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

by Ned Sublette, Constance Sublette

The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of “breeding women” essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves’ children, and their children’s children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could only be decommissioned by Emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States. The American Slave Coast is an alternative history of the United States that presents the slavery business, as well as familiar historical figures and events, in a revealing new light.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History, African American, Historical, The United States Of America

768 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2015

About the author

Ned Sublette is a critically acclaimed writer, historian, musician, and photographer. Born in Lubbock, Texas, and raised in Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico, he lives in New York City with his wife, writer Constance Ash. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 20052006, and was previously a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 20042005 he was a Tulane Rockefeller Humanities Fellow in New Orleans."

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abandoned! But still a 5 star book. How could that be? The first half of this book is about slaving as an alternate economy replacing cash and banks. Jefferson was a key player in cutting out the middleman - the British - and breeding slaves himself, both as a business and rape, his personal perversion, one widely popular among wealthy white men at that time.

It is always rape when the other person is unable to consent, and since the slaves were not recognised as people only as chattel, the same as oxen or various vessels, they could not give consent. That meant either he was fucking farm animals which was illegal then as it is now or the slaves were really people but without any human rights whatsoever. Either way it was perverted and wicked. But profitable. Rape could yield a pregnancy with a baby that was the interest on the investment into a slave. It could be sold, exchanged as payment for a bill, or raised for labour and if a girl, further breeding and increase in wealth.

It was interesting to read of the exchange for goods with African slave traders for the captured people, and of the methods of transport and dispersal in the US as well as the sales and exchanges of these people. There was something of the culture they retained, and how best the slave masters tried to suppress that culture, of the language and religion and much else. All this was, if not new, more detailed than is usual in books of this kind.

But then it became a history of colonial America, often not even related to the slave coast or slaves at all. I am not interested in reading a history of America. With history books it is more usually events or how people lived than the battles and politics that I want to know about. So since the book is mired, for me, in what the Bostonians thought of the English and how only three clans interbred and it keeps putting me to sleep at night... that's it.

Another reader, especially an American, might find this history informative and it is well-written, but I didn't and life is too short for books I don't enjoy. But that doesn't take away from how interesting the first half of the book was.
________

Notes on reading the book. Update Yesterday I saw my ex-husband's family tree. My son it seems is the 9th generation grandchild of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. The comments attached to the family tree show great pride in this connection and subsequent family involvements. In part this connection is responsible for the large amount of land the family owns.

But, as this book has drummed into me in a way no other has although of course it's not something I had never heard of, the way Blacks and Whites got together back then was when the Master raped the Black slave woman. It wasn't necessarily violent, it was that she had no choice. She didn't have a legal standing as a human being and therefore no rights at all. The Master's attitude was either he wanted sex or because he was trying to breed more slave at home, rather than paying for the import of them and thereby increase his wealth. I do not know why my ex's family are so proud of this connection in the light of how the connection began.

I have put this book to one side for now. It is very hard having Black family and reading that slavery was much worse than I had ever imagined or was ever detailed even in books as heart-rendingly upsetting as Twelve Years a Slave
_________

With my limited knowledge of American history, I had always thought of Jefferson as a good man who ended the importation of slaves out of the recognition of their common humanity. Not a bit of it. He did it for financial reasons, he would vastly increase his wealth (and slave holdings) and boost up his base in Virginia if he could get rid of the middlemen and control the economy of slaves directly by turning them into a home-grown rather than imported product.

I'm reading this together with the equally heavy and well-written The Sugar Barons about the industry of sugar and slavery in the West Indies. These books require a lot of thought so that I am reading them both quite slowly and sadly. I hadn't realised the depth of cruelty men were happy to inflict on others for a financial gain.

[DeB · Rating 5 out of 5]

To understand ourselves at any point in history, we need to have the knowledge of what has shaped us- globally, culturally, politically, financially. When the technology of ocean travel improved to the degree that European nations could conquer, colonize and capitalize upon the resources of the new countries which they discovered, labourers became essential. In America, particularly the Southern States, that labour became negro slaves.

This book offers deep insight and revealing knowledge of America's underpinnings, and the almost entrenched political unconscious heritage still visible today, in various factions of the USA. The perspectives contribute to a key understanding of the dissonance in America regarding race, status, wealth, entitlement and equality.

