on the problem. but it shows the cdc at work and how important the cdc is and that is a big point in my "pandemics" book. ..

>> now i am very pleased to introduce tonight speaker. edward baptist's associate professor of history at cornel university. originally from durham north carolina, he is also the coeditor with the late stephanie camp of new studies in the history of american slavery and the louis hyman of american capitalism a reader e-book from simon & schuster. the "l.a. times" calls "the half has never been told" an ambitious new economic and social history of america and peniel joseph director of the center for the study of race and democracy at tufts university writes that it is a true marvel. groundbreaking thoroughly researched expansive and provocative able for scholars of slavery and its aftermath to reconsider long-held conceptions. we are pleased to bring to harvard bookstore tonight, please join me in welcoming edward baptist. [applause]

>> i'm just going to turn this on as a stopwatch so i don't go on too long. i promise it's silenced. thank you all for being here to meet the economists favor -- favorite author of the week. some of you may have heard of that. i'm not going to talk directly about that yet but if you want to ask questions we can get into that a little bit later. i am really happy to be here. there are some old friends that are here, people that i haven't seen in a long time so that's pretty cool. all right, let me just get into it. let me try to describe the book a little bit. this book in one sense is the story of two bodies. the first body, and i lay the whole book out as you will see in just a moment as a series of metaphors based around the body.

the first body was the new kind of slavery that emerged in the young united states right after it achieved its independence from the british empire. although at the end of the american revolution slavery look to some observers as if it would disappear along with the new states other colonial institutions. it did not. instead like wade hampton of south carolina it transformed an institution. once those innovators learn how to produce cotton and slave labor cotton fiber became the most important commodity of the industrial revolution. as world demand for cotton brew after 1790 the victims of those forced migrations are people like charles ball, a young maryland man sold to a slave trader in 1805. the trader who ball learned was named the giffen chained him to 51 people and march them all 400 miles to south carolina. that's where my giffen sold

charles ball to wade hampton. divided by 400 miles of marching from his wife and children ball had not seen his mother sends her sale to a slave trader years before and now wade hampton and his overseers would try to separate him from his very own self using work management techniques as ingenious as anything modern experts could imagine except these were backed up with bertell whippings and other kinds of torture. they force ball to reveal exactly how much work he could do if he went full speed up from daybreak to dusk and the next day and the next day and so on. they pushed him to work even faster always with the threat of a bloody horrifically painful skin shredding cowhide whipping hanging over his head. what happened charles ball would happen again and again. by the time and flavors finished millions of acres in the mississippi valley buying millions of more from members like france to cut made by ever more efficiently by enslaved african-americans was becoming a key raw material of an

unprecedented transformation that we remember as the industrial revolution. and eventually this change would raise millions upon billions of human beings standards of living moving them out of for them out of furmack subsistence agriculture and into factory focused work. while this change is challenging implications for the future of every species that lives on this planet there's no question the modernization of human society has brought great benefits to many humans but for charles ball is ever more efficient cotton labor was one of the foundations of his transformation a broad campaign and he was not alone. by 1860 and flavors like camden had moved over 1 million enslaved people. they now control 80% of the world cotton market at its most important point. the british cotton market and helped make possible in britain and in new england as well the revolutionary factory system that change forever how human economies work.

as a writer and a historian who is trying to get a handle on this massive phenomenon i was inspired by the novus ralph ellingson and he'd describe it as as a vast drama being played out on the body of a giant to use his terms. his metaphor seem to describe the experience of people like charles ball and in fact to describe all of them together and they way the body made up of all the enslaved bodies that were being bought marched and exploited into the sources i was reading plantation ledger slave traders journaled newspapers full of slave sale as in runway as all of them were people being describe renaissance a giant metaphorical body. you are part of a system that was supposed to work together. it was being stretched across new states and territories in decades of rapid american expansion. everything that enslavers tried to do was attempt to turn an enslaved body against their own

