69 pages • 2-hour read
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Tongues–1819-1824”
Having “looked so imperiled” during “the thirty-odd years since the 1780s,” slavery is “[n]ow growing at a metastatic rate” (147), expanding and spreading across the United States. By the early decades of the 19th century, “virtually all white Americans [are] interested, almost all profiting in some way—financially, psychologically, or both—from slavery’s growing empire” (147). The only thing that seems to threaten the united interest, albeit only temporarily, is the Missouri Crisis, which takes place during the period of 1819 to 1821. From 1800, “an alliance between northern and southern pro-expansion white politicians who simply [refer] to themselves as ‘Republicans’ [dominate] American politics” (153), their alliance based on the profits both South and North gain from the slavery-dependent cotton industry. However, some northerners begin to worry about the “ever-growing weight of [southern] slave owners’ political power” (154). When white settlers in Missouri Territory petition Congress for statehood in 1818, northern representatives propose amending the statehood bill to include a ban on “the importation of more slave[s] into Missouri” and propose “free[ing] all enslaved people born in the new state once they [reach] twenty-five” (155).
The two sides are at odds, with “almost all northern representatives” being prepared to “vote against more slavery expansion” while southern representatives decide that “the right to expand slavery [is] inseparable from any other right that they [possess]” (155). Things grow “more and more heated” and there are even “rumors […] that congressmen [are] carrying pistols into debate” (156). Eventually, however, a compromise is drawn. A senate bill admits “Missouri as a slave state,” adding Maine “as a free state, to keep the Senate balanced,” while “bar[ring] any more slave states from being carved out of the Louisiana Purchase above […] [what is] essentially Missouri’s southern border” (157). The North and South are once again united in their shared interests in profiting from slavery.
As “northern whites [return] to ignoring the rights of African Americans or the consequences of slavery and its expansion for the enslaved,” slaves can “look to no one but themselves for help” (158). However, this is a difficult prospect. The “opportunity for collective resistance along the lines of Saint-Dominique [has] been foreclosed by enslavers and governments” (147);indeed, even forming connections and community is problematic. Enslaved people come from different regions and backgrounds, speak “literally different languages” (150), and have been stripped of friendships, family, and “all the relationships and statuses that made up the structure of social life” (148).
Moreover, the journey south and west has “given many reason to feel distrust of their peers” (148) while “the pushing system [pits] migrants against each other” (149) and, in desperation, many struggle and fight for the few perks and benefits they can get. Of course, enslaved people do manage to build communities and cooperate despite this terrible situation. Although some take on personal possessions as a way of showing that “I am more than a hand” or “more than a body to be sold, beaten, raped, and divided from my children” (152), many things are shared collectively, such “food […], bean plants in a garden patch, enough space for one more man to lie down in a cramped cabin, a piece of hard-won advice” (152). Enslaved people also manage to create a shared dialect, “what linguistic scholars call modern ‘Vernacular African-American English’” (150). To survive the terrible treatment of white enslavers, African Americans ultimately have to “create new ties to each other in the constantly changing places where they [find] themselves” (158).
Music is often central to this community-building. Before the Haitian Revolution, enslaved Africans “spread the story of the zombi […] a living-dead person who ha[s] been captured by white wizards” (146). A zombi’s “[i]ntellect and personality” depart “but the ghost-spirit and body [remain] in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer planters” (146). When Robert Dickey buys Lucy Thurston, she “dies” but “her body [cannot] settle into death on a cooling board” and “morning after Louisiana morning” must instead “shuffl[e] into a sea of cotton” (145). A zombi now, Lucy toils in the cotton fields, silent, numb, withdrawn, and lost. Loved ones “[call] to her” and “[fish] for her spirit” (146) but cannot reach her, until they begin to sing “a new tune whose wave carrie[s] across the gray field” (146). This, at last, reaches her, telling her that “We need you. You cannot go where you are trying to go” (146). She later recalls that, “I got happy […] and sang with the rest” (147).
As it was for Lucy, music is vital to many enslaved people and communities, serving “as another tongue, one that [speaks] what the first often [cannot]” (160). While white music of the period is simplistic and one-dimensional in its rhythms and dances, and often sticks “to the same lyrics for decades” (164), innovation and improvisation are key to the music of enslaved African Americans. Creating new, often entirely improvised lines successfully brings acclaim and self-respect, as “[s]killful words [make] one valuable to self and peers [and help] the enslaved to see themselves not as hands but as a voice” (163). Moreover, music is not solely about individual skills; community is also central to the experience and musical gatherings are extremely social. Everyone can “sing and dance in the circle” and anyone, of any gender, can “jump in the middle of the ring” (164) and perform. Taking the form of “rings surrounding a changing cast of innovators,” these “musical and social rituals” allow enslaved people “to act in ways that [reinforce] a sense of individual independence through the reality of mutual interdependence” (165). That is to say, they allow enslaved people to simultaneously celebrate individual and collective identity.
