De Bow Research Articles

Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question

Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question

Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World

Adrian Brettle's book offers a topic new to the literature on the Confederacy: a comprehensive look at planning for the post-Confederate world. The book is well written, though aimed more at scholars than a lay audience. It is based on remarkably intensive research in a variety of sources, including military records, papers of politicians and civilians, and congressional hearings from both sides in the conflict. The simple and counterintuitive thesis of Colossal Ambitions is that an abundant number of Confederate politicians and other leaders, such as planters, engaged in extensive planning for the era after Confederate independence. Brettle quotes optimistic leaders hoping for hegemony over Latin America, industrialization, new cooperation with Indian nations, a reboot of relations with England based on trade, and interaction with the United States. Brettle examines Confederates who had ideas about the future. However, he often describes musing about the postwar world as planning. Dreams of change would matter more if the Confederacy had a process for planning a colossal future and making it happen. For the story to matter, he would need a way to turn ambitions into reality. Brettle depicts the Confederacy's most eloquent voice for progress, the political economist and publisher James D. B. De Bow, as a planner, and here he has a case. However, De Bow, a strong voice for economic reform before the war, is an interesting individual rather than a movement.

Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World by Adrian Brettle

Reviewed by: Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World by Adrian Brettle Daniel J. Burge (bio) Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World. By Adrian Brettle. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. xi, 330. $45.00 cloth; $45.00 ebook) Over the last fifty years, historians of U.S. empire have frequently examined the southern dream of empire. Robert E. May, John McCardell, Walter Johnson, and Matthew Karp have all traced and analyzed how prominent southerners sought to use the power of the U.S. government to reinforce, and often expand, the institution of slavery. These studies, however, typically end with the outbreak of the Civil War. Adrian Brettle's Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World is thus a welcome contribution to studies of U.S. empire, as it extends the analysis of southern empire into the ensuing decade. Brettle shows that southerners did not abandon the expansive plans they advocated for in the 1850s. Instead, "patriotic Confederates remained convinced virtually to the end of the Civil War that their nation would survive to implement the progressive commercial, territorial, diplomatic, and racial programs they envisioned and debated during the conflict" (p. 1). Brettle crafts his argument by moving chronologically through the Civil War in six crisply written chapters. After an introduction that explains his major points, Brettle transitions into an opening chapter that examines Confederate planning before the outbreak of the Civil War. In this chapter, Brettle demonstrates that Confederates envisioned a powerful Confederacy where "slavery and territorial expansion would be the national priorities . . . with the aim of increasing production and exports of staple crops" (p. 41). This chapter sets up his ensuing evaluation of how Confederate planning evolved over the course of the conflict. In each chapter, Brettle relies upon a variety of voices, ranging from politicians, to editors, to economic boosters. His broad examination of sources enables him to illustrate the diversity of opinions that existed within the Confederacy (pp. 104–07). Brettle's chronological focus also allows him to craft his most original argument: Confederate leaders did not abandon their plans [End Page 84] for empire. "By the end of 1862," Brettle noted in his third chapter, "the military disasters of the late winter and spring seemed a distant memory to planners of the new nation . . . Confederate optimists confidently assumed they had made progress toward independence and then an expansive, prosperous future" (p. 109). Defeats in the Southwest and the French occupation of Mexico did alter Confederate plans, but they did not cause Confederate planners to retreat into a defensive shell. Leaders optimistically believed they could wait until after the war to recapture these regions. Wending his way through the Civil War, Brettle shows that Confederates remained hopeful about the future of their nation. To be slightly more specific, Brettle proves Confederate leaders remained optimistic about the survival and future growth of the Confederacy. If there is one area where historians can build upon Brettle's conclusions it is on the popular reception of these visions of empire. Certainly, the men whose names pepper the pages of Colossal Ambitions believed and hoped that the Confederacy would become a dominant, slaveholding empire. Quotes from Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, James D. B. De Bow, William H. Trescot, and Henry Hotze illustrate this optimism. But did citizens within the Confederacy share this vision of empire? Certainly, understanding the views that Confederate planners held is important, but future historians will need to uncover how deeply these visions of empire permeated the Confederacy. In all, Brettle's Colossal Ambitions is an impressive volume. Scholars have analyzed how Confederates conducted their foreign policy, detailing in particular the Confederate attempt to secure diplomatic recognition from Great Britain and France. In doing so, however, they have often overlooked, or downplayed, how truly ambitious Confederate leaders remained. Confederate planners not only expected to maintain their independence, but they also envisioned the Confederacy would rise to become the dominant power on the continent, a nation that was militarily, economically, and territorially superior to the United States. Confederate leaders did not expect to [End Page 85] lose the Civil War and only their defeat ensured that their...

