By this time, many tobacco planters in Virginia and Maryland found their soil worn out and devalued, but owned a “surplus” of slaves, people that, configured as property, were worth ever-higher prices in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.Ī prime field hand who might fetch $400 if sold to a neighbor would bring three times that amount released to a trader looking to resell in New Orleans. When the federal government outlawed Atlantic slave traffic beginning in 1808, the domestic trade picked up speed, and the forced migration of moving feet was herded in one direction: south. The reader is readily engaged in this scholarly treatment of over 400 pages, thanks to Baptist’s narrative style and his skillful interweaving of personal stories from slave and enslaver memoirs and letters with complex political and economic context. With Baptist’s meticulous research and comprehensive, chronological approach, the other half of the story has now been told, and told very well. On the other hand, Baptist utterly follows through on his promise in the same introduction to show us “how slavery changed and moved and grew over time,” from its near exhaustion in the upper South to its ever-spreading explosion in the Deep South following the invention of the cotton gin. Write this off as an effort to enhance a book’s marketability by claiming a never-considered premise. It is unfortunate, then, that the introduction begins with the confounding statement that neither slave owners nor early historians admitted slavery was an institution “committed to profit-seeking.” Of course they did. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism is an achievement of the first order.

The other half has never been told