Foreign Slave Research Articles

A Study on the Phenomenon of Foreign Slaves in the Tang Dynasty

As one of the most prosperous periods in ancient China's economic, political, and cultural history, the Tang Dynasty's literature features many depictions of foreign slaves. These individuals became captives due to wars or arrived in China through trade exchanges along the Silk Road and other means. They played various roles in Tang society. This study is divided into five parts: the introduction, a detailed exploration of the types, sources, and primary occupations of foreign slaves in the Tang Dynasty, an analysis of the fundamental reasons for the influx of a large number of foreign slaves into Tang territory, an examination of the impact of foreign slaves on Chinese society during the Tang period, and the conclusion.

Travelling Thomas: Slave Trade and Missionary Travel in the Acts of Thomas

The Acts of Thomas is a long, rich, and fascinating narrative about the Apostle Thomas who was forced to travel to India as a missionary. When Thomas hesitates to go, his master Jesus literally sells him as a slave to an Indian merchant. Like other Apocryphal Acts, the Acts of Thomas revolves around the apostolic figure battling both human and demonic adversaries. Celibacy is central, although familiar narrative elements from ancient romances and novels are also present. On his way, Thomas sings, prays, teaches, heals, converts, and baptizes. His travel follows open trade routes in the ancient world, by land and by sea. He participates in various social events like parties, weddings, and family celebrations. His own status as a foreign slave/apostle, with a strange religion, is negotiated and contested: Sometimes he is treated like a foreign slave, suffering violence and harassment. On other occasions, his exotic strangeness in language and religion gives him access to royal palaces and influential men and women. By examining the role played by slavery in initiating this travel, as well as various intersections of religion and gender in the overall narrative, this article explores the Acts of Thomas to draw a more nuanced picture of travel in the ancient world.

Travelling Gods, Ritual Memory, and Slavery in Contemporary Benin

Abstract For more than two centuries the Bight of Benin participated in the Atlantic trade. Today, along the same coastal region, it is possible to encounter Tchamba, the spirits of foreign slaves from the northern savannah. Tchamba ritual practice, part and parcel of the Vodun religion, narrates peculiar stories of domestic slavery and the Atlantic trade, of struggles for emancipation, love and trade, women and men, slaves and masters. Most of all, the worship of Tchamba questions the notion of memory in both discursive and embodied forms, and the ways in which we create linkages between practices, narration, history, and the experience of time.

Jews and Carolingians — Cooperation, Publicity, Slave Trade and Administrative Resource

The prohibitions on the possession of Christian slaves, adopted at the beginning of the 5th century, squeezed Jews out of the industrial sphere of activity, i.e. from agriculture and handicrafts, to trade and financial and economic services, previously not very revered in the Jewish environment. Since the trade of that period was predominantly the slave trade, Jews became the main slave traders of the early Middle Ages. The texts of sources of the 5th-7th centuries indicate that during this period of time Jewish merchants were not public and hid under Greek pseudonyms — Anthony, Vasily, Priscus. The Saxon Wars of Charlemagne, which began in 770, became manna from heaven for Jews - they gained access to the almost unlimited demographic resource of the pagans, whose sale in slavery was not limited to the Catholic Church. By gifts of Asian luxury items at the beginning of the 9th century Jews were able to significantly strengthen their position in the French court. In 825, Jews received official bulls from Louis the Pious on permission to sell foreign slaves (mancipia peregrina) to countries located “below our empire” (infra imperium nostrum). Here, for the first time, we see elements of publicity — the judgments contain the names of Rabbi Donatus and Samuel (most likely from Paris), David and Joseph from Lyon and Abram from Saragossa. From the letters of Bishop Agobard of Lyons for the period 826-828 follows that these permissions were not purely declarative — in the event of conflicts between Jewish slave traders and the local administration, a “Master of Jewish Affairs” (Iudęorum magister) arrived and settled the situation. In conclusion, we comment on the economy of the Elba-Cordoba slave trade route and give a brief overview of the Jewish slave trade of the 9—11th centuries.

