23 Quotes by Edward E. Baptist

And when we combine the information from the first document that Boswell recorded – the deed or act of sale, which showed that Pierce was selling Ellen to Barthelemy Bonny of Orleans Parish for $420 – with a second one, we can see that in the 1820s enslavers had also come as close to fully monetizing human bodies and lives as any set of capitalists have ever done.

Surely, if the worst thing about slavery was that it denied African Americans the liberal rights of the citizen, one must merely offer them the title of citizen – even elect one of them president – to make amends. Then the issue will be put to rest forever.

Some resented the way coffles, driven right through town, put the most unpleasant parts of slavery right in their faces. Others resented the embarrassment the traders could inflict. In the 1800 presidential election, Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent, John Adams, and the federal government shifted to the District of Columbia – and so the heart of the.

I am in want of money” usually won. “You know every time they needed money they would sell a slave,” said Robert Falls. Traders calibrated their innovations not only for southwestern entrepreneurs who wanted hands, but also to provide a highly useful service to southeastern white folks – the ability to turn a person into cash at the shortest possible notice.20.

Moreover, the 3.2 million people enslaved in the United States had a market value of $1.3 billion in 1850 – one-fifth of the nation’s wealth and almost equal to the entire gross national product. They.

Some historians have called lashings “discipline,” the term offered by slavery’s lawgivers and the laws they wrote, which pretended that masters who whipped were calmly administering “punishment” to “correct” lazy subordinates’ reluctance to work.

Everyone knows that banks take in deposits and lend out money, but they don’t always realize that when banks lend, they actually create money. We call that money credit.

On island after island, Europeans and their pathogens killed the natives, slave ships appeared on the horizon, and cane sprouted in the fields. Streams of survivors crawled forth from slave ships to replenish the cane-field work gangs of men and women as they died. But enslavers grew fabulously rich.

The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization. In fact, slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation – not only.