>> David Ferriero: Good afternoon. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United
States. It's a pleasure to welcome you to McGowan
Theater this afternoon and a special welcome to those of you joining us on YouTube. Today Edward Baptist will talk about his new
book just released, "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism." Before we begin, I'd like to alert you to
two upcoming programs. On Friday, in this very room, at noon, Lynne
Cheney will be here to talk about her new biography, "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered." Although Madison was a modest, reserved man,
he was the driving force behind the Constitution and was crucial throughout. A book signing will follow. Saturday, 13th at 2:00, meet "Little House
on the Prairie's" star Melissa Gilbert. Her new book, "My Prairie Cookbook: Frontier
Food from My Little House to Yours" offers fans comforting family recipes as well as
Gilbert's personal recollections and memorabilia. A book signing will follow. To learn more about these and all of our public
programs and exhibits, consult our monthly calendar of events. There are copies in the lobby as well as a
signup sheet, you could receive it by mail or e-mail. Another way to get involved is to become a
member of the Foundation for the National Archives, the foundation supports all of our
education and outreach programs. There are applications in the lobby. Edward Baptist's new book, "The Half Has Never
Been Told," delves into the economics of slavery in America before the Civil War. He shows us how the growing empire of cotton
fueled industrialization and commerce, helped the United States grow into a modern capitalist
economy. 10 years in the making, "The Half Has Never
Been Told" looks at enslaved African-Americans at the center of the story. Baptist uses interviews written by survivors
and secret letters and newspapers and public documents to tell the story of how American
slavery grew, changed, and shaped the American nation. Baptist's work has been called the fullest
account of the evolution of slavery in the United States from the revolution to the Civil
War. Baptist's account is eloquent, humane, passionate,
and necessary. Ed Baptist grew up in Durham, North Carolina,
got his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and did his graduate work at the
University of Pennsylvania. Since 2003, he has taught at Cornell University
where he teaches about the history of slavery, the United States Civil War, American capitalism,
and digital history. He's published "Creating an Old South: Middle
Florida's Plantation Frontier Before the Civil War." And with the late Stephanie Camp, "New Studies
in the History of American Slavery." He and Louis Hyman published a book called
"American Capitalism," a reader coming out this fall. Ed is also leading a project called "Freedom
on the Move" that's building a crowdsource database of all fugitive slaves. It's a personal pleasure to welcome Ed to
the stage today. I first heard about this project in 2001 when
I was the librarian at Duke University where I had the pleasure of working with Ed's mother
in the Duke libraries. Welcome Ed Baptist, please. [Applause]
>> Edward Baptist: Thanks David. Thank you to the National Archives for hosting
this event and perhaps, most of all, thanks to all of you for coming here. I really look forward to your questions. Those are often where I get the most out of
these kind of events. In fact, they pretty much always are. I feel like I should say that you all are
now in the presence of the economists' favorite historian. For those of you who have seen that little
dust-up on social media, I can also answer questions about that. What I really want to do is actually talk
about the book and give you all an introduction to that. Let me jump into that. Well, my new book, "The Half Has Never Been
Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism" is the story of two bodies. The first body was the new kind of slavery
that emerged in the young United States right after it achieved its independence from the
British Empire. Although at the end of the American Revolution
slavery looked to some observers, including some enslaved people, as if it would disappear
along with the new states' other colonial institutions, it did not. Instead, enslavers like Revolutionary War
hero Wade Hampton and South Carolina transformed the institution of slavery. Once these innovators learned how to produce
cotton with slave labor, cotton fiber became the most important commodity of the industrial
revolution. As more demand for cotton grew, enslavers
began to move, enslaved AfricanAmericans south and west to the areas where you could grow
cotton by the thousand. The victims of these forced migrations were
people like Charles Ball, a young Maryland man sold to a slave trader in 1805. The trader whom Ball eventually learned, McGiffin,
chained Ball to 51 other people and then marched them all 400 miles to South Carolina. That's where McGiffin sold Charles Ball to
Wade Hampton. Divided by 400 miles of marching from his
wife and children, Ball had also not seen his mother since sold 20 years earlier. And now Wade Hampton and his overseers would
try to separate him from his very own self using work management techniques as ingenious
as could be imagined except backed up with brutal whippings and other torture. They forced Ball to reveal how much work he
could do if he went full speed from day break to dusk. And then the next day and the next day and
the next day and so on they pushed him to work even faster, always with the threat of
a bloody, horrifically painful skin-shredding cowhide whipping hanging over his head. Over the next few decades what happened would
happen again and again. By the time enslavers finished seizing millions
