The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

In the Introduction, Baptist cites Ralph Ellison’s proposal that “we view the whole of American life as a drama enacted on the body of a Negro giant who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and scene upon which and within which the action unfolds” (xxv). He uses this to structure the book, naming the chapters after parts of the giant’s body that have some symbolic bearing on the stories told within the chapter. However, it also functions as a symbol in itself, representing the absolute centrality of the role enslaved, exploited African-American bodies play in the development and successes of the United States. In this, it recalls what is perhaps the central message of the book: that slavery cannot be treated as an isolated, premodern shame with limited bearing on the modern world or modern America.  

In the first decades of the 19th century, enslavers begin referring to slaves as “field hands” (101). This is highly symbolic and has significant ramifications for enslaved people. Turning enslaved people into “hands” means reducing them to their capacity to labor, to their “disembodied hands” (103), mindlessly picking ever-larger quotas of cotton. This is an important move away from older models of slavery, in which slaves “rose in status by learning trades” (103) and where acquiring “[s]kills meant that one could