Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism w/ Edward Baptist

I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the road to now. Greetings from Gallup, New Mexico, where I have stopped with the family. The end of the first day of a 3-day road trip from Long Beach, California. Back to Nashville, Tennessee. I've been on the road for the last month, as some of you guys know, Bob has been out a lot out there, entertaining the masses with the avid brothers. And so we have been sharing some of the great episodes of the past with you guys, and so is the same today. Today's episode that we are re-sharing is our conversation from 2018 with Edward Baptists on the history of American slavery. Ed wrote the book The Half has never been told, slavery and the making of American capitalism. It is an incredible book. I'm telling you, if you're interested in the history of capitalism or slavery or just general American history, this is your go-to. Now this conversation is brilliant, but when we've gone back to re-air some old episodes, one of the things that will always make me a bit hesitant is if we had some sketchy audio quality, and at this time in 2018, before Bob and I had really figured all this distance recording out, we had some kind of scratchy audio. But I recently learned, thanks to our producer Gary Fletcher, that Adobe now has an AI-generated audio recovery software program that you can upload tracks to. And it will take these kind of scratchy, not-so-good clips. This may have even been from Skype, that's how long ago it was. And it will actually restore them. And so with this episode in order to do that, I went back and re-edited the entire thing. So why am I going on about this? Well, just for two reasons. Number one, because I like it when the podcast sounds good. But number two, because I want anyone out there who's listening who is a podcaster who has a similar situation, maybe you're even still recording it away, that you're not getting the audio you like. Go check it out. This isn't a paid spot. I don't know if Adobe is the only one. It's included in a subscription if you've got one. There may be other ones. But man, it has opened up a whole new world in terms of re-earing these episodes, because we're actually putting out what I think is a much better audio version of the older episodes. And therefore, it's a delight to re-edit. So we hope you enjoy this, even as someone who was in the room for this conversation, going back and listening to it again, was a delight. Finally, we've got more new episodes coming up soon. Don't worry, we are back at it. We're starting to book guests, and we've got some great ones lined up along with some news that's coming soon that we're really excited to share. Patrons, we thank you. You keep this show going. If you guys want to join our patrons over on Patreon, it's patreon.com/theroad to now. So thank you, and enjoy our conversation with Ed Baptist. Thanks for listening. Edward Baptist, welcome to the road to now. Thank you. Glad to be here. I've been reading your book. The half has never been told, and a thousand light bulbs have been going off in my head. Not only does it change the way, not only has it helped to change the way I think about the slave trade, but it's written so beautifully. You really write great prose, and I want to talk about how a historian can do that later. But first, I just want to welcome you, and thank you for being here. Thank you. Glad to be here. Like I said, and thanks for doing this, and getting what historians do out to what I think is probably a little bit of wider audience, so we sometimes reach. Well, we definitely try. You argue in your book that the slave trade in the United States helped to expand and define what we understand to be American capitalism. Can you begin by explaining the conditions, the slave trade found itself in at the time of the writing of the Constitution, and how it was able to kind of revitalize itself at that point? Sure. So I think the first thing to talk about is that for most of US history after the Constitution when we talk about the slave trade, we're mostly talking about the so-called domestic slave trade. So the trade within the US, right? So you have a slave trade across the Atlantic to the Americas that brings something like 11 to 12 million people from Africa, early 1500s to the middle of the 19th century. And what comes out of that to North America in terms of the number of people is maybe 450, 500,000 people total. But that number of people who are brought over from Africa expands over time through growth and reproduction to the point where there are actually over 800,000, probably close to a million enslaved people in the US at the time of the founding of the US. But those folks are, to a large extent, concentrated in areas where the crops that they are making tobacco and grain and Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina are not really profitable anymore because of changes in international markets and things like that. What is profitable, what is suddenly starting to be profitable, is cotton. So the challenge that those who want to profit from slavery face at the time of the writing on the Constitution is, first of all, making sure that slavery continues to be part of the United States. And second of all, making sure that they have free reign to move and slay people to the places where they can make the most profit and those turned out to be the places