of acres in the Mississippi Valley from the Indians and buying millions more from European
empires like France, cheap cotton made ever more efficiently by enslaved African-Americans
was becoming the key raw material of an unprecedented transformation that we remember as the industrial
revolution. Eventually, this massive economic change would
raise millions and then billions of human beings' standards of living, moving them out
of rural subsistence agriculture and into factoryfocused work. While this change has challenging implications
for the future of every species on this planet, there's no question that the modernization
of human societies and human economies has brought great benefits to many humans. But for Charles, whose ever more efficient
cotton labor was one of the foundations of this transformation and for millions of other
human beings who like him were enslaved, it brought nothing but pain. And he was not alone. By 1816, slavers like Hampton moved over 1
million enslaved people, controlled over 80% of the world cotton market, and helped make
possible a revolutionary factory system that changed forever how economies worked. When I did the research for this book, I attempted
to be as comprehensive as possible. I visited dozens of archives, including the
National Archives. I read through literally hundreds of collections
of papers, tens of thousands of papers in particular of their cotton records, their
letters, as well as newspapers and so on. All of these things we might call the enslavers
archive. But I also looked at what you could call the
enslaved people's archives. And these were largely generated once they
left slavery. So we have about 100 or so published autobiographies,
autobiographies during the 19th Century written by people who had been enslaved. These are crucially important. Also important are the approximately 2,200
interviews that were done during the Great Depression by W.P.A. workers, people working
for the new deal of survivors of slavery. And there were a few other documents that
I would put as part of the enslaved people's archive or formerly enslaved people's archive. But I would also draw your attention to one
more thing that I was barely able to scratch the surface of but which the archivist mentioned
or perhaps alluded to a few minutes ago, which was the fugitive slave ads themselves. That was something I was only able to begin
to incorporate here in this particular project. This project was complicated enough. Those thousands of different sources, tens
of thousands of pages of records, records that talked about the lives of millions of
people whose lives and whose acts then influenced tens and even hundreds of millions of other
people as cotton became the most important commodity in the growing world economy, the
increasingly interlinked global economy of the 19th Century, trying to figure out how
to get a handle on that and shape it into a story because I also wanted to tell a story
that had a narrative read to it that moved the reader from point A in time to point B
in time, from the Revolution to the Civil War and explain to people how the grand drama
of American politics, American economic growth, and the Civil War itself were a part of and
were in part driven by millions of stories like that of Charles Ball. Trying to figure out how to do that in one
text was very difficult. If you read the book, you can tell me whether
or not I succeed or fail, perhaps. But let me explain a little bit about how
I tried to shape this information into a story. As a writer and as a historian who was trying
to get a handle on that massive movement and as I consequence first of all, Ralph Ellison
described American history this isn't an essay. This is not in his novel "Invisible Man" which
you've probably heard of or perhaps have read. He described it as a vast drama being played
up on the body of a Negro giant, to use his terms. He was writing in the 1950's. Ellison's metaphor seemed to describe the
experiences of people like Charles Ball, tied up, the body made up of all the enslaved bodies
that were being bought and marched and exploited. In the sources I was reading the plantation
ledgers, slave traders journals, newspapers full of slave sale ads and so on. These were all, I came to see, came to believe,
all part of a giant metaphorical body. And this one was stretched across the new
states and territories and across the decades of rapid American expansion. And everything that enslavers like Hampton
tried to do was an attempt to turn enslaved people's bodies enslaved African American's
bodies against their own interest. So they measured Charles' cotton picking rate
and demanded more unless he had to raise left hand against right hand and turn all the resources
of his mind from sun up to sun down to the effort of trying to meet the quota they had
set upon him, the effort of trying to survive one more day with an unstriked back. I saw that you could dramatize the image of
the economic and other relationships which enslavers were creating in some ways as the
parts of that metaphorical body. I named chapters after some of these metaphorical
parts: feet for the chapter that covers the development of the slave trade which marched
people south and west; their feet moving them against their wills, away from everything
they've known, everything that gave them strength and love; right hand and left hand for the
way enslaved African Americans created abilities at work were distracted from and turned against
them; seed for the way entrepreneurs figured out how to tap markets for the financing that
allowed them to buy ever growing armies of enslaved migrants, forced from Virginia, Maryland,
and the Carolinas to the new states, states like Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi;
