Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the number of slaves in the United States grew five-fold. During those decades a million enslaved people were sold out of the Carolinas and Chesapeake region, including Maryland, to vast new cotton plantations in the interior south. In the 1820s, Baltimore was the biggest center of slave trading on the East Coast. Edward Baptist, a Cornell University History Professor, argues in a new book that, far from dwindling in importance during the 19th century, slavery was the driving force of the American economy, shaping it to this day.
The book is called "The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism." In it, he details how slavery and American capitalism were, and still are, inextricably bound. Professor Baptist joins Sheilah on the line from Cornell University to talk about it.
Baptist will be at the National Archives in Washington today at noon. You can watch his talk live here.