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

Reviewed by: A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Douglas R. Egerton (bio) A Curse Upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. By Kay Wright Lewis. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $64.95 cloth; $28.95 paper; $27.50 ebook) Even before the arrival of large numbers of enslaved Africans into the British mainland colonies, English colonists were experienced in the tactics of exterminatory warfare. In battles against Irish Catholics and Indigenous Americans, settlers learned how to eradicate some enemies while enslaving others. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Kay Wright Lewis argues in this provocative study, Americans mastered the rhetoric of race war, and a good many of both races, she convincingly demonstrates, regarded it as a serious threat. Even after emancipation, African American fears of racial extermination continued, reemerging in the writings and speeches of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X. Southern whites and Caribbean masters learned that racially based conflicts often cut in both directions. As French refugees fled the revolt in Saint Domingue and settled in Charleston, they carried with them stories of the formidable capacity of Black soldiers. Those fears [End Page 341] nearly became reality in South Carolina in 1822 when former bondman Denmark Vesey orchestrated a plot to liberate the enslaved through bloodshed before sailing for Haiti. When questioned by one of his lieutenants over the necessity of wholesale slaughter, Lewis observes, Vesey replied by remarking that "nits make lice," a term earlier used by white settlers regarding southern Indians. These mainland revolts were initially isolated and quickly failed, the author notes, but thanks to the internal slave trade, stories of Vesey and Nat Turner traveled across the South and were passed from one generation to the next, keeping alive ideas of a war to the death. On occasion, Lewis's determination to fit all of her data into her larger theory appears forced. When discussing the late antebellum efforts of lower South fire-eaters to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, the author suggests that the debates—which in fact divided Carolina planters from their Virginia brethren, who wished to sell their surplus laborers to the fresh lands of the frontier South—"set the stage for future ideas about Black labor and Black disposability" (p. 141). Although it was true enough that white southerners united in claiming that abolition would result in a race war and the extermination of freedmen, advocates of the traffic in Africans insisted that it would reduce the price of enslaved labor enough for middle-class farmers to buy and carry bondmen into the western territories. Far from thinking in terms of "disposability," writers such as Louisianan James De Bow argued that modern steamships could quickly ferry captured Africans to the South with little loss of life. De Bow's editorials embraced the language of paternalism and insisted that Africans were better off enslaved by Christian masters than left on their own in the old world, a ghastly argument shared by a good many white Americans regardless of section. Lewis returns to form in her final chapters, however, as the Civil War years witnessed a rebirth of the language of extermination. Northern Democrats, who worried that Black military service would lead to demands for citizenship and voting rights, warned their Black neighbors that Confederates planned to chop captured African [End Page 342] American soldiers into "mincemeat, or [be] quartered and pickled" (p. 179). Conservative Democrats had their agenda, of course, but they were right enough in thinking that Jefferson Davis and his Congress threatened to enslave or execute Black prisoners of war. Even without orders from Richmond, Confederates at Fort Pillow in Tennessee and Marks Mills in Arkansas slaughtered both Black combatants and civilians. Lewis's prose is clear and strong and only rarely lapses into jargon. Although most of her sources are published rather than archival, her dense footnotes reveal both secondary literature and often obscure pamphlets and newspaper editorials. Wisely, Lewis lets these past voices speak for themselves through ample quotations, demonstrating the centrality of fears of mass extermination among both...

Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett

Reviewed by: Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade by Sharla M. Fett Scott Heerman (bio) Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade. By Sharla M. Fett. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Cloth, $35.00.) Sharla Fett's splendid book on illegally enslaved Africans is at once readable and accessible, while making several key contributions to scholarship on slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation in the nineteenth century. The book will interest a wide cast of scholars and would be appropriate for advanced undergraduate students. Before a few years ago there was relatively little scholarship on the slave trade after its abolition took effect in 1808, and historians have actively been working to fill the gaps in our knowledge. Fett is one of them, and her most recent book helps fill a crucial one. The book offers a tight chronology, mostly between 1857 and 1861, and traces the experiences of roughly eighteen hundred captive African slaves on four vessels: the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota. All four vessels embarked from Africa and were intercepted on the high seas, whereupon the human cargo was detained in various U.S. ports and the [End Page 650] would-be slaves were returned to apprenticeship, and eventually freedom, in Liberia. While Fett's narrative and argument are confined to a handful of ships over a few short years, the book is anything but narrow. Fett uses this history to offer different ways to conceptualize slavery and freedom in the wider Atlantic world. First among these is her framework for understanding the captives' harrowing journey. During the nineteenth century, African shipmates like those on the Echo, Wildfire, William, and Bogota were typically called "liberated Africans," or emancipados, to mark their movement from slavery to freedom. Yet Fett's story confounds this simple binary and offers a careful history of enslaved people's experiences after their capture, detention, and repatriation. Fett prefers the term "recaptured Africans," which emphasizes "the constraints of death and suffering, containment and racialization, that African shipmates endured" (4). With this conceptual innovation, Fett analyzes the liminal zone that recaptured Africans occupied, and brings a deep knowledge of slavery in West Africa to bear on the history of emancipation in the Americas. The result is an erudite transnational history of the complexities of human bondage and emancipation. A second key conceptual contribution is the way in which Fett's study of the slave trade informs the history of U.S. slavery. Often, historians separate the Atlantic trade in African captives from the history of plantation production in the U.S. South. Yet Fett convincingly shows that slave smuggling "exerted a significant impact on nineteenth-century U.S. public debates and popular culture" (6). She situates the politics of slavery globally, highlighting that the 1850s was a period when slavery retreated in newly independent Latin American nations and in the British and French Caribbean, while also seeing an unprecedented reinvention that birthed new plantation complexes in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. The simultaneous abolition and expansion of slavery shaped debates over race and racial hierarchy, which in turn propelled the rise of scientific racism and theories of polygenesis to justify the institution of slavery. By examining the experiences of these recaptive Africans, Fett unearths new dimensions of this history. She does the bulk of that work in chapters 2 and 3. First she looks at the slave trade tourism at Fort Sumter, which brought paying tourists into close contact with the recaptives. Next, in chapter 3, she offers a careful reading of print culture. Looking in particular at Harper's Weekly, De Bow's Review, and other prominent publications of the time, she shows how recaptives' experiences in detention provided fodder for proslavery ideologies. In this way it becomes evident that the politics of race and slavery went beyond the halls of Congress and the statements of lawmakers, into popular print and culture. [End Page 651] After opening chapters that set out the contours of the illegal slave trade after 1808, the second half of the book focuses on...

OLMSTED, DE BOW, AND THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE ON THE AMERICAN SLAVE SOUTH

Scholarship on the American Slave South generally agrees that John Eliot Cairnes’sThe Slave Powerprovided a highly biased interpretation of the functioning and long-term viability of the southern slave economy. Published shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, its partisanship is partly attributed to its clearly stated goal to shift British support from the secession states to the states of the Union. Thus, it is generally agreed, Cairnes sifted his sources to obtain the desired outcome. A more balanced use of the sources at his possession would have provided a very different outcome. This paper will challenge this general assessment of Cairnes’s book by examining in some detail two of Cairnes’s most important sources: Frederic Law Olmsted’s travelogues on the American Slave South and James D. B. De Bow's compilation of statistical data and essays in hisIndustrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States(1852–53). By contrasting De Bow's use of statistical evidence with Olmsted's travelogues, my final purpose is to question the weight of evidence on the American Slave South. Cairnes aimed, I will argue, much more to balance the evidence than is generally acknowledged, but it is misleading to think that balancing a wide range of evidence washes out bias if this evidence itself is politically skewed, as is the rule rather than the exception.

