The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

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

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

“The coffle-chains enable Georgia-men to turn feet against hearts, to make enslaved people work directly against their own love of self, children, spouses; of the world, of freedom and hope.” 

The coffle-chains that linked enslaved men together for their forced marches into new territories did more than prevent the slaves from running away or fighting back. They took away all autonomy, forcing slaves to betray all they held dear, and beginning the process of reducing them to objectified “hands.” 

“The Chesapeake enslavers were bound by many different considerations when it came to buying or selling human beings: family ties between enslaved people that were important to other whites, fear of angry slaves, fear of one’s evangelized conscience, fear of foreign criticism of the land of the free.” 

Slavery in the northeast in the early years of American independence was shaped by restrictions emerging from public scrutiny in the early states and from slaves’ relative autonomy. One of the key aspects of the “new slavery” was that forced migration moved slaves into new territories away, from scrutiny, and used the pushing system to obliterate their hopes of resistance.