, and not so cocksure of the superiority of all things American. But overall, my life and that of many friends have been a blessing.

Not so for all Americans. Native Americans were pushed off of their lands and herded onto reservations. Black Americans, many of whose ancestors arrived here in bondage, are far more likely to be arrested, jailed, killed and die in childbirth than whites. On average, black people have accumulated a fraction of the wealth of whites.

The last point gets to the heart of a remarkable book that I came across – The Half Has Never Been Told. Cornell history professor Edward Baptist argues quite convincingly that slavery wasn’t simply a practice confined to the agrarian South, but the engine that jump-started the American global economy. Slavery drove the country’s southward and westward expansion, and turned a fledgling coastal republic into a world player.

The book is compelling, eye-opening, infuriating and heartbreaking. It’s weighty, but accessible, with a rich narrative alongside charts, graphs, maps and statistics. It is exhaustively researched and meticulously footnoted. It took Baptist more than 12 years to research and write, in part he said because he was trying to re-wire the way U.S. history is understood. He wrote in an afterword:
“I was trying to center American history on the exploitation, movement, and disruption of African-American bodies, lives, and families … As I learned in my research, there was a concrete relationship between African-American suffering and economic growth: the more that enslaved people were tortured, the more efficiently they produced the new global economy’s most essential commodity. Through the cotton enslaved people made – cotton they were forced to make in an ever-more-productive fashion – African-Americans enriched almost all people in the world. Almost all people, but not themselves.”

A few nuggets: In 1810, there were approximately 1,191,000 slaves in the U.S.; by 1860, that number jumped to 3,953,000. Slave ownership accounted for 18.9 percent of total U.S. wealth in 1860, as they were treated as a commodity. In 1800, enslaved African-Americans produced 1.4 million pounds of cotton; by 1860 in a westward expanded nation, slaves produced 2 billion pounds of cotton. Cotton accounted for 61 percent of all U.S. exports in 1860, and 88 percent of the cotton imported to Great Britain.

The book title comes from an interview that a Hampton University student, Claude Anderson, conducted with a retired schoolteacher, Lorenzo Ivy, in Danville, Va., in 1937. The interview was part of dozens of projects begun by FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) designed to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. Men like Anderson interviewed older Americans to get a fuller picture of the history and lives of the country. He had a sanitized list of questions to ask, prepared by white bureaucrats, about slavery and its effects. Instead of following the script, Ivy, born 11 years before the start of the Civil War, volunteered what he had seen, what he and his family and their friends endured. Black people bought and sold. Men and women beaten, whipped and raped. Families separated. Men shackled in chains walking miles to railroad stations, where they were herded like cattle and shipped off to work plantations and fields. Then Ivy said, “Truly, son, the half has never been told.”

The book came out in 2014, was widely acclaimed in publishing and academic circles, and won a handful of awards. It deserves a broader run. I suspect the reason it hasn’t is because it’s a scholarly work and because it’s an uncomfortable topic. Race relations and the treatment of black and native populations are the country’s original sin. It’s difficult enough to have honest, informed discussions about race amid conventional wisdom and our broadly accepted idea of slavery’s place in our country. But to have a historian argue, with much proof behind him, that slavery wasn’t merely a regional horror ended by the Civil War, but a foundational aspect of the entire country that benefited whites in the north and south alike and as far away as western Europe, that’s a seismic shift for a nation founded on the idea of freedom and liberty.

Baptist’s book isn’t easy reading, but it’s worthwhile reading.