Engerman’s controversial 1974 monograph, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Slavery grew more profitable and widespread as the nineteenth century progressed, and millions of slaves were not only disenfranchised but also systematically tortured for the sake of American capitalism.īy contending that slavery was an efficient method of labor, Baptist concurs with Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Baptist argues for the exact opposite of these three misconceptions. First, slavery would have inevitably ended second, Southern slavery was inefficient and unprofitable, out of step with the North’s industrialized economy and third, the worst crime of slavery was the deprivation of black Americans’ political rights (xviii-xix). He intends to dispel three longstanding misconceptions about slavery to which most historians have subscribed. Baptist therefore implies that The Half Has Never Been Told is an act of historiographic penance, rectifying the academy’s past sin of whitewashing American slavery. Baptist opens his magnificent new work, The Half Has Never Been Told, with the assertion that the historical academy of the early twentieth century was “openly racist” (xvii). The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of the Deep South.
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