where they can make cotton. So the writing of the Constitution is a crucial part of that because it establishes a national state, a national state where you have one financial system because slave trade is very expensive. The people who want to actually move and slay people and then profit from their labor, they're going to need to have capital, they're going to need to have financial capital. And second of all, because other people are already living on the land where that cotton is going to be grown and the Native Americans who are there are very strong nations militarily powerful. The Native national state is powerful enough to force those people off the land. So those are the kind of preconditions that whether they're conscious when seeking that or not, Southern enslavers end up bidding out of the Constitution, a strong national state with military power and the ability to set up the financial circuits and processes that are going to get them the money that they need. I'd like to point out here, as I feel like it's always my obligation to, there's this myth about America that the government didn't use to get involved in people's lives. But I think there's no more intense government intervention in one's life than being run off of one's land by a strong federal government with the military. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that was the purpose of the national state for many of the people who supported it was to get more land out of the hands of the people who hadn't grown up on it and give it to them. And so ultimately what you get is a lot-sided balance of power, right, where there's actually after the Constitution's written, because of the three fifths clause, there's a lot more political sway held in the Southern states. Is that, would that be an accurate assumption? There's a lot of political power. There's not quite as much as they would want from the beginning, you know, but they're able to build alliances with a lot of northern politicians in northern power brokers. And that continues right up until they edge of the civil war. That doesn't always have the same balance or the same effects. But in part, because so much money is invested in Southern slavery, even as Northern slavery is coming to an end, more and more money is, Northern money is getting invested in Southern slavery because of being invested in Southern slavery, and part because of that relationship, the ability to sort of political leverage that Southern elites have with Northern elites is pretty strong really well up into the 1850s. And so one of these early alliances, or the, and I like how you say the Southern entrepreneurs and the Northern interests were yoked together one way in which they were was the Yazoo land schemes. Right. Could you make some? Yeah, please. Sure, sure. I mean, the thing about the Yazoo land schemes that we, we talk about is that it's, I don't, I don't know exactly how you count, but that might have been the third set of scams on the same territory, you know, that we're sort of laying out and converting into paper, right, representing in paper form this, you know, abazing land that investors could get in on the purchase of and draw, draw gains from, you know, that they could buy and sell their shares of stock and the Yazoo land company, Yazoo land company was something like the third such land company that was trading the same land by the 1790s. So in the 1780s, 1790s is a series of land companies that get grants from state governments and these grants per court to hand over big chunks of West Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and so on and so forth. The Yazoo land company is a final woman, it's the biggest one. And it's the one that the Supreme Court ends up kind of kind of. of ratifying, right, saying that the investors in the land scheme had to be made whole in some way, shape or form, even though the state of Georgia, the voters of the state of Georgia became outraged when they realized that what they thought of as their territory, the territory that they were going to get to exploit, had actually been at least on paper, sold off to a whole bunch of investors over the course of the 1790s, investors who were in Boston, New York, and places like that. So, despite the fact that the population of Georgia, the 99% of whites in Georgia, which is not a 99% of all the people living in the state, but the ones who can actually vote get outraged at the grift that's gone on. Supreme Court ends up saying essentially there's nothing you can do about it, a deal is a deal, a contract is a contract, and this gives free reign to a particularly golden-micolic, creative, destructive kind of capitalism, and a leaking together of finance, capitalism, with the expansion of slavery, which essentially concludes or it essentially proposes that there's not really, there's not really any space in this kind of capitalism, the right and wrong, the morality or the immorality of land deals, much less slavery or taking land from Native Americans. Contract is a contract, the deal is a deal, and the government is for the calculus and the grifters, and the line between those two is pretty hard to draw on something like the Yasumanga's, or perhaps in 2018 as well. One of the things that I think is amazing is that your book just runs over all these myths that we still tell ourselves today, and one of these is this idea that slavery is somehow not part of the capitalist system. It's an aberration