"The American Slave Coast" is not easy reading; at times it jumps around in its narration. It is a long book, and takes commitment to complete. The thoroughness of its research led me to feel at times that I was studying a textbook; the quality and quantity of information is such that I can barely do it justice. I am proud to have had the opportunity to be introduced to such history. My Goodreads friend PetraX made me aware of it.

Another book, to which I can compare in terms of its profound quality and my appreciation is "The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher" by Debbie Applegate. It won a Pulitzer Prize. In my opinion "The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry" should as well.

The "liberty" of the Thirteen Colonies was not an ideal copied from the French Revolution, by Thomas Jefferson. Rather, "liberty was the right to property. Slaves were property." Jefferson was a slave owner; he furthered his own wealth by banning the importation of African slaves and creating an "industry" of slave breeding for sale. Interstate slave trade was a bigger business than tobacco for Virginia, whose slave population grew while other states' declined. Cotton, rice and sugar were brutal crops, in brutal climates, and brutally managed to achieve top production. There was nothing humane about the slave industry.

In business terms, a saturation point develops in a marketplace where there will be no "growth" in the need for a product, or production may outdistance the need of the present market. The product, if it's value is rated on its marketplace demand, must therefore always become a desired commodity in a new marketplace.

In order to be profitable, slavery needed places where it could expand. Andrew Jackson, as a frontier settler, had a deep hatred of Native Americans and saw them as friends of the British. As a military commander, slave owner, and later, President, Jackson was intent on the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans for the purpose of territorial expansion of the American nation. French Louisiana granted slaves freedom if they could match their purchase price. That practice was discontinued when Napoleon sold Louisiana. Texas was left as a solitary republic for ten years, under presidents who recognized that its annexation meant an expansion of slavery but who wanted the Northern vote more than the South's business. Polk gave Texas statehood as he tried to annex California from Mexico, and bring the slave trade to the Gold Rush.

The business of slavery encouraged the creation of more territories and states; it was the primary impetus for settlement of the United States before the Civil War. Slaves were the equity of the Southern states. A stable universal currency did not exist until the election of Lincoln.

"The War of Independence...was fought in part to protect slavery from the growing power of British abolitionism. ...The Civil War was the 'revolutionary' war, because it ended chattel slavery, and, in removing the appraised resale value of human beings from the balance sheets, remade the basis of American money."

And some notes and quotations directly from the source:

"This is a history of the slave-breeding industry, which we define as the complex of businesses and individuals in the United States who profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth.

At the heart of our account is the intricate connection between the legal fact of people as property -- the 'chattel principle' -- and national expansion. Our narrative doubles, then, as a history of the making of the United States as seen from the point of view of the slave trade.

It also traces the history of money in America. In the Southern United States, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was inextricably associated with its own peculiar economy, interconnected with that of the North...

...This book describes an economy in which people were capital, children were interest, and women were routinely violated..."

"Over the years we have been researching our nation's history, we have seen repeatedly that no matter how bad we thought slavery was, it was even worse. There's no end to it...

No one living today can fully understand what the enslaved endured in the total-slavery world of the Old South...

The history of the slave-breeding industry demonstrates how far the unrestrained pursuit of profit can go.

...the Thirteenth Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, to prohibit slavery, left a loophole: prisons.

From Jefferson's ambiguity forward, convict labor has been part of American commerce, and as twenty-first century readers are well aware, it continues."

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. FIVE STARS.

[Harry Allagree · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first comment is that I'm not sure why the name of Constance Sublette, wife of Ned Sublette, isn't included as co-author above with his name.

This is probably the most important political history book that I've read in my lifetime. It provides a key understanding, not only of what the U.S. Civil War was all about, but also why many white people of Deep South heritage, particularly current politicians, think & make decisions as they do, and how the American Constitution has often been deliberately twisted by the self-interest of white leaders prior to the current President. This is an extremely important book, (2016 copyright), and I'd recommend that it for reading by every honestly open-minded U.S. citizen.

Beyond that, it's very hard to in any way do justice to the contents of the book. It is long; it's not easy reading; it's disheartening in many ways; it's exceedingly well-researched, using primary documents & quotations, so that it can't be blown off as "propaganda"; it can be confusing because it jumps around a bit in the narration. But, overall, it speaks for itself.

Just for clarification, I'm including here some introductory quotes from the book as well as some end-quotes:

"This is a history of the slave-breeding industry, which we define as the complex of businesses and individuals in the United States who profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth.

