Late Antebellum Period Research Articles

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States

Carolina's Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1860 by Hayden R. Smith

Reviewed by: Carolina's Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1860by Hayden R. Smith Philip Mills Herrington Carolina's Golden Fields: Inland Rice Cultivation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670–1860. By Hayden R. Smith. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 245. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-108-42340-3.) Anyone who has seen aerial imagery of former rice plantations in South Carolina is impressed by the enduring geometry of the slave-built canals and dykes that captured freshwater tidal flow for the irrigation of thousands of acres of rice fields. Far less visible are the remnants of inland rice cultivation, the subject of this meticulously researched first monograph by Hayden R. Smith. Whereas the gridlike tidal fields "sprawled across the riverbanks," inland fields were "contained within the topography of the wetlands," relying on reservoirs, springs, and subtle shifts in soil type and elevation for irrigation (p. 40). Inland fields are difficult to recognize today, often hidden or disfigured by natural overgrowth and human development. Introduced to these obscure landscapes through archaeological fieldwork at South Carolina plantation sites, Smith soon realized that their history is little known and often misunderstood. A dearth of primary records and a scholarly focus on tidal cultivation have tended to reduce inland cultivation to simply a less sophisticated precursor to its more famous tidal counterpart. Smith affirms that inland cultivation matters as an origin story: "Reservoir-irrigated rice cultivation was the first successful type of plantation agriculture developed in South Carolina and it served as the foundation for the South Carolina colonial economy" (p. 3). Yet, as the author lays out over seven chapters, the significance of inland rice cultivation did not end with the early colonial period in South Carolina. Rather, inland cultivation played an important and evolving role in South Carolina, even as it was outpaced by more efficient tidal production. The [End Page 907]extension of the history of inland rice cultivation to 1860 makes Carolina's Golden Fieldsan especially valuable addition to the historiography of slave-based southern agriculture. Smith divides the story of inland cultivation in South Carolina into three temporal periods, which he covers in chapters 2–4. Together these chapters argue that inland cultivation was a long-lived and increasingly sophisticated form of agriculture, one that occupied specific environmental and social niches within the Lowcountry. Chapter 3, which covers 1730–1789, is particularly instructive as it was in this period that the story of inland rice cultivation took an unexpected turn. Rather than doom inland cultivation, the introduction of tidal culture helped bring about a transformation in the earlier system. Tidal cultivation depended on agricultural expertise and a slave labor task system developed through early inland rice planting, while inland rice planters modeled the advances in land and water management made on tidal rice plantations to greatly expand their own operations. As Smith summarizes, "In their most mature form, inland rice plantations resembled their tidal counterparts in terms of extensive irrigation networks, labor control, and agricultural schedules. What separated the two systems was how they handled the natural resource of water" (p. 127). In chapter 4, Smith provides a microanalysis of four Wando River inland plantations to demonstrate how planters adopted a variety of strategies to better control small-stream floodplains and inland basins. Inland cultivation was generally not as lucrative as tidal production, but Smith demonstrates in chapter 5 how aspiring planters in the late antebellum period purchased these less expensive properties as a means of social mobility. This chapter and the next, which covers the place of inland rice in antebellum agricultural reform, enrich the narrative by demonstrating how inland rice maintained cultural relevance, although its economic importance declined. While the focus of this work is narrow, it is an admirable model for how "attention to the environment leads to . . . historical analysis" (p. 4). In his striking consideration of topographical and geological detail, Smith expertly leads the reader to a better understanding of how early Americans perceived and exploited the natural world. Philip Mills Herrington James Madison University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

Workers and technological change in the United States

In this paper, we put forward a theoretical framework for understanding a positive relationship between labor laws and innovation and rigorously test it against both historical and empirical data. We show how several periods in the economic history of the United States – like the increase in slave-field hand productivity in cotton picking in the Antebellum South, the transition in the North from artisanal shops to nonmechanized factories, the increase in productivity in mechanized textile factories in the Northeast in the late Antebellum period, and the increase in productivity in sharecropping after the Civil War – can be understood, at least partially, through our theoretical framework. To build further support for the framework, we empirically analyze how change in labor laws during the early twentieth century affected patent issuance by state. And we also look at how changes in worker power, as proxied by strike activity, affected patent issuance by industry between the early twentieth century and 1980.