and it was bound to go away, but you do a really good job in this book of pointing out that Northern financiers are heavily involved in this. I mean, first of all, there's Yasu, which is just another piece of evidence that you're founding fathers' reliance speculators, but there's also this deep investment Northern banks lending money to Southerners to buy slaves. Also, one of the things I show in my class every time is Edna Insurance Company. I show those, I say, who has Edna Insurance? A couple raised their hand, and I show them a picture of a slave insurance policy. It's not just a Southern affair. Could you talk about how much of the capital in the United States was involved in slavery by the mid 19th century? Yeah, and I think I'll start off by saying our numbers and our ways of looking at it are always inadequate because in fact, just as in any modern economy, everything's penetrated with everything else, right? Just to look at the raw numbers, if you added up the book value of all the enslaved people in the United States in the 1850s, their value is higher than the value of all the stocks and bonds, all the factories, all the railroads, and all the deposit accounts combined, so it's bigger than all of those, right? And the only sort of category of wealth in the United States is bigger at that point in time is land. And a lot of the most valuable land is the land that is valuable because enslaved people are working on it and making cotton and children things like that. So just looking at the question of well, right? We can see that it slavery is incredibly important. If we dig deeper, we can see that these links make it impossible to say that, as some of our historians used to say that this apple is in but not the capitalist world, because if you flip it around, that becomes sort of a way of saying that's sort of excusing northerner of European capitalism as well, as if the cotton just shows up on their doorstep, they don't know how it gets there and they don't really have any involvement in the process. Of course, of course they did. They had deep involvement in the process. So we look at what, not just northern, but European banks and the companies that are kind of the equivalent of things like Goldman Sachs today, so they would be called merchant banks. So their primary job was funding commercial transactions. Most of what happens there, most of what they're involved in every single year, both the northern and the European merchant banks, at least in their business with the United States is financing the annual crop. So their advancing supplies, their advancing bun so that cotton planners can pay their sort of ongoing debts, and they in return will buy the cotton crop when it comes out. But they're also involved heavily in financing the purchase of enslaved people, and the most obvious way is in the 1830s where this whole set of subbing banks can create it, and they get because the people who are running the banks and the people who are running the slave plantations are also the people lying states like Louisiana and Mississippi and so on. They get the opportunity to issue a huge number of state back bonds. So these would be, in many cases, $1,000 each bearing interest of about 6%, and they are backed by the faith and credit of those states. So in other words, at the banks default, they're going to be, you know, the investors will be made whole by the state and Mississippi's taxpayers or Louisiana's taxpayers or whatever, becass the theory. And these banks are then sold in northern and European markets, and the money from those sales goes right into those banks who then lend the money to slave owners or prospective slave owners who go straight to the market in New Orleans and notches, and they buy people who had just been transported from Virginia and Kentucky. So this is the domestic slave trade that we're talking about. We talked about earlier in which attains a scale much bigger in the US context than it did than the Atlantic slave trade to the US ever attained. And it's directly financed by not just the slave owners, not just the banks that lend them the money, but investors overseas, and ultimately also the taxpayers of those states as well. So you got to mass it a number of white people just in that instance who are investing in, hoping to benefit from, and ultimately drawing a lot of wealth from this institution. You know, and we're talking about these schemes, and they are very cold. They're very sinister, right? The whole interplay of men and money and human flesh and blood. It's just so, it's very violent, disgusting to my ears, to, I know, to our ears today. The way that you can make this narrative work are by weaving together character sketches. And one of the characters in this book is a guy named Vincent Nolte. And he very much fits what we're talking about on an individual human scale. Can you talk about Vincent Nolte and creative destruction? Oh, yeah. Vincent Nolte who left us a whole lot of biography when he was old and it kind of fallen on hard times. But he, he was from it, I remember correctly, Northern Italy. But he's, or at least he was born there. But his family, I think his uncle in particular, is part of this kind of merchant class that really works across multiple states in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s. And he gets apprentice to, first to his, his uncle's merchant firm and ultimately gets a job with the bearing brothers, which is the