Of course, this music grows “all the more fascinating to whites as it [grows] more impenetrable” (166). They depict “black dancers and singers as acting on traditions, or even instinct,” a stereotype that will later evolve into the still-existing racist myth that “African-descended people [have] a ‘natural,’ biologically innate, unchanging, common response to rhythm” (163). White people also begin to mimic black performers, “frailing their banjos in the most authentic way, often while (weirdly) blacked-up, ‘playing negro’” (166). In this way, blackface becomes “the archetypal model for how non-black performers [will] sell a long series of innovations created by enslaved migrants and their descendants—ragtime, jazz, blues, country, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, and hip-hop—to a white market” (167). However, the music made by enslaved African Americans is not being made for whites but as a survival technique and act of solidarity and community in which “people animated by music […] [rediscover] themselves as truly alive, as people who [matter] for their unique abilities and contributions, as people in a common situation who celebrate their own individuality together” (160).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Breath, 1824-1835”
In the 1820s, the slave trade is still changing and developing, as “an emergent crop of professional slave traders” (173) replace jack-of-all-trades entrepreneurs and Georgia-men. These specialist “slave speculators” (179) modernize the trade by introducing “systematic channels of communication and exchange, widespread advertising, consistent pricing” (183) and setting up “private ‘jail[s]’” (184) and regular, organized transportation systems.
Much of their focus is on areas with “large enslaved populations and anemic cash-crop possibilities” (180), particularly in “North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland” (176). While the resilience and ingenuity of generations of enslaved people in these states has allowed them, against the odds, “to thriv[e], living longer and raising more of their own babies to healthy adulthood,” many white people are “heading southwest across the mountain to places where money [can] be made” (178). The “only real wealth” of those remaining behind lies in “[h]uman property, generated by enslaved people’s own commitment to raising and protecting children” (178). This situation leads to an arrangement that is beneficial for both sellers and buyers.
Previously, in the Southeast, “white people [had] bought and sold black people on exceptional days” such as “[q]uarterly court days” and “Sundays, when gentlemen traded horses and people in the yard outside of the church” (184). Now, as Robert Falls observes, “every time they [need] money they [will] sell a slave” and the new speculators are there to buy them seven days a week, providing “a highly useful service to southeastern white folks—the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice” (185). Now that buying and selling enslaved people is “no longer extraordinary, but ordinary, something businessmen [do] in business days” (184), the new specialist slave speculators have “come as close to fully monetizing human bodies and lives as any set of capitalists have ever done” (175). Reduced to tradable commodities, enslaved people are describing their experiences with “the same phrases, again and again” (172), observing that they are being sent “handcuffed through the county like cattle” or driven “like a pack of mules, to the market” (179).
African Americans are not only pointing out the ways they are being presented and treated as commodities; they are explicitly challenging this framework. In prevailing understandings—which are only growing stronger with the increasing professionalization of the slave trade—the buying and selling of slaves is “a legitimate transaction in legally held property” (188) and “owners of property should be able to do whatever they [want] with what they legally [own]” (188). However, enslaved people are now insisting that “buying and selling people [is] a crime” and that, “when they were sold, or otherwise forced to move, they had been ‘stolen’” (187). By insisting that they “have been stolen,” enslaved people are “preparing a radical assault on enslavers’ implicit and explicit claims of legitimacy” (188),and insisting that “there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner, only the ability of the strong to take from others” (189).
In this way, enslaved African Americans create “a vast oral history that [is] also an argument about the nature of slavery” (172), but forced migration means they have “been carried far away from any audience that [has] the political or economic power to do much about the situation” (191). The Missouri crisis has proved to be “not even a blip on the long upward climb of slavery’s expansion” (185) and in both the South and North, “active white opposition to slavery [has] dwindled toward the vanishing point” (186). There are “a few scattered white dissidents […] trying to raise the issue of slavery” (192) in the 1820s, mostly Quakers who put out newspapers with names like The Emancipator, The Philanthropist, and “The Liberator, but “white abolitionists […] [are] a small minority” (197). However, it is not only white voices spreading the abolitionist message. Free African Americans are “using the boom in newspaper publication and readership to spread what they [have] seen and heard from those who [have] survived forced migration” (194).
In 1827, free African American Samuel Cornish begins publishing Freedom’s Journal, “the first African-American newspaper in the United States” (195). Two years later, David Walker, another free African American, publishes a book of essays titled An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. The book declares that “[m]ost whites […] either directly or tacitly [support] slavery and [are] thus ‘our natural enemies’” (195). He also declares that blacks have the right to defend their lives against white violence and calls for slaves to rise up against enslavers, declaring that they will “glory in death” (196) and sending panic through the white population, especially in the South.