At the heart of our account is the intricate connection between the legal fact of people as property -- the 'chattel principle' -- and national expansion. Our narrative doubles, then, as a history of the making of the United States as seen from the point of view of the slave trade.

It also traces the history of money in America. In the Southern United States, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was inextricably associated with its own peculiar economy, interconnected with that of the North...

...This book describes an economy in which people were capital, children were interest, and women were routinely violated..."

"Over the years we have been researching our nation's history, we have seen repeatedly that no matter how bad we thought slavery was, it was even worse. There's no end to it...

No one living today can fully understand what the enslaved endured in the total-slavery world of the Old South...

...Unfortunately, the agenda of the slave society seems all too familiar to us in the twenty-first century world...

The history of the slave-breeding industry demonstrates how far the unrestrained pursuit of profit can go."

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most amazing, comprehensive and disturbing books I’ve ever read on American history. And the book covers a large chunk of the American timeline, from the beginning of European colonization, to the end of the Civil war. The Sublette’s supplant the paternalistic view of slavery popularized in Margaret Mitchell’s “ Gone with the Wind” and the subsequent popular movie made from it. The Picture of slavery that the authors paint is categorized by its utter brutality and inhumanity. The main emphasize on the book is the subject of “slave breeding.” In the ante-bellum South slaves were the most lucrative possession, even more so than land, which often was worthless without the slaves to work the labor intensive crops of rice, sugar and cotton. The law to eliminate the importation of slaves to take place in 1808 had virtually no effect in eliminating slavery, nor was it intended to. The Authors paint the opportunistic Thomas Jefferson in a particularly bad light. It was his plan to corner the market of “slave breeding” for Virginia, then export slaves to the other Southern states. The reactions of the various states was one of the most interesting part of the book.

The authors give a detailed account of the dangers that the Slave states faced, particularly those
closest to the then Spanish-held Florida. The Spanish allowed runaway slaves to live and prosper within Florida. Also, there were a number of Indian tribes in Florida that used it as a staging area to attack Southern states. The Southern states believed in “states’ rights” and a weak federal government with the exception of protecting them from the Spanish and the specter of future slave rebellions, made urgent by the slave rebellion in Haiti. The idea that a slave rebellion could be triggered at any time directed much of the concern of the populace and its elected officials. There was so much worry over this that the closing of the importation of slaves was looked at as a positive situation, even for states that needed to import slaves.

I usually cringe when I read of something being compared to Nazi Germany, but there are some real parallels with American slavery. Dr Mengele had some competition with Southern doctors who would do experimental surgery on slave women without anesthesia. The plantation was in itself a sort of concentration camp. Slaves were train-ed, and transported in coffles, which insured a high mortality rate. The deeper into the South a slave was transported, the less likely there would be an avenue of escape. The slavers went into areas even the Nazi didn’t. Breeding humans for the sole purpose of increasing capital. Children of slaves were considered “interest.” ‘Sophie’s Choice” was played out every day in the Slave States, without the possibility of even having to make a choice. Slave families were ripped apart at auctions. Often to never see loved ones again.

One of the more monstrous subjects of the book was the selling of slave women as concubines. Slavers would often impregnate these woman and young girls, then sell their own offspring!! All with few complaints from the wives of the slavers, since in many cases they had very little to say in their marriage, being in a sense the property of their husbands.

The Unites States has a poor track record in punishing the treason of the richest few percent. We see that playing out today just as it did at the end of the Civil War. Despite all the carnage that the leaders of the Confederacy created, there was little real punishment meted out, and certainly no capital punishment. (The Commander of Andersonville was hung and though that was well deserved, there were extenuating circumstances that implicated his superiors. This was the equivalent of executing Lt Calley for My Lai without taking into account his implied orders and the Policy of “Free Fire Zones”!!)

In my opinion, Capitalism – especially unregulated Capitalism, ALWAYS degenerates into slavery – chattel or wage slavery. We see this today in the penitentiary system, especially with the For-Profit prisons. The authors make this claim and include a photograph at the end of the book showing the Louisiana State prison at Angola, which was a formerly the plantation of the nation’s largest slave trader!

The authors last line is a good summary of their book and a cautionary note for all of us;

“The History of the slave breeding industry demonstrates how far the unrestrained pursuit of profit can go.”