Abolitionizing Missouri: German Immigrants and Racial Ideology in Nineteenth-Century America

Kristen Layne Anderson's study looks closely at the ways German immigrants in St. Louis moved from a relative ignorance of and indifference to issues of slavery and abolition to positions of antislavery by the late antebellum period, hardy Unionism and support for emancipation during and because of the Civil War, and civil rights (especially voting rights) for blacks during Reconstruction. In doing so, Anderson offers one of the few sustained inquiries into how any immigrant group engaged the issues of race, national obligation, and equal rights at that time. Anderson's approach is largely chronological and evolutionary, as she observes how Germans in St. Louis came to equate free soil and then emancipation with their own economic and political self-interest. By Anderson's reckoning, critical external actions—for example, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, secession, and arming black troops—created critical moments that forced Germans to choose a course of action, each pushing them toward a more antislavery and racially egalitarian perspective and position. At no time during this movement was German thinking of a piece; proslavery and prosouthern German voices countered the seeming majority standing against slavery's advance and southern secession. For Anderson, however, the antislavery and pro–black rights narrative arc moved almost inexorably in one direction until the 1870s.

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

Reviewed by: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp Brian Schoen (bio) This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.95.) Not that long ago scholars portrayed antebellum southern planter-politicians as parochial, keen on walling themselves off from the changing world. Even as intellectual and economic historians chipped away at the image of a culturally isolated, anticapitalist South, political historians [End Page 660] continued to study their actors chiefly within their plantation kingdoms, state legislatures, or as combatants in an increasingly raucous national political arena. Starting in the late aughts, however, historians thrust southern statesmen onto the world political stage. Building on the pioneering work of Robert E. May's The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (1973) and more fully developed nineteenth-century global histories, Edward Bartlett Rugemer's The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (2008), Matthew Pratt Guterl's American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008), and Robert E. Bonner's Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (2009) highlight the challenges of navigating slavery through rocky waters. My own (bias alert) The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009) stresses the power that slaveholders perceived cotton gave them as they did battle in the global arena. Matthew Karp's This Vast Southern Empire draws deeply from this scholarship, while moving beyond it to demonstrate just how crucial southern politicians were in directing federal policy toward what he calls a "proslavery internationalism" (4). This densely researched, carefully argued, and artfully written book persuasively shows that the South's politicians were often at the helm of the federal government's core military and diplomatic apparatus during the late antebellum period. Karp reminds us of their outsized influence by showing that southerners held nearly 80 percent of the secretaryships of war and the navy. From 1847 to 1861, they also dominated the House and Senate Committees on Naval and Military Affairs, providing a majority of the committee appointments and controlling the leadership in 73 percent of the sessions. Southern influence over the War Department, from John C. Calhoun through Jefferson Davis and to John Floyd, has been long known. Karp will surprise many readers by showing that less well known southerners like Abel Upshur, John Y. Mason, Matthew Fontaine Maury, Thomas Butler King, and Stephen Mallory dominated U.S. naval policy. Nor in Karp's telling were these small government-types. Instead—like Max M. Edling in A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (2014)—he sees this era and these men as expanding and modernizing federal power, from gunboats to artillery to administrative systems. Though southern leaders were divided over the pursuit of territorial expansion, their single-minded desire to preserve slavery at home and abroad led them to expand American federal influence on land and at sea in the Caribbean Rim and South Atlantic. Far from fatalistic or recoiling at the modern arc of history, southern slaveholders applied strength to [End Page 661] bend it toward their will, believing that "slavery and progress had proved impressively congruent" (169). Situating this story within the broader contours of global, national, and sectional political narratives is tricky business, but Karp proves up to the task. He offers nuanced examinations of singular moments, such as Henry Wise's tempestuous time as minister to Brazil, and of major events, including Texas's annexation and the Mexican-American War. He moves adeptly from the halls of Congress to cabinet deliberations to, when necessary, the broader public debates over American foreign policy. His argument that southerners' concern about slavery's stability in Cuba, Texas, and Brazil likely outpaced their desire for territorial aggrandizement is particularly noteworthy. In a few places Karp's emphasis stretches beyond the evidence. Southerners may have agreed that "the record of U.S. foreign policy in this period forms little more than a chronicle of anxieties about Cuban slave emancipation" (61). Nationally, however, there were many...

Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West

Reviewed by: Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West Sharony Green Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South. By Emily West. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 244pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0813136929. Emily West’s study on the voluntary enslavement and residency petitions of free people of color is among the latest scholarly works to widen our awareness of just how peculiar an institution slavery was in the United States. Her primary mission: examining the ways in which anxious free blacks and enslaved people used these petitions to preserve “family” ties during the late antebellum period, a time when white southerners were justifiably concerned about the future of slavery. Proceeding often chronologically, she takes up the many strands to this issue with the now-obligatory nod to Walter Johnson. In other words, she never overstates the “agency” of free blacks in their seeming use of proslavery laws to enhance their own condition. West pursues her topic by first providing an overview of the increasing number of laws and restrictions on free people of color, state by state. She is especially concerned with the 1850s, a period when “moves to expel or enslave free blacks reached a crescendo” especially after the 1857 Dred Scott case brought the question of citizenship for African Americans up for political debate and the [End Page 171] 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid revealed the extent of white disagreement on the subject of slavery (19, 25). Next, West focuses on residency requests, carefully showing that most of these were made prior to the 1850s, the decade that saw a greater number of enslavement petitions. Notably, much of the surviving evidence of residency requests comes from Texas. Though she does not say so explicitly, this might possibly be a result of the point at which Texas entered into the Union. While a republic, free African Americans and their white advocates in this territory “took advantage of a perceived malleability in race relations” (58). But, even after residency restrictions were passed following Texas’ admission as a state in 1845, free people of color quietly ignored them. For example, Greenberry Logan moved to Texas following his manumission from Kentucky. In his 1837 petition, he stated that he had been informed that he could only live legally in Texas only by “the consent of Congress,” something that distressed him, as he had fought during the Texas War of Independence (59). While his request was sent to a special committee, it was apparently never heard. Yet Logan continued to live quietly in the state with his free-born wife. Logan’s experience demonstrates the ineffectiveness of residency and enslavement laws, which decreed one thing while black and white bodies did something else. The fuzziness around the outcomes of such laws is one reason why earlier scholars have been reluctant to examine them. Such reluctance is also a consequence of the admittedly small body of evidence. West herself relied on just 143 petitions for enslavement and 38 for residency, drawn primarily from the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, supplemented by primary sources in earlier published work, some of the latter verified when possible. Scholarly foot-dragging, as West remarks, is also a result of the huge challenge of doing textual analyses. When one gets right down to it, the true authors of these petitions, as she writes, were often never known. West rightly embraces Stephanie Camp’s injunction that we speculate bravely on what people really meant or wanted. Thus, in later chapters, she devotes considerable space to exploring [End Page 172] the motivations of those who claimed to write them (blacks), or those who seemed to benefit most from them (whites). While West is keen to foreground kinship as the leading impetus for why blacks resorted to so drastic an act as re-enslaving themselves or their family members, the multiple meanings of kinship might be better tackled in the same manner that she troubles the notion of freedom. While it is certain many blacks were “cajoled,” as West often notes, into making such petitions by unscrupulous whites, the tensions between these blacks’ experiences...

Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty by Gary W. Gallagher Jim Owens Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty. Gary W. Gallagher. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8203-4540-6, 152pp., paper, $19.95. Gary W. Gallagher in his Becoming Confederates: Paths to a National Loyalty, the result of the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University in 2011, summarizes many topics he has explored in other works on the Civil War. Using brief biographical essays on Robert E. Lee, Stephen Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal A. Early, Gallagher explains these themes: that the Confederacy was a nation; that the “majority of [the] Confederacy’s white residence developed a strong national identity”; that the “mainline military forces represented the [End Page 313] most important institutional expression of the Confederate nation”; and “that military officers formed an important component in the equation of Confederate loyalty” (2–3). He writes in his introduction, “I take my analytical cue from David M. Potter . . . that every human being possesses numerous overlapping and often mutually reinforcing loyalties, with different ones emerging as most important at various times” (3). In examining these theses and applying them to three individual soldiers, he takes exception with those historians who claim the primacy of states’ rights in triggering the Civil War. In these biographical sketches, he notes that there were generational differences: Lee and Early came to their acceptance of secession later than Ramseur, who grew up during the strident days of the sectional crises. He explains how each man grew to dislike Yankees more as the war progressed. Finally, he embraces U. B. Phillips’s thesis of the “centrality of slavery and race to the loyalties of all three men” (6). In his final chapter, Gallagher carries his ideas beyond the war, writing: “The paths toward Confederate loyalty for Lee and Ramseur and Early help delineate important contours of American history from the late antebellum period through the end of the century. They highlight how Americans juggled multiple, often conflicting loyalties. They reveal white southern identity preoccupied with racial control that transcended political and class line. They render it exceedingly difficult to argue the Confederacy should not be deemed a nation. Perhaps most important they help us understand why and how Confederates waged a prodigiously bloody war and the manner in which they dealt with defeat” (91). With Ramseur and Early, Gallagher seems most at home explaining the ultimate embracing of Confederate nationalism. With Lee, he has to deal with a whole literature emphasizing the general’s loyalty to Virginia and his seeming reconciliation in his farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, in which he urged his men to go forward without rancor. But Gallagher argues, using Lee’s private correspondence and the actions of Ramseur’s daughter and of Early, that “reunion” and “reconciliation” were not the same. These men, he asserts, were white southerners who did not repudiate slavery. Gallagher uses his research well, citing support as well as counterarguments for his arguments. These three brief biographical sketches introduce his provocative ideas but do not offer definitive proof; that awaits another book with broader cast of characters, both military and civilian, from a broader geographical perspective. The concluding chapter, which discusses the development of Confederate iconography following Appomattox, in particular, offers a succinct [End Page 314] beginning for anyone who wishes to pursue the topic. Gallagher has written a stimulating book, well worth reading, which forces the reader to rethink concepts concerning secession, states’ rights, race, and the legacy of the Civil War. Jim Owens Lynchburg College Copyright © 2015 The Kent State University Press

Harriet Tubman: Transnationalism and the Land of a Queen in the Late Antebellum

Abstract Harriet Tubman and female fugitives from the United States maintained elevated expectations for British Canada during the late antebellum period. Their quest to reach Canadian soil was twofold: they wanted to resist enslavement in America, and also to sidestep sexual exploitation and gender degradation. Female runaways and refugees reasoned that their dual desires could be achieved in Canada, both because slavery had been abolished there via the Imperial Act of 1834 and because Queen Victoria's reign, starting in 1837, gave the impression of greater esteem and rights for women. Unfortunately, what they found on the “Queen's soil” was that racism as well as sexist beliefs were a transcending sentiment, which did not discontinue at the American-Canadian international border. Still, these women in the dominion of Canada fought to challenge constructed borders, whether racial, sexual, or national.

Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862–1871 by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes (review)