and backs for the way by the 1830's, the system, the great big interlinked and growing body
of relationships was building the wealth on the backs of enslaved people. And, indeed, the wealth not just of the cotton
states but of the other states as well. Still, whites in the cotton states were on
average far wealthier than those in the rest of the United States. And the health of all western countries' economies
depended to no small extent on the price of cotton. What about the second body? I mentioned it in a sense there were two bodies
within this story. This one is the body of AfricanAmerican, Africa-America
itself, the creation of a body exploited by the corporate relationships created by enslavers
and financiers and politicians and factory owners and consumers. What about that body? How should we think about that body? If it we're thinking first one as a sort of
body that Ralph Ellison talked about, a body that's exploited and turned against itself,
what should we think in essence about what African Americans thought of themselves and
their own relationships to each other? Well, Western culture has acquired over the
last 200 years a couple of metaphorical ways to think about people whose bodies are controlled
and forced to work against their own control and interests. One of them is the zombie. Now, this word entered U.S. culture in a large
scale when U.S. Marines occupied Haiti in 1915 and has gone on to become a staple of
horror film and literature. But the concept in Haiti, at any rate, in
some ways is actually a commentary on the history of slavery from the perspective of
the enslaved. And, of course, Haiti emerged from the revolution
the slave revolution, that overthrew slavery. So this concept, too, is, in a way -- I'm
going to explain how this works, in my opinion, is in a way a commentary on the history that
precedes the revolution. What it was like to be enslaved. Well, here's the Haitian concept of zombies
in practice, though. You'll see what I mean. Supposedly some Haitian practitioners can
use spells and potions to kill a person and then raise them up as a body that moves and
acts but which really isn't alive anymore. This zombie story is really, as I said, a
myth about slavery, a system in which powerful white wizards created rituals of social death
as an anthropologist described the ways slaves were separate their people in their own and
their own control over their own bodies. We can see how forced migrants, though already
enslaved when they were bought by slave traders, were pushed through rituals of new levels,
new kinds of social depth like separation from family, the process of sale. And we can see how they could feel that in
the cotton fields they might be moving but they were no longer truly alive. There's a different metaphor. Well, let me back up a second and try to explain
what some of the stakes of that are, that process of being moved and sold and ending
up feeling like you're not truly alive. In the 19th Century, African America was endangered
potentially of becoming a sort of vast zombie body, as it were, as cotton slavery expanded. And by the time that Charles Ball separated
from the family and the hope for freedom and the pride in his own labor that it made even
a life in Maryland slavery worthwhile. By the time he was toiling down one cotton
row after another all day long, becoming the equivalent of a zombie from self personally
was a real possibility. And the people on the slave labor camp of
Wade Hampton seemed to him to be moving towards that state as well. It was unclear whether they would be able
to build relationships to each other, of friendship, of support, of religious fellowship in some
cases of marriage, and love. It was unclear whether they would be table
to bring out of themselves the will to keep themselves alive and children alive. The first day that he was on the plantation,
he was shocked at how bad they looked, at how unhealthy they looked. They were being driven so far that they had
no time to grow their own food. So he wasn't sure if he was going to end up
in that state as well, the state that was one of both of body and the mind. And so it wasn't just a fear for Charles Ball
as an individual. It wasn't just a fear that individual slaves
in general would end up in that state. There was also a possibility that an entire
society would end up being destroyed, would end up being forced to walk in a sort of half
dead state in the service of its captors. As the power of enslavers grew, so, too, did
their ability to render not just individuals but a whole body of AfricanAmerica dead in
spirit, components dead to one another, enslaved forever in the body that served as their captors. There's a different metaphor that could also
describe the way African-Americans as individuals and in general experienced enslaver's new
level of exploitation in the 19th century. I would argue this is the one that more accurately
describes what actually happened. That metaphor is the idea of the prisoner
of war. When you see on video clips a shot down pilot
or a kidnapped journalist forced to mouth the ideological slogans of their captors,
we don't think that the P.O.W. believes those words. In fact, we hear about prisoners of all nations,
in all situations who develop their own society, their own codes of communication, their own
modes of resisting even when they cannot act. This creation and curation of alternative
realities, acts of care and respect for each other, of hopes, hidden societies, systems
of value that relentlessly oppose those of their captors, this is what keeps P.O.W.s
from becoming zombies. And slavery, especially the intensified entrepreneurial
constantly changing kind that developed in the 19th Century U.S., this was as the author
