Abstract
Frankly, my dear, we do give a damn!
The images of Gone with the Wind, Uncle Remus stories, an inefficient benevolent feudal plantation system, and a purely southern phenomenon are all destroyed, exposed, and refuted with overwhelming evidence of the violent, oppressive, coercive, organized, and efficient production of cotton, this country’s largest export during the antebellum period. Moreover, it is a nationally and internationally supported system linking plantation, factory, merchant, banker, and international investor in a complex web of interlocking, amplifying reactions of extended credit with slaves as collateral and risky ventures of crop production, coerced field hand quotas, and the threat of the lash.
Amid a wave of important monographs by scholars such as Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson, Jr., Brown and Harvard cosponsored a conference in 2011 of emerging scholarship detailing a plantation system located in a web of early capitalistic institutions that had major antebellum consequences but was also deeply implicated in American political economy. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, is an outgrowth of that conference.
The volume, following a powerful introduction by the editors, is divided into four parts: plantation technologies, slavery and finance, networks of interest and the North, and national institutions and national boundaries. Each chapter provides new critical information and helps build a strong, compelling case for a new image (an old one for Africana and African American writers not given their due) of the plantation and its larger context. No chapter should be passed over.
In the first part, Edward Baptist presents the technology of work, from using both hands in cotton-picking to a left-handed power whipping machine to produce larger, more efficient harvests, essential to a burgeoning national political economy.
Caitlin Rosenthal shows how accounting systems and books were used to track individual slave production by farmers interested in the scientific management of maximizing quotas and even allocating nutrition and claiming depreciations on slave laborers.
Daniel Rood discusses how the McCormack reaper was developed in Virginia before moving to Chicago for wheat plantations, in conjunction with ironworking and flour mills for shipping to Brazil. The reaper mechanization was used not to save labor, but time.
In Part II, Bonnie Martin examines the use of slaves as collateral for local mortgages, a practice that expanded greatly over time and provided streams of cash and credit, surviving bank panics and providing the capital—from enslaved labor and crops—to expand the national political economy.
Joshua Rothman, using Mississippi as a case study, shows how risky speculation in expanding cotton production prices and huge due payments could not sustain themselves, leading to a crash in 1837. Owners downsized by selling slaves to pay off debts—and, of course, breaking up families.
In the most graphic and tragic chapter, Daina Ramey Berry documents slave suicides and homicides and slave owners’ use of insurance policies to cover loss of life. So slaves had value as property after death but sought to sustain their humanity by focusing on the trip over Jordan, “comin’ for to carry me home.”
Part II concludes with Kathryn Boodry’s exposure of Rothschild investment in cotton, the role of August Belmont, and the eventual shift to the gold of the West and westward expansion, making cotton less significant for the economy. The slave system then became less protected and subject to eventual war and emancipation.
The opening chapter of Part III, by Eric Kimball, demonstrates New England’s pre-cotton involvement with the West Indies colonies for over a century that provided the infrastructure, livestock, and food for sugar plantations. Ships brought back molasses that was turned into rum.
Stephen Chambers documents an illegal relationship linking American ownership of Cuban plantations, where they used slave labor for sugar cane and coffee and garnered vital Cuban gold for our economy, to significant shipments to Russia, supported by active American foreign policy that crashed due to a Cuban slave rebellion, France’s attack on Russia, and our declaration of war against England in 1812.
Completing this part, Calvin Schermerhorn, using case studies of three ships, explicates a chain of credit and supply in a coastal slave trade ranging from Rhode Island shippers to New York merchants as slave traders to slaves held beside commercial goods embarking in Baltimore and disembarking in New Orleans to be sold by agents to regional plantations.
Part IV begins with a chapter about Georgetown University’s use of slaves by Craig Steven Wilder, who argues that this involvement laid the foundation for a national Catholic Church in America.
Andrew Shankman presents the ideas of an important publicist, Matthew Carey, who argued that our economy needed expansion through an extension of slavery. To build a strong capitalist system, the country needed a political economy with secure slave owners supported by a republic of slavery.
Alfred L. Brophy analyzes the extensive technology of southern legal thought supported by courts and legislatures to expand an efficient capitalistic economy and markets grounded in the dehumanizing utility of slavery as a property regime as well as a labor regime.
In the final chapter, John Majewski makes the argument that northern bankers were content to make profits from cotton and farmers were content to supply livestock and foods to southern plantations. The sticking point for many Northerners was the need for education to support economic development. Southern states did not support public education; and Northerners’ fear was that slavery, if extended to other states, would weaken educational expansion that they saw as essential to the national economy. That is why the North came to oppose slavery.
We do give a damn because this scholarship radically revises our history, our memory, and even our responsibility in regard to the past, present, and future. The volume is dedicated to former Brown University President Ruth Simmons, who addressed the university’s history with slavery and how to respond in the present before others took up that task.
Economists have challenged this volume’s scholarship, arguing that a new species of cotton seed was responsible for increased production, not the labor regime or its supporting coercion, organization, and management. Seeds need tending, and field hands did the work under the quotas and threat of the lash documented here. Moreover, the property machine and lines of credit, supply, commerce, and markets implicated far more than the plantation. Profits were made off the hands, bodies, and minds of unfree, captive humans treated as property.
This volume has appeared in the context of other historiography, including a multi-volume Penguin Publishers American History series that radically revises our history and work on New England’s involvement in slavery.
Now, why should sociologists pay attention to these works—not just historical sociologists, but all who teach and write about American society in a global world? Our history was made under the conditions not only of pilgrims seeking liberty and freedom or Pocahontas marrying John Rolfe, but with the destruction of indigenous societies as we moved westward, with the capture and enslavement of Africans, and by building national institutions based on that destruction and enslavement. The consequences of those institutions are with us today, as present politics reveals. Courses in introductory sociology, sociology of education, sociology of religion, social inequality, sociological theory, and more should make these social conditions explicit, followed by the social movements, social transformations, and political economy that maintain or alter society.
I do not come to this literature dispassionately. My paternal ancestors arrived in Virginia and established a tobacco plantation, owning slaves as early as the mid-1600s. As descendants moved down through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama, they took part in Creek Wars and established a plantation lasting until the Civil War while others moved to Mississippi and larger plantations. My southern relations continue holding beliefs compatible with that history. My Alabama father broke with these beliefs and studied agricultural economics at Columbia because he opposed the Jim Crow system of coercion and exploitation. Rather than go to work in the New Deal, he chose to join the Communist Party and, among other things, was a shadow organizer of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an interracial organization. I carry that history with me; and as a sociologist, I believe humans make history but under conditions from the past. But some humans remain in control unless the others organize for change amid contingencies and contradictions. The history lesson of this scholarship is a powerful paradigm shift that cannot be ignored. That is why we must give a damn.