The Historical Role of Leviticus 25 in Naturalizing Anti-Black Racism

Leviticus 25:39–46 describes a two-tier model of slavery that distinguishes Israelites from foreign slaves. It requires that Israelites be indentured only temporarily while foreigners can be enslaved as chattel (permanent property). This model resembles the distinction between White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves in the American colonies. However, the biblical influence on these early modern practices has been obscured by the rarity of citations of Lev. 25:39–46 in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about slavery. This article reviews the history of slavery from ancient Middle Eastern antiquity through the seventeenth century to show the unique degree to which early modern institutions resembled the biblical model. It then exposes widespread knowledge of Leviticus 25 in early modern political and economic debates. Demonstrating this awareness shows with high probability that colonial cultures presupposed the two-tier model of slavery in Leviticus 25:39–46 to naturalize and justify their different treatment of White indentured slaves and Black chattel slaves.

Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts by T. M. Lemos

Reviewed by: Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts by T. M. Lemos Eric A. Seibert t. m. lemos, Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Pp. xiv + 225. $80. In this very timely and revealing study, Lemos explores the relationship between personhood and violence in the ancient Near East generally, and in ancient Israel specifically. L. attempts "to establish that in very many cases personhood and violence were closely connected in this region," and she considers "the most important nuances and implications of this connection" (p. 24). The book consists of six chapters, with the first and last serving as introduction and conclusion. The intervening chapters explore the main concerns of the book with respect to four specific groups of individuals: foreigners, women, slaves, and children. Her work fills a gap in biblical scholarship, which has paid little attention to the concept of personhood and even less to the intersection of personhood and violence (p. 4). In the introduction, L. discusses her methodology, defines key terms (personhood and violence), and provides an overview of the book. She describes her approach as one that will consider a diverse array of ancient sources—textual and otherwise—synchronically. This is done with an eye toward determining "who was considered a person" in ancient Israel (p. 15; emphasis original). This has significant relevance for conversations today about who counts as a person, and L. explores contemporary examples related to this in the final chapter. In chaps. 2–5, L. explores the extent to which foreigners, women, slaves, and children were considered persons in ancient Israel. L. convincingly demonstrates that personhood [End Page 318] in the ancient world was not fixed or static, but rather "fleeting, mutable, and subject to erasure" (p. 172). While foreigners, women, and slaves were all granted a degree of personhood, if they were "transgressive," their personhood could be diminished by dominant individuals (typically men) who used violence to subordinate them. Lemos further argues that this violence often took the form of animalizing those being subordinated by actions such as mutilating or mangling their bodies, leaving them unburied, or removing their skin. Some readers may not be fully convinced by all the connections L. makes between violence and animality in this regard. Did people in the ancient Near East view human sacrifice as a form of animalization as L. suggests (pp. 54, 148)? Would people have regarded the Levite's carved-up concubine as a form of butchering, like the kind of thing one does with an animal (p. 81)? Perhaps. It is difficult to know for sure. That notwithstanding, L. draws on numerous sources that make these connections strikingly clear (e.g., curses against transgressors of treaties, royal bravado about slaying both animals and enemies), demonstrating that her general point is surely valid. Of the four categories of people considered, foreign slaves and children fare most poorly. With regard to personhood, L. believes the status of foreign slaves "is possibly the lowliest of any social group in biblical sources" (p. 130). Yet with children, it was even worse. Practices such as child sacrifice, selling children as slaves, and cannibalism lead her to conclude "that children, and young children in particular, were not accorded the privileges and protections of personhood in ancient Israel" (p. 168). They were, in other words, non-persons. At various points, L. challenges and overturns some well-entrenched assumptions in biblical scholarship. Perhaps most notable in this regard is the oft-made assertion that women were viewed as property in the ancient world. L. finds no evidence for this. Instead, she argues that "it was patterns of domination and subordination that governed relations between husbands and wives and fathers and daughters" (p. 68). L. also forcefully critiques those who argue that slavery was not really all that bad in the ancient world. She takes to task those who cherry-pick certain verses that seem to evince a more benevolent attitude toward slaves while at the same time ignoring, or minimizing, those that clearly demonstrate the extreme vulnerability of those enslaved such as female slaves, who were constantly at risk of "sexual exploitation" (p. 125). This is a...