interests. so they measure charles ball's cotton picking great until he had to raise left hand against right-handed to survive the working day with. as i wrote i saw the image of all of these relationships that enslavers were creating. feed for the slave trade that march people moved south and west away from everything they had ever known everything that gave them strength and love the right-hand and left-hand the way that charles ball's creative ability extracted from him. entrepreneurs figured out how to tap world credit markets with the financing that allow them to the ever-growing armies of enslaved migrants and by the 1830s the system the great big interlinked bodies of relationships is building the wealth of wade hampton on the backs of enslaved people. once in the cotton state average for far wealthier than those the united states and the health of all western countries economies

depended to no small extent on the price of cotton. what about the second body? that one is the body of african-americans itself the culture and identity formed in no small part in reaction to the creation of the body exploited by the corporate relationships created by enslavers and financiers and factory owners and consumers. western culture is acquired over the last hundred years a couple of metaphorical ways to think about people whose bodies are controlled and forced to work against their own control and interest. one is a zombie. this word entered u.s. u.s. culture and a large scale after u.s. marines occupied haiti in 1915 and it's gone on to become a staple of horror movies and literature. the context in haiti at any rate was really i would argue a commentary on the history of slavery supposedly some haitian practitioners can use spells and potions to kill a person and then raise them up as a willis body that moves and acts but isn't alive anymore.

i would say on one level the zombie story is really a meth about slavery which of course the haitian people also endured. a system in which powerful white wizards created rituals of social death as orlando patterson made -- put it as a way they could be enslaved and with no control over their own bodies. though they were enslaved when they were bought by slave traders they were personal rituals of social death like separation from families. we can see how they could feel it in the cotton fields they might be moving but they were no longer truly alive. u.s. pop-culture zombies and what they have done with a meth was to me more like a replay of slavery horror stories that gripped 19th century white america with anxiety from time to time and those faithful servants suddenly turned into murderous irrational rapist just like american zombies were known to do but maybe it's no accident

that the zombie trope and culture took off in the mid-1960s as images of black power occupied white america's television screens. but that's a digression. in the 19th century the zombie body that african-american was a danger of becoming a skull cotton slavery expansion was more like a classical haitian formulation that by the time charles ball separated from the family in the hope for freedom and pride in his own labor that made a life that maryland slavery worthwhile was toiling, by the time it was toiling among cotton row after another all after another with dave on becoming the equivalent equivalent of a zombie was a real possibility for him and not just for him but for all african-americans who endure this. as a powerful enslavers grew so too to their ability to render not just individual for body of akron -- african-american dead in its various components that to another enslaved forever and a body that served their captors. but there's a different metaphor that describes at the second body the one that responded to it enslavers exploitation

actually did and that was a prisoner of war. when we see on video clips of a shutdown predator kidnapped journalist ideological slogans of their captors we don't necessarily think the p.o.w. actually believes those words. in fact we know that they don't did indeed we hear about prisoners of all nations and all situation to develop their own society their own codes of communication, their own most of resisting even when they cannot act. this creation and duration of alternative realities acts of caring and respect for each other hopes hidden societies values that relentlessly oppose those of their captors is what keeps p.o.w.s from becoming zombies. slavery especially the intensified entrepreneurial constantly changing kind that developed in the 19th century u.s. was as the author coats put it a constant state of war. enslave african-americans drop into deeper growing system of slavery after the mac and revolution behave more like

p.o.w.s and zombies. other collective body and individual bodies were stretched on a rack of brutal new systems of labor control slave trading and financialization more of them refuse to succumb to despair far more than the number who simply gave up. some slave societies people gave up and summon slave societies and laypeople did everything they could do to escape their collective collective identity on people like charles ball chose to identify with each other. with disparate elements they built a common language and it common set of cultural practices. they chose to identify with and care for each other. part of this came from the fact that instead of assimilating the ideas and justifications of their oppressors they created an account of history that deems the process that enslavers tried to use to divide them and exploit them to force migration to the high profit entrepreneurial cotton frontier is the evil that they faced together the evil that made them one. they called it being stolen in fact and they put all kinds of

