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With recklessly radical revisionism, Edward E. Baptist claims that American capitalism only developed from slavery for cotton growing and that it had no relation to Protestantism. In his review in the New York Times (A Brutal Process, October 3, 2014), Eric Foner quoted Carl Degler, who quipped that the capitalism "came in the first ships." Degler himself relied on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Baptist also apparently ignored Eric Williams, premier of Trinidad and Tobago, who in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), argued that capitalism developed out of slave based system used to grow sugar in the Caribbean and Brazil. Significantly, Baptist also incorrectly insists on the centrality of the interstate slave trade after 1808. Baptist emphasizes that "Southerners created numerous financial innovations that were essential to the process of the domestic slave trade," when it was, in fact, more often Yankee and British bankers who did so. It is true that "cotton picking in the antebellum period was due almost entirely to violence against slaves," as Felicia R. Lee wrote in her review in the New York Times (Harvesting Cotton-Field Capitalism, October 3, 2014). But, the worst violence was actually due to the capturing of them in Africa by other blacks, who marched them to the coast in chains and then held them in pens until they sold them to Europeans or after 1808 to Yankees. Thereupon, Yankees shipped them across the Atlantic in horrible conditions to Cuba, where they were brutally broken in or "seasoned". Finally, smugglers took them into the Gulf States to sell them to the planters. In my unfinished draft An Antebellum Dilemma Uncovered, I mention that Kenneth Stampp, in his masterpiece (The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, 1956) had already proven how dreadfully the slaves were abused in the United States. He failed, however, to explain how under such appalling conditions the slave population had increased so much from 1810 (1,130,781) till 1860 (3,950,546). I also show how the estimates for the numbers imported illegally between 1808 and 1861 have been dramatically diminished over the decades from W. E. B. Du Bois' correct 1896 estimate of 250,000 to virtually none. Orlando Patterson, in his An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (1968), claimed the British colony of Jamaica had the harshest system of slavery in world history, with an average life expectancy of eight years. However, in some Latin colonies the slave life expectancy was only seven years. In neither of those two systems did the owners bother to import many females. Baptist relies on the near-absence of illegal importation of slaves in order to claim even more than Stampp (and with dramatic rhetoric) that the introduction of whipping machines and of other abuses of slaves accounted for the observed increase in cotton production. As Baptist's critics have already suggested, some of the increased production was due to better seeds, better soil, and better crop rotation. However, none of the other critics have pointed out that the most significant factor in the increase in cotton production was probably the increase in those slaves illegally imported after 1808. Perhaps, almost as many were illegally imported as were walked down the Natchez Trace, often chained together or those shipped from the upper south round Florida near Cuba to the Gulf Coast to support the cotton kingdom. Stephen Douglas, who had defeated Lincoln during a senate race in Illinois in 1855, said during speeches in 1858 and 1859 that there were tens of thousands of slaves being illegally imported every year more than ever before. Douglas's wife had inherited an estate, which abutted the plantations of my great-grandfather Confederate Colonel William Alexander Percy in Washington County, Mississippi. That area was near Greenville, the county seat in the center of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, the most fertile rain watered land for growing cotton in the world. Douglas, as well my ancestors, saw these illegally imported slaves first hand. Beginning in the 1890s, Du Bois actually knew many more freed slaves, who had come over from Africa than those who were interviewed by Roosevelt's WPA, upon whose testimony Baptist relies. The WPA interviewed freed slaves starting in 1933. If the accounts of Douglas and Du Bois are not enough evidence, then scholars should consider the direct chain of oral history from confederate Colonel William A. Percy I, Princeton 1853, to Senator Leroy Percy his oldest son, to my father William Armstrong Percy II, of whom at age six his uncle Leroy became the guardian. Daddy, a lawyer trained at Stanford, told me at a young age how slaves had been illegally imported via Cuba to Mississippi. I am not the only one to notice the weakness in Baptist's chain of logic. The anonymous author that The Economist chose to originally review Baptist's book, treated its central premise with suspicion: "Take, for example, the astonishing increases he cites in both cotton productivity and cotton production. In 1860 a typical slave picked at least three times as much cotton a day as in 1800.... Mr Baptist cites the testimony of a few slaves to support his view that these rises in productivity were achieved by pickers being driven to work ever harder by a system of 'calibrated pain'. The complication here was noted by Hugh Thomas in 1997 in his definitive history, 'The Slave Trade'; an historian cannot know whether these few spokesmen adequately speak for all.... Slave owners surely had a vested interest in keeping their 'hands' ever fitter and stronger to pick more cotton. Some of the rise in productivity could have come from better treatment. Unlike Mr Thomas, Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.... Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains." The Economist's original reviewer didn't note Douglas's and Du Bois's testimony about the illegal slave importation - and was surely unaware of my own family's oral history supporting their accounts, but sought to try to make sense of the causes of higher productivity. The Economist's original review was correct to point out that Baptist's generalization from anecdotes told to the WPA interviewers by a few freed people, as the explanation for the increase in cotton production, was not an objective process. The final sentence in that review caused a firestorm of emotional criticism. Readers of their review were left with the impression that The Economist had trouble believing that slavery was bad for the slaves. The original review simply argued that it seemed improbable that such a large rise in productivity came from worsening treatment, and that Baptist had proved his case. The original review's last statement taken on its own is not incorrect either. We know that indeed there were blacks in Africa, who captured, brutalized and sold the slaves to be shipped across the Atlantic, the crews of which contained some blacks. Indeed there were whites in USA, who denounced the slave trade and demanded abolition. No one can dispute these facts. When these statements were pushed together into one paragraph in The Economist's original review, some interpreted as inflammatory. To them, the journal appeared to take "sides," and the resulting firestorm of criticism made The Economist disavow the review - an act of cowardness. Baptist's responses to The Economist's review (for example, at http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/07/opinion/baptist-slavery-book-panned-economist-review/) lay out his intentions: to encourage whites today to be more sympathetic about inequality between blacks and whites. However, before he wrote his book, the historical record of the abuses of slavery already existed. The profits that slavery generated for Yankees and Southerners are no longer much disputed. Generating discussion itself is not a bad thing, but disguising an emotional plea as science needs to be seen as just that: advocacy, just as The Economist original review called it. Baptist might be forgiven for making this mistake, except that he continues with his bombast (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/07/economist-review-my-book-slavery) obviously being deceptive by claiming "The Economist reviewer was saying that the key sources of my book, African Americans - black people - cannot be believed." There is in fact nothing in The Economist's original review disbelieved the oral histories that Baptist cherry picked. Those interviews, as well as many others, have been around for a long time; but they do not constitute irrefutable evidence of pervasively worsening treatment over the years from 1808 to 1861 during which cotton production increased substantially. One might suppose that Baptist was unaware of the research of W.E.B. Du Bois about the illegal importation of slaves. W.E.B. Du Bois, a scientific historian who had training in Germany as well as a PhD from Harvard, in his old age regretted that he had not spent more time writing about the illegal importation of slaves. To make matters worse, the firebrand Baptist, a John Brown want-to-be, cites the ongoing riots in Ferguson, Missouri in his response to The Guardian.