[Elizabeth Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought the book based on a Daily Kos essay that used it as a reference. It sounded fascinating; and it is, but not just because of its wonderfully detailed rendition of how the United States economy was established on a foundation of black bodies. What gives the reader chills are the many parallels of that economy with the one we have now, and how modern "slave merchants" are using the same rationale and methods to keep labor under their corporate thumb.

I gave the Sublettes' book my highest rating because it's superbly researched, full of fascinating details that humanize what could have been a very dry subject such that distancing oneself from the events and ideas isn't possible, and is written in a narrative style that is as captivating as any novel.

One comes out of this book with a wealth of information most people either aren't aware of at all or know only as vague references learned in American history class. In addition, anyone who is paying the least amount of attention to the status of our federal government will see the truly frightening way the mindset that kept millions of human beings as livestock is slowly corrupting it. It's a history of the slave trade in America, but if we aren't careful, it will also be a prophecy of our future.

[Polly Krize · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

As a primarily fiction reader, I found this book to be long but informative. A definitive history of the slave breeding practices in eighteenth century America. Using human beings as capital and savings accounts is a repugnant theme, but this well researched and well presented book cannot help but impress the reader. The struggle between breeding and importing slaves was new to me, as well as the huge political and economic impact that this caused.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Regardless of whether or not you are interested in the Civil War, if you are American you should read this book.

The Sublettes present a detailed history of slavery and how it was necessary to the Southern econcomy. The writing is good.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is easily the most important book I read this year, and as difficult as it was to plow through at times, it is an enlightening examination of the true horror of chattel slavery.

On its face, slavery is immoral because the practice treats humans as a possession, not a person. But American slavery used people not just for their labor, but to propagate the system for the owner's profit, forcing enslaved women to replenish the stock of humans needed to perform labor and enhance wealth. When the importation of slaves from Africa was banned, the business of slave breeding boomed to fill demand.

The authors' research took them to first person accounts of slavery from multiple perspectives: formerly enslaved people, slave traders, public and political figures, as well as literary and journalistic writings. The disciplined dive into a broad well of historical information gives this book a deserved gravitas.

[Dennis McCrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been reading this book off and on since 2016. I started reading it back then as part of the search for the long term affects of slavery and the wealth it created in the families that supported, sustained and engaged in it, both in the north and the south. How the 1807 law outlawing the importation of slaves signed by Jefferson actually made the slave trade more profitable for the domestic slave traders that engaged in it. How this wealth was generational. And that the descendants today of many of these families still benefit, be they from former Northern or Confederate states.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A harrowing and detailed look into the heartless brutality of slave-breeding and the economic and governmental artifices designed to support it -- marred by an overlong and disjointed second half.

Sublette's 2015 "The American Slave Coast" is really two books. The first being a detailed examination into the rise of slave-BREEDING as a means to keep up the supply of American slave populations (and their attendant value as capital high). The tension between colonists' general disgust with the slave TRADE and their tolerance of slavery generally gave rise to a curious disconnect.

Sublette's book is fascinating for its look at the different ways different colonies approached their slave populations, with Virginia's tobacco crop being very different from South Carolina's indigo or rice production or Mississippi's cotton crop. Each commodity and economy took very different approaches to their slave labor populations, and Sublette's comprehensive look into each is very rewarding.

With the prohibition of slave importation enshrined in the Constitution, the need to maintain labor populations necessitated "natural increase" -- i.e., the local breeding of slaves -- and Sublette doesn't shy away from the horrors that this practice entailed -- in everything from the sexual exploitation of young female slaves to the commodification of female slaves as little more than birthing units akin to livestock -- valued solely for how many offspring they could produce. Copious primary documents spell out the amoral/immoral nature of this practice, and it makes for some uneasy reading at times.

The second half of Sublette's book is less rewarding as it's a more disjointed historical narrative up through the Civil War that feels disconnected from itself. As a general narrative, it lacks chronological or even thematic consistency and jumps around too much and frequently feels more slapdash.

Case in point, Solomon Northrup's famous slave narrative "Twelve Years a Slave" gets mentioned at least 4 times in wildly different contexts but in language that's eerily identical each time. This gives the latter half of the book a bit of a "padded" feeling. That coupled with a narrative that shoehorns racialist comments or slavery adjacent anecdotes into its narrative leads to long passages that are basically: "Remember Martin van Buren? Yeah, he had policies or statements related to slavery." Since it's never a comprehensive look at any one era or figure, this approach feels arbitrary. It's a known fact that slavery was the major political fulcrum up through the civil war, but the second half of "American Slave Coast" doesn't really approach that topic with real consistency.

