The Half Has Never Been Told¶
Metadata¶
- Author: [[Edward E Baptist]]
- ASIN: B01HXM0R9Q
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HXM0R9Q
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
historians of Woodrow Wilson’s generation imprinted the stamp of academic research on the idea that slavery was separate from the great economic and social transformations of the Western world during the nineteenth century. — location: 229 ^ref-13856
the white South’s desire to whitewash slavery in the past, and maintain segregation now and forever, served the purpose of validating control over supposedly premodern, semi-savage black people. — location: 236 ^ref-24713
The first major assumption is that, as an economic system—a way of producing and trading commodities—American slavery was fundamentally different from the rest of the modern economy and separate from it. — location: 261 ^ref-23156
In the span of a single lifetime after the 1780s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a subcontinental empire. — location: 324 ^ref-58721
slavery’s expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation—not only increasing its power and size, — location: 333 ^ref-22615
viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue. — location: 355 ^ref-40244
“On the moral level I propose we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds.” — location: 374 ^ref-23225
After the American Revolution—which seemed at the time to portend slavery’s imminent demise—a metastatic transformation and growth of slavery’s giant body had begun instead. — location: 380 ^ref-28967
all northern whites had benefited from the deepened exploitation of enslaved people, many northern whites were now willing to use politics to oppose further expansions of slavery. The words that the survivors of slavery’s expansion had carried out from the belly of the nation’s hungriest beast had, in fact, become important tools for galvanizing that opposition. — location: 428 ^ref-8486
The entire country would become slavery’s next frontier. And as they pressed, they generated greater resistance, pushed too hard, and tried to make their allies submit—like slaves, the allies complained. And that is how, at last, whites came to take up arms against each other. — location: 435 ^ref-11182
Perhaps white Americans’ battles with each other were, on one level, not driven by a contest over ideals, but over the best way to keep the stream of cotton and financial revenues flowing: keep slavery within its current borders, or allow it to consume still more geographic frontiers. But the growing roar of cannon promised others a chance to force a more dramatic decision: slavery forever, or nevermore. — location: 440 ^ref-45013
“to send a parcel of poor Slaves where I dare not go myself” seemed a kind of extreme taxation without representation, — location: 541 ^ref-45550
“religion and humanity [have] nothing to do with this question.” “Interest alone is the governing principle with nations,” — location: 652 ^ref-64895
instead of finding slavery’s expansion to be something that they just had to accept, to avoid ushering in a kind of conflict that could break the infant bonds of nationhood, white Americans soon found in it the basis for a more perfect union. — location: 669 ^ref-44893
At his new owner’s place, Hayden comforted himself by watching the reflection of the rising sun every morning in a pond, as he had done with his mother back in Virginia. — location: 755 ^ref-9488