"The Half Has Never Been Told" Edward Baptist

 Every now and then a student or parent tells me, “Slavery wasn’t that bad,” or the time honored classic, “the Civil War was about State’s rights, not slavery.” Edward Baptist provides an in-depth response to such arguments making it clear the vast majority of the wealth of the United States was built on the exploited labor of slaves who toiled on land stolen from Native Americans. And by the way, slavery and its role in the US had everything to do with the Civil War.
Baptist uses the extensive records kept by slave labor camps as owners sought ways to maximize the production of cotton and with it their profits. Southern slave owners would have made the folks at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers proud as they figured out ways to monetize the people they owned. Mortgaging slaves allowed them to sell debts as investments, as investors, many of them living in the north hoped to get in on the profits being produced by slave labor. They even figured out how to get southern governments to back their schemes making taxpayers responsible if people defaulted.
Baptist supplements these records with published accounts of runaway slaves and the oral history interviews with people who grew up as slaves.Through it all, Baptist describes the inherent cruelty in slavery as owners pushed and beat their slaves to perform more efficiently. Baptist describes this as the “whipping machine” and documents the use of torture to drive profits, to keep the slaves “in their place,” or to just prove they were in charge.
One of the important tasks Baptist undertakes is to explain how slavery and the desire of slave owners to expand the system underlay almost every important event in the early years of the United States. This includes arguments over the Second Bank of the United States, removal of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Creek, conflicts with Mexico over Texas, the Mexican-American war, the transcontinental railroad and more. This is important material to use to supplement the traditional interpretations of most high school American History textbooks.
I read this book on a tablet which I found frustrating as this is one of those books where it is important to read the end notes. So sometime, I plan to buy the book in its traditional format.