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

is, from enjoying the civil right to move in public spaces as equals or have access to the same educational and economicopportunities as whites.
    Southern whites built monuments to the defeated generals of their war for slavery, memorialized the old days of the plantation, and wrote histories that insisted that the purpose of the war had been to defend their political rights against an oppressive state. They were so successful at the last goal that they eventually convinced a majority of white Americans, includingmost historians, that slavery had been benign and that “states’ rights” had been the cause of the Civil War. Yet the kingdom that the South’s white lords had regainedwas a starved one. They themselves were much poorer than they had once been. Their violence was more self-destructive, and less profitable.
    Even the new story about the old past was a kind of fool’s gold. The valorization of causeslost, the delusional praising of fathers’ treason—these things did not make one better adapted to the modern world. White entrepreneurs vigorously promoted a “New South.” But the region’s economic decisionmakers struggled to adapt to two postslavery realities. First, neither African Americans nor anyone else would do hand labor at the breakneck, soul-scarring pace of the whipping-machine. Manywhite yeoman farmers, impoverished by war and unable to pay debts or taxes, lost their land and became tenants and sharecroppers themselves. The total number of bales produced in the United States didn’t surpass 1859’s peak until 1875, despite a significant increase in the number of people making cotton in the South after emancipation. Cotton productivity dropped significantly. Many enslaved cottonpickers in the late 1850s had peaked at well over 200 pounds per day. In the 1930s, after a half-century of massive scientific experimentation, all to make the cotton boll more pickable, the great-grandchildren of the enslaved often picked only 100 to 120 pounds per day. 11
    Second, both because productivity was now declining instead of rising, and because of the political-economic isolation thatthe South’s white rulers inflicted upon their region in order to protect white power, the South sank into subordinate, colonial status within the national economy. Although many southerners wanted to develop a more diverse modern economy that went beyond cotton, for nearly a century after emancipation they failed to do so. Despite constant attempts to industrialize, the South could only offer naturalresources and poverty-stricken laborers. It did not have enough local capital, whether of the financial or the well-educated human kind, and it could not develop it. Although a textile industry sprang up in the piedmont of the Carolinas and Virginia, and an iron and coal industry in Alabama, they offered mostly low-wage jobs. Non-textile industries suffered in the competition with more heavilycapitalized northern industries, which literally rigged the rules—such as the price structures that corporations used to ensure that Pittsburgh’s steel would cost less than Birmingham’s. Extractive industries, including coal mining and timber, devastated the landscape and depended on workforces oppressed with shocking violence. The continued small size and poverty of the nonagricultural workingclass also limited urban and middle-class development. Thus, in the 1930s, a lifetime after the Civil War, the majority of both black and white southerners were poor and worked on farms—often farms that they did not own. 12
    LIZA WAS IN HER forties when she and Cade got together. Sarah to his Abraham, she still bore two children by him. In 1882, the couple finally got officially married. A fewyears later they moved to New Orleans. In 1890, sixty-eight years old, he first applied for an invalid pension from the federal government, which had committed itself to support old soldiers and their widows after the soldiers died. On his application he listed