Ultimately, "American Slave Coast" is a very informative history of the harsh realities of slavery in the U.S. from the perspective of heartless commodification of a group of people. Though it lacks direction as a general history of slavery in the U.S.

[Cherie Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1808 the importation of slaves ceased in America, cutting off the supply of slave labor from Africa to the U.S. agricultural industry. From that time to slavery’s abolishment during the Civil War, captive African American women were used as breeders to continue the slave trade, the sale of their children bringing profits to their owners and feeding the southern economy based on slavery.
This despicable practice of using human beings for reproduction is the subject of a massive new work by Ned and Constance Sublette of New Orleans, published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press. “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry” looks at the interstate trade of slaves, mainly from Virginia, what the authors call “the great slave breeder.”
Ned Sublette is the author of “The World That Made New Orleans,” “Cuba and its Music” and “The Year Before the Flood.” Constance Sublette has published, as Constance Ash, three novels and edited the anthology “Not of Woman Born.” The two began working on the book in 2010 when Ned Sublette was in residence at Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience in Chestertown, Maryland.
“That fellowship was an absolutely transformative experience for us,” he said. “The Starr Center has been the laboratory for some of the most dynamic work being done about the history of the early republic.”
Constance Sublette’s interest in biography influenced the way historical figures enter and exit the narrative, according to the publisher’s press release.
“For me it was for the women — those millions of nameless women who were mandated to be constantly pregnant, even if it killed them, yet had no legal right to their own children,” she said. “This book is for them.”
From http://louisianabooknews.blogspot.com...

[Philip Meneses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential history reading.

[Felicia]

Amazing book - it made me hate Thomas Jefferson even more.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

The American Slave Coast: A History Of The Slave-Breeding Industry, by Ned and Constance Sublette

There seems to be a mistaken assumption among many writers about slavery that the historically minded contemporary person looks with horror at the thought that slaveowners, particularly those in areas where soil had been declining, engaged in slave-breeding. Considering, though, that the United States had a mild enough slavery regime--especially in its tobacco states to the north of the slave states--where slaves were able to enjoy natural increase, something that was nearly unheard of in the rest of the New World, it is little surprise that masters would find that increase to be a worthwhile asset to exploit and to deliberately cultivate like any other one. Given that the entire United States imported as much slaves, roughly, as the tiny island of Barbados, where else were those slaves going to come from except from being bred from the local stock, as it were, given how slaves were viewed as chattel by their owners. As abhorrent as that appears to the authors and perhaps to many contemporary audiences, the result flows naturally from the logic of the situation. Given that human civilizations have always exploited some underclass that it was in their interest to ensure could at least maintain its population for maximum exploitation, why should it be considered a negative aspect of America's slavery system that slaves did increase both through their voluntary actions as well as through coerced efforts at breeding as would be familiar to anyone from a farming family who has tried to breed goats or cattle or anything else of that nature? We know that slavery is bad, but at the same time, is it not better that slaves lived well enough to increase in the United States in ways that were not possible in the sugar islands of the rest of the New World, whose importations caused so much more violence because they had to repeated over and over again for centuries?

Indeed, the authors have a deeply confused view in the history that they seek to present. The logic of the slaveowners is merely the logic of the ideological allies of the authors in the BLM, and even their behavior is the same in seeking to memorialize what they view as being critical aspects of their history, and in denying historical memory to those they view as enemies. Southern slaveowners did not think that there was any right that blacks had that whites were bound to respect, and contemporary BLM figures do not believe that there is anything that could be done against whites that would be wrong in their eyes. Their morals and practices are the same, equally reprehensible to those not blinded by the seduction of identity politics. The authors seem not to understand how the conduct of Southerners with regards to blacks makes perfect sense when you accept their premises--I don't happen to accept their premises personally, nor does anyone else in the present day except contemporary radicals whose premises are exactly the same, only in reverse. Much of this book (which is immense, coming in at more than 670 pages of core content) is rather repetitive in seeking to paint Southerners and their Northern enablers as some sort of horrible monsters. Yet the violence and anti-white hostility that the authors celebrate and cheer on was and is the justification for a great deal of the violence against blacks that the authors bemoan and view as being so unacceptable. People, including even whites, have a right to self-defense, and those who threaten their lives and well-being deserve beatings and judgments, so long as that property is properly defined and limited.