biggest, the biggest British bank and the biggest British merchant bank. They send them to, to New Orleans when it's just becoming part of the US national, national state right after 1804. And there he helps to make the links between Orleans local merchants and local cotton buyers who will buy and cotton from, from slave owners who bring it down to Mississippi. And the people who want to buy cotton in, in England and, and in continental Europe as well. And he's, he's one of the people who's moving the credit west into the hand across the Atlantic into the hands of the planters and the cotton back east. And he comes up with a number of different innovations, which are pretty new, at least in the US context, certainly in the South. He comes up with a regular, what's called a price current. It talks about the, the going price of cotton. And there were lanes and ultimately in other markets. And this helps open up the, the cotton market, because it provides people information that up until that point would have often simply been passed in private letters between friends and between allies. Right. So now you've got this sort of public kind of quote to price quote. So basically it's, it's CNBC for its time. Exactly, exactly. It's a little bit delay, but it's CNBC, you know, it's not instantaneous. Right. So yeah, he's, he's crucial in helping to get the stock market or the, excuse me, the, the kind market. up and running in the deep south. But he was an interesting guy also, right? I mean, he didn't really, there was no more morality or reason to how he worked, right? He was driven by making money and doing in his own way, and smashing the old ways, correct? - Yeah, and in fact, he doesn't really care. He's happy, for instance, when the British come to attack New Orleans, you know, there's a rumor that's going around that he's been selling cotton to the British, and as I read the autobiography anyway, he doesn't even really try to give a convincing dismissal of that argument. And then when some of the cotton that he owns is kind of co-opted by Andrew Jackson and put in front of Andrew Jackson's lines that his riflemen, his Tennessee riflemen are going to hide behind, right? When he's shooting at the British, just east of the city in the battle in January 1815. Well, when that's all over, he's seeing Andrew Jackson a bill for the cotton that was a requisition. And he's pretty angry when he doesn't get an idiot aim it. So, yeah, there's not a bone of patriotism in that sense in his body. - Ben, a transactional, amoral businessman. - Yes, homoeconomic is fine as, I want to say that a lot of times I read books, and I think, wow, this was a great idea. Like, you know, and I appreciate it. And I think, wow, what a great project it would be to do. Rarely do I read a book like this where I look at it and go, I will never accomplish anything nearly this great. The writing, the stories, your qualitative and quantitative, I don't even understand how both those things exist in one brain, but you do such a great job of hitting on these myths. And as someone who lives in Tennessee lives up the street from Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, there's this interesting attempt, I think, for a while they were trying to make to portray Jackson as one of the founders. But you point out in your book, and this is something that I think is important, he's a different generation of American than the founders. And his vision of slavery and what it becomes is fundamentally different. You know, no longer do you have the wolf by the years analogy, you know, with slavery. Could you talk about how Jackson's generation, the second generation of Americans, transform slavery and their understanding of their relationship to the institution? - Sure, and when we talk about the revolutionary generation, you know, I'll say one or two things that I'm sure they over-generalized, but I think what you can say is that by the time you get to 1783, there are clearly a number of the so-called founders who have serious doubts about slavery, right? - Right. - You can see that there's contradiction pretty deeply embedded in the nature of the republic, if you're going to be making arguments about liberty and yet holding people as slaves. And we find, of course, right alongside and people who are perfectly happy to hold that contradiction together, but at least there's some who admit the contradiction, you know, whether they actually act on it or not is everything. And there are reasons for that. I mean, there's a basic philosophical incompatibility, sure, but also, as slave people run away and huge numbers in the revolution, right? They run away, they join the British, thousands of them leave with the British when the British evacuate. Can it's enslaved people who are self-liberating themselves to force the issue of emancipation in northern states, you know, particularly in the case of Massachusetts, which is the first to really drive towards an emancipation? So the founders have that experience, right? And they do different things with it to be sure, but some of them come to the conclusion that slavery, you know, maybe it's not an institution that can be a core part of the republic, but it survives. And in fact, new opportunities for profit open up with cotton, with expansionism, with new streams of finance, and with the connection to the industrial revolution. And people like Andrew Jackson, and even more so that the generation that's