The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region. The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In this 1897 photo, African American men and boys are shown picking cotton on a plantation in Atlanta, Georgia. As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana, sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps, they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton. To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women - the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property - were transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become - and remain - a leading global economy.īut as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage.

The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.

Baptist the half has never been told