Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told

Edward Baptist 's book, The Half Has Never Been Told, is a book that shows the unspoken history of life on a Southern plantation. Baptist used oral histories of former enslaved people, and with this information he wrote about how the increase in slave labor from 1790 - 1860 shaped America. He also used these oral histories to give further insight on the true lives of slaves in the South. By using Baptist’s book, in addition to the oral histories of different former slaves, we can answer questions like, how did masters get their slaves to increase their productivity? How did slaves resist or revolt against their master? And how did masters truly feel about their slaves? Slavery was a lot of things in the South. It was an economy, a business, …show more content…
They would give slaves a quota that must be met. Every time the quota was met, they raised the quota. If a slave couldn’t reach the quota, they got whipped. You would think that slave masters would just rely on whipping and other physical abuse to motivate slaves to work harder, but that actually isn’t true. Masters would abstain from whipping slaves, because a slave who cannot work is a useless slave. Marks of physical abuse also lowered a slave 's price. Buying and selling slaves was a legitimate business in the south, and slaves who had scars were valued less. Looking at Baptist’s argument, compared to an oral history by a former slave, his argument seems correct. In the oral history “James Johnson. The Cotton Man. Ex-Slave 79 Years Old.”, the ex-slave James Johnson talks his story of how he went from slave picking crops in the field, to working in an office that distributed bales of cotton. James Johnson was able to work his way up the ranks because of how hard he worked in the fields. “If de nigger shows dat he is willin’ to work and to learn to be business lak, make money and walk straight wid his boss and fellowman, de better class of de white people is gwine