forced movement into the cotton frontier and that one category of being stolen. if one body with a system of functions that extracted value from all enslaved peoples bodies by subjecting them to a continual process of instruction and the other body was that of african-americans as a people. as a people. superthin discover their own sense of identity in the crucible of intensified exploitation and horrific violence. the bodies, the two big bodies had actually bodies but there are lots of actual bodies in the book and many of them endure some pretty horrific treatment. these are instead to metaphorical bodies that are at the spine that perhaps has never been told. the two bodies that grow entwined and fight each other almost like siamese twins trapped in the same woman that's the story that is in the course of 20 pages. it's a long book until you look what it's trying to do which is perhaps overly ambitious but

unless what i've try to do which is to re-center the history of united united states between a revolution in the civil war around this one historical process in two bodies around the enslaved african-americans were forced to migrate to the cotton frontier and his work and labor and his resistance provided at the same time the fuel of america's capitalism but also the culture, the ideas and ultimately the political momentum that would destroy this first version of american capitalism. by the end of the book each of these bodies has played a central role and as i just indicated their struggle brought on the civil war. brought about emancipation and in 2014 is still not always clear which body is going to be the winner. the struggle seems to be continuing. now what i would like to do his transition to the reading of the passage or two. do we have time for that? all right.

i want to read a little bit about charles ball who i mentioned before. charles ball as i suggested before was from maryland and in many ways he encapsulates the story of this force migration because he believed in 1805 that the future could be different from him, different for him from what his own mother had endured. she had been taken by a slave trader when he was just a boy. he believed living in maryland where many enslave people were achieving freedom sometimes they're saving money, sometimes through emancipation by their owner because their owner had gotten certain religions or political convictions, sometimes both of them, he believed he might be able to achieve freedom eventually. later he would laugh in thinking that because on the one day he

was sent one nice spring day he was sent by his owner to drive a wagon to a nearby town and when he got to the nearby town and sat down to the e breakfast in the stable and he happened to look out to the door, he saw his owner and another white man who didn't recognize talking and when he walked back out there he was quickly surrounded by a crowd of men. suddenly and here i will read from the book, suddenly he felt the presence of several people looming around him. he turned as out turned as i've ignore a dozen white men surrounded him. before his eyes had time to flicker from one hard face of from one hard-faced connects his head back as someone sees him by the caller from behind. you are my property now the boys shouted in his ear and his ball with his head around is how the man with whom -- ballard is his honor with whom ballard had been whispering. you must go with me to georgia the stranger snarled.

ball was taken and walked to a place where 51 other people are waiting in chains and he walked into the chains with them. the fact that enslaved men were locked together as they were marched south is very significant because their feet and their legs were not chained but their arms, their hands were chained together and this prevented them from doing anything except walking in step. this prevented resistance very effectively. this prevented running away because 51 men chained together with a couple thousand pounds of iron being carried between them are not going to be able to get away quietly or quickly. but it did make certain things very difficult like eating, like normal bodily functions like going to sleep was very very

difficult for 51 individuals chained together to actually manage those kinds of very simple things. so one of interesting things about the autobiography that charles ball later dictated to a white abolitionists was the way he talks about his own internal process that he went went through the process of being sold and marched south and he talks repeatedly about his desire to commit suicide after this had happened and his frustration that he can't do that because he is chained. the first night as he slept chains to dozens of other people nestled between two people who he was chained to was just a span of a few links to separate them. he writes, he remembers later that it took him a long time to fall asleep. here i will read another short passage. when at last he slapped his son

came to him. and during the little boy tried to break the chain between his fathers manacles to set this father's hands free so he could fix the boys broken world but the iron held and charles sun faded. charles grandfather appeared. born in africa and the 1720s he had been kidnapped as a teenager and sold to a man who brought them across the saltwater to maryland. there they remained him and by the time charles had known him whole venice two was called to be with half a century and slavery. ben never surrendered his enslavers or the enslaved -- and slay people who behave submissively in his mind. charles father tried to play less defined part that after the sale of his wife and children the father change. he spent his free time talking about africa and slavery. the owner grew worried that the anchorman would run away. arrange for a posse to help seize charles father for a