puts it a constant state of war. And so enslaved people were prisoners of war. And that's how they behaved more often than
they behaved like zombies. Though their collective body and the individual
bodies were stretched on the rack of brutal new systems of labor control, slave trade
and financialization, more than refused to succumb to despair, far more than the number
who simply gave up. In some slave societies people gave up. And in some slave societies, enslaved people
did everything they could to escape their identity, to turn against each other and find
themselves as separate and different from each other. But in this one, more people like Charles
Ball chose to identify with each other. They built a common language and a common
set of cultural practices. They chose to identify with and care for each
other. Part of this came from the fact that instead
of assimilating ideas and justifications of their oppressors, they created an account
of history. They named the very process that enslavers
tried to use to divide them and exploit them, the forced migration to the high profit entrepreneurial
cotton frontier, as the deepest evil that they faced together; the thing that actually
made them one. So if one body was a system of functions that
extracted value from all enslaved people's bodies by subjecting them to a continual process
of creation and destructions, the other body turned out to be that of AfricanAmericans
as a people, a group that though imprisoned discovered their own sense of identity in
the crucible of an intensified exploitation and horrific violence. So the metaphorical bodies that this book
talks about are not actual bodies; they're metaphorical bodies. So when you see the chapters and they see
"feet," and so on, those work as much as metaphors as descriptions of every fifth thing that
happens in that chapter. There are, of course, lots of real bodies
in the book and lots of them endure some pretty horrific treatment. These two metaphorical bodies are the spine
of "The Half Has Never Been Told," the two bodies that grow and fight each other almost
like Siamese twins in the same womb. That's the story that develops over the course
of the book's 420 pages. It's a long book, until you think about what
it's actually doing, which is re-centering the history of the United States between the
Revolution and the Civil War around this one historical process and two bodies. Let me briefly, to tell a little story that
I learned here in the National Archives. This comes from the records of Union veterans'
pensions. There are, perhaps, 100,000 African-American
Union veterans, give or take a few, who either applied for pensions after the Civil War or
family members applied for pensions. This process required them to write what were
essentially autobiographies and get people to testify to the truth or the falsehood of
these autobiographies. And then somebody in Washington would decide
whether or not that person was worthy of a pension. So the files that accumulate over time tell
this story not just of individuals but what their community thinks of their story and
what the community, their neighbors, friends, know about that story. And one that I chose to include near the end
of the book is a story of Cade and Liza McCowan. Cade was the veteran and Liza his widow. As I walk the reader through this story or
through what we know of it, what we see is two more people who, again, like Charles Ball,
were separated from the people who they knew. In the case of Cade McCowan, he's brought
from Virginia or perhaps from North Carolina or perhaps from Maryland. His wife is never quite straight on where
he came from because they met long after the war. But he went through that. And Liza McCowan went through that process
as well. She was moved from Missouri where she was
born down into Louisiana. And he was moved from the southeast to Louisiana. They're both working in slavery when the Civil
War comes. And when the Civil War comes and the Union
Army enters Louisiana, what they both do, in two different, they take two different
paths, Cade literally swims part of the Mississippi River, hanging on to the edge of a row boat
until he finds a Union gunboat. Liza goes and works for the Union Army in
a refugee camp. But what they do is they move, change, and
take advantage of the situation that has emerged. They act in their own individual ways to bring
this system that had oppressed them, this system that had done so much to damage their
lives and to move their bodies around and to exploit their bodies, they do things to
change that. Though their lives continue to be difficult
in certain ways after the Civil War, they also have things that they would not have
had after the Civil War, the ability to move, the ability to find, to choose and find to
some except, the kind of work that they would do, the ability to get married to each other
and know that they would be able to remain married if they both so chose to each other
for as long as they lived, and the ability to raise their children and know that their
children would not be sold away from them. These were not small things. These were not small victories for them to
achieve. And they were able to do things like that
in part because of the efforts, not just their own efforts in escaping to Union lines and
in Cade's case actually fighting for the Union Army, but because of efforts that had begun
a long time before, because of the things that Charles Ball did on a plantation where
he found himself, to build relationships to other people, to simply survive one day after
another, and then to tell his story. Because the story that escaped slaves tell
become crucially important to the development of the abolitionist movement that helps to