In reading this book, therefore, I did not share the sense of horror that the authors had. People in positions of authority will always abuse that authority based on their own selfish lusts, and white Southerners as discussed here certainly had plenty of selfish lusts and desires for domination that they exhibited for hundreds of years on those unfortunate enough to be viewed by law and custom as their chattels. Many people, like Thomas Jefferson, wrote eloquently on their own feelings of being wrong in depending on slaves for their wealth and of the shameful deeds that were sometimes necessary to pay their debts, and about the vengeance they feared for. This book revels in that vengeance when it comes to slave revolts, Haiti's revolution (which has not exactly been a boon for its nation's citizens over the past two centuries, or for its natural environment), and in the inevitable arming of free blacks and fugitive slaves whenever someone was at war with the American South as a force multiplier against a vulnerable plantation society. Yet it is precisely that vulnerability that the American South had that has made its rhetoric and its legal codes so harsh. Less insecurity would have led to less harshness, and yet the authors lack the moral sense to feel some compassion for people who felt, and continue to feel, with good reason, under seige.

In terms of its contents, this book is divided chronologically into six parts. The first part of the book looks at the economic worth of the capitalized womb of the slave woman, looking at the law and economics of slavery with 1808 as a key turning point in ending the importation of slaves to any great degree except for small amounts of smuggling, forcing the United States to rely on its own natural increase (I). The second part of the book then goes back to the origins of American slavery in the Chesapeake colonies and the Deep South, examining the importance of Barbados as a source of the sort of slavery found in South Carolina and the Deep South, and the societies that developed along the Chesapeake and Atlantic coast during colonial days (II). The third part of the book then looks at the silent profit of slavery during the period of Independence through the French Revolution as it was experienced in the United States (III). After that the author examines the development of the American internal slave trade in the aftermath of 1808, and its role in the War of 1812 (IV). The penultimate part of the book examines the growth of slavery in the Deep South and the rise of the slave power as well as the spread of American power and influence Westward to the Pacific (V). The sixth and final part of the book then looks at the state of slavery and of the South before and then during the Civil War as slavery in the United States came to a definitive and sudden end (VI). A coda gives the author's views on contemporary racial politics, after which there are acknowledgements, picture credits, notes, references, and an index.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Rick Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ned and Constance Sublette have produced a book that is required reading for any serious student of U.S. history. It is in fact the story of the institution of chattel slavery in this country. Its legal origins are documented, as is its intricate involvement in the war for independence from Great Britain. Our revered Constitution entailed multiple accommodations to slavery and slaveholders. The first century of American independence is the story of the economics of slave power. Very few of our founders had clean hands. The slave trade and its cruelties are revealed here for the dark blot they are on our national soul. The roots of the poverty and victimization of African Americans today is revealed as a continuation of the old burden of slavery. As a descendant of slaveholders and their sons who fought for the Confederacy, I am grieved to inherit the shame I believe they bore but did not feel.

[Dexter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend adding this book to your reading lists and libraries. This is the best book on the history of US slavery I have ever read. Furthermore it shows how the history, politics, westward expansion, and the economy of this country is intertwined with African slavery and indigenous genocide. Everything we are proud of in this country was capitalized and built at the expense of the blood, sweat, and tears of our forebears. The people, regardless of their treatment, chose to stay here to help build a “more perfect Union” and teach the rest of the nation how to love—there is no greater expression of patriotism.

[Denise Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This facutal, historical, very dense and detailed book was outstanding. I am currently doing some famiy ancestory work and the background of this procative historical book provided so much insight into connecting the past with our current struggles to reconcile this part of our history and why it still matters in the need for holistic total reconciliation today. The authors did a VERY detailed job of this "peculiar institution."

[Jennifer Dines · Rating 5 out of 5]

What lengths will people go to make money and to make more and more money? This book answers this question while tracing vividly the economy of slavery - people as products. American slavery was a capitalist enterprise, and negrophobia made it easy to keep the wealth coming in. This book will likely become required reading - it's fascinating and makes one crave more history.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing, extensive and well-documented history by Ned and Constance Sublette about the institution of slavery in the U.S., the fundamental connections between slavery and the infant U.S. economy, and the industry of slave breeding that grew exponentially with the official halt of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. A must read.

[Jiliyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly a work of passion. A mixed blessing. I have real objections to Sugar plantations being called as "death camps". The tone and agenda takes away from the scholarship.
Ending the international slave trade might have been done to make money for the protectionist slave breeders - But the idea of many motives gets lost in the passion.
To be taken with a grain of salt.

[RMazin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book over a period of years. Didn’t read it consistently, just a little at a time. The writing didn’t slow me down. It was the content. It needed to be absorbed because it was challenging what I had been taught and what I thought I knew. At times I was enraged by what I did not know, other times I was enraged because of how the material, in my schooling, had been either sanitized or not even presented. I began to grasp the economics of the United States through the impact of slavery. Economics was never considered to be the pathway to the past in my school years. It was always dates, events, people and some politics.

This book Is a brutal reckoning of the entwinement of slavery, economics, and the founding of the United States. Some may think that there is too much historical context regarding how the slave trade affected so many institutions, finances, countries and policies. But all this is necessary if one is to understand the magnitude of the past and its impact down through the years.

I was drawn to this book about six years ago, when I had heard an interview (perhaps on some NPR affiliated program) with the authors. I was stunned. A few weeks later while I was cruising the shelves of an independent bookstore (shout out to Changing Hands in Tempe) the book was waiting for me. Slowly, while reading across many other books and genres, this title worked its way into my core.

If you want to be more and better informed about American history and the impact of slavery, this is a necessary book to read. If you were astonished by Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” you need to continue your education. If you want to learn how to better interact with the policies and politics of today, ground yourself here to go forward. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the authors for arduously and tenaciously getting so much history and insight into a long time period that covered so many records and documents. Many thanks to the authors for making such a readable, heartbreaking, mind-opening book so accessible. May today’s current curriculum challenges and censorship agendas not impede what should be known and gleaned from “The American Slave Coast.”

[Paul · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was an atrociously bad book, and the audiobook reader did a terrible job.

From the first chapter I got the strong impression that these authors had some sort of heavy axe to grind, and this was going to be horribly biased, with some sort of general political ideology influencing their view of history. I laughed out loud when, at one point, they tried to suggest that (in some minor point) they weren't guilty of "presentism", when the entire book is one big exercise in presentism. The premise of the entire book seemed to be, "Let's judge slave-holding society by the norms of today and make no effort to understand how the people of the time viewed themselves and one another." It doesn't take an obscenely long book like this to tell me people today think slavery was wrong.

Another thing to note is that the authors' understanding of economics is... woefully inadequate. They seem to be harboring under some sort of marxist delusions or something. They suggest early on in the book that capitalism "relies on constant growth", which is not true by a long shot - just because constant growth is a result of capitalism does not mean markets will somehow fail if they reach their natural extent. They also have some sort of weird fetish about money and how gold-backed money was inherently wrong and also that because people often made trades in slaves that slaves were the real currency of the south - this is a bit bizarre, since slaves would be terrible as a currency, being that variations in quality and potentially rapid depreciation would make them a terrible unit of exchange and store of value. Presumably people made large deals in slaves because it wasn't always easy to liquidate one's holdings (in the same way that companies are occasionally purchased using stock in the modern era).

Finally, if you are going to listen to the audiobook edition, you may want to avoid the version read by Robin Eller. Her delivery is insane, like she doesn't understand when to pause and when not to (like she makes large pauses between "Charleston" and "West Virginia", for some reason), and she often puts the emphasis on the wrong words. She also does not know how to pronounce many of the words in the book (voracious and Beauregard immediately spring to mind, but there are many, many others), which makes it a bit hard to understand what she's saying. The whole time I was listening, I was thinking, "This is either done by a really good text-to-speech algorithm or a really, really bad audiobook reader."

[Liz Lem · Rating 5 out of 5]

The human toll due to U.S. Slavery System was devastating. This system focused on the financial gain and economic output of an enslaved person. This means that “the owner” had no regard for the enslaved person. One line was “If you were white, upon birth your name would go into a Bible. If you were black, upon birth your name would go onto a balance sheet.
This is a very long book and yet an excellent piece of scholarship. Here are 3 things that I learned:
1. Don’t meet your heroes. I spent several days feeling disoriented after reading about how Thomas Jefferson hid or history hid his actions and thoughts around slavery. There’s sufficient evidence presented that shows that he had little or no empathy for the enslaved individuals as persons or as part of a family.
2. The full version of history is really worse than I thought. Slave owners systematically raped enslaved women to impregnate them. When a child was born they had the enslaved status of the woman. Thus fathers owned and sold their children.
3. The revolutionary war was about slavery too. A good point is made that in 1771 it looked as if Britain would outlaw slavery soon. This fear prompted Southerners to join the revolt against the British.