born in the 1790s and onward, they become, in many cases, quite vehemently, pro-slavery, one example I use in the book is that at the case of a slave trader. And he's named after abolitionists, right? He's named after Grandville Sharp, was this great British abolitionist. And his parents name him, their last name is Pierce, they name him Grandville Sharp Pierce. And Grandville Sharp was in London helping in the 1770s and 80s helping to bring court cases that protect runaways from slavery, that try and prosecute slave traders, throw enslaved Africans off the ship, the zoned, it's a famous court case. So that's what Grandville Sharp is. Grandville Sharp Pierce is literally buying and selling human beings in the New Orleans slave market in the 1820s, right? He's buying them in North Carolina, Virginia, and marching in there. And he's signing his name, Grandville Sharp Pierce. And that I think is, I mean, when I realized, wait a minute, this guy is named after Grandville Sharp, that really crystallized for me the way in which, in certain ways we could say history ran backwards, right? Well, what we would like to think of is the direction of historical progress. It ran backwards in that case, but it ran towards these new kinds of profitability, these new sources. And I think there's a lesson in that for us. - There sure is, and it's this idea that money's more important than humanity, right? In your research and reading people's journals and diaries and studying the time and newspapers, was there a shift in the ethos of American society to accept something so cruel that they were they lying to themselves or trying to, whether they're in denial about how violent and oppressive and how wrong forced migrations were? - One of the things that was really helpful was to think about the Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter's definition of entrepreneurialism, let's say, and his definition of capitalism was really that this is kind of unbridled entrepreneurship, but he's the one who really popularizes this idea that capitalism is a process of creative destruction, right? So the destruction often happens first, right? And that creates opportunities for those who are creative and seasoned to actually open up new modes of production and selling and transporting commodities, financing and et cetera. Usually we're presented with this as a good thing, this is the genius capitalism, but of course, the destruction often involves not just the destruction of, I don't know, sort of tired old rules about how to do business, but the people who are actually protected by those rules which turn out to be non-seqired, right? But actually have a purpose. And so in the 19th century, you have this kind of perfect storm of a philosophical willingness in some cases to challenge foundations of belief and behavior and to, in fact, enshrine the idea that change itself can be a good thing. Alongside the idea, or alongside the opportunity, the very real transformations in world economy that are making profitability, well, that are making profit much more available to many more people through, for instance, selling cotton to textile mills that need way more cotton than they needed 50 years before. But the opportunity is there, and the incentive to cast aside any qualms you might have, anything that might have come down to you from you being named Granville Sharp, right, to just throw those things away and go for the main chance as people said. - But I think that one of the things when you look back at the history of slavery and the way that it applies now is that when you look at what happens by the 1840s and 1850s, like as, you know, once you start seeing, like not a majority by any means in the North, but you start seeing like a concerted effort to humanize slavery, right? No longer an economic question, right? To actually bring empathy, you know, with, you know, with Frederick Douglass and other, you know, other individuals, it's the creation of an entire social system around justifying slavery. I mean, you have it in the church, you have it in science, the creation of entire scientific definitions of diseases that only black folks can have that explain, you know, things that would be really hard to explain, like, why don't they want to work all the time? Why do they want to run away? Which to us seem like, or should seem like an obvious answer, right? Of course, you're beating them. They want to run away because they have no autonomy and no liberty at all. You know, and could you talk a little bit about this? 'Cause I think that often these things exist in our lives all the time. And they're built using the legitimacy of faith or using legitimacy of science to convince us that what we're already doing is right. Right, right. I mean, you know, the one obvious example, yeah, right here now, which is increasingly challenged, but it's been a reality of intellectual, in social discussion in the US. is the claim that poverty rates or rates of imprisonment among African Americans can be explained by African American culture rather than by the actual realities of political economy and inequality in the United States. So that's something which is very similar. It's sort of an apologetic ideology that we pretend is not apologetic. We pretend that it's actually an objective description of reality. And so you certainly see an upsurge as you get from the 1830s on in particular more abolitionist critique of slavery as a Southern