bring on the Civil War. So the struggle to survive, individual bodies,
and to survive as a whole, collective body that, in fact, had to be built, a sort of
giant P.O.W. camp stretched across the south, that struggle to survive was crucially important
to being able to bring about the Civil War, bring about Union victory in the Civil War,
and bring about the end to slavery. As we see in 2014, of course, many struggles
continue, many struggles for African Americans and for other people around the world. But I would like to hope that in a very small
way when people read the book, although there are certainly some horrific stories in there,
I hope that they'll also see that it's a story of survival and in that sense while we might
not see survival as a kind of redemption, in those circumstances it truly was and truly
brought about historical change. I'll stop there. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to
take them. [Applause]
Thank you. >> Thank you very much. It's a superb production. I'm looking at the impact of white Christianity
in Africa. So you have massive transfer of capital from
Africa into the Americas. And you also have therefore the destruction
of economics of Africa because the families are destroyed. The social fabric was destroyed really by
the consequence of that. I wonder if you could give me some information
on that section of historical society. >> Edward Baptist: On the consequences of
the middle passage? >> Yes. >> Edward Baptist: On Africa? >> Yes. >> Edward Baptist: Ok. So that's not really the focus of the book. >> I understand. Just wanted some information. >> Edward Baptist: Sure. Well, the Atlantic slave trade is a massive
human movement that precedes internal movements in the Americas and clearly has a massive
impact on Africa. But I think I'm going to kind of dodge that
question a little bit because there are Africanists who can speak to that a lot more clearly than
me. What I will say, and maybe this will be more
useful, is that the expansion, while I'm not in a position to quantify the nature of the
impact on Africa over time and to some extent it's always going to be speculative, what
happens in the 19th Century in the U.S. with the expansion of cotton production is part
of the process that creates the industrial revolution, as I said, and transforms human
economies. But there are other processes like that that
are happening in the Atlantic Basin, in Americas, in Africa, and in Europe that are linked to
the impact of the cotton expansion. The cotton expansion and the demand of the
world for cotton textiles is what helps to pull one million people out of their homes
in Maryland and Virginia and the Carolinas and into an intensified kind of slavery in
Mississippi and so on. But you can also say that that same upsurge
in consumer demand, that same upsurge in industrial production, also leads to a tremendous intensification
of sugar production in Cuba, coffee production in Brazil where somewhat similar processes
happen that also involve ultimately millions of enslaved people, and even on the African
coast where there are forms of slavery in some areas that existed in a sort of traditional
society. In the 19th Century sometimes with the direct
intervention of Europeans and sometimes without their direct intervention what you see is
an increase in plantationstyle production right along the coast for products, production
of products; for instance, palm oil is one of them, that are crucially important to the
industrial revolution. So not only the industrialization of Europe
pulling still more people out of Africa very violently to places like Brazil and Cuba and
before 1807 the U.S., but even in Africa it's remaking the economy during the 19th Century
and leading to intensified expanded slavery there. So I don't know if that gets to what you're
talking about. >> I've read that Lincoln thought that he
could end slavery, short of war by containing it, keeping it from expanding into new states,
new territories, and that he thought that way it would die out within a couple of generations. I also read that a lot of southerners had
the same concerns and that's why they split the Democratic Party in the election of 1860
and nominated somebody who would not even work with Lincoln. I'm just wondering whether you think that
Lincoln was right and whether those southerners who were afraid as you said, I think expanding
west, Cuba, Mexico; whether you think Lincoln was right and the southerners were right who
opposed him and started the Civil War as a result. If you could just speak to that? >> Edward Baptist: Does anybody remember what
number President Lincoln was? I always have to, I always have to count this
on my hands. Yeah. So 15 presidents before Lincoln had presided
over some form of slavery territorial expansion, either processes that were concluded acquisitions
that were concluded in their term in office or processes that were underway. In fact, when Lincoln proposes gradual emancipation
early on to the governors of some border states, he was taking an act that was more radical
against slavery than just about any other act any president had made before, or all
of them combined, right. I think sometimes we understate the radicalism
of Lincoln. But I think your question is right on point
about the fact that Lincoln believed that closing off expansion would end slavery within
a few generations. And many southerners did as well. But I think the reasons were a little bit
different. So Lincoln had bought into a set of ideas
that many northern Republicans and their political predecessors had started to believe after
the economic depressions of 1837 and 1939 which was slavery was inherently inefficient
as a system and that it was something that had a clock ticking on it, that it was going
