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

however, there was no scale, no chalk, and no whip at the end of the day. And that was nosmall thing. 9
    Yet the Radicals also convinced Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which by making former slaves equal citizens of a multiracial republic did what no other postslavery settlement had ever done. It wrote into the Constitution a nationwide standard of birthright citizenship that would eventually enable future generations—descendants of slaves and immigrants alike—to undermineracial and cultural supremacy. Although the Fourteenth Amendment didn’t extend the vote to women, Congress, state constitutional conventions, and the press all debated the possibility. In that heady postwar time of rewriting the basic bargains of American political economy, anything seemed possible. 10
    In the short term, African-American voting permitted male former slaves to make policy in statelegislative halls where once deals had been brokered to securitize their own blood and seed. African Americans represented southern states in the same Congress where compromises had formerly kept the door open for more slave trades, more first days in the cotton field, more stained dirt by the gin stand. Between 1866 and the early 1870s, Reconstruction in the South seemed like it might producea radically transformed society. White resistance was brutal and widespread, but the national commitment to emancipation kept federal troops stationed in the South. But after 1873, when the industrial economy fell into a deep depression, white America’s conscience wavered. Consumed by labor disputes in the North, Republican leaders were increasingly unlikely to see the free laborers of the Southas people with whom they shared interests.
    African Americans were watching the promise of emancipation, the heady days of eagles on brass buttons and unions under the flag, slowly begin to sagand fade—like Thomas Faro and Liza, who moved to New Orleans after the war. She built up a business selling food to travelers on steamboats, and she bore Thomas two children. They struggled on to make freelives, but the world turned, compounding the universal tragedies of human life, amplifying failures and speeding hope’s decay.
    Thomas died in the 1870s during a smallpox epidemic that swept through black Louisiana. Liza then moved to St. John the Baptist Parish and got a steady job working on the plantation of John Webb. She met Cade McCallum, who was a supervisor there. The war had batteredhis body, and he could only do hard labor sporadically, but he drew the workers’ respect. One day in the late 1870s, Cade’s old army brother Amos Gale came to see him, at “rice-cutting time.” He met Liza, who had moved herself and her two children in with Cade. Although there was nothing to eat in the house but “a dried alligator hanging up there,” Cade and Liza cut it down, cleaned it, and sharedit with Amos.
    Outside the cabin, the dark was coming down. Across the South, night riders went out—hooded in white, burning, raping, beating, and killing. They stole one state’s elections after another. They torched the houses of black folks bold enough to buy land, or even bold enough to paint their own house, for that matter. They rode to Washington and made deals. To resolve the disputed presidentialelection of 1876, northern Republicans made a corrupt bargain with the South’s Democratic rulers to let the latter have “home rule.” The “Redeemers,” as the white southern Democrats called themselves, changed the laws to roll back as much of Reconstruction as they could. By 1900, they had taken away the vote from most black men, and many of the less reliable white men as well. They alsolowered the boom of segregation—“Jim Crow,” as people would come to call it—an array of petty and brutal rules. This forbade African Americans from, for instance, drinking from the same water fountains as whites, eating at the same restaurants, and attending the same schools—that