Reviewed by: Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862–1871 by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes Amy Feely Morsman (bio) Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields: Letters of the Heyward Family, 1862–1871. Edited by Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen H. Stokes. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 480. Cloth, $39.95.) In Twilight on the South Carolina Rice Fields, Margaret Belser Hollis and Allen Stokes have made accessible the correspondence of the Heywards, one of South Carolina’s founding families and one of the South’s richest in the mid-nineteenth century. This particular collection, the latest installment in the University of South Carolina’s ongoing effort to make its large documentary collections available for wider public use, helps to advance the work of scholars exploring the social and economic consequences of emancipation and Confederate defeat for white southerners. Thus, the focus of this book is not Daniel Heyward and Nathaniel Heyward, the immensely successful rice planters in the revolutionary and early antebellum period, but their descendant Edward Barnwell (Barney) Heyward, who presided over the family’s low-country rice plantations in their decline rather than at their zenith. Born in 1826, Barney Heyward was a rice planter in the late antebellum period and during the first two years of the war. Late in 1863, he traveled to Richmond to secure a commission in the Confederate engineer corps and returned as a lieutenant to his native low country to fulfill his military service. For the duration of the conflict, he was never far—in mind or body—from his family’s plantations along the Combahee River, and he returned to planting there after the war ended. This collection of letters begins in 1862, with Barney’s courtship letters to his second wife, Catherine Maria (Tattie) Clinch, whom he married in February 1863. Roughly half of the collection includes their letters to each other and to other relatives during the war, mostly about the comings and goings of family members, the movement of supplies from plantation to town, and news about the war. Barney’s letters from Richmond in early 1864 detail entertaining encounters with notable Confederate women such as Mary Chestnut and Varina Davis and later that year his complaints about the inadequacy of his commanding officer in the engineer corps. Letters from Barney’s father’s overseer provide informative reports about harvesting the rice crop, military impressment of Heyward plantation property, concerns about the movement of slaves, and the difficulty of getting crops to market. Letters from the end of the war to 1870, which make up roughly the second half of the book, provide an interesting and unconventional perspective on life as a postwar planter. Like so many other men who were [End Page 423] rich in land and slaves, Barney Heyward did not have an easy time making planting profitable after emancipation. He clung to traditional notions of white supremacy and complained often about the brutish behavior of African Americans in general, but over the course of a year or so he began to see a difference in the former slaves whom he employed. Whereas other, older planters seemed stuck in their ways, intent on squeezing work from freedpeople without pay, Barney expressed a different vision of working with former slaves. He prided himself on his willingness to adapt to the free labor system, paying his workers what even they considered a fair wage and selling commercial products to them through a commissary on his property. Sacrificing time with his wife and young children living in Charleston, Barney closely supervised his field-workers and earned their trust. Among the freedpeople, he quickly became known as the planter to work for along the Combahee River. Despite the effectiveness of his workforce, Barney was dogged by weather troubles and conflicts with neighboring kinsmen. He often reported feeling on the verge of success with his planting operations, but he never quite triumphed over the challenges of postwar agriculture. Barney’s life ended abruptly in 1871, as did his wife’s a year earlier, and their chronicle ends abruptly too. Hollis and Stokes provide no explanation as to why...

“Under These Classic Shades Together”:

cross American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families. Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society. Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects A

Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863 (review)

