The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

The history that most often appears in the high school text does serious damage to the truth of the founding of the country. How often we think we know events and people but soon learn that the real story is much more complicated or even that the original story is a lie. This is the experience I had over and over again as I read this outstanding book. It was well written, thoroughly researched and riveting in providing a new portrait of events that I thought I knew. It's a page-turner. The documentation was exceptional. If only "the people" could know the truth. Well, now you can. By simply reading this book, you learn year-by-year, president-by-president the choices they faced and the decisions they made. The country's constitution is re-aligned. All is contextualized. Often known and repeated quotes appear different, richer, truer. Thought patterns that began then, now have just been updated. The "why" of the pattern is clear. Many new people are presented and interwoven in the saga. The birth, education and experiences of many known people are told in a way that you grasp who they really were, not the ones text books told us about. This book is exceptional and I hope many more people will open their eyes to the true American legacy. We are not the country we have been told. This book adds many new, essential missing pieces. Through the Lens of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The book goes well beyond the shallow few paragraphs about slavery that I got in school in Illinois, from grade school through college. It lays out the economic reasons that slavery is protected in the US constitution, how it is that among the first 6 presidents of the new nation, 4 were from Virginia. The interweaving of the independence movement and the colonial business of slavery. Well written and meticulously documented, it is the best historical discussion of the economics of slavery that I have come across. It goes into the events not only in the mainland of the Americas, but also the island territories governed by various European powers. The speculation in slaves as just another commodity, the reasons for.market fluctuations in the prices of slaves. How loans collateralized with slaves were bundled by banks and sold as investment vehicles to people who never knew their bonds were backed by the value of slaves. It is a real eye opener. How some big name Wall Street investment firms got started as cotton brokers who traded the occasional coffle of slaves for a plantation owner who needed quick cash before the cotton harvest. It is a real page turner, crisply written with copious footnotes and references, but these never bog down the narrative. I recommend this book to anyone who really wants to understand the history of the USA and its tie to slavery.

An absolute MUST READ for anyone who actually wants to understand world history. This should be assigned reading in all high schools. All I was taught was the propaganda that 1) there was slavery in the American South and 2) we had a Civil War that ended it. What a (literal) white-wash. This brilliant book dissects the elements of slavery in America and shows how it permeated ALL of the country, and impacted Britain, France, Africa, and of course the Caribbean.Without hysterics, the authors just tell the FACTS about how our Founding Fathers EMBRACED slavery at every level - from Jefferson's plan to end American slavery by sending slave babies to the Caribbean ("Negro mothers get over loosing a child very quickly") to Ben Franklin's newspaper ads for slave auctions, to the use of slaves as collateral for bank loans. It exposes how slavery wasn't just an isolated Southern "tradition" - SLAVERY WAS THE FOUNDATION OF THE NORTH ATLANTIC ECONOMY AND WHITE WEALTH.Eye opening. You will never think of the founding of Amerikkka the same way after you read it. Ours in a country founded on the theft of the lives and labor of millions of captured and enslaved human beings. Profoundly disturbing - which is why everyone in America needs to read it.

Besides describing the hellacious atmosphere of the ante-bellum south, with chained slaves marching hither and yon on dirt roads while everyone else paid no attention and annoyed slaveowners took infant slaves who cried too loudly from their mothers and gave them to white onlookers, the book's numerous statistics hit me hard. Here are two doozies:- In 1860 most U.S. millionaires were slave owners whose wealth was the resale value of their slaves, not the value of their land or crops.- In 1860 4.3 percent of the white population in the 15 slaveholding states owned slaves.This stat is so telling to me because Martha Stout estimates in her book "The Sociopath Nextdoor" that 4 percent of the population is sociopathic. A match! 4.3 percent : 4 percent. A slaveowner had to be immune to feeling bad about kidnapping or buying and owning a person, breaking up crying families, forcing slaves to mate each other, raping slaves, taking babies from their tormented mothers and selling them apart, brutally beating slaves often, sometimes to death, etc. -- i.e., slaveowners literally had to be sociopaths -- not capable of feeling bad about the suffering they caused. White devils indeed.- The authors calculate the size of slaveowners' white families, including the actual slaveowners, to have been about 14 percent of the population of the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Even if white family members of slaveholders weren't born sociopaths, being raised by a slave-owning sociopathic dad and/or mom probably twisted many non-sociopath offspring into psychopaths, like Ted Bundy's grandfather torturing and killing small animals in front of 5-year old Ted. Imagine an economy where these kind of bent actions aren't rare but the main business of the wealthiest people.From this book I concluded the southern states' slave economy was the economy of the region's sociopaths, almost entirely unified and empowered in their pursuit of wealth in the laziest and most brutal fashion: owning people and increasing that wealth through breeding. White offspring reared among psychopathic dads and moms, plus the acquiescing remainder of the population, knocks the glory of early U.S. history down about a hundred and fifty pegs and into an inferno.

