The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist Read Free Book Online

plunged into Fort Sumter—had raised over four years of wara claim to freedom, to citizenship, and to relationships no one could sell. When he returned to Washington, Lincoln gave another speech, in which he acknowledged this indisputable claim. Then thepresident announced his support for extending the vote to African-American men. Their service in battle had saved the nation. Booth was in the crowd at that speech, too. He turned to a friend. Lincoln’sannouncement, Booth snarled, “means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.” And on Good Friday 1865, April 14, he murdered the president.
    ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS EITHER the last casualty of the Civil War or one of the first of a long civil rights movement that is not yet over. He was succeeded by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was unfortunately an alcoholic racist bent onundermining emancipation. Johnson spent the summer signaling to southern whites that they could build a new white supremacy that looked much like the one African Americans had fought to end. In the fall of 1865, southern white voters made it clear that they did not plan to come to terms with freedom. In elections intended to reseat southern states in Congress, they sent a host of sullen Confederatesback to Washington. At the same time, whites in southern legislatures were trying to keep the status of African Americans as close to slavery as possible, passing vagrancy laws to limit mobility, proposing apprenticeship laws binding black youths as unfree laborers in white families, and making troubling threats about bringing back the whip as cotton-picking rates declined.
    Angered by southernwhites’ unwillingness to admit that they had lost the verdict of war, northern Republicans in Congress, led by a faction called the “Radicals,” took control of Reconstruction. Overriding Johnson’s objections, they refused to seat the newly elected southern representatives and senators. They passed a series of bills that took the vote away from most ex-Confederate officers, and they extended thepower of the army and the “Freedman’s Bureau” to impose new labor systems on the cotton South. The Freedman’s Bureau sent agents into southern counties to mediate between land-owning, cash-poor planters and the formerly enslaved. African Americans wanted, above all, to avoid anything like the pushing-system or the whipping-machine: no more driver’s lash, no weighing-up and recording, nothing thatresembled that. They wanted mothers to have a chance to care for their babies and tend their gardens. They wanted men to be able to plow without other men riding behind them with guns on their hips. They wanted children to go to school instead of doing field work all year. And African Americans throughout the South usually wanted their own land, on which they could grow subsistence crops and liveas what, in another country, we would call independent peasant farmers.
    The freedpeople’s dream of land went largely unfulfilled. The US economy still needed the overseas earnings generated by the South’s power inthe world cotton market. Therefore, just as had been presaged in South Carolina and Louisiana during the early years of the war, neither postwar federal policymakers nor white landownerswere interested in seeing the freedpeople become landowning small farmers. Instead, Freedman’s Bureau agents—including many with “Radical” political views—forced formerly enslaved people and former enslavers to sign and keep wage-labor contracts for 1866. Over the next few years, a compromise system emerged across the South: various permutations of “sharecropping,” which meant that African-Americanhouseholds worked individual plots of land as tenants, in exchange for paying the landlord a share of the cotton crop they grew. Landowners and local store owners advanced goods on credit to the sharecroppers, but at high interest rates, often trapping freedpeople in permanent debt. For sharecroppers,