The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn (review)

Reviewed by: The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 by Calvin Schermerhorn Craig Hollander (bio) The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860. By Calvin Schermerhorn. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. 352. Cloth, $65.00.) Calvin Schermerhorn’s The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism comes on the heels of much recent work on slavery’s extensive role in American economic development, including Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013), Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), and Damian Alan Pargas’s Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (2015). But this book does not deserve to fall by the wayside or be overshadowed by its predecessors. Scholars of slavery—especially those interested in the domestic slave trade—should push through any potential topic fatigue and read it. Despite its broad title, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism is really only about one component of the slavery business: the interstate slave trade. In other words, it is not about the foreign slave trade, the local slave trade, the rental market for slaves, or plantation administration. As Schermerhorn states up front, his book is primarily intended to detail how domestic slave-trading firms forcibly transported one million enslaved people from the mid-Atlantic states to the sugar- and cotton-growing regions of the lower Mississippi valley and Texas. Historians have long known the general contours of this commercial system. By focusing on one discrete subject per chapter, however, Schermerhorn is able to shed new light on how the interstate traffic worked in practice, from both an operational and a financial standpoint. In the process, he reveals that slave traders were savvy business insiders rather than social pariahs. According to Schermerhorn, slave-trading firms were also on the vanguard of the market revolution. His book therefore “examines progressions from sail to steam, rough trails to iron rails, and the financial wizardry that permitted enslavers to leverage their bondspersons on financial markets” (3). Schermerhorn is at his best when describing the effect of these “progressions” on the development of the domestic slave trade. He argues convincingly that interstate slave traders—at least the successful ones—were early [End Page 103] adopters and innovators who were quick to employ state-of-the-art modes of transportation, take advantage of government support, and create new financial instruments to facilitate their business operations. In that regard, they did more than traffic slaves from one region to another; they made markets more efficient, fostering the growth of American capitalism itself. For instance, it was a slave trader named Jean Baptiste Moussier who thought of the idea to enable members of an association of stockholders to leverage their own plantation property to buy similar assets (including slaves). Two financiers in New Orleans then used Moussier’s idea to create a property bank called the Consolidated Association of the Planters of Louisiana, which was backed by the state of Louisiana. The Consolidated Association sold bonds abroad, producing an explosion in credit among sugar planters, who, in turn, purchased more land, improved their plantations, and bought fresh slaves. Such tales of “financial wizardry”—the transfer of debt instruments from one party to another—might be difficult to follow, let alone explain. Thankfully, Schermerhorn is a very good storyteller and a strong writer, despite indulging in a convoluted metaphor or two. He is also careful not to lose sight of the victims while recounting how slave traders operated. Schermerhorn constantly reminds his readers that slave traders ripped apart families, committed appalling acts of brutality, and sexually assaulted their captives. Unlike some others, however, he resists the urge to wax eloquent about lashings, rape, and death. Instead, he mostly lets his sources do the talking for him. As a writer, then, Schermerhorn employs the same technique as the subject of one of his chapters: “I draw a veil over a scene,” wrote Solomon Northup, “which can better be imagined than described” (203). Northup’s considerable...

Slave Smuggling by Foreign Privateers: The Illegal Slave Trade and the Geopolitics of the Early Republic

The article examines the slave smuggling done by French and Spanish American privateers operating along U.S. shores in the 1810s. The illegal, post-1808 slave trade has received significant attention, with historians broadly agreed that the law failed to end the trade. Current explanations focus on the domestic pressures and interests that prevented effective enforcement of the law, such as the demand for slaves, the political strength of southern legislators, and the malfeasance of law enforcementThe slave smuggling carried out by privateers, however, demonstrates the importance of conditions external to the United States. Attempts to abolish the slave trade coincided with the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the Latin American Wars of Independence. The fog of these wars, waged near American waters, gave foreign privateers ample opportunity to introduce new slaves to the country by taking advantage of loopholes in the law and weaknesses in foreign policy.Based principally on federal court records, the article describes how foreign privateers smuggled slaves, how the United States responded, and why slave smuggling declined. Altogether, the article argues for the importance of international developments in the persistence of the foreign slave trade.