to eventually come to an end. It could only survive by moving west and getting
fresh land. But slave owners believed that slavery could
only survive by moving west because only by doing that could they create new opportunities
for southern whites. And only if they could create new opportunities
for southern whites and expansion did that in a couple of ways, which I can describe
in a second, but only if they offered these new opportunities would southern whites who
were either not fully part of the slave economy, in other words didn't own slaves themselves,
didn't work for a slave owner, or even those who were at sort of the bottom tier of the
slave economy, only then would they be fully committed to supporting a system where some
southern whites were extremely wealthy, much wealthier, than the majority of non-slave
holders. Slave holders knew that they had to keep offering
these kinds of opportunities. Whenever they acquired a new territory, three
things happened. The first of all was that there was more land
and more opportunity to create new economic enterprises, especially slave labor camps. The second thing was that those territories
and all of the county and towns and so on created wonderful opportunities for people
to make new careers, whether it's politicians, newspaper publishers -- every little village
had three or four newspapers until the editors started to shoot each other. This happened quite a lot. All of these kinds of opportunities. And more than that, business opportunities
as merchants and so on. These gave the chance for non-slave owners
to say I'm a pretty smart guy; I can move out there and find my way into the planter
class that way and made it look open. And then finally and most important of all,
new territory had this amazing effect on European investors. They sent money there. And they sent money there in great big gobs
and buckets. Millions of dollars every year were transferred
from European savers to southern borrowers in a sort of continuous stream. And that, I think, is why southern slave holders
didn't want to see a closing off of the frontier. Not because there was any sort of inherent
economic inefficiency. It was certainly more efficient than share
cropper cotton production after the Civil War. It was a lot harder than for the people who
actually did the work, but, yeah. So I think they agreed on that point, Lincoln
and the slave holders. >> Were they right? >> Edward Baptist: Were they right? I think Lincoln was wrong. I think Lincoln was wrong. Forced labor has, I would argue, played a
much bigger part in our global economy since 1865 than any of us would particularly care
to admit, even to this day. People are picking cotton in conditions of
unfreedom in Uzebekistan, for instance. That's one allegation we hear quite frequently. And we know there are other kinds of slavery
and other kinds of forced labor around the world. And in the right sort of political situation,
with the right kinds of protections for enslavers and lack of protection for enslaved people,
the level of exploitation can still be enough to make slave ownership economically efficient
proposition. >> First of all, I'd like to thank you for
the framework and the metaphors; really brings a thoughtfulness to this part of American
history. How do we take our history and inform our
present, basically? We still have, as we all know in this room,
an incredible inability to understand how the experience of slavery is informing everything
that happens from our schools. I'm interested particularly since you mentioned
the Coates essay, what you think about informing the question of reparations and what reparations
would actually mean in terms of now, both economically and, you know, sort of philosophically
based on, you know, Robinson's book on the debt and so forth. How can this piece of history help to inform
present day so we can still come to terms with the racial divide and become racial allies? >> Edward Baptist: Ok. Well, I know my answer isn't going to really
change this situation, but let me try to give a little bit of food for thought maybe, perhaps. I think there's three things to think about
here. The first one comes from the work of a historian
named Ken Pomeranz, now at the University of Chicago. And he looked at the question of why in the
end, why industrialization happened first in Great Britain and more broadly in the Western
European world, including the United States. And this is a question a lot of people have
looked at and have given a lot of explanations, as you can imagine. According to his story, and I think there's
some persuasiveness to it, in preindustrial economies, sometimes you have societies that
were going through some pretty rapid economic development all the same; like, for instance,
Northern China in the 17th and 18th Centuries. That's where his own work started, where he's
most deeply rooted as a scholar. But at a certain point, those societies would
go through or would enter what he called a resource cul-de-sac so without advanced methods
of production that are highly, highly efficient, ultimately the society. If it dedicated enough of its labor force
and enough of its resources in general towards the production of anything other than fuel
and food, like, for instance, the fiber that would be necessary to create a major textile
industry, then those societies started to crumble. Ultimately with pre-modern modes of transportation
and pre-modern kinds of energies and so on and so forth, they simply couldn't leap into
the next level of orbit, if you will, or out of this sort of gravity well of traditional
agricultural economies. It only happened once. And that was, of course, the one that took
off between 1750 and 1850 in the west. And those societies had access to massive
