The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Read Online Free PDF

coincidentally in Iberville Parish.
    By that time, Cade McCallum was still on Palang’s farm, though he was probably no longer picking cotton. In 1861 and 1862, southern cotton producers,believing that their collective monopoly on the international cotton market gave them leverage that would sway European powers to their side if they induced a “cotton famine,” quit planting and selling their great staple. Most grew food crops for Confederate Armies instead. By early 1862, the number of bales received at Liverpool fell to 3 percent of the 1860 level. The sudden dearth of cottonon the world market raised prices, ironically rendering cotton from other production zones price-competitive with the yield of enslaved hands for the first time in the nineteenth century. In West Africa and in Brazil, cotton production expanded dramatically. And in Egypt, farmers turned the rich soil of the Nile delta into a huge cotton plantation. Theytook their earnings from 1861 to Cairo andpurchased slaves brought down the Nile from Sudan or across the desert in caravans from Darfur. One historian estimates that the slave trade to Egypt expanded from less than 5,000 per year in the 1850s to more than 20,000 by 1865. 2
    Even before the end of 1861, the Confederacy lost control of its oldest cotton region, South Carolina’s Sea Islands. When Union ships bearing an invasion force arrivedoff the coast south of Charleston in the summer of 1861, enslavers fled. Union forces occupied the coast around Hilton Head. African Americans, who made up over 90 percent of the local population, began talking about dividing the plantations where they had toiled for generations into individual farms. But federal and other northern policymakers feared that the South would follow the Jamaicanprecedent. There, after Britain’s 1834 empire-wide emancipation, formerly enslaved people refused to participate in sugar-plantation labor, wrecking Jamaica’s commodity-export economy. To prevent a repetition of that process, as the 1862 crop season loomed, the Treasury Department claimed authority over the abandoned lands and rented them to northern entrepreneurs who proposed to reorganize and revivecotton production on the Sea Islands.
    Often the lessees’ agenda went beyond profit alone. For example, there was the group of Vermont entrepreneurs who assured the Treasury that their “New England skill and energy” could “direct these persons [to] grow cotton 25% cheaper when employed by fair wages than when compelled to do it as slaves.” Thus they could prove that enslavers not only were politicallyimperialistic, destroying the rights of other white people, but also had operated an inefficient, backward system. Indeed, they believed, “so faforable [ sic ] an opportunity to prove this will probably not occur again for ages.” Should $6 per month prove insufficient motivation to convince newly liberated African Americans to enter the cotton wage-labor market, instead of growing corn and yamsto eat, the New Englanders also asked permission to use “the ball and chain” to enforce “authority.” 3
    The experiment didn’t work, at least not on the terms of northern plantation lessees. They signed contracts to pay workers by the month, only to find that at the end of 1862, half of the cotton was rotting in the fields—cotton that could have been picked only at whip-driven speed. Unwilling toadmit that wage labor might not be as efficient in all cases as slave, some experimented with paying pickers by the pound, withholding monthly wages until the end of the harvest, or haranguing the workers—telling them that if they failed to work well, “I shall report them to Massa Lincoln as too lazy to be free.” Yet neither Sea Island experiments nor distant continents came closeto spinningLancashire’s mills back up to speed. Cotton remained scarce on the world market, and cotton prices sky-high. 4
    Across this particular continent, the Union and the Confederacy fought