However, after the failed 1811 slave revolt in Louisiana, most enslaved people believe that “[r]edemption by revolt [is] impossible” and many turn to “a different exit from hell on earth” (200) instead: religion. Although they have been on the continent for over a century and half, at the close of the 18th century, “few enslaved people had converted to the staid, planter-dominated Anglicanism of their enslavers” (200). However, as “the first evangelical Protestant preachers […] [begin] to travel through the South” (200), many enslaved people attended their services and evangelism starts to grow rapidly among both black and white communities. For the first two decades of the 19th century, “mixed black-and-white frontier congregations emerged, and they welcomed new African-American members” (203).
Evangelism appeals to enslaved people in part because “emotional conversion experiences and informal participatory services treat disempowered people as if they have souls equal in value to those of other powerful” (203). Likewise, many find “kinship and a promise” in the story of Jesus, “a wrongly captured man who endured torture and violent death” (204) only to rise again. In turn, enslaved people greatly influence the form, and the popularity, of evangelism, adding to its already booming growth. Influenced by African religious practices and beliefs in which it is “common for gods to throw people to the ground, to breathe in and through them, to ride worshippers’ spirits and remake their lives,” African Americans bring “the same intensity of conversion” (200) to evangelic Christianity. White people adopt this, too, “learning that shouting and singing [are] appropriate responses to the breath of the divine” (200-01). Church communities not only embrace “enslaved men and women as spiritual brothers and sisters” but even accept them “as experts and guides” (201).
However, there is also significant kickback from white enslavers, who fear that enslaved people may “imbibe with the morality…notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel” (201), encouraging revolt and rebellion. By the 1820s, white people who had embraced enslaved members into the community begin “deleting rituals that [recognize] recently joined African Americans as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’” (203). Rejecting calls for emancipation as too extreme or economically damaging, southern states instead add “new limits of slave literacy and on free black life […] aim[ing] to restrict access to ideas about freedom” (209). Southern states also enact laws to “put an end to independent black Christianity,” banning black religious gatherings without white supervision and ensuring “all religious practice […] [will] be kept under the eyes of enslavers and their henchmen” (210). White ministers promise “to make Christianity into a tool that [will] help enslavers govern their society” (210), telling enslaved people that “The great God above has made you for the benefit of the Whiteman” (204), and insisting that “slavery [is] God’s will. To worry about slavery [is] to doubt God. To oppose it [is] heresy” (211).
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
The relationship between the North and South is an important theme of the fifth chapter, which discusses, among other things, the Missouri Crisis of 1819 to 1821. At the time, “virtually all white Americans [are] […] profiting in some way—financially, psychologically, or both—from slavery’s growing empire” (147). However, the Missouri Crisis represents an early instance of the North questioning the role of slavery in the US, albeit only for a brief moment, before a compromise allows them to unite once more, via their mutual profits. It is important to note that this is not motivated by concern over the treatment of enslaved people or a belief that slavery is morally wrong, but by northerners’ disquiet over the “ever-growing weight of [southern] slave owners’ political power” (154) which they see as undermining their own influence. Southerners, meanwhile, see the North’s interventions as undermining their rights, as they believe that “the right to expand slavery [is] inseparable from any other right that they [possess]” (155). This framing of slavery’s expansion as a matter of southerners’ rights will become increasingly significant to the debate in the lead-up to the Civil War, as will northerners’ concerns over the political influence of southern plantation-politicians.
The theme of slavery as a modern and modernizing institution returns in these chapters, too, with the increasing professionalization of the slave trade itself. Whereas the buying and selling of enslaved people had previously been undertaken by entrepreneurs who dabbled in various trades including slavery, in the 1820s, “an emergent crop of professional slave traders” (173) begins to dominate the trade. These new “slave speculators” (179) build on the Georgia-men’s approach of buying slaves and moving them south and west to sell on for greater profits. The new speculators formalize and modernize this process by introducing “systematic channels of communication and exchange, widespread advertising, consistent pricing” (183) and regular, organized transportation systems. Whereas previously “white people [had] bought and sold black people on exceptional days” (184), this formalizing of the trade helps to make the buying and selling of enslaved people an everyday, unexceptional transaction, something “no longer extraordinary, but ordinary, something businessmen [do] on business days” (184). This growing normalization of buying and selling enslaved people is another aspect of the new slavery. It also reflects the increasing commodification and objectification of enslaved “hands” that characterizes new slavery, as for many white slave owners this becomes a normal source of revenue and “every time they [need] money they [will] sell a slave,” the newly-formalized trade allowing them “to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice” (185). Indeed, through these changes, the new professional slave speculators “come as close to fully monetizing human bodies and lives as any set of capitalists have ever done” (175).