quantities of commodities that came from outside the core areas that ultimately industrialized. In particular, what's really important is
cotton from the American south. Cotton from the American south which becomes
the main fiber that is used in the industrial revolution. He did a little thought experiment. He said, all right, let's say that Britain
did not have access to the American South's cotton which because of the kinds of labor
management that were being inflicted on people like Charles Ball, was being produced more
and more efficiently in the fields every single year. Let's say they didn't have access to that. 1830, sort of the middle of the industrial
revolution, would Britain itself have been able to produce enough fiber? You can't grow cotton in Britain. So it wouldn't have been cotton. That would have been a problem, too, for reasons
we could talk about. But let's say even if you did it with wool,
it's harder to invent the right kind of machines for wool, but eventually that was done. Let's say did it with wool. In order to produce the same amount of fiber
that was being brought from the southern U.S. states to Britain in 1830,you would have to
turn every single acre on the island of Britain into a sheep pasture. All right? There would be no London. There would be no coal mines. There would not even be room for factoris. So we think about reparations when we think
about the impact of slavery on the history of our economy, the economy we all share throughout
the world, in fact, but which has been particularly productive and successful here in the U.S. When you think about that, you have to think
not just about the quantity of the contribution but how the contribution and how the institution
of slavery may have helped us to get to a completely different kind of life and a completely
different kind of economy from what we would have been in otherwise. I'll skip the second one which is an anecdote
and I can come back to later if necessary, but let me get to the third point. What would reparations look like? There's a lot of discussion about this. I'm not saying any ideas are right, any ideas
are wrong, but I do think that part of the discussion should be two groups, two kinds
of African-American institutions that were systematically starved in certain ways after
emancipation but which are crucially important in the history of African-America and which
also have a lot to give to all of the United States; and one is black farmers who have
been systematically up until the very recent past denied access to the same kind of USDA
support and also have been, I think, the only word is oppressed by local governments; and
the other group is historically black colleges and universities which were created by and
sustained by primarily African-American communities. You might say, well, why should, let's say,
federal money be diverted to a small HBCU when it could go to Harvard? Right? Nothing against Harvard, but first of all,
Harvard already has a lot of money. Right? It's not clear that giving money to Harvard
will make the same kind of marginal impact that it would if you gave to an institution
in my hometown, North Carolina Central, which is a fantastic institution in a lot of ways
but could use a lot more money. And then people might say there's not enough
expertise there. If you put money there, experts will go there,
black, white, whatever. So I think, you know, whether the discussion
leads to reparations or whether the discussion doesn't, I think that thinking about black
farmers and HBCUs should be part of the discussion from my perspective. >> A couple of questions. You mentioned earlier that---it--you mentioned
there were about 100,000 former black Civil War veterans actually applied for pension. I was doing the math in my head. There were about 180,000 blacks who served
in the Army, roughly 20,000 in the Navy. Depending on who you believe, about 30,000
killed in combat. What happened to the other 50,000? >> Edward Baptist: That's a ballpark guess. 100,000, I made the guess on purpose purposely
to be on the low end. But you all may know much better than me how
many files are from USCT veterans. >> Not in my head. >> Edward Baptist: Didn't mean to put you
on the spot. That's a ballpark, keeping it purposely low. >> Fairly conservative. >> Edward Baptist: Yes. >> Those are only ones who applied for pension. >> Edward Baptist: Yeah. Not everybody applied for pension. Not everybody had survivors who applied for
pension. >> Right. But given the institutional varies you had,
I guess the interesting question, obviously outside of the scope of your discussion, is
the number that actually received pensions once they applied. For example, you read Richard 's grandfather
tried many times and didn't get it because he was in Mississippi. The final question I have is this. You said something that was interesting, when
Jackson defeated the Cretes and Indians, Native-Americans, and primarily in Mississippi and Alabama,
and defeated the English during 1812, in New Orleans it opened up a broad frontier of land. So based on what you had mentioned that business
model where you indicated that the expansion particularly to the west was also included
notions of providing for whites who were not members of the planter class, and it also
opened up the door for additional investments from Europeans. So was that expansion of the land grab in
Alabama and Mississippi and ultimately I goes some extent maybe as a result of the Louisiana
Purchase, does that fit into that paradigm that you alluded to earlier? >> Edward Baptist: Yeah, did it also result
in sort of enhanced support among nonplanter whites for the system of slavery? Yeah. I think it does. What happens politically in those states after