De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach (review)

De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach (review)

John F. Kvach. De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South.

John F. Kvach. De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South.

De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach (review)

Reviewed by: De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach Andrew Parker Patrick (bio) De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South. By John F. Kvach. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 280. $50.00 cloth) John Kvach’s study of De Bow’s Review combines biography with an insightful reading of the changing content of the leading reform [End Page 119] journal in the antebellum South. The result is a complex portrait that undermines stereotypical views of the “Old” South as a static and backward region by highlighting the existence of a vibrant community of southerners interested in the development, diversification, and improvement of the southern economy. Kvach effectively demonstrates a level of continuity between “Old” and “New” South reformers through his narrative linking the life and career of editor James Dunwoody Brownson (J. D. B.) De Bow to regional developments from the 1820s through the early years of Reconstruction. Kvach fills a notable historiographical gap by providing a sustained biography of De Bow from his early background in Charleston, South Carolina, through the creation of his Review as a platform for promoting an agenda of regional economic diversification and development to his strident defense of slavery and rabid secessionism in the years leading to the Civil War. That De Bow died in 1867 meant his influence on Reconstruction was minimal, yet Kvach demonstrates that De Bow remained committed to a vision of regional diversification and development while accepting the failure of secession and Confederate independence. Kvach links De Bow’s personal history to the ups and downs of his Review, which struggled to collect subscription fees and often only survived due to De Bow’s considerable determination and efforts. Kvach also traces the shifting themes and emphasis of the Review’s content. The journal began with a focus on regional economic development and diversification within a national framework but transitioned to a defense of slavery amid rising sectional tensions before eventually arriving at a position of staunch southern nationalism. In the years prior to the Civil War, the Review’s proslavery secessionism argued that the region’s economy could only thrive outside the restrictive confines of the United States. Kvach’s deeply researched work goes beyond De Bow’s personal and professional history to re-create a list of nearly fifteen hundred individual subscribers to his journal throughout the South. By examining this group via the snapshot provided in the 1860 census, Kvach presents a revealing portrait of the Review’s readership: a community of reform-minded southern planters, professionals, entrepreneurs, and [End Page 120] merchants. De Bow and his Review mirrored their readers’ commercial and regional interests. The appendix listing “The Identified Readership of De Bow’s Review” demonstrates the meticulous labor that went into Kvach’s work and will be of particular use to those who hope to utilize the Review in their own research. Tables, figures, and Kvach’s analysis highlight important patterns in the Review’s readership and content. The work’s subtitle accurately summarizes the significance of De Bow’s Review in providing “the antebellum vision of a New South,” but it also suggests the importance of Kvach’s contribution, namely to complicate what is too often viewed as a neat distinction between the “Old” South and the “New.” Given this recognition of continuity between periods of southern history, it is perhaps surprising Kvach placed no more emphasis on the similarity of obstacles that undermined efforts to reform the region’s economy in both De Bow’s lifetime and beyond. De Bow’s death in 1867 limited his influence on Reconstruction, but New South prophets struggled to realize their vision of a modernized economy because many white southerners were unable to overcome the legacies of slavery, the very institution that warped De Bow’s Review from a journal promoting regional economic reform within the framework of the Union to a zealous mouthpiece for southern nationalism. Nonetheless, Kvach’s work makes a significant contribution by highlighting underappreciated aspects of the antebellum South. Andrew Parker Patrick ANDREW PARKER PATRICK is a PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky working on a dissertation examining the...

