The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  The freedpeople’s dream of land went largely unfulfilled. The US economy still needed the overseas earnings generated by the South’s power in the 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 landowners were 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-American households 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, however, there was no scale, no chalk, and no whip at the end of the day. And that was no small 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 undermine racial 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 state legislative 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 produce a 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 South as 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 sag and 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 free lives, 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 battered his 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 shared it 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 presidential election 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 also lowered 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 is, from enjoying the civil right to move in public spaces as equals or have access to the same educational and economic opportunities 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, including most 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 regained was 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 causes lost, 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. Many white 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 cotton pickers 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 that the 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 natural resources 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 heavily capitalized 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 working class 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 few years la
ter 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 many ailments. Some were typical of old age. Some were especially likely among those who had suffered through forced migration, hard labor, and soldier’s service in mud and rain: intestinal disorders, old injuries, a fluttering heart that left him exhausted. After sixteen years in the Carrolton neighborhood, he died. It was February 1906. The family laid him out in his blue uniform. The old veterans from the neighborhood came by to pay their respects, and they slowly walked him to his tomb.

  On that cold day as Liza walked back from the cemetery to the house where she would now have to live with her son and his family, not only was Cade McCallum lying dead in his tomb; what was worse was that he seemed to have been defeated, and Liza, too. Slavery was gone, but Jim Crow was alive. Almost all southern African Americans were shut out of the ballot box and the political power it could yield. Segregated public accommodations and schools promised that they and their descendants would be second-class citizens for the foreseeable future. The young people who took the train north to Chicago and New York found that even outside of the South, they faced segregated workplaces and neighborhoods, a door of opportunity only intermittently and partially open.

  But the body of African America, stretched, and chained, and stretched again, the body whose tongue and spirit and blood had developed alongside slavery’s expansion, was still alive. For the history in which Cade and Liza and millions of others had been caught up, the history that had been stolen from them and which people were always trying to steal from them, was not over, and in many ways, still is not. Slavery and its expansion had built enduring patterns of poverty and exploitation. This legacy was certainly crystal clear in Liza’s early twentieth-century South. African-American households had virtually no wealth, for instance, while a substantial portion of the wealth held by white households, even after emancipation, could be traced to revenue generated by enslaved labor and financing leveraged out of their bodies before 1861.

  More broadly, the history of feet and heads, hands, tongues, breath, seed, blood, and backs and arms had made all of African America, the United States, and the modern world. The shaping began in the 1780s. The possibility of profit from forced migration kept the United States together through the lean years after the American Revolution. The Constitution’s compromises built a union on slavery and embedded its expansion—some thought temporarily, some thought permanently—in the fabric of the American political economy. For the three score and ten years that followed, a full biblical lifespan, enslaved people were marched and shipped south and west. African Americans’ hands and creativity, turned against themselves and even against each other at times, made commodities and built an archipelago of slave labor camps, a literal organism of economic production.

  Image A.3. Convention of former slaves, left to right: unidentified, Anna Angales, Elizabeth Berkeley, and Sadie Thompson, 1916. Library of Congress.

  From markets built on the labor and the bodies of enslaved people, and from the infrastructure laid down to ship the product in and out, came economic growth. But from this economic growth came not only wealth, but also political power in the councils of the nation. Poor white men insisted that they, too, should enjoy the psychic rewards of right-handed power on slavery’s frontier, and from that came temporary defeat for arrogant planters. Yet clever political entrepreneurs, most notably Andrew Jackson, turned assertively populist energies into the channels of political power, too. They created a new interregional political alliance that yielded decades more of compromise and that enabled the South to maintain its disproportionate power within the federal government. Still, both South and North depended on slavery’s expansion. The products generated from the possibilities of co-exploitation explain much of the nation’s astonishing rise to power in the nineteenth century. Through the booms and the crashes emerged a financial system that continuously catalyzed the development of US capitalism. By the 1840s, the United States had grown into both an empire and a world economic power—the second greatest industrial economy, in fact, in the world—all built on the back of cotton.