As I understand it from the book Slavery was a complex and entrenched system in the southern states. It helped build and maintain wealth for certain white families. Both the system and the individual stories are worth hearing.

[LaShawnda Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing information, detail and perspective!

American Slave Coast was very hard to listen to. The book is harder to read. I began the book with a book club a few years ago. It was supposed to be discussed over three meetings but we barely made it through the first discussion. I put the book down for a while. During Covid19, I revisited with the audio version. I got through the bulk of it while working on my property rehab. I found I had to be somewhat preoccupied to not be overwhelmed by the information. Last year I got into the stock market. That, along with my real estate investment, created a layer of foundational interest that was a bit less personal than being a descendent and detainee of the American slavery system.

Truly despicable stories to listen to, but so very helpful in understanding where we are as a nation. This book has helped me understand the intentional violence against Black people is baked fully into the development of the nation as well as how that violence is applied as an economic tool.

[Daniel Kleven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Until reading this book the phrase "slavery in America" had little concrete detail for me. I knew it was bad and had some exposure to its brutality, but I really had no idea how extensive the system was. This book is so many things: at the core, it is a history of the slave-breeding history, but it is more than that. It is a comprehensive history of America's politics, economy, and international relations. It thoroughly documents various presidents, vice-presidents, senators, and other leaders. It reprints facsimiles of original documents and photographs. It tells the first-hand stories of enslaved peoples in American and holds nothing back. It's rare to encounter a book that so thoroughly educates you in such a sweeping manner. My conception of this country is now fundamentally shaped by the history presented here, and I can't ever go back. This is one of the best books I've read in the past few years, and for those with the fortitude to endure it, I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Martine · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's so much information in this book. Unfortunately, the organisation is a mystery to me. As far as I can see, the book hops around between different places and topics in a mostly chronological order. Most of the chapters simply run into each other, separated by a few lines of primary sources. Even the six different parts aren't a clear demarcation. As a novice to this period of history, I felt like I was set adrift on an ocean of information, with no map or lifeline, reduced to clinging to the raft and letting the tides take me where they wanted to go. Not a very pleasant experience. I had to let go a few times and put the book down for a while and I feel like I've only grasped a bare overview and a heap of useless (and confused) facts instead of getting a true introduction. In all, I would not recommend this book to anyone but a specialist.

[Sbwisni · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Too historically dense at points for me personally, and a commitment in terms of length, but oh so fascinating! Almost abandoned as it switched into more of the history of our country post-Revolutionary War (that was the part that really started to lose me as a non-Historian), but it got better again. Did not know the history shared about Louisiana, Texas, and California in regards to slavery, for example. Beginning of the book still had the most interesting ahas/wows and engaging parts to it for me.

Listened to on audiobook over 2 different reservations. Expired and had to re-reserve…beginning is quite intense and hard to digest in large chunks. Important part of our history to understand though!

Even if you only listen to the first 1/3 to 1/2 (10-15 hours), it’s well worth your time!

[Anna Yoakum Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the hardest books I’ve ever powered through emotionally and mentally, but in the most important way. I consider myself to be educated and well-read on many of the subjects this book touches on, but I was honestly shocked at the excruciating detail revealed that went into the political, socioeconomic and trade systems that kept slavery entrenched in our society for centuries – especially regarding many of the founding fathers’ (some of whom are wrongfully highly regarded even today) involvement in designing a corrupt system that became the blueprint of the United States economy and wealth for centuries. There’s no bias or hysterics – just the facts. It’s well-cited, annotated and researched – this should be on every required reading list.

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very dense and depressing book, and I think you need an open mind to read it because it doesn’t always present America in a very flattering light and I think that may be hard for some people to swallow. As a non-American, there’s a lot I didn’t know about American history, like the fact most of the canonized founding fathers were raging assholes hell bent on a white supremacist doctrine but it sure does make a lot of sense. (It also adds a certain poignancy to Miranda’s retelling using a cast made up almost entirely of minorities. A black man played Jefferson; he’s rolling in his grave.)

After more than 100 years of fiat currency I admit I don’t understand the intricacies of the banking system then, but it’s easy to see how much of its past America has not gotten over.