River of dark dreams: slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 526. Illustrations, tables, notes, acknowledgments, index. $35.00.)Nearly million slaves arrived in the Mississippi Valley between 1820 and 1860, Walter Johnson tells us. There were more millionaires there in 1860 than in any other region of the United States and, in that same year, 3500 steamboat trips brought $220 million worth of cotton and other com- modities to the port of New Orleans. The dark dreams of the book are the aspirations of planters, whose path to riches required the cruel and ma- nipulative treatment of enslaved black people and who eventually sought expansion into Central America and the Caribbean Sea in violation of federal law. This regional approach to the Mississippi Valley makes sense, although non-specialist could finish the book unaware that there were plantations in Louisiana that used the labor of 125,000 enslaved people to produce half of the sugar consumed in the United States.Historians and general readers alike, however, will come away from this book knowing good deal more than they did. Johnson's two chapters on steamboat transportation, for example, explain the technology of the boats, the operation and limitations of the industry, the pilots' skill, the public's enthusiasm, passenger accommodations and behavior, the intense competition over speed, and the significant possibility of collision or explosion that would result in large numbers of people being drowned, scalded, or both. Johnson gives an excellent description and analysis of cotton production as well as the credit and marketing mechanisms that made it possible. Placing all this within world-historical context of busi- ness enterprise, he makes convincing case for the idea that cotton plant- ers were simply capitalists of non-industrial sort.Southern imperialism grew out of economic limitations. As early as 1840, steamboats had connected the 17,000 miles of navigable rivers in the Mississippi Valley, making the shipping industry less attractive to valley capital. In the 1850s, when railroads began to reach the Mississippi, the outlook worsened. Meanwhile, planters and merchants increasingly felt themselves under the yoke of northern economic and political interests in Congress and wished for direct access to world markets. In the New Or- leans region, the answer to these problems involved expanding into Cuba and Nicaragua rather than Kansas and Nebraska. Johnson argues that greater appreciation for filibustering and the complementary movement to reopen the foreign slave trade would free Civil War historiography from a set of anachronistic spatial frames and teleological narratives limited to secession and the land area that became the Confederacy (p. …

The British, Persecuted Foreigners and the Emergence of the Refugee Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain

For most of the nineteenth century, there were no barriers to immigration into Britain, and hence little need for the British to distinguish one foreigner from another. Despite this fact, philanthropists, officials and public commentators identified some foreigners as ‘refugees’, a designation that called for national sympathy. How and why did this category emerge? What were its inclusions and exclusions? This essay traces the expansion of the refugee category in the context of British commitments to European liberals and foreign slaves in the second quarter of the century. It argues that, by the 1840s, would-be refugees and their British supporters established a standard narrative from which audiences were meant to recognise particular foreigners as refugees and respond accordingly.

The Slave Trade Act of 1819: A New Look at Colonization and the Politics of Slavery

Few topics have garnered more scholarly attention lately than the African colonization movement. Now more than ever, researchers appreciate colonization's enduring role in the politics of slavery. Yet most of them continue to portray colonization as quixotic fantasy that inevitably failed as a public policy. In truth, the movement scored a number of triumphs. None was more important than the establishment of Liberia. This essay examines the first and arguably most significant obstacle that impeded the Liberian enterprise – securing government funding. Prior to 1816, colonization schemes abounded, but none came close to securing state support. However, in January 1817, the newly established American Colonization Society (ACS) asked Congress to create a colony for free blacks, and the House Slave Trade committee issued a largely favorable report, thus bringing colonizationists to the threshold of the government vaults. But as conflicts over slavery grew worse, the vaults' doors began swinging shut. Consequently, in 1819 colonizationists resorted to subterfuge, obtaining federal assistance under the guise of helping dispose of “recaptured Africans” (i.e., foreign slaves illegally imported into the United States). Stealth may not have been an especially noble means of obtaining government aid, but it was an effective one that testifies to the colonizationists' resourcefulness and resolve. Indeed, without it, colonizationists would never have received the federal funding that was essential to achieving their signature – if underappreciated – success, the founding of Liberia.