De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South

Journal Article De Bow's Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South Get access John F. Kvach. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 270 pp. $50.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 3, December 2014, Pages 945–946, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau661 Published: 01 December 2014

De Bow’s Review: The Antebellum Vision of a New South by John F. Kvach (review)

De Bow's Review: Antebellum Vision of a New South. By John F. Kvach. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Pp. 270. Cloth, $50.00.)Reviewed by Jason PhillipsOn February 27, 1867, southern nationalist and economic visionary James D. B. De Bow died while visiting his brother in New Jersey. An antebellum crusader for southern railroads, De Bow became president of the Tennessee Central and Pacific Railroad months before his death. Northerners placed his remains on a southbound train. But the Civil War that De Bow had zealously promoted ruined the transportation system he labored so long to develop. morass of postwar southern rail lines lost his body before it reached his home in Nashville. No tombstone or monument marks his grave.The disappearing body of James De Bow demonstrates the paradoxical life of an Old South economic booster. Despite living during the cotton boom, De Bow championed diversification, urbanization, and industrialization. He earned readers' trust with objective statistical analysis that encompassed the region, but when sectionalism intensified De Bow discarded factual writing and penned passionate screeds that favored narrow interests. When he abandoned his prophetic vision of a diversified southern economy in favor of King Cotton's empire, his powers of foresight failed to appreciate the South's economic weaknesses and its impending doom. After his cause lost, this notorious fire-eater embraced Confederate defeat as an opportunity for economic reformation. Instead of wallowing in nostalgia like other prominent southerners, De Bow resumed his antebellum fixation on the future. While peers published histories of the Confederacy, De Bow titled his first postwar article The Future of the United States. A rare, repented rebel, he publicly admitted his mistakes.Paradoxes also marked De Bow's memory and historical legacy. timing of his death, after defeat but before Radical Reconstruction and Redemption, branded him as an Old South figure who vanished with the vanquished Confederacy. His vision anticipated the New South Creed of Henry Grady and other boosters, but De Bow did not live to assert the precedent of his vision. Even New South editors in Nashville, where De Bow had worked and lived, misremembered De Bow and misspelled his name when they recalled him at all. Historians have also neglected the first southerner to promote a regional economic plan, because De Bow's career defies scholars' neat periodization of Old and New South. As a result, historians have paid more attention to De Bow's southern nationalism and his pro-slavery writings of the 1850s than to his advocacy for southern industry and cities. Many scholars quote De Bow's Review, but few of them have studied the man behind the magazine. Only one outdated biography of De Bow had existed, until now.John Kvach addresses all these paradoxes in a refreshing biography of an important antebellum intellectual. His fine work contributes to recent scholarship that complicates our understanding of the Old South's economy. Beneath the veneer of moonlight and magnolias, historians are uncovering bustling cities, middle-class entrepreneurs, and self-aware professionals who transformed the southern economy before the Civil War interrupted the region's modernization. …

The Mexican Image through Southern Eyes: De Bow's Review in the Era of Manifest Destiny

De Bow's Review was the leading magazine of the South during the antebellum period. This historical study examines the journal's meaning-making about Mexicans and reveals how the magazine, as the principal voice of the section's plantation, commercial, banking, and mining interests, promoted the image of a broken, degenerate Mexico and proclaimed that only the “Anglo-Saxon race” was capable of bringing progress amid the American project of empire-building. Though Mexicans’ racial status was unresolved in the 1840s, De Bow's Review correspondents later assigned to them the status of non-masters unfit to self-govern and, therefore, fit only to serve and to be ruled by their Anglo-American conquerors. The context of the correspondents’ claims of Mexican inferiority suggests that they simultaneously engaged in an unspoken struggle to differentiate the South from the North by defining Mexican inferiority in relation to Southern values of bravery, honor, and dominance.