  Dependence on cotton stretched far beyond North American shores. A world greedy for a slice of the whipping-machine’s super-profits had financed the occupation of the continent, and the forced migration of enslaved African Americans to the southwestern cotton fields helped to make the modern world economy possible. The steadily increasing productivity of hands on the cotton frontier kept cheap raw materials flowing to the world’s newest and most important industry, the cotton textile factories of Britain, Western Europe, and the North. Theft of days, years, labor, of the left hand’s creative secrets helped provide the escape velocity for the fledgling modern world to do what no other historical society had done before and pull away from the gravitational field of the Malthusian cul-de-sac. Slavery’s expansion was the driving force in US history between the framing of the Constitution and the beginning of the Civil War. It made the nation large and unified, and it made the South’s whites disproportionately powerful in that nation. Enslavers had turned right hand against left to achieve not only productivity but also power that few other dominant classes in human history had possessed.

  Yet from the epic of theft and survival, of desire and innovation, came the Civil War, too. Expansion’s profits and power made southerners willing to push for more expansion. This made some northern whites into allies who recognized their dependence on cotton profit and were willing to do what was necessary to keep it flowing. These were southern whites’ allies. But southern power frightened other northern whites. Some feared that slavery, acceptable enough when it remained a southern institution, would invade the places they lived or wanted to live. Others believed that slavery corrupted everything, and that its expansion fed the rot in American society, American freedom, the American soul—whatever category was their touchstone for everything good. Still others believed that the financial disasters of the late 1830s and early 1840s showed that slavery was economically derelict, doomed, a drag on the capitalist economy’s future.

  All those groups united in the Republican Party of the late 1850s behind the one policy position on which they could all agree: that slavery’s expansion must be stopped. For white southerners, who had always been able to find new frontiers, the victory of that party in a national election was too much. Buoyed by their other successes in the 1850s, by the nearly complete consensus of white southerners behind the slaveholder political bloc, and their overwhelming power within the national Democratic Party, enslaver-politicians made decisions for secession and then for war.

  It has been said that the Civil War was “unnecessary” because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it. If slave labor in cotton had ever hit a wall of ultimate possibility, enslavers could have found new commodities. Southern enslavers had adapted slavery before, with incredibly profitable results. Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy well into the twenty-first century. And the lessons that enslavers learned about turning the left hand to the service of the right, forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so that those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies) and heard in many places. Though these were not slavery, they are one more way in which the human world still suffers without knowing it from the crimes done to Rachel and William and Charles Ball and Lucy Thurston; mourns for them unknowing, even as we also live on the gains that were stolen from them.13

  Nor is it obvious th
at slavery’s expanders would have been politically defeated, outnumbered, or boxed in. In the 1850s, slavery-expansion’s promoters were making continued expansion defensible in constitutional terms that the North found quite acceptable long after the war. In addition, the vast enslaved body was the biggest store of wealth in the American economy. So long as law and normal politics reign, wealth-holders typically find ways to preserve their wealth. Successful revolt from within was impossible, so war was the only way slavery would end in the United States. War is what the enslavers, in their right-handed arrogance, launched, and it was—for them—a tremendous mistake.

  YET CADE MCCALLUM WAS dead in his tomb. So were many of the men and women who with him had seized the finally-here chance that enslavers’ overreach had opened up to enslaved men and women—a generation that had made sure that they would finally see the end of it. But dead, too, it seemed, were the dreams of equality, independence, of redeeming the thefts of slavery’s deepest, longest journeys. Liza, toiling up the street in the cold, might have seen little chance of reversing that process of decay. In 1937, when Claude Anderson came to talk to Lorenzo Ivy, she might have still said the same thing.

  Indeed, though former enslavers and their descendants had lost much of their power through defeat in the Civil War, they had regained some of it by the early twentieth century. Southern white elites continued to wield disproportionate power through the next one hundred years. The willingness of many white southerners to unite around the idea of hanging on to racial power made the South a swing region, and white southerners a defined interest group, willing to join whichever national party was willing to cater to its demands. That was only one of the ways in which the bitter fruit of the southern elites—and their defense of slavery and of their own power—continued to gall democracy everywhere in the country. In another case, the federal judiciary took the Calhounian argument for the independence of slave property from majority control and made it, in the form of the so-called Lochner Doctrine, a defense of rampant industrial power in the face of attempts to regulate workers’ safety, consumer health, and environmental impact. In yet another case, scientific racism had a long history after the fall of the Confederacy. It was used to justify anti-Semitism, the extermination of native peoples around the world, brutal forms of colonialism, and the exclusion of immigrants. And it continued to be used to justify discrimination against the descendants of the enslaved.