Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas by Christa Dierksheide

Abstract

Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas. By Christa Dierksheide. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. [xvi], 279. $45.00, ISBN 978-0 8139-3621-5.) Just as World War II is often dubbed a war, the clash between abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is often imagined as a rare conflict with clear forces of good and evil. In Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, Christa Dierksheide problematizes simple duality, asserting British and American pro- and antislavery advocates actually shared much in their visions of slavery and empire. Both factions, Dierksheide maintains, promoted for slaves--defined as gradual improvement--as part of envisioning empire as a positive, civilizing force for humanity (p. 1). One side just anticipated amelioration within slavery, the other through abolition. The book focuses primarily on slaveholder ideologies. Part 1 highlights Virginia, with a chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson's argument ameliorating slavery would supposedly prepare enslaved peoples for abolition in some distant future. Chapter 2 turns to antebellum Virginia and the debates between slaveholders Thomas Dew and John Hartwell Cocke, stressing while Dew defended slavery and Cocke pushed abolition and colonization, both advocated amelioration; Dew just believed reform made slavery acceptable. Part 2 traces a similar trajectory among slaveholders in South Carolina. In the early national period, Henry Laurens was inspired by his emerging national identity to seek amelioration for slaves with an eye toward future emancipation. By contrast, William Harper and other slaveholders argued slavery should be improved but not abolished. In both Virginia and South Carolina, Dierksheide argues, the antislavery amelioration of the Revolutionary era unwittingly paved the way for antebellum arguments reforming slavery made abolition unnecessary. Clear and concise, these sections on U.S. slaveholders offer nuanced readings of their principal characters, demonstrating pro- and antislavery activists were not binary opposites (p. 2). Both sides were condescendingly paternalistic toward enslaved people, and both advocated reforms. It is less clear whether Dierksheide is correct in asserting that historians have so long supposed pro- and antislavery thinkers to inhabit entirely opposite poles (p. …