Excerpt from White Lies by Ann Bausum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

White Americans had been enslaving others for more than two centuries by then. Slavery had begun in the future United States in 1619 when a few dozen African men and women were brought against their will to the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. These workers were the first of more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children who would be forced to leave their homelands and travel to America. More than fifty thousand would die during their voyages. Those who survived provided enslaved labor during the development of the North American colonies and the subsequent states. Their descendants inherited lifetimes of bondage. Even after the fight for American independence freed Whites from foreign tyranny and oppression, most Blacks remained enslaved in the newly formed republic.

In 1808, members of Congress made it illegal to bring captive Africans into the country from abroad. The law did not prevent the selling of enslaved people already living within the seventeen states, however, and legislators found it hard to agree to reduce enslavement. The topic of slavery became so divisive that between 1836 and 1844 no one was even permitted to discuss it on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Many of these lawmakers had a personal interest in the continuation of slavery because they were themselves enslavers. In fact, more than 70 percent of members of Congress had previously enslaved or were still enslaving other people when they first began meeting in 1789; this figure declined, then leveled out to around 40 percent during the decades that preceded the Civil War.

In the North, where slavery was less prevalent, there was growing public support for abolishing the practice. Pennsylvania started to end slavery in 1780. Massachusetts followed in 1783, and New York in 1817. Some states, like Massachusetts, ended slavery immediately; others, such as Pennsylvania and New York, instituted gradual reforms, and years passed before they fully took effect. No such plans gained approval in the South. Slavery was not just tolerated there; it was embraced.

Cotton—and the millions of dollars that could be made by growing and selling it—helped fuel the region's reliance on enslaved labor. So did recent technological advances. The cotton gin, which was patented in 1794, helped supercharge the cotton economy. It turned the time-consuming task of hand-cleaning cotton fiber into a speedy mechanical process. Other inventions made it possible for machines to spin and weave those fibers into cloth. These changes created an international industry based around cotton grown in the American South. Much of it was converted into fabric at factories in northern states and in Great Britain.

Southern farmers met the rising demand for cotton by growing more of it. Many moved farther south, expanding settlement into states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, where conditions were just right for the crop. Buying additional land was only one part of the formula for growth. Landowners—who were almost invariably White men—needed more workers, too. Cotton was still a labor-intensive crop. It needed to be planted by hand, weeded by hand, and picked by hand. And at that time the hands that did that work were overwhelmingly those of enslaved Black men, women, and children. Many people were uprooted from previous sites of enslavement, separated from family members, and forced to move south to complete these tasks. Traffickers based in Virginia, which had more enslaved residents than any other state, grew rich brokering sales of human beings bound for southern cotton fields.

TURNING RACE INTO RACISM

BY 1848, as George Junkin prepared to relocate his family to the South, members of Congress were once again debating slavery. Wisconsin was admitted as the nation's thirtieth state that year, and more states were coming. Each addition had the potential to alter the balance of power in Congress by creating more so-called slave states or more states, such as Wisconsin, where slavery was prohibited. Every decision forced lawmakers to make a challenging choice. Should slavery be permitted in a new territory? Or should it be banned? Such questions became increasingly difficult for federal legislators to answer. Some feared the wrong decision could threaten the very fate of the nation.

Excerpted from White Lies by Ann Bausum. Copyright © 2025 by Ann Bausum. Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.