Ernest Obadele–Starks . Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808. Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press . 2007 . Pp. x, 270. $34.95.

Ernest Obadele–Starks . Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808. Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press . 2007 . Pp. x, 270. $34.95.

Post-Emancipation Slave Commerce: Increasing Child Slave Trafficking and Women’s Agency in Late Nineteenth-century Ghana

Victims of all slave trading systems in Africa always included significant numbers of children, but, until the nineteenth century, these formed smaller proportions of total volumes of trade slaves. Following abolition, however, the age/sex ratio of trade slaves began to shift as slave trading in children increased. Child-slave trading assumed a more expansive dimension when later in the nineteenth century European colonial powers, as a strategy for interfering and destroying indigenous slavery in their colonies, outlawed and criminalized slave trading. In Ghana a brisk trade in child-slaves from northern to southern Ghana grew after the passage of an anti-slave Ordinance in 1874. This paper examines the paradox of post-abolition child- slave trading in the Ghana. It explains the increasing availability of children in the north-south slave marketing network, child trafficking strategies and women‟s role in these, and the factors which sustained both demand and supply. Its main argument is that the entry of foreign slave raiders in northern Ghana created a supply mechanism which invigorated a north-south trade and that this mechanism was kept vibrant by an increasing demand in the south for child slaves in the face of the relative scarcity of adult captives

Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after 1808

GLADSTONE AND SLAVERY

ABSTRACTWilliam Gladstone's views on slavery and the slave trade have received little attention from historians, although he spent much of his early years in parliament dealing with issues related to that subject. His stance on slavery echoed that of his father, who was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, and on whom he was dependent for financial support. Gladstone opposed the slave trade but he wanted to improve the condition of the slaves before they were liberated. In 1833, he accepted emancipation because it was accompanied by a period of apprenticeship for the ex-slaves and by financial compensation for the planters. In the 1840s, his defence of the economic interests of the British planters was again evident in his opposition to the foreign slave trade and slave-grown sugar. By the 1850s, however, he believed that the best way to end the slave trade was by persuasion, rather than by force, and that conviction influenced his attitude to the American Civil War and to British colonial policy. As leader of the Liberal party, Gladstone, unlike many of his supporters, showed no enthusiasm for an anti-slavery crusade in Africa. His passionate commitment to liberty for oppressed peoples was seldom evident in his attitude to slavery.

Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States After 1808

Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States After 1808

Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution Lesley Doig (bio) Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution. By Charles Rappleye. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Pp. 400. Cloth, $27.00.) Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution details the ideological views, political actions, and business enterprises of the Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island. Aimed at a popular audience, this work not only describes the often admirable involvement of the family in the creation of the United States but also reveals the diametrically opposed roles that Moses and John Brown, the brothers at the center of the story, took in the contentious debate over the place of slavery in the new nation. This is a rich and engaging narrative that humanizes the complexity of the early nation's struggles to define itself. [End Page 140] The tension between the impulses of commerce and conscience serves as the underpinning of Rappleye's story. The brothers' merchant father, James Brown, was the descendant of a prominent line of colonial Baptist pastors, but he opted for a life of trade rather than religion. After the death of their father, the young Browns entered business under the supervision of an uncle, trading rum, candles, and, at times, slaves. The author recounts how commercial pursuits brought the family prosperity and with it, increased social and political influence. However, while the brothers generally shared interests early on, their paths divided when Moses converted to Quakerism in 1774. During the Revolution, John supported the patriots as a war supplier and privateer. Moses, along with other Quakers, provided aid to victims of the war but chose not to become actively involved in the conflict. It was after the war, however, that the ideological, religious, and temperamental differences of the brothers culminated in a very public disagreement. Wracked with guilt over his involvement in slavery, Moses freed his slaves in 1773. Later, with Quaker allies, he tried to convince Rhode Island's General Assembly to pass a bill barring state residents from participation in the slave trade. John, outraged that the state government would think to limit the freedom of merchants, led the opposition that blocked the bill. The brothers continued their argument in personal letters that demonstrate both their deeply divided personal convictions and continued mutual affection. The two also publically debated the issue in the press, using pseudonyms that only thinly veiled their identities. Eventually the dispute became more than philosophical. To Moses' dismay, John resumed slave trading in 1786. He continued even after a federal law was passed in 1794 prohibiting Americans from participation in the foreign slave trade. As a result, John was convicted of illegal slave trading in a federal district court. This conviction, however, did little to damage John's reputation. He was elected to Congress two years later and there became an outspoken defender of the rights of both slave owners and those merchants who wanted to deal in slaves. The brothers never resolved their disagreement over slavery, and Rappleye does not force a tidy conclusion in his narrative. In many ways this suits Rappleye's purposes, for he clearly sees the battle between capitalism and ethics as both quintessentially American and ongoing. In crafting this work, Rappleye utilized enviable research skills. He gathered documents from such myriad sources as edited collections, [End Page 141] Providence archives, the invaluable microfilm series "Papers of the American Slave Trade," and the personal holdings of Brown descendents. He also mined previously published histories for the many quotes and facts that flesh out his story. As a result, the dual biography at the center of the work is notably graceful; it draws full portraits of both men and is central to the book's success. Moses is presented as a complicated, if deeply principled, figure. And while one might expect that the portrayal of the abolitionist would be the most valuable part of this work, it is actually Rappleye's examination of John, the northerner who so actively defended slavery, which will add depth to readers' understanding of the brothers' debates. What clearly...

Lincoln, Race and Slavery: A Biographical Overview

Locating Lincoln at a fixed place along the line of nineteenth-century thinking on race and slavery is not easy. Although he said much about slavery, he said little about race. Lincoln's statements about slavery leave little reason to doubt his assertion that “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel” (1). Slavery was “a monstrous injustice” and “the sum of all villanies” (2). He had seen plantation slavery firsthand in his twenties, probably while flatboating goods down the Mississippi, “and the horrid pictures are in my mind yet” (3). In 1837, while still a junior Illinois state representative, he joined with another like-minded Illinois representative to protest “resolutions” adopted by the state legislature, endorsing “domestic slavery” in the southern states. “The institution of slavery,” Lincoln declared, “is founded on both injustice and bad policy” (4). A decade later, as an Illinois congressman, he voted for the Wilmot Proviso—which banned slavery from the territory acquired in the Mexican War—“as good as forty times.” In January 1849, he proposed a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, a bill that ultimately failed. Lincoln explained the failure with the following: “finding that I was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence, I dropped the matter knowing that it was useless to prosecute the business at that time” (5). He considered “foreign slave traders” as “enemies of the human race,” and characterized “slave-breeders and slave-traders” at home as “a small, odious and detested class” (6). And given how contrary slavery was to both natural law and America's republican ideology, it was inconceivable to him that slavery could endure permanently in the United States, or was ever intended to by the Founders. Even in plain economic terms, slavery was doomed to extinction by self-suffocation, and Lincoln “was quite sure it would not outlive the century” (7).

Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (review)