georgia trader but all been overheard to whiteman talking about the plan. he crossed three miles of woods in the dark to charles' bothers kevin. handing him a bag of dried corn he sent them off to pennsylvania and no one ever heard from charles father again. ben would have come for his grandson too but the endless debt, 10 years gone now. when the sun came up they found stumbling forward trying to keep time with the rest of the -- let me just skip to one more story and then we will go to q&a. if you don't mind i will tell you a boston story. because boston is very implicated in this story as many of you probably know in the

early 19th century a group of investors and factory managers and entrepreneurs some of whom were called the boston associates created america's most significant textile factory and of course they spend -- spend southern cotton into products. actually because of the structure of the american tariff system the major market released for the first 10 or 15 years for the nail, new england textile center in southern slaves. southern slaves are spending too much time working in the fields to make their own clothing so their owners by the clothing from new england manufactures. american tariff structure protected the course are less finally woven cloths and impose a tariff on british versions of that but because the british were better at making the finer middle and upper-class clothing the above those to come and free of charge to protect the middle and upper-class consumers of that club. southern slaves, their owners

bought for them to rough cloth that was being made in other places. well, southern markets, southern cotton very important and made a close connection between the so-called cotton wicks and particular very conservative group of politicians and southern politicians but there was one man from a very old boston family who lived very closely here who had an even closer connection this was john gorham palfrey. john gorham palfrey had been born in boston. he moved south to louisiana when he's a teenager because his father a boston merchant was opening a plantation down there. when he got to be 16 or so he started harvard younger in those days, he was sent back up to harvard where he did his undergrad degree and that he became a unitarian minister and then a professor of divinity at

harvard and all the while his brothers on, has four other brothers were acquiring their own plantations in helping to manage their father's property. their father was still alive but he was getting older. one of the brothers dies dies but there are still three of them around. but the early 1840s when the older palfrey of the older john palfrey is clearly nearing death and as he aged one of john jungers -- john's younger brother writes mnd devises john the younger that he would buy the terms of the napoleonic civil code inherit one third of his father's property most of value of that property was in enslaved. the best way to share that money would be to sell the people he inherited that you might incur the risk of palfrey at some busy abolitionists reporting that the rep and have been selling flesh etc. etc. are living on income

of slave labor. in 18431 of the first cotton ships bringing raw material to arrive that fall in boston brings the news of john the elder's death. the younger and now owns 20 human beings ranging in age from an infant to 65. at the current price level in new orleans they are value purchased 7000 and by the way their different ways to calculate what that means in 2014 but the range of those calculations goes from about $300,000 to $1.7 million. john the younger through a complex process that is even now not even clear had decided he did not want to own enslave people anymore. without notifying his brothers john petition petitioned the louisiana state legislature would have banned mission inside the state to let him free the 20 slaves and allow them to stay in

the state in their homes where they had built after recovering from the process of forced migration. the brothers learned that john sections from a new orleans story reporting the legislature's rejection of his request. one of them writes angrily to john the whole story is going to be published in the local paper coming saturday and all the neighbors would hear of it and think of palfrey's brother wasn't abolitionists. meanwhile purposing emancipation for 20 people at old john's camp would render the other 40 the other two-thirds unmanageable and send the news up and down to the river by the grapevine telegraph to new orleans to find a lawyer for freedom suit. better to let them remain quietly at work and time of gradually settled difficulties henry insisted. john doesn't agree with that. he eventually traveled down to new orleans, travels into the countryside readies 20 individual for live and pays for

their passage to massachusetts and they work us admitted. the interesting thing about him is it's pretty clear he didn't do this out of any antiracist radicalism. his letters have some pretty unpleasant stuff even for that day and he certainly at best could be thought of as a paternalist and is dealing with these formerly enslaved people. at the same time what i try to do and although i note that in the book i tried to give them some credit for doing what so many other white americans could not do which is to reject his own state in this massively wealth generating system. it was painfully impossible for almost anyone who directly to benefit from it to convince themselves to stop taking a financial benefit and the fact that he could do so i think is

