![]() ![]() ![]() Enslavers’ techniques for organizing and extracting ever-increasing amounts of work from the enslaved rested on the regular practice of bodily violence. The second story of slavery is the story of the brutality and torture of the cotton camps. The banning of the Transatlantic slave trade in 1809 did not prevent the sale and transportation of slaves from the Southeast to enslavers in the Southwest as demand grew for labor “hands” to cultivate and pick cotton. New Orleans immediately became a vital shipping and trading port for the South. ![]() ![]() The successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) and Napoleon’s subsequent failures to subdue the former slave rebels precipitated the Louisiana Purchase from France to the United States. Cotton, a booming staple, represented the “second story” of slavery in the New World, the first being that of the luxury goods, sugar and rum. Unlike many narratives, this history focuses on how the incredible expansion in wealth and prosperity in the young nation rested upon the unpaid and dehumanizing toil of enslaved African Americans in the emerging cotton industry of the Deep South and Southwest. Baptist presents a readable and engaging account of slavery in the United States from approximately the American Revolution through the Civil War. ![]()
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