One Hundred and Eighty Years of Great Statistical Collections from the US Census Bureau

Generations of information seekers have relied on the statistical compendia--most notably, the Statistical of the United States--produced by the Census Bureau and its predecessor agencies. As the federally-funded versions of these information resources become a thing of the past, it is fitting to remember their unique benefit to researchers of all stripes and libraries of every type. In this retrospective, Mark Anderson recalls the launch of these publications, reviews their coming of age, and reminds us why it will be difficult to do without them.--Editor In early 2011, librarians around the country were dismayed to learn that the Census Bureau budget for FY 2012 made no provision for the Statistical Compendia Branch, the agency which produced not only the renowned and much beloved Statistical of the United States (SA), but also its major supplements the County and City Data Book (CCDB) and the State and Metropolitan Area Data Book (SMADB). As justification, the Bureau pointed out that as more and more government data is accessible in user-manipulated electronic formats, print is an obsolete medium for most research purposes. No doubt there is some truth to that, but information seekers had come to rely on these unparalleled resources for good reason. Single-volume collections of condensed social, economic, and demographic data have a long and esteemed history. The role of the census enumerators, who were originally charged by the Constitution with counting the free and slave populations of the various states for the purpose of congressional apportionment, expanded to collect a large amount of demographic and economic information about American families. After only a few census cycles, early demographers, social scientists, public planners, and businessmen saw the need for a summary of the most important data sets from the most recent censuses collected and available in one place. The first census volume to bear the word Abstract in the title was published as a volume of the 1830 decennial census and was titled of the Fifth Census. This bore little resemblance to the present SA, and was merely a state-by-state and county-by-county summary of the populations of each, divided into the free and slave segments, and included a calculation of the number of House of Representatives seats each state would receive, based on those counts. According to Article 1, Section 2 of the U. S. Constitution, slaves counted as three fifths of a person. The real grandparent of today's Statistical was the brainchild of James Dunwoody Brownson De Bow, director of the 1850 Census. Mr. De Bow lobbied Congress to fund the printing of a single volume of basic demographic, economic, and social that would compare the current year with previous years. He wrote in the introduction to the Statistical View of the United States, statistics ... constitute the ledger of a nation, in which, like the merchant in his books, the citizen can read, at one view, all of the results of a year or of a period of years, as compared with other periods, and deduce the profit or the loss which has been made in morals, education, wealth and power. Congress agreed, and a House resolution of January 12, 1854 authorized the publication of a hundred thousand copies of a compendium of the Seventh Census, so long as it was printed in royal octavo form and did not exceed 400 pages. The censuses of 1860, '70, '80, and '90 each contained a compendium which summarized time-series data collected from many diverse agencies. However, the census bureaus that were responsible for the first 12 censuses (1790-1900) were ad hoc operations, each created by an act of Congress, placed under the jurisdiction of the State or the Interior Department, charged with collecting data and publishing the current census, and then dissolved when that work was done. Since census bureaus were not permanent, an annual SA was not possible. …

De Bow’s Revolution: The Memory of the American Revolution in the Politics of the Sectional Crisis, 1850–1861

In January 1861 editor James D.B. De Bow advocated the secession of southern states from the union as he proclaimed to his readers that white Southerners “are mainly the descendants of those who fought the battles of the Revolution, and who understand and appreciate the nature and inestimable value of the liberty which it brought.” While editors on both sides of the Sectional Crisis over slavery in the 1850s and 60s claimed to be “custodians of the legacy of 1776” as they used the American Revolution symbolically in their rhetoric. By focusing on De Bow’s Review, a widely read and influential journal during this fight, we can gain a better understanding of the specific terms by which Southerners were encouraged to think of themselves not as rebels but as guardians of “the true American character.”

"The Difference of Race": Antebellum Race Mythology and the Development of Southern Nationalism

In January of 1860, less than one month after John Brown's execution and less than a year before the fateful election of Abraham Lincoln, the influential New Orleans periodical, De Bow's Review, presented for the edification of its readers an article entitled "The Basis of Northern Hostility to the South." The author advanced a provocative thesis that would explain, he contended, the widening chasm of opinion and sentiment between the northern and southern states. The article argued that the antagonism between northerners and southerners, which had most recently and dramatically manifested itself in the trial and execution of John Brown, constituted more than a mere disagreement over slavery. Indeed, the writer maintained, Yankees would remain eternally hostile to the South, even if they could be brought to agree with southerners on the issue of slavery, for the dispute between North and South was not merely political and economic in nature. It also reflected a deep cultural and racial division that had originated over two hundred years ago in England in the antagonism between Puritan and Cavalier. "The cavaliers and puritans of that age," the writer observed, "were undoubtedly the ancestors, and, to a great extent, the prototypes of this. . . . The puritan hatred of the cavalier was deep and bitter, but neither deeper nor more bitter than that of the mass of the Northern, for the people of the Southern [End Page 1] States, especially that portion of the North known as New England" ("Basis" 9).