1815 and before the mid-1830s is pretty dramatic. It's a real ferment of white democracy and
a lot of our basic concepts about how political parties work and how you participate in them,
who's a real citizen and who's not. A lot of it comes from that place, that era,
that frontier. As planter whites are trying to figure out
how to maintain some kind of control of the economic arrangements there and as non-planter
whites are pushing them the more conservative off to the side and saying you have to accept
us as equals. That's not the only place that our basic ideas
of a sort of two-party democracy and so on come from. Stuff that was happening in New York State
at the same time is also important. But it's a really key source of that, for sure. >> Thank you. >> Edward Baptist: Thanks. >> [Question Inaudible]
>> Edward Baptist: Sure. There's been some economic study of the industrial
slavery. You see particularly in Virginia is a big
center of that in the 1850s. And there's some other places as well. The economists have concluded that on various
different sorts of accounting models, slavery is an efficient use of capital and industrial
production, but slave owners weren't always so eager to send their slaves off to Richmond
to work in the factory, because those individuals had a depressing tendency to acquire cash
and find a way to get out of slavery. Sometimes it was much better from the enslaver's
point of view to grab that individual and march them over to the slave trader's office
and realized their value right then and there. So yeah. That's industrial slavery. And there's a question about whether or not
enslaved people could have been used in industry on a large scale if, let's say, cotton production
had ever become less of a revenue earner. >> Thank you, Dr. Baptist, for your remarks. I'm a graduate student in history focusing
on embodiment and 19th Century enslavement, so it was a special treat to hear you speak
today. I was wondering what draws you to the metaphor,
the zombie metaphor specifically. I understand that it's source-based and that
there's this anxiety of African Americana moving towards this half dead state as referenced
by someone like Charles Ball, but I'm wondering how you do reconcile that metaphor with a
more active move towards survival. The things that we all know about the creativity
and resistance that we see with breaking tools, playing dumb, you know, slowing down work. If you could just speak more to those tensions
or any of that you might see that would be great. >> Edward Baptist: Thanks. I came to it not just from reading the Ellison
essay, but also and I think more powerfully from what emerged from the sources themselves. Places where formerly enslaved people talked
about the trauma of separation from family and movement to a new place under such horrific
conditions. The way that they talked about that experience
and sometimes they sort of ran it through a religious set of pipes, if you. They ran it through a religious set of ways
of thinking about their experience and processing their experience and sometimes they didn't. But they talked about that experience in terms
that were essentially terms of death. They had to either resurrect themselves, sometimes
with the help of their friends and companions, and sometimes on their own. And I wanted to really honor that struggle. I think one of the dangers when we talk about
things like breaking tools and everyday resistance and I do talk about that and that's very important,
but I think one of the dangers if we start talking about that or if we emphasize that
too heavily is that we don't honor the process that people had to go through in order to
survive. We need to have a balance between the trauma
and the survival, between the resistance and the difficulty of resistance in order to really
see how important the resistance is. So as a writer, I was seeking to balance those
things in a way that evoked the sources. >> Thank you for a terrific talk. I actually work in energy policy, so the story
I think of when I think of the industrial revolution is improvement in energy efficiency
moving from water to coal and ultimately oil. I wonder if in your book or your other work
you look at how that might be intertwined in driving the expansion of the slavery or
how the expansion of slavery was driving that need to find ways to power more factories
or how those were interrelated at all. >> Edward Baptist: Yeah. I think that's a great question. Coal starts to get used on a large scale to
power factory equipment relatively late in the industrial revolution. So 1830s, 1840s in the U.S. is when you really
start to see that happen so industrial revolution has already started, but it's certainly I
think it's true that just as without fiber, the industrial revolution was potentially
stuck in a resource cul-de-sac without coal and fossil fuels. Certainly that would have happened as well. Whether or not we would have got to the point
where we could use colon a large scale to power factories without cotton, I'm not sure. But in order to move further up that road
of industrialization, human societies seemed to have had to rely on fossil fuel. I don't know of an alternative with the 19th
Century technology. >> David Ferriero: I'm afraid we're out of
time. >> Edward Baptist: Ok. Thank you very much. [Applause]
>> David Ferriero: Don't forget there's a book signing one level up at the bookstore. We'll see you in a few minutes.
There are plenty of thinkers and researchers who've suggested the South's economic backwardness to this day stems from the massive inefficiencies of slavery.
lecture starts at 7:00-ish
And he'd be absolutely right. After the plantation owners lost slavery, most of them would have immediately realized the need to divest in other forms of business.