One day two lifetimes ago, about 1825, a man from Maryland was standing outside a Methodist church after service, talking with his friends and fellow church members. William was enslaved. Parts of his life were very difficult. But he had also been able to create richness in other parts of his life. He probably had a family, and he was very active in the church. Yet as I explain in my new book The Half Has Never Been Told, on that particular day everything suddenly changed for William. William saw his owner approaching him with another white man. William might have never met this man before, but he had heard all about him. This was Austin Woolfolk, a slave trader who shipped hundreds of men, women, and children from Maryland down to New Orleans every year. And Woolfolk was carrying rope. Woolfolk told William to stretch out his hands. William had been sold. He would be shipped or marched down to New Orleans, where Woolfolk would sell him again, probably to a cotton planter. In Louisiana, or Mississippi, or Alabama, hed have to learn a different kind of work, and build a new life -- if he survived the diseases and violence that shortened African-American lifespans in the cotton regions. Now his friends began to break down, weeping and screaming like people at a young persons funeral. They were watching yet another friends life dissolve in front of their eyes. Starting in the 1790s, slave owners began creating a huge cotton and slavery complex on the newest frontiers of the young United States. Cotton soon became the worlds most important market commodity -- the Big Oil of the 19th century -- and the work of slaves like William was driving the industrial revolution. We live today in an economy built in part on the foundations that people like William laid. ...Because of decisions by white people like Williams owner, today millions of African-Americans in Maryland or Virginia dont know their millions of Mississippi or Louisiana cousins, and vice versa. But the loss goes beyond the fact that family reunions are smaller than they should be. Slavery systematically exploited, brutalized, and impoverished some people. The forced movement of people to the cotton frontier made others wealthy, and not just enslavers. Northerners and Europeans created a worldwide textile industry based on slave-made cotton. They lent money to slave owners to buy more Williams from more Woolfolks and took the profit. Even today, the discrepancy between the descendants of the enslaved and white Americans is huge: In terms of family wealth, white households have almost $15 for every dollar held by African-American ones. cnn/2014/09/07/opinion/baptist-slavery-book-panned-economist-review/index.html
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 17:52:06 +0000
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