The Fire-Eaters (review)

I58CIVIL WAR HISTORY stereotypes handed down by earlier writers. He appears to be at times a little puzzled by evidence to the contrary. For instance, Davis was, it is said, notoriously impatient, yet the author concludes that in the case of Joseph E. Johnston (of all people) he was too patient. He also, perhaps in an effort to avoid being too friendly to his man, stops to criticize him rather gratuitously on occasion. When the author comes to strike the final balance, he finds that the credits "somewhat outweigh" (704) the debits—not very satisfying, perhaps , but at least an honest admission of the complexity of the task at hand. Then there comes what must be the inescapable comparison: "Not even Lincoln could have achieved Confederate independence, though with his human and executive skills he would certainly have done a betterjob than Davis. But that is because Lincoln was truly a great man. Jefferson Davis was a good man, possessed of elements of greatness, but few of them suited to the impossible task he was called upon to perform" (704). William C. Davis may not have written the definitive biography ofhis man, if there is such a thing as a definitive biography, but he has written one that will be useful to a wide variety of readers for years to come. He leaves us considerably in his debt. Ludwell H. Johnson, III College of William and Mary The Fire-Eaters. By Eric H. Walther. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 333. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $12.95.) Throughout his collective biography of nine secessionists, Eric Walther weaves a complex tapestry of the personal lives and careers of the fire-eaters and, by extension, the Southern society which they sought to preserve. Fireeaters , Walther maintains, must be understood as standing apart from both moderate states' rights politicians who would use the threat of secession to extract Northern concessions on the slavery question as well as other radicals who promoted Southern interests but stopped short of secession. If states' rights politicians and radicals sought Southern salvation within the Union, Walther's fire-eaters viewed secession as the means by which Southern liberty , independence, and honor would be preserved and perpetuated. Secessionists pursued this objective with a common single-mindedness that belied the diversity of their backgrounds and interests. Louis T. Wigfall's poverty and crudeness contrasted with John A. Quitman's wealth and Laurence Keitt's ennobled sense of honor. Edmund Ruffin was sixty-six when South Carolina seceded; William Porcher Miles was thirty-eight. Nathaniel Beverly Tucker withdrew from politics to teach the theory of secession in the classroom; William Lowndes Yancey was the quintessential political agitator. Robert Barnwell Rhett, driven and devious, became an adroit political tactician , while fellow South Carolinian Miles forever struggled to reconcile abstract principles with political realities. Ruffin and James D. B. De Bow both BOOK REVIEWS159 criticized the South's economy; yet Ruffin championed scientific agriculture while De Bow promoted industrialization. Walther contends that, paradoxically, complexity and diversity underlay the fire-eaters' success in realizing their commonly shared objective. Believing that by their nature, politicians and parties jeopardized Southern rights and liberties through compromise and by avoiding decisive action on the slavery question, secessionists were early on alienated from the republic's political system. Yet rather than form a third party, these dissimilar individuals appealed separately and together to a variety of interests and individuals in the South who, by the end of the Buchanan administration, too came to believe that only a Southern republic could preserve their society and traditional liberties. Without duplicity or hypocrisy, their message resonated with agriculturists and industrialists, slaveholders and non-slaveholders, citydwellers and yeomen. Although diverse in guise, the fire-eater message was consistent and simple. A diseased North, corrupt and class-ridden, posed an overwhelming and immutable threat to the South. By dominance of numbers and a manipulation of the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution, Northern politicians would limit then abolish slavery—an institution which by promoting white equality and liberty, secured the liberties of republican government. Drawing on the ideals and heritage of the Founding Fathers, fire-eaters espoused a...

