Since I was thinking about Ed Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told, which is a one-volume economic history of American slavery, I thought I’d flip through it and find my favorite chart. It’s this one. It shows how absolutely devastating the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment were on the Southern economy.

If you go to the second from the bottom line, labeled “1860”, you’ll see that the total wealth of the USA was $16,160,000,000. There were nearly 4 million people enslaved at that point and the value of those 4 million people was $3,059,000,000. The last column shows that chattel property—enslaved persons—made up 18.9 percent of the wealth of the United States.

The last line shows US wealth in 1870 and the last three columns were zeroes. The end of slavery wrecked wealth in the South, at least until they got the carpetbaggers out and were able to institute Jim Crow.