institution. You certainly see a rise in pro-slavery apologetics. The rise of what we now would call scientific racism, right? So the attempt to cloak racist ideas that had existed in many cases for a long time in the language of newly popular, newly prestigious science. You definitely see that in the 1830s and 1840s. But you know, I would say that the run up to that goes way, way, way back into not just US history, but to Western history really from the earliest days of the Atlantic slave trade. There is critique, not just resistance from enslaved Africans, but there is a strand of critique coming from within Western culture itself. And the push back to that comes from attempts to justify the cruelties of slavery through arguments about essential decimates of Africans, these would be Europeans. A lot of people will say something like, well, you know, slavery ended 150 years ago. Like, how can it still have an impact on the world today? And it's like, well, one example is the fact that you continue to believe an absolutely ridiculous explanation of humanity that was contrived by these folks. The fact that we live with this absurdity of the way light reflects off your skin as a defining factor of who you are. Why do you think we're so reluctant to look at a history that while painful, in fact, might actually help us understand the way power works and get past this. Why are we so reluctant? What do you think? Because we don't, in some cases, want to get, we don't want to understand how power works and get past it, right? Because we don't want to do that, right? Because it benefits some people and those who benefit the most in some cases is not always true, but in some cases, they're the most resistant to actually looking at it. We're talking about slavery as a fundamental bounding economic institution and a fundamental source of accumulation, the growth of a capitalist economy, right? And we know that what happens in the past shapes what happens now and there's no easier way to measure that than to look at how wealth is transmitted through history. Then we're obviously, if we're talking about slavery as a process of generating wealth and, in fact, stealing wealth and distributing it unequally, we're talking about wealth today. We're not talking about just wealth in 1860. We're talking about wealth in 2018. Where does it come from? How did they get here? Why do some people have it? Why do some people not have it? And we're looking at a context when the average African-American household has something like a somewhere between $1 for every $12 the average white household has or one in every versus every 20, it depends on how we measure it. So average wealth, how white household is between 12 and 20 times as wealthy as the average African-American household. Then we're really seriously asking questions about how it got to be that way. And we're seriously thinking of slavery as one of the reasons that we're applying something that some, you know, depending on the poll, but something like 90 percent of whites do not want to actually discuss or consider, which is some sort of reparative restorative justice for this process. So of course, we're going to get pushback of one talks about. Of course, we're going to hear that pushback because we're not talking about the past only. We're talking about the present. We teach our children from the very beginning when they start becoming socialized with other kids. If you take something from someone, you are to give it back. Right. Right. Well, we should teach that. Sometimes I wonder, but, you know, we should teach that, right? That's the norm. Getting back to the actual chronology of the history. During the outbreak of the Civil War, cotton production in the United States decreased dramatically, but it expanded in other parts of the world. And with it, so did slavery. Can you talk about that? Because that was like here, we were in some ways having a war to challenge slavery, where it just became bolstered in other parts of the world. Yeah, I think I think that's an important part of the story that we like to think of emancipation is sort of a one way process, right? Things just kept getting better and better and better. And that that wasn't true if you were in Egypt, necessarily, because a lot of the production which expands in Egypt is actually carried out, not just by Egyptian peasant farmers, but by enslaved people from births out in Africa. Now, the research, you know, there's not as much research on this as there is on the US side of the story, but that's one of the sort of emerging things that we're learning. We also know that kind of production expanded in Brazil as well during the course of the US Civil War. And Brazil continued to have the Atlantic slave trade until fairly late in the 19th century and slavery there lasted longer than it did in the US at its own set of internal slave trades. It also became the home of about 20,000 Confederates who took off from the United States relocated to Brazil and set up a town down there that to this day celebrates Confederate holidays. Yeah, yeah, Americana, the Confederators. Well, so the title of your book is The Half has never been told. And, you know, this is the idea of a people who have been set who have been set upon forced migration. They lose their history. Well, I don't think actually that the people lost their history. I think that it was too logistical excluded from white versions of the history. Let's put