23 Quotes by Edward E. Baptist

Unlike other political questions, abolition talk carried with it the seed of revolutionary violence. Therefore, southern officials and newspaper writers claimed, it was not protected speech.

Walker insisted that the dynamism of nineteenth-century slavery made it worse than earlier forms: the ancient Spartans did not lock the Helots in coffles and drag them “from their wives and children, children from their parents, mothers from their suckling babes.

Julia Blanks said that her grandmother was freeborn in Virginia or Maryland, but whites lured her into a coach in Washington, DC, drove her to the White House, and presented her as a gift to Andrew Jackson’s niece.

From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation.

Enslaved people recognized that the slavery they were experiencing was shaped by the ability of whites to move African Americans’ bodies wherever they wanted. Forced migration created markets that allowed whites to extract profit from human beings. It brought about a kind of isolation that permitted enslavers to use torture to extract new kinds of labor.