Click here to  read about the suspension of a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice over his participation in a state government pornographic email scandal that involved employees of the attorney general's office.

 
 

  A Horrifying Book about American Capitalism and Slavery 

American exceptionalism causes many to truly believe the United States is the best, most free nation that ever existed.  It is possible to love our country but still acknowledge some aspects of the past that are shameful.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist is an amazing book that explores in surprising new detail how slavery and capitalism developed in the United States.



The organized horror and inhumanity of slavery that played such an important role in the growth of the entire country was as bad as anything Stalin did in the Soviet Union or Belgium did in the Congo and worse on a grander scale than what the British did to the Boers in South Africa (when the phrase "concentration camp" was invented).

It is shocking to read about mortgages and repossessions on human beings, fancy financial products that allowed investors all over the world to finance collateralized people, and the cruel methods used to increase productivity in the cotton fields.  The reader is introduced to terms such as "the pushing system" or "fancy girl" and learns of the Financial Panic of 1837 (which should make the U.S. now cut a little slack for Latin American countries that default on their loans since that is what we did back then), and the forced migration of perhaps a million slaves to  labor camps on what was then the frontier.

Some of the facts in this book will astound you. For example, in 1840, about 20% of the entire wealth of the United States was the total value of enslaved people.  Extremely fair skinned people were held as slaves, because a person's status as a slave was determined by his or her mother's status.  If a woman, who was a slave, was one-sixteenth black (great-great grandmother was black) and she was impregnated by a white owner, then her child was a slave even if he would have looked whiter than I do.  Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, wrote a letter in 1815 that explained the rules on who was black and who was a slave that included detailed mathematical explanations.



One story in the book of a divorce of a slave slave owning couple in Louisiana should have particular resonance with family lawyers, since the men, women and children the spouses owned were treated like we would handle furniture in a divorce today. 

This book provides a glimpse into our country's past that is harrowing but essential for all Americans to know.  Our kids never get the full picture of slavery in history class or the shameful truth of how slavery fueled the growth of our young country.

Amazingly, the sub-prime mortgage bubble that collapsed our economy in 2007 was presaged by a similar economic bubble involving slaves in the 1830's.  Just as sub-prime mortgages were securitized in the last decade and sold all over the world as an investment, so were American slaves in the 1830's.  The southern states' legislatures charted associations which sold bonds all over the U.S, and Europe.  The money raised with the sale of the bonds was loaned to landowners and speculators to buy more land and slaves, which were the collateral for the loans.  The value of slaves surged and eventually the bubble popped and the result was the Panic of 1837, that brought the U.S. economy to its knees and caused a long, deep recession.

There is a lot to be learned from history and Americans would do well to know more about our nation's past, including the events that are not so glorious and inspiring.