significant and in fact it turned out to have significant effects because it sparked a new set of debates within massachusetts politics and a splinter. charles sumner gets involved and so on and so forth. in its own way its own little way that emancipation is part of the process that leads to the civil war. but what's an even bigger part of the process is what charles ball did. after two or three years working on wade hampton's plantation learning day after day to pick faster and during immense difficulties he decides the time has come to flee. in fact by this point he has been moved across the savannah river into georgia. waiting until the cornstarch to get right in the fields, he ties his favorite dog to a tree in the woods. he can't bring the dog with him. he knows somebody will find it

and he leaves and it takes him approximately four months to get back to maryland because he is traveling only at nighttime. one point he him most died of hypothermia at a midnight river crossing where he fell and etc.. he is even captured at one point but refuses to give his name and refuses to give any information invaders able to escape from that. i will just read the last little bit of that story. so ball park south of the jail heads northeast. at the potomac defines a small boat tied up on the shore. growing himself across ball hiked into the same thing. at 1:00 in the morning he reached the door of his wife's cabin stood there in shock. perhaps you'd been replaced. finally he summoned the courage

to knock in hurt his wife respond whose wife respond to spare? he said charles and she said who is this that speaks like my husband? not the same because his tongue sounded different now. i will stop there and take any questions. [applause] what is the protocol for the questions? yes sir. >> you got a great review and "the wall street journal." question, you use the body metaphor. how might that relate to david ryan davidson's last book. yet this whole section on the animal location of the blackbody and i think at some point he alludes to elephants. in your historiography, how do

does -- how do you overlap there this idea of the blackbody. what david says is that central to the whole white supremacist ideology is this idea that you must reduce the african to that of an animal and from here to ferguson. based on the work that you have done how do we incorporate or get to this idea that basically black to this day is essentially an animal and that is sort of the cycle cultural lens for which this society views the descendents of slaves? >> so of course great society allergy is full of contradictions. let me talk about two contradictions and i agree that obviously that imagery is deployed with great frequency.

in fact the expansion of slavery in the u.s. and all the wealth generated with whatever affects on the development of western civilization as we know it of course relies on humanity of enslaved people. for instance, the pressure on enslave people to pick more and there's a debate about whether increased totals and the amounts that the average person pics increases for new% between 81860. almost as fast as the average textile worker. almost as fast as their output of increasing in factories with machines. so enslave people are picking much more cotton as it seeds and i would argue that it's -- enslavers are focused on making people pick faster every single day. we have great records of that but if they are focused on taking faster every day, which

again is a say this is the most common record they keep, the record of how fast people pick if they are focused on that what they are really focused on doing is outsourcing all the creativity, all of their thinking, all of the innovation in the system of cotton production to enslave people. we don't have to figure out, we don't have to do a time and motion study like frederick taylor did with industrial production back in the 1890s. we just got the quota hire and we get them to figure it out. it's a horrific kind of theft because it steals so many hours and days from people but it can only happen if you are dealing with people who you understand who you to believe to be every bit as creative as you, every bit as innovative as you if not more. [inaudible]

>> animals don't improve how they do things. they don't change. human beings do. so that's one thing. then, the other thing i will point out to you is that we know that the sexualization of enslaved women is crucially important to the system of slavery and i argue in a book that it's not a bug, it's a feature of slavery. it's absolutely essential and that in itself is not entirely new but what i think is also clear is enslavers especially slave traders use the sexualization of women to enhance their profits, to make their commodities more attractive to purchasers, to get enslavers who are in louisiana and mississippi or whatever they have choices, they can via more

