Local planters, including one Charles Mallory, detailed enslaved men to build berms to shelter the besiegersвЂ™ cannon. Rebel troops entrenched themselves athwart the fortвЂ™s landward approaches. Fortress Monroe, built to protect the James River from ocean-borne invaders, became the UnionвЂ™s last toehold in eastern Virginia. To protect slavery, Virginia had just seceded from the United States, choosing a side at last after six months of indecision in the wake of South CarolinaвЂ™s rude exit from the Union. Now they were going the other way, boarding ships at Richmond, the biggest eastern center of the internal slave trade, to go by sea to the Mississippi Valley.Д«y the time a dark night came in late May 1861, the moon had waxed and waned three thousand times over slavery in the South. After the legal Atlantic slave trade to the United States ended in 1807, hundreds of thousands more enslaved people passed the point. Lying in chains in the holds of slave ships, they could not see the land until they were brought up on deck to be sold. Twelve years later, the crews of two storm-damaged English privateers also passed, seeking shelter and a place to sell the twenty-odd enslaved Africans (captured from a Portuguese slaver) lying shackled in their holds.ДЄfter that first 1619 shipload, some 100,000 more enslaved Africans would sail upriver past Old Point Comfort. Anchoring a few miles upriver, they had founded Jamestown, the first perma- nent English-speaking settlement in North America. Long before the fort was built, in April 1607, the Susan Constant had sailed past the point with a boatload of English settlers. Fortress Monroe stood on Old Point Comfort, a narrow triangle of land that divided the Chesapeake Bay from the James River.

Back in 1850, when Lorenzo had been born in Danville, there was neither a university nor a city called Hampton-just an American fort named after a slaveholder president. And many writers and students were hired to interview older Americans-like Lorenzo Ivy, the man painfully shuffling across the pine board floor to answer AndersonвЂ™s knock.ДЄnderson had found IvyвЂ™s name in the Hampton University archives, two hundred miles east of Danville. To put people back to work after they had lost their jobs in the Great Depression, the WPA organized thousands of projects, hiring construction workers to build schools and artists to paint murals. But the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a bureau of the federal government created by President Franklin D. Anderson, an African-American masterвЂ™s student from Hampton University, would not have been able to work at the segregated mill. In the decades after the jubilee year of 1865, Danville, like many other southern villages, had become a cotton factory town. Pouring into the streets around them, dancing and singing, came thousands of African Americans. The bluecoats, rescuers and rescued, formed up and paraded through town. But they did discover hundreds of Union prisoners of war locked in the tobacco warehouses downtown. When they got to Danville, they didnвЂ™t find the fugitive rebel. The blue-coated soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were hot on his trail. Davis stayed a week, but then he had to keep running. Or so Jefferson Davis had proclaimed on April 3, after he fled Richmond.

Back in 1865, it had been the last capital of the Confederacy. Releasing his breath in a rush of decision, he steps up to the door of the handmade house and knocks.Дanville is on the western edge of the Virginia Piedmont. On the porch of number 513, he rearranges the notepads under his arm. Claude Anderson parks his car on the sideВ of Holbrook Street in Danville. 'We don't want to hear that at its root, the economic growth depends to a large extent on slavery.' Book Excerpt: 'The Half Has Never Been Told'ДЄ beautiful late April day, seventy-two years after slavery ended in the United States.

'Slavery continues to have an impact on America in the most basic economic sense,' Baptist told Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson.

History professor Edward Baptist is author of 'The Half Has Not Been Told.' (Cornell University)Д®dward Baptist argues in his new book, ' The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,' that the forced migration and subsequent harsh treatment of slaves in the cotton fields was integral to establishing the United States as a world economic power. The cheapest and best cotton came from the southern United States. Twitter facebook Email This article is more than 6 years old.Дuring the middle of the 1800s, cotton became the world's largest commodity.

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