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21 " That now-archaic word “likely,” ubiquitous in slave sale advertisements, had a cluster of converging meanings: vigorous, strong, capable, good-looking, attractive, promising—in other words, likely to reproduce "
― Ned Sublette , The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
22 " When we speak of “branding” today, we should remember that it was at one time literal: with a hot iron pressed against human flesh. "
23 " Following the precedent set by the Europeans, who referred to the coastal regions of Africa by their exports—the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast—some writers have referred to the Chesapeake region as the Tobacco Coast. But it would also be appropriate to call it the American Slave Coast. "
24 " According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its “Agriculture” supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 “whites” in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole. "
25 " The idea that the South fought a war so that it could be left in peace to have slavery merely within its settled boundaries is sometimes voiced as a cherished myth today, but it does not fit the facts on the ground, nor did anyone think so at the time. Quite the contrary: the war was fought over the expansion of slavery. Southern rulers feared being restricted to the boundaries they then occupied. The dysfunctional-from-the-beginning Confederate States of America was set to have an aggressively annexationist foreign policy. "
26 " Perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population of the slaveholding states owned a hundred slaves or more, and a few owned a thousand or more. It has been suggested that the 1860 census numbers might have underreported large slaveowners, but it’s unlikely that large slaveholders—again, almost the entire political class of the South—amounted to even 1 percent of the population of their states. "
27 " The South’s 1860 population of 3,953,742 enslaved people comprised or made viable an estimated four billion dollars’ worth of private property......Four billion dollars was more than double the $1.92 billion value of farmland in the eleven states that seceded.* Without labor Southern land lost what value it had, but even with labor Southern land in 1860 still was worth much less than land in the free states "
28 " The next five decades would each show a growth of the enslaved population of never less than 24 percent— "
29 " Slave-raiding, which was typically conducted by Africans, was notoriously wasteful of life, since only the young were taken and often the rest were killed. If one died for every one taken captive in slave raids—a speculative and possibly conservative number—that would mean the transatlantic slave trade killed or enslaved some twenty-five million Africans. "
30 " Maria had died in childbirth-related complications sixteen years before, in 1804, as her mother Martha (or Patty) Wayles Jefferson had died from childbirth before her, and as her grandmother had died after giving birth to her mother. "
31 " American motor-and-music city of Detroit. Two centuries after the settlement’s founding, Cadillac’s name was a synonym for mass-produced luxury. He thus has the best name recognition today of any French colonist, and his memory resounds in countless song lyrics. "
― Ned Sublette , The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square