more slaves are not by more slaves. everything has trade-offs. if you borrow more money you have to pay that back and then you have to make calculations like where's the cotton going? you do these things in the middle of all of this sea of economic uncertainty and change that goes up and down. and sometimes you know you get into a bubble situation where you have a cotton boom that you should know because if you have experienced it before it's going to eventually burst that put slave traders want to do is get slaveowners or potential purchasers to override that kind of thinking and to just go ahead and buy. to what extent they do this intentionally or not, they talk, they end up accomplishing that goal by using the sexualization not just a female slaves. today is the sexualization female slaves to enhance i would argue the extent to which people are willing to purchase all of slaves by creating the slave

market by getting people to think of the slave market is a place where you buy sex and we know from behavioral economic studies or at least there's pretty strong data suggesting that when you introduce sex into a buying and selling situation men purchase more and they purchase with less concern for ultimately paying off whatever it is they are buying on credit. there are a number of studies that suggest that and it looks to me like that's exactly what happened. you see where i'm going. you don't sexualize animals. i suppose some people do. [laughter] but not on a large scale. a question over here.

>> given the difficulties in getting animals in captivity and sues to reproduce often is there much data on reproduction rates among enslaved women? >> we can talk about comparing different human societies i think. i think it would be just yeah i think that's the way it will take the question. what you see is that in the united states enslaved women from, enslaved women in virginia and maryland are having more children by the 17 50's than their counterparts in let's say jamaica. there are all kinds of reasons for this and historians have argued about it for years and years and years. but what is clear from my research and from my sources is

that enslaved women transported to places like mississippi and alabama had fewer children than their counterparts in virginia. there are lots of reasons for this. if you are married and you're yanked away from your family, from your spouse is going to take a while before you are going have any more children willingly. that makes sense. there is also a much harsher disease environment. infant death rates in large mississippi cotton plantations and large louisiana sugar plantations and large alabama cotton plantations, those were almost identical to the infant death rates in caribbean plantations so in the counties where the slave labor camps were the biggest, then it's quite possible we don't have good enough county level data to be sure of this but it's quite possible you actually had a negative population growth rate,

natural population growth rate. population growth was provided mainly by force migration rather than by birth. >> without referring directly to the economist, which you just did, i did just a little bit of research on the amount of slavery that exist today worldwide in just about every country in the world, even america and i noticed a reference to one chocolate company that said well, by the year 2020 they will stop selling chocolate produced by slavery and coded devoir i think it is.

corto devoir. is there anything in your research that would shed light on how easy it is for an economic system to devoid itself from the source such as the so-called fair trade implementation? >> in the u.s. it was obviously very difficult for it to happen. there was was a civil war and 700,000 or more people died and in fact given had not -- enslavers wouldn't have started the war that slavery would have ended. it was a colossal blunder although they would would have worked hard ever since to get it back. they i say that as a north carolinians. yeah anyway. i think it's very difficult for

people to turn away from things that make them very wealthy or make their lives significantly more convenient that seems to me it's all the more important to understand that we have been peddling a convenient fiction often nonbut more on than off since the 1860s. we have been peddling this convenient fiction that slavery is an economically backward system and the sounds of inevitably destroying itself or in efficiency, inevitably collapsing. there is no reason to think that from looking at the history of american slavery which accolade -- actually grew and grew until there was this massive dramatic war and we can look at the micro level and we can find what seems to be evidence that in certain kinds

of production, we will just talk about production. we wanted to talk about the way the way that slavery is used as collateral. certain kinds of production at maybe in slave labor it's more efficient. the case of the enslaved cotton pickers in the west are once they start picking cotton and once they are put into a system that clearly extracts more and more pockets of cotton from them every day take over the world market. they become the main producers of commercially available cotton. they underprice everything else so we can't rest easy in the confidence that systems of coerced labor and existence and bondage are simply going to disappear without action is sometimes very painful for us and secondly it also points to the air of making deficiency productivity our main benchmark for evaluating the economic systems rather than a standard

that ultimately privileges a standard that i think we can only call moral. but that is begins aside on but it seems to me it clearly indicates that. i don't know who is next. >> another really powerful piece on racial history came out in the past few months is coats argument. i'm just wondering what your scholarship, what opinion it's led you to as response to his peace overtures to the question of reparations in general. >> yeah i mean that's a fantastic piece like just about everything that comes off of his fingers onto the keyboard. it's pretty amazing. even his tweets are better than anybody else's. [inaudible]

