Liberty is Land And Slaves: The Great Contradiction

Abstract

We are all familiar with the difficulty of trying to reconcile the stories of liberty and oppression that constitute nineteenth century American history. One day's lecture celebrates high rates of voter participation, the courage of westward pioneers, econom ic opportunity, and technological innovation, while the next day's class laments the Cherokee's Trail of Tears and Frederick Douglass's beating along the Baltimore waterfront. Our students have difficulty putting these two narratives together, which accounts for the large number of essays that read: Despite the fact that the bonds of slavery on African Americans got tighter, that the op portunities for women remained few, and that Native Americans lost most of their lands, Jacksonian De mocracy was an era of unprecedent ed freedom. To be sure, we should be gratified that the social history of the last thirty years has been writ ten into textbooks and state stan dards and has made it impossible to ignore the experiences of women and people of color. But at the same time, students find themselves forced into intellectual contortions to incorporate this new information into the broader patriotic narrative of liberty that still guides textbook authors, American civic culture, and political discourse. We want students to know both the stories of liberty and oppres sion, but we need not require them to choose which one is more im portant. These two narratives are not mutually exclusive, and as our students are increasingly aware, liberty and oppression existed simul taneously in the nineteenth-century United States. Nonetheless, we now have an opportunity to take students one step further?toward the recognition that liberty and oppression were intertwined, or to use the common academic term, contingent upon one another. It was not just a coincidence that some people in nineteenth-century America had lib erty while others did not; rather, some people's liberty depended upon the denial of liberty to others. In no place was this interrelationship more vivid than in the south ern states during the first decades of the nineteenth century, especially when we consider the patterns of economic development that brought about the market revolution. As in the northern states, a spirit of en trepreneurship and progress made most white male southerners ex tremely optimistic about their future prospects. These embraced the pioneering ethos, and, in the space of a few decades, transferred the geographical center of the region from the Chesapeake south and west to Mississippi and Louisiana. They were agricultural innovators, eager to apply the most recent technologies to the cultivation and processing of such staple crops as cotton, rice, and sugar. In sum, southern white were men on the make. However, the two key ingredients in the southern version of the market revolution came with enormous