Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South (review)

Abstract

I38CIVIL WAR HISTORY relief as enthusiasm. In contrast, editor Gabor Borrit argues that Abraham Lincoln blindly stumbled toward mass slaughter in the mistaken belief that slavery could be marginalized without resort to arms; even readers who find Borrit's depiction of a naive Lincoln unpersuasive, as does this reviewer, will find much in this wide-ranging essay to ponder. William Gienapp explains why the globe's most advanced democracy failed to preserve the peace, andWilliamW. Freehling similarly suggests that war came because of the political peculiarities of a slave regime unlike any other in the Americas. My caveats are few. Notes belong at the foot of the page, and a work of history, especially one designed in part for classroom use, should have an index! Douglas R. Egerton Le Moyne College Henry Hughes and Proslavery Thought in the Old South. By DouglasAmbrose. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 226. $45.00.) Perhaps only Henry Hughes, the relatively obscure "sociologist" from Port Gibson, Mississippi, could have rivaled George Fitzhugh's status as America's most inventive and outrageous defender of slavery. This youngest of the lot of Southern "controversialists" was something of a caricature of several betterknown proslavery writers. His megalomania, distinguished by inklings of messianic mission, surpassed that of James Henry Hammond, while his wracking doubts and acute sense ofisolation made George Frederick Holmes and Beverley Tucker seem distinctly upbeat and clubby in comparison. As for his social vision , he was as contemptuous of Yankees as Edmund Ruffin, more chilling in his prescription for race relations than even Josiah Nott, and every bit as intent on fundamentally reforming Southern slavery as James Henley Thornwell. DouglasAmbrose adds his carefully drawn portrait ofHughes's life and work to an ever-expanding gallery of proslavery ideologues. Nearly a dozen modern studies have taken the same biographical approach scholars ofabolitionism have long used, conveying the personal stories ofthose disparate individuals who mustered the "positive good" defense ofthe institution (though it seems worth noting that full-blown studies of such early innovators as William Harper and Thomas Roderick Dew remain to be written).Ambrose is not the first to take up Hughes's fascinating career—BertramWyatt-Brown, RonaldTakaki, and Stanford Lyman have shown in shorter pieces how Hughes turned to the incipient field of sociology to craft his own evaluation of Southern "waranteeism." But this closely argued book presents, in the sort ofpainstaking attention to Hughes's theories that his historical contemporaries never came close to granting, what will surely be the definitive study ofthis peculiar Mississippian's fourteen-year public career. After detailing Hughes's family and his upbringing during the Southwestern cotton boom, Ambrose turns to the remarkable diary kept by the young lawyer between 1 848 and his trip to Europe in 1 853. This source takes readers on a tour of a mental landscape they will not soon forget, while it also allowsAmbrose to BOOK REVIEWS139 compile a list (located in an appendix) of Hughes's reading that will be of use to all students of Southern intellectual life. The core of the study, however, is an extended investigation of Hughes's Treatise on Sociology of 1 854 and a handful of his later writings, all of which Ambrose subjects to a searching analysis owing much to the work of Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. In the final chapter, Ambrose argues that even though Hughes became a casualty of sectional conflict in 1862, his "statist" program was realized by the unlikely agent of the Confederate States of America. This is the most original and provocative (ifnot the most convincing) part ofthe study and is the one likely to be of most interest to students of the Civil War. That this volume does not rank among the best studies of proslavery polemicists is as much a tribute to the achievements of Drew Faust, Neal Gillespie, and others as it is an indication of any serious flaws of its own. That said, however, there remains the lurking sense that in its admirable attempt to be evenhanded about its subject; the book does not adequately convey Hughes's "fine sense of the ludicrous," as his eulogist aptly put it, and...