>> a little bit, yeah. i have been standing up for him for a long time. from my perspective how can you help the? i know the economist said this is an objectivity. this is advocacy and i don't know that i clearly advocate anything in the book except saying we should tell the truth about the history and here's the truth as i understand it from doing the research and analysis. but you asked the question about reparations and let me answer it in two ways. let me say first of all in the 1830s and i talk about this in the book, in the 1830s financially innovative southern slaveholders, southern bankers who are slaveholders and british bankers and also some northern american bankers get together and they create all kinds of

what we would today call innovative new financial products, ways to mortgage enslaved peoples bodies, turn those mortgages into bonds and then sell the bonds on all of the major financial markets in the world. this might sound familiar to you because this is what made lots of people rich from the 1980s to 2008 and made lots of these other people poorer when the system imploded but some people still were quite rich after that. that's essentially the same kind of relationship. what i am saying by that is if you are an investor in britain and bought one of those bonds you were buying a slave. you weren't buying an individual slave. you were buying the right to the income flows generated by the repayments of mortgages of a thousand different slaves which is even better than owning one slave because they are not going

to all die. they're not going to offer going to all run going to all run away at once etc. etc. etc.. well you know it turns out that some of the same errors were made and some of the same miscalculations and assumptions that blew up the system in 1837. but finance folks come back in after 1837 and they are willing to lend again because cotton generate so much revenue they get so much profit. what i'm saying is that profit from the suffering of people like charles ball was spread across the atlantic world. it wasn't just in the south. so the wealth that it generated is still everywhere. it was not all burned up by william tecumseh sherman. a lot of it is here in boston for instance. boston is not unique in that. we have to remember that when we are talking about reparations and we have to remember that

this isn't just about morality that these bad things were done. it's about the fact that wealth was transferred by a particularly fair when process process and that wealth is still brown. if we decide to think about while it's not just enough said is held by one group of people but also a debt that is owed to other people that there's a pretty extensive reckoning that would have to happen. one small footnote to that, though i don't talk about it in here there's a great document that occasionally get some play on the internet and i think coats was talking about the other day. jordan anderson's letter to his former master. i don't know if anybody saw him talking about this on line. a former slave escapes to ohio during the civil war. his tennessee enslavers writes them back and says come back and work for me and i will take good care of a family. he writes this amazing letter where among other things he says i hope you're not going to try to take care of my family the

way you try to take care of my daughter behind the shed. i hope you are not going to try to take care of my family the way that you beat my son out in the yard but he also says wages say that's a good idea. let's calculate the back wages you owe me. if you look at jordan anderson's letter and you take the amount that he puts in as he puts together as what is owed to him and his wife for 30 years of labor or whatever multiply it by a couple million whether you want to look at all 4 million slaves are just 2 million adults, you know you can figure out what number you want to use and then put it into an interest calculator. put it at the prevailing interest rate over the last 150 years and what you will

there are many other pieces to that as well but what i do want to say is that the core of this story here i think is not just a plantation record but as with several other historians and slavery but not all the core is the documents that the testimony left behind by the people that survive slavery and the u.s. compared to a save brazil or cuba we have these amazing amounts of documents. we always wish we had more and we always wish they were longer and richer and everything that we have about 2200 interviews with survivors of slavery from the 1930s. we have another 100 or so interviews between the civil war in the 1930s. we have about 100 published autobiographies. we then have some sources we still haven't dug into yet in any appreciable way like the pension records from the u.s.

