Portside

Think today's lack of congressional comity is bizarre? It's nothing (or not yet something) compared to the physical violence prevalent on the floor of the House and Senate in the period leading up to the Civil War.

This book, which won the American Book Award last month, aims to reorient our thinking about slavery, by focusing on "slave-breeding," a practice that helped ensure the institution's survival after the Constitutional ban on the transatlantic trade went into effect in 1808. In this review, Malcolm Harris discusses the implications of the practice, by outlining just how central slavery was to the production of U.S. wealth.