In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time

Book Review: 'The Half Has Never Been Told' by Edward E. Baptist

In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time BN-EK527_bkrvba_DV_20140905112225

In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time BN-EK527_bkrvba_DV_20140905112225

Slavery's defenders often portrayed the South's "peculiar institution" as the antithesis of money-grubbing Yankee capitalism, rooted in an idealized agrarian hierarchy of white master and enslaved African that had been ordained for all time by God and natural law. Indeed, they often insisted that it was a supremely charitable endeavor that saved the slave from his own innate barbarism, asserting, for example, that they had to provide for elderly, infirm and immature slaves whether they were productive or not, as if they were members of their own family—albeit of a very inferior sort. As the wealthy South Carolina planter and politician James H. Hammond condescendingly put it in 1845, in a truculent rebuttal to attacks on slavery made by a British abolitionist: "We must therefore content ourselves with our dear labor under the consoling reflection that what is lost to us is gained to humanity." Abolitionists were contemptuous of such self-serving nonsense, but they too tended to see slavery as an economically inefficient, and morally reprehensible, hangover from the premodern past.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist-1409952510

a third of all U.S. wealth at the time

Well, that seems fair. Land, labor and capital.

In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time

In the 1820s, slave owners held two million slaves worth $1 billion—a third of all U.S. wealth at the time

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