In all my time spent in history classes, I learned very little factual history of the USA, a failure of the education system that deserves an F... But finally after reading this book, I know the entire true story of the country I have lived my entire life in. This one book explains it all, and I was so happy to get the true history, and to answer so many questions I had about how we got where we are today with a government that has not changed much over the centuries. I feel I have actually been able to see the entire picture clearly for the first time in 70 years. Would like to have had it much earlier, but it was deliberately hidden from me by our government and it's propaganda machine.It is a large book, but the last section is the bibliography detailing all the source material. It is very interesting even for a "text" book. I bought a second copy for my niece, who is also interested in learning the history of the USA.

Once read, never to be unread. A basic question is why was slavery so hard to eradicate? This book is a major part of a very persuasive answer. It is basically a recasting of the first semester of a U.S. history survey course with the internal slave trade, slave breeding in particular, as the main theme. Overstated? No. Overwrought? Barely. Convincing? Oh my, yes. It made a textbook I was considering for adoption seem insipid, evasive, and in the pocket of the Slavery deniers. Minus a star for prose lapsing into the personal, though how not? It is a worthwhile emotional and time investment for serious readers.

This is an important new contribution to the work being done on the relationship between (modern) slavery and capitalism. The book is in fact about much more than the system of "breeding" slaves e.g., discussion of how a modern (i.e., capitalist) credit system was used to finance much of the slave system and its growth (including the use of bundled, securitized mortgages for the purchase and sale of slaves) and was absolutely necessary for its ongoing expansion.The other thing to note about this book is that the authors are fine writers and so the tale they tell is not an "academic" one but rather a beautifully crafted and told story thoroughly documented both with statistics but also with powerful personal stories. So, in other words, this book is not simply an important contribution to the work being done on the relationship between (modern) slavery, gender and capitalism it is also a pleasure to read (something which i'm sorry to say cannot be said for far too much of what passes as good writing these days).

A monumental work of scholarship and a superb nutshell version of American and European history. The depth of the roots of slavery probed here in detail. If the actual work of slaves in cotton, tobacco and sugar cane is the leaves of the tree, the trunk and all roots are the mercantile and banking system that turned humans into financial capital and credit. Slavery was tenacious because these financial roots were tenacious, very deep. In American schools we are briefly shown a few leaves of this tree of horror but never the roots until now. so dark, so ugly - American Founding Fathers tainted anew.Very dark text - ought to be required reading in college. Sublettes write throughout as if blacks are total 100% victims to this day for 100% of their historic and ongoing travail. My gut and reading leads me to believe blacks have always played a role in their plight but it is anathema to discuss any of this on any level - historical, anthropological, neurological or any other way - all off limits now - the racist trigger is the hairiest of hairs-PC academic career third rail. Like the nose hair of a gnat. It doesn't help black lives to keep it all bottled up but black talking heads don't seem to mind.Are there long-term lasting genetic-epigenetic effects resulting from the age of American slavery (“The fecundity of the capitalized womb”) that are locked into both white and black genomes as methylated chromatin? Are black and white Americans now born deformed by 18th, 19th Century slavery horrors?Experiment: Test African blacks and American Blacks for DNA,RNA methylation differential. Are there residual heritable genetic effects of slavery horror. See: TTT (Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma – Dr. Natan Kellerman)

An excellent account of the depravity at the centre of the American slave regime. Should read alongside Seven Beckert's Empire of Cotton

What a great book! The best book on U.S. slavery yet. Written in an easy to read popular style that is accessible but informative. If you want to understand "Black Lives Matter" this book is essential.