Reviewed by: Mr. Lincoln Goes to War Rodney O. Davis Mr. Lincoln Goes to War. By William Marvel. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Pp. 367. Cloth, $30.00.) This book is rather a mixed bag. In large part it consists of detailed accounts of the three major Civil War battles (and Union losses) of 1861: Manassas, Wilson's Creek, and Ball's Bluff. It also contains a retelling of the undeniably outrageous injustice done to Union general Charles P. Stone, who was made the scapegoat for the defeat at Ball's Bluff and the death there of Abraham Lincoln's great friend Edward Dickinson Baker. But the author's major intention is to indict President Lincoln for underestimating the consequences of refusing to allow the peaceful secession of seven Southern states and of risking war at Fort Sumter instead. According to Marvel, Lincoln thus prepared the way for the unprecedented but precedent-setting and unconstitutional invasions of the civil liberties of Americans that occurred during that first year of the resulting conflict and the bloodshed and misery that followed. In Marvel's words, "In his zeal to preserve the Union [Lincoln] abandoned statecraft, exploiting the delicate issue of Fort Sumter and committing the nation to a bloodbath far worse than he or any of his advisors ever envisioned" (282). Such second-guessing is hard to contend with. Marvel is no doubt right on the above counts. Of course Lincoln was horrified and deeply remorseful at the Civil War's great cost. When blame for the cost of the war is handed out, Lincoln would be the first to admit that he deserves some of it. However, Marvel in turn understates some of the strongly felt convictions that governed Lincoln's behavior during the weeks after his inauguration, convictions contributing to what Marvel considers a blundering intransigence. A couple of examples may suffice. One of these is Lincoln's own conviction, as affirmed in his first inaugural message, that the Union is perpetual and older than the Federal Constitution. To say that Lincoln took seriously his solemn oath to [End Page 299] protect the Constitution is hopefully to state what should therefore be obvious: that he did not consider himself to have been elected to preside over the immediate dissolution of the Union. Indeed he would have felt his obligation to preserve the Union with particular force at the beginning of his term. Marvel also understates Lincoln's disbelief in the possibility of an amicable separation of the Northern and Southern states, a disbelief also stated in the First Inaugural. Such issues as the return of fugitive slaves or the suppression of the foreign slave trade would be even worse irritants after separation than before. Issues that led to separation could not be quieted by separation; they would remain critical, and they would be even more poisonous after acquiring an unhealthy international character. Doubtless it is useful to be reminded of the alternative courses that the new president might have pursued as he pondered the worst crisis in American history. "Deliberation on [Lincoln's] performance remains incomplete . . . without recognizing that other courses remained open to him," Marvel writes (286). The research that Marvel has done in making this case is massive, and his prose is positively lapidary. To his credit, Marvel makes no bones about the fact that it is indeed a case that he is arguing, against Lincoln. Readers should address his book with this understanding at the outset. Rodney O. Davis Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

:Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West, 300–900

The early medieval period has been the locus of lively scholarly debates in recent years over issues fundamental to an understanding of how what we know as “Europe,” “Christianity,” and “the Islamic World” came to be—issues like the nature of identity and of political power. This very useful book situates the impact of gender within the context of the latest scholarship on these larger debates. The authors of these sixteen essays, covering Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, and “Germanic” societies, are more interested in what gender can tell us about the early Middle Ages than what the early Middle Ages can tell us about gender. They do not offer new theoretical paradigms, but they do break new ground in our understanding of the period in question. One important theme to emerge from this book, although not singled out in coeditor Julia M. H. Smith's fine introduction, is the interaction between gender and ethnicity. Many groups in this period were concerned with their ethnic (for want of a better word) identities. Walter Pohl, in “Gender and Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages,” uses stories of Amazons and pseudo-bearded women to examine the ways late antique writers explained difference. By equating fighting women with the Amazons of Greek myth, authors made them a separate ethnic group, casting women who were too strong and aggressive as pagan and “other.” Mary Harlow shows how late Roman ideas of the relation between dress and masculinity changed as they began to adopt “barbarian” styles like leggings. Shaun Tougher's article on the court eunuch points out that while in the late Roman period eunuchs tended to be ethnic outsiders, by the ninth century many Byzantine eunuchs were native, indicating a severing of the link between foreignness and emasculation. Julia Bray's comprehensive overview of Abbasid social structures connects the foreign slave origins of several of the mothers of Abbasid rulers to a new concept of the family in which maternal lineage was no longer as important as it had been. Bonnie Effros challenges traditional methods of determining the ethnicity of burials from the brooches found in women's graves, arguing that this assumes women were passive transmitters of fixed identities, although she does not prescribe a different methodology (which presumably would have to entail radically redefining what we understand by “ethnicity” in the early medieval context, a redefinition scholars have already begun to undertake).