e.t. soldiers come african-american soldiers who fought in the civil war. they and their families gave depositions to justify getting a federal pension and late 1870s and there are amazing stories in there as well. they are straight or put the stories at the center of the bigger story from the beginning my purpose was to show the ways in which african-americans were at the center of the larger american story as that story grew and went forward up to 1865. it is true the economist thing to me for that a little bit headset you know why should we take the testimony of a few ex-slaves as describing what the system of forced labor was like? because they are the ones who have the clearest view of it

first of all and it's not just a few. it's hundreds and hundreds at one point or another talk about what forced labor was like and hundreds of others talk about everything so always tried to put them at the center of the story. in fact reading through all those documents over and over again and studying them in different ways some of which are increasingly possible because of digital technology and others which are just old-fashioned reading even at one point attempt to apply the principles that really come from biblical criticism to understanding the way in which a story develops and is told over time by different enslaved people. throughout that process what i ultimately came to see was that while every individual story was a little bit different there has been sharing of stories and ways of telling them, ways of thinking about for instance what

the word stealing meant in a context where you could be sold which was a legal transaction but it took you away from your family. those stories began at a certain point for me to comment on each other and to illustrate each other. to bring smaller things out into bigger things. so yeah. a question over here. >> one thing that i was wondering about is the history of lehman brothers which connects the southern system to the financial crisis of 2008. >> it does. lehman brothers gets its start as let's call it a sort of a pop-up firm that comes into into the south with a little bit of capital after the panic of 1837

and 1839 nobody down there has much liquid capital. although the guys that are running the cotton mills in mobile have gone broke because they had so many deaths and so many complex financial and germans etc. and just stopped buying cotton. from there they gave ultimately get into other things. they come into being because of one financial disaster and they perish and another one is created by somewhat similar methods. >> a question here. >> hi. what do you think is behind the nature desire to empathize with enslavers that seems to crop up from time to time in presenting their view as being equal with

activity while presenting the enslavers view as more objective than the slaves? >> and about 1835, there is a slave narratives that appears right about the same time as charles ball's narrative and people were able to authenticate a lot of details about charles ball but this other narrative written by a guy named james williams man he was according to him born in virginia and moved to alabama through a slave trade process, with some a cotton plantation and ultimately escapes. some of the details supposedly didn't line up. they couldn't be fact checked sufficiently and proslavery writers jumped on this. and they launched a massive campaign in the press to discredit james williams's narrative.

ultimately narrative after narrative appeared and they were unable to discredit all of them. but i think, i don't think that's where "the hill" it of undervaluing enslaved peoples testimony begins but it illustrates a knee-jerk reaction is i think you described it that has been going on a long time because at times african-american testimony seems to directly contradict some of the basic myths and believes of large sections of white society. so it makes sense that some people would want to discredit it and i think it's pretty much that simple. >> do we have time for one more question? >> i don't know if i can phrase this well but you mentioned the

history of your family and other members of the family might have felt. i have heard you can't really logically exempt someone that somehow what experience can change the perception and the ideas that people hold. how is it i mean what role can scholarship plan that type of activity? what other things have you done to get people to open their minds to the experiences that you portrayed in the book? >> one of the things that i have tried to do is to create gripping retellings of vignettes that appear from the sources and to do this in a way that i'm sure some historians will think is too cinematic and i accept

that and we can evaluate them one by one. but that is an attempt to do exactly what in an analytical way or a narrative way the larger story is trying to tell which is to put the reader as much as is possible from this distance appears when we none of us know exactly what enslaved people experienced are exactly what they felt like etc. but to put them in a position as much as possible looking out through their eyes and seeing the world from where they stand. i think it's only one people are able to do that but they can start to question their own assumptions, that they can start to look at them and say from the other side that absolutely makes no sense or from the other side is he the myths and allies that might not be all of the assumptions i once held that are part of some of the assumptions

and to be in that position i think you have to make that kind of transit into someone else's point of view. are right? thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you everyone for coming. the books are for sale in the next room. if you could start to the line-up this aisle here. [inaudible conversations]

next charles wright the 20th poet laureate of the united states delivered his reading in washington d.c.. this event is just under one hour. >> plewe