A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Stephen E. Maizlish A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Kay Wright Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5127-8, 292 pp., cloth, $64.95. Kay Wright Lewis's goal is to correct past accounts of slavery and its aftermath that have inadequately acknowledged the fear and trauma created by the racialized violence African Americans experienced. In A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World, Lewis claims that "extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain" slavery (2). For African Americans, the memories of that violence in the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow society that followed "remained significant into the Civil Rights era" (2). Whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lewis argues, believed that emancipation and black equality would lead to a race war and the extinction of both races. It was to avoid this outcome that whites employed exterminating racial violence against blacks. Racial violence in America began with the first European settlements. It was initially directed against native peoples. As the colonies expanded, this culture of exterminating brutality came to dominate race relations generally, eventually extending to the imported African population. Lewis traces this growing determination to eliminate or enslave those whom European settlers considered barbarians through the entire colonial period. White people's fear of what they believed to be the warrior past of the Africans they enslaved drove them with particular force to treat their slaves with harsh and gruesome cruelty. Nevertheless, African slaves resisted their enslavement. That in turn, argues Lewis, led to retaliation and even more widespread exterminating white violence. This bloodletting persisted into the antebellum period and intensified in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The result of this new explosion of terror was a series of lasting traumatic memories that haunted the black community for many years. Fear of a race war continued to consume the antebellum white South following Turner's insurrection and its bloody aftermath. Dread of a race war dominated the Virginia debates over slavery and formed the basis for Southern opposition to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Lewis argues that this dread also explains the panicky Southern white people's reaction to John Brown's raid. The memory of the exterminating horror that came after Turner's upraising led African American slaves to be wary of and ultimately reject participation in Brown's plan for a slave insurrection. They feared a bloodbath, but even though they had not responded positively to Brown, one followed the raid anyway. Lewis follows her analysis of racial violence in antebellum America with the claim that South Carolina left the Union not only in reaction to its perception of Northern hostility to slavery but also from a belief that the Federal government [End Page 299] would no longer protect the South from a slave insurrection, that is, from the very race war Southerners had long dreaded. Slaves saw the war for the Union, unlike John Brown's raid, as an opportunity to at last achieve their dream of freedom, so they willingly participated in the Northern war effort. The white Southern response was predictable. As they had been for centuries, African American civilians, along with captured black soldiers, were slaughtered by white Southerners in another exterminating reign of terror that continued after the war and traumatized the black populations for decades to come. That trauma, Lewis explains, was only reinforced during the years of Jim Crow and by the violence visited upon returning black soldiers following the First and Second World Wars. Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s had different views of how to counter white violence, but, Lewis reminds us, they all recognized that this violence needed to be confronted. Lewis is correct to focus on the ever-present Southern concern over a mutually destructive war of the races. It is impossible to examine the Southern white past without continuously encountering this obsessive anxiety over racial conflict. Lewis's...