it that way. Because when people went to interview those who survived slavery in the 1930s, they told much the same story that black abolitionists who escaped from slavery back in the 1830s and 40s and 50s were telling. So there's a what I would call a vernacular history that runs underneath and is I think the real river carrying the real water of the true version of the American history. And so part of what I tried to do with a book and other historians have done this work too and I've learned from them quite a lot. But the part of what I tried to do was to to surface that history in the sense of bringing it to audiences that maybe had heard part of it, but not everything that I could tell of it or maybe hadn't heard any of what I could tell of it. It just depends on the reader and the audience, of course. So, you know, I take that title the half has never been told from something that one of those survivors of slavery said when he was interviewed in Danville, Virginia and in the 1930s. And that was his phrase. That was his phrase. But of course, we say the half has never been told. It doesn't mean that, okay, I'm going to tell the other half, but then it's all gone. No, it's never done. I mean, the story, telling that story, you know, there's always another half to it, another set of perspectives to tell. I want to address one more of these myths that I hear people tell. There is this myth that persists that like off slavery was going to go away anyway. The war wasn't really about slavery, but in your book, you, I mean, you crush it. You're like, no, it would have kept going on. It was not on the way out. Could you talk about why it is that this myth that slavery was going to go away on its own? Why doesn't that hold up? Well, I think underlying that myth is this pretty consistent desire to exempt ourselves or our ancestors from being involved, not just from being involved in slavery directly or indirectly, but from doing it because we were benefiting. It's much easier to say, well, you know, it was this institution that we inherited, you know, sort of, I don't know, sort of the way we might inherit a superstition or, you know, some kind of cultural habit that's, yeah, it's relatively old, old-fashioned, but not really that important. My dad used to always like to have brits for for breakfast, which seemed to me in the 70s and 80s. It seemed like that was part of it backwards south, right? Okay, but you know, slavery is not in grits, right? Slavery is a profound, powerful economic interest in 1860. It's not something that's going to go away on his own accord, any more than the big Wall Street banks. would suddenly just wither away and die tomorrow. Right, if we, if we just stop paying attention to them. No, this was a tremendous source of power that people were obviously willing to go to great lengths to protect and to defend and to perpetuate against any threat, no matter how small. So I don't, I don't believe that economic institutions are automatically just winnowed away and just disappear because they're slightly less efficient than something else, even if slavery was less efficient, which I think, you know, was also up for debate. They don't go that way because states create and shape markets. They set the rules, they regulate how they work, even when they say that they're being anti-regulatory. They're still regulating and they're still market making. And the power of slavery among the powerful in the US was so great and they're interested in it was so great, even on the Northerners, right? They, even if it did turn out to be less efficient in the long run, it would have still been perpetuated for a very long time. Yeah, it's part of that myth that, that Southern slaveholders took care of their slaves. The myth that you, the story you always get, or not, not always, but close enough to always get when you go to the slave plantations and it's just white folks. And they look around and they say, "Hey, you know, the slaves here had it pretty good." Maybe it wasn't so great next door, but, you know, at places like this it was fine. It was fine. Yeah, yeah, that same old myth. You know, I said at the outset of the interview that the book reads like a novel. Can you speak for a moment about how as a historian, you approached the craft of writing and to be a little more specific, what advice could you give historians with regards to taking raw historical data and molding it into beautiful prose like you do? Well, I think what I tried to do when I think a lot of historians do, a lot of historians that I admire is to try to, first of all, recognize and admit to themselves the emotional power and impact of the stories that they're reading in the archives because we're lying if we say they don't have power. These, in some cases, are documenting people's lives in moments of great crisis. And, you know, their victories, their losses, their survivals, their failures to survive, et cetera. And so, we can't pretend that we, as historians, are objective, purely objective in relationship to them. I don't believe that's true. And so I think we have a responsibility to communicate that kind of engagement with the sources to our readers alongside all the other things that we as professionals can bring, which is the ability to know enough about how the sources are produced to, so that we can put those sources in a proper context, right? So, if we know that a census is gathered in such and such a way, and it leaves