Slavery Quotes by Edward E. Baptist

“few years after Ball was herded south, a slave trader marched a coffle past the US Capitol just as a gaggle of congressmen took…

— Edward E. Baptist

“American” women (and a few men) complained that here, wealthy white men sometimes lived with mulatto women until it came time to marry a…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Enslaved African Americans built the modern United States, and indeed the entire modern world, in ways both obvious and hidden.”

— Edward E. Baptist

“Within half a century after Butler sent Charles Mallory away from Fortress Monroe empty-handed, the children of white Union and Confederate soldiers united against…

— Edward E. Baptist

“The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Chains enabled another kind of violence to be done as well. Chains saved whites from worrying about placating this one’s mother, or buying that…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Once all the gold and silver had been thoroughly stolen, the empires found even greater sources of wealth by laying a belt of plantation…

— Edward E. Baptist

“One night at a tavern in Virginia’s Greenbrier County, a traveler watched as a group of traders put a coffle of people in one…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Many whites, now proclaiming that science proved that people of African descent were intellectually inferior and congenitally prone to criminal behavior, looked wistfully to…

— Edward E. Baptist

“But he forgot to close a lock one night, and as a newspaper reported, “the negroes rose and cut the throat of Mr. Speers,…

— Edward E. Baptist

“by the 1840s the North had built a complex, industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor. Yet,…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people…

— Edward E. Baptist

“The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not…

— Edward E. Baptist

“Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And…

— Edward E. Baptist

“The next day, as they walked, a stranger rode up, matching the Georgia-man’s pace. “Niggers for sale?” He wanted to buy two women. The…

— Edward E. Baptist