The Cause of the South: Selections from De Bow's Review, 1846–1867. Edited by Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson. New Orleans, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xiv, 306. $27.50 cloth, $8.95 paper.

The Cause of the South: Selections from De Bow's Review, 1846–1867. Edited by Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson. New Orleans, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xiv, 306. $27.50 cloth, $8.95 paper.

Reviews

Book Reviews in This Article:F. R. H. du Boulay. The Lordship of Canterbury. An Essay on Medieval Society.Elspeth M. Veale. The English Fur Trade in the Later Middle Ages. Faculty Office Registers, 1534‐1549. A Calendar of the first two Registers of the Archbishop of Canterbury s Faculty Office.A. J. Slavin. Politics and Profit: a study of Sir Ralph Sadler, 1507‐47.D. M. Livock (Ed.). City Chamberlains’ Accounts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.A. M. Everitt. The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion.Peter Laslett. The World We Have Lost.Lionel Munby. Hertfordshire Population Statistics.A. D. Francis. The Methuens and Portugal, 1691‐1708.D. F. McKenzie. The Cambridge University Press, 1696‐1712. A Bibliographical Study.Sir Francis Hill. Georgian Lincoln. Camden Miscellany.R. M. Barton. A History of the Cornish China‐Clay Industry.John Burnett. Plenty and Want. A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day.M. W. Flinn (Ed.). Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, by Edwin Chadwick, 1842.E. J. Hobsbawm. Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour.Frank Whitson Fetter. Development of British Monetary Orthodoxy, 1797‐1875.J. M. Hussey (Ed.). The Cambridge Medieval History.Henry J. Cohn. The Government of the Rhine Palatinate in the Fifteenth Century.Carlo M. Cipolla. Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400‐1700.Alain Dubois. Die Salzversorgung des Wallis, 1500‐1610. Wirtschaft und Politik.Z. Y. Hershlag. Introduction to the Economic History of the Middle East.Sunil Kumar Sen. Studies in Industrial Policy and Development of India.Frank H. H. King. Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1845‐1895.William W. Lockwood (Ed.). The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan.Eijiro Honjo. The Social and Economic History of Japan.UNITED STATES OF AMERICAStuart Bruchey. The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607‐1861: An Essay in Social Causation.Daniel H. Calhoun. Professional Lives in America: Structure and Aspiration, 1750‐1850.Frederick G. Jensen. Capital Growth in Early America.Alice E. Smith. George Smith's Money.Albert Fishlow. American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante Bellum Economy.Eugene D. Genovese. The Political Economy of Slavery, Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South.David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis (Eds.). Economic Change in the Civil War Era.Thomas J. Pressly and William H. Scofield (Eds.). Farm Real Estate Values in the United States by Counties, 1850‐1959.Thomas W. Gavett. Development of the Labor Movement in Milwaukee.Gabriel Kolko. Railroads and Regulation, 1877‐1916.J. D. B. De Bow. The Industrial Resources, Statistics, etc. of the United States.Thomas R. Brooks. Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor.Harvey S. Perloff, Edgar S. Dunn, Jr, Eric E. Lampard, and Richard F. Muth. Regions, Resources, and Economic Growth.J. Van Fenstermaker. The Development of American Commercial Banking: 1782‐1837.Robert F. Durden. The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896.Cedric B. Cowing. Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Stock and Commodity Speculation, 1890‐1936.Marshall R. Colberg. Human Capital in Southern Development, 1939‐1963.Joe S. Bain. International Differences in Industrial Structure: Eight Mations in the 1950's.Jacob Schmookler. Invention and Economic Growth.M. Da Pozzo and G. Felloni. La Borsa Valori di Genova nel secolo XIX.Valerio Castronovo. L'industria laniera in Piemonte nel secolo XIX.PERIODICAL LITERATURE, 1965

J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South

J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South

J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South.

J. D. B. De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South.