these people and it leaves other people out, you know, we need to communicate that to the readers alongside the numbers that that census ends up yielding. Because that, in turn, also helps us and the readers understand the stories that maybe, you know, are a little bit less dry on the surface, or we are less dry, but we need to let the readers know that no sources is purely objective. Every one of them is a story. But what we're gonna try to do is braid together the different stories into a larger story that we think is the best representation, what actually happened, why it happened, and what it meant to the people who were involved in it. - There's a moment in the book, and it might be chapter three, where you talk about like a man is being shot for rebelling, and you say, inside his brain, billions of neurons just cut off. And the memories of his mother and the door, when he was, when he was, the he remembers from his childhood, they just went. And the names of the people standing around him, watching him be shot, they just went dark. And oh my God, man, like that's not something that's sort of, that is, that is bringing in the humanity to the reader. And it's like, I mean, when you read that, I don't know how you would get through this book, if you have any callousness towards this institution. And not just, not just think about the pain and the suffering, but also just think about humanity. It's really amazing. Sorry, I'm going to quit fanboying on you now, but it was God, man. - That's what makes this book so special. You kind of do that over and over again. And I think, you know, you talk about in the introduction, you say, man, this is a really vast narrative. I'm trying to write a book about, you kind of lay it out there, but, but I think that's how you succeed is by humanizing it. And it really brings the reader along. The final question here, we're talking about historical narratives. What about your historical narrative? What, you know, you're from North Carolina, is that correct? - Yeah, from Durham. - Yeah, so I'm here right down the road from Durham right now. What events occurred in your early life that put you on the road that you're on today? - I think probably more than one event, it was the process of growing up in Durham and being part of a recently desegregated school system with, or a number of years, mostly African-American classmates and teachers, being even among the whites, you know, my family and my wife, friends, families, you know, being among groups of people who had a critique. They had a critique of the larger narratives that you would hear, both openly and more subtly, projected at you, whether we're talking about what was in traditional textbooks, what was at historic sites, what was coming through on the news, because they're always narratives. They're always narratives running in the background and at the foundation of the stories that we're telling about daily life. So growing up around people who had a critique of that, and then when I went to college, being around some great teachers, my advisor, David Johnson, who's a historian from Trinidad, who was a disciple of the kind of Walter Rodney School of Third World Marxism, and just reading a Walter Rodney and hearing in his class is a sort of unapologetic critique of the myths of Western history, more broadly, I'm just WB Du Bois, but I can't remember what in which work, but he said, "Pretty sure is Du Bois." We can edit it out later if I got in this building, but where he said, "You know, the northern people "and even white northerners have been spoiled by sweets "on subject of the Negro," and as he put it in that day and age. What I think he meant was that those folks who in the early 20th century were shaping nationalist historians, nationalists, history of the United States. They had just got way too easy on themselves and on their ancestors and on the United States, and they'd even gone too easy on this other whites who they defeated in the Civil War and who they were now making nice with and whose lynchings and segregation they were essentially ignoring. I mean, we just saw that the Senate passed the anti-lynching bill, and the Senate is 229 years old. This is 2018, and finally, this doesn't happen. So there's a critique, it was already out there. There's a critique that is deep and wide and will be there for many, many centuries to come because it's gonna be useful, I think. And so I tried to participate in pushing that there, that story forward and trying to get it to a broader audience, but I don't think I know I wouldn't have done that if I had not had that very, very long process of instruction that I was lucky enough to be immersed in. - Well, we are lucky to immerse ourselves in your product, your output, your hard work. Thank you for being on the show. - Yeah, thank you Ed. This is amazing. - Same, same book. - Thank you for listening to The Road to Now. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you did, could we ask that you share the word about the show? That would be fantastic. You can give us five stars on whatever app you use. If you do it on Apple Podcast, please give it a try. Give us also a little review. That helps spread the word. If you know someone who would like this, shoot him a text. Let him know, say, hey, here's a great episode. You might like, that makes you a better friend, right? You're sharing something great. 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