The theme of enslaved people’s solidarity and resistance is also key to these chapters. As the slave South grows more organized and vigilant, “opportunity for collective resistance along the lines of Saint-Dominique [has] been foreclosed by enslavers and governments” (147). However, enslaved people do manage to fight back in other ways. One is to challenge the prevailing understanding that buying and selling enslaved people is “a legitimate transaction in legally held property” (188) by reframing their enslavement as “a crime” and declaring that “when they were sold, or otherwise forced to move, they had been ‘stolen’” (187). In doing so, they undermine white justifications of slavery and declare that “there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner, only the ability of the strong to take from others” (189). Such arguments, carried north by escapees, help to revitalize the now almost non-existent white abolitionist movement and a “small minority” (197) of whites begin to speak out and publish newspapers dedicated to emancipation. Some free people of color also begin writing and publishing attacks on slavery, another form of resistance. David Walker, another key character in the book, is particularly outspoken. Reflecting the collective sentiment that “there is no good master, no legitimate heir to the ownership of slave property, no kindly plantation owner” (189), he insists that “[m]ost whites […] either directly or tacitly [support] slavery and [are] thus ‘our natural enemies’” (195).Walker advocates for the use of violence to defend enslaved people’s right to live free. In this, he reflects both the outrage of African Americans and the way they are beginning to utilize new opportunities such as the growing readership for newspapers to disseminate their critiques. The response to his writings, which include attempts to prevent free African-American sailors from disembarking in the South, in case they distribute his pamphlet, as well as measures to minimize enslaved people’s literacy, reflect the fear of retribution white people experience and the lengths to which they will go to suppress dissent.
The same is true of enslavers’ response to African-Americans’ embracing of evangelical Christianity. For a short while, “mixed black-and-white frontier congregations emerged, and they welcomed new African-American members” (203), even incorporating aspects of African religious practices into their ceremonies. However, white enslavers soon come to fear that African Americans may “imbibe with the morality…notions of equality and liberty, contained in the gospel” (201) and they strive “to make Christianity into a tool that [will] help enslavers govern their society” (210). To that end, they enact laws to “put an end to independent black Christianity,” banning unsupervised African-American religious gatherings. As with the efforts to suppress slave literacy or engagement with political texts, this serves to undermine enslaved people’s access to ideas of freedom and equality and their ability to organize and build communities.
Enslaved people also fight back through solidarity, supporting each other and striving to make functioning communities and a culture that nourishes the soul and provides the strength to survive as a form of resistance. Under the new slavery, African-American communities are fractured and fragmented, with enslaved people often speaking “literally different languages” (150) and showing the divisions and dislocation that result from forced migration and “the pushing system [which pits] migrants against each other” (149). With families divided and personal relationships interrupted, enslaved people work hard to “create new ties to each other in the constantly changing places where they [find] themselves” (158). In contrast to white people who are primarily seeking personal gain and increase in status, enslaved people strengthen their communities and express solidarity through communality, sharing things such “food […], bean plants in a garden patch, enough space for one more man to lie down in a cramped cabin, a piece of hard-won advice” (152) that help them survive and fortify their relationships.
Music and singing are extremely important to this development of community and solidarity-as-resistance, as Baptist explores through another symbolic device, “the story of the zombi” (146). A zombi is “a living-dead person who ha[s] been captured by white wizards” and so abused that “[i]ntellect and personality” departs while “the ghost-spirit and body [remains] in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer planters” (146). Baptist uses the story of Lucy Thurston to show how an enslaved person might become a zombi through the brutal, inhumanity of her enslavers. When she is sold to a plantation owner, Lucy “dies” but her lifeless, empty body still has to rise “morning after Louisiana morning” and “shuffl[e] into a sea of cotton” (145) to labor all day. Baptist shows that Lucy is so deeply traumatized by life under new slavery and the pushing system that she is entirely withdrawn and lost as loved ones attempt to “[call] to her” and “[fish] for her spirit” (146), only to be met with blankness and silence. While this aspect of Lucy’s story reveals the traumatizing effects of slavery, the remainder also reveals the restorative power of music and singing for it is only when her loved ones begin to sing “a new tune whose wave carrie[s] across the gray field” (146) that they are able to reach her” (147).
Singing is symbolically highly significant, serving enslaved people “as another tongue, one that [speaks] what the first often [cannot]” (160). Frequently utilizing new, often entirely improvised lyrics brings individuals both recognition within the community and self-respect because “[s]killful words [make] one valuable to self and peers [and help] the enslaved to see themselves not as hands but as a voice” (163). Similarly, singing together in groups allows enslaved people to celebrate individual skill and strengthen communities and collective identity, to reinforce “a sense of individual independence through the reality of mutual interdependence” (165). Ultimately, music and singing allows enslaved African Americans to rediscover “themselves as truly alive, as people who [matter] for their unique abilities and contributions” (160) and this is in itself a powerful form of resistance to the dehumanizing, zombifying effects of new slavery.
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