Reviewed by: Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863 Charles Irons (bio) Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776–1863. By Rita Roberts. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Pp. 261. Cloth, $39.95.) In Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, Rita Roberts sets out to explain why so many black northerners in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identified themselves proudly as “Americans” despite their country’s wretched record on issues of racial justice. She concludes that African American activists and reformers remained committed to the United States because they believed that the Christian God would soon transform the country into a land of hope and opportunity for all. Evangelical northern blacks, she argues, were convinced that “Americans, black and white, would become a new people, distinct from any population in the world, because of their Christian republican faith” (3). African American northerners, in her account, began to lose hope in this millennial vision by the 1850s and started seriously to consider emigration away from white Americans. With the coming of the [End Page 440] Civil War, however, and particularly with Lincoln’s move toward emancipation, they recommitted themselves to the country of their birth. People of color in the antebellum North generated a rich body of literature, which Roberts plumbs for her analysis. She draws extensively on the public record: on periodicals, pamphlets, convention records, and published narratives. The fact that evangelicals authored such a large proportion of African American publications in the antebellum period—and enshrined their hopes for uplift in them—resoundingly supports Roberts’s basic contention about the linkages between evangelicalism and reform (by which Roberts means “abolition, antiracism, and black community development” [3]). However, her decision to limit her use of ecclesiastical sources to denominational newspapers and published sermons constrains her ability to probe fully the connections between evangelicalism and activism. How did activists conceptualize the relationship between their public advocacy for reform and their work within individual congregations? To what extent did church members empower or restrain their activist leaders? On what issues were there the greatest conflicts between rank-and-file members and activist leaders—or among leaders? Roberts may have found answers to these and other questions in church minutes, records from denominational meetings, theological treatises, and other such sources, all of which would have helped to situate her authors in specific faith communities and give more content to their beliefs and practices. What is more, Roberts might have used ecclesiastical sources to develop more fully her understanding of the concept of millennialism. She holds that black evangelicals believed that God would intervene in history to help them transform the United States, but she does not interrogate this belief systematically. In a nice section on David Walker, Roberts notes that black evangelicals by the late 1820s were moving with the Arminian stream of the Second Great Awakening toward what Timothy Fulop has called a more activist “progressive millennialism” (77–83). She does not address the relative weight of the two other varieties of black millennialism that Fulop identifies, however, or wrestle with tough questions about black evangelicals’ understanding of race and millennialism. Laurie Maffl y-Kipp has recently demonstrated how profitable a more aggressive interrogation of the concept can be in Setting Down the Sacred Past (2010), a theologically astute analysis of African American race histories. In a powerful fifth chapter subtitled “The Problem of Race and Black Evangelical Reform,” Roberts surveys the often contradictory strategies through which leading black activists confronted racism in the late antebellum period. In African Americans’ efforts to combat new theories of black inequality, Roberts argues, “reformers placed themselves at a disadvantage [End Page 441] when they shared with promoters of scientific racism a nearly similar standard of civilization and a restricted application of Christianity” (152). For instance, when intellectuals such as New York physician James McCune Smith, who receives central billing in the chapter, used science to refute white claims of racial dominance, they tended to do so in a way that reified the idea of essential racial differences. African American activists’ response to this rhetorical dilemma illustrates Roberts’s thesis...

“All for Keeping His Own Negro Wench”:Birch v. Benton(1858) and the Politics of Slander and Free Speech in Antebellum Missouri

In August 1849, outspoken proslavery Missouri Supreme Court Judge James H. Birch sued Unionist Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri for slander because he had publicly accused Birch of having kept “his own negro wench” and whipped his wife because she had dared to complain about it. On first impression, the lurid accusation and resulting lawsuit might seem merely colorful window dressing for the virulent sectional politics of the late antebellum period. Benton's objectionable utterances certainly exemplify the verbal pyrotechnics that, after the Mexican War, often accompanied public debate over the question of whether African-American bondage was to extend across the continental United States. But the vituperation that gave rise toBirch v. Benton, in fact, marked the beginning of one of the most widely-publicized episodes in the struggle pitting the champion of Jacksonian democracy in the trans-Mississippi Southwest against a powerful cadre of proslavery leaders who sought to end his thirty-year career in the United States Senate. According to legal historian Gerald T. Dunne, the politicized nature of the case and its contentious appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court provided the critical catalyst for lawmakers in the state to amend its constitution in 1850 to replace lifetime tenure for judges with periodic voter choice. The landmark constitutional revision both instituted popular election of judges and shook up the composition of the proslavery high court, including the removal of Judge Birch.

Toward the Anthropometric History of Native Americans c. 1820-1890

We analyze the height of Indian scouts hired by the US army after the Civil War. Their average height of 170 cm (67 in.) confirms that American natives were very tall compared to Europeans but were among the shortest segments of the rural populations in the New World. Their height was closer to that of the urban populations who experienced a much heavier disease load than rural populations living in a low population density environment. The trend in their height describes an inverted and elongated “U” shape with some increase in the late antebellum period and a subsequent decline after the Civil War. This implies that in spite of their considerable tribulations the Native American population was able to maintain and to some extent even improve their nutritional status through the Civil War, though harder times followed for those born thereafter.

Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth?

Using a newly developed geographic information system transportation database, we study the impact of gaining access to rail transportation on changes in population density and the rate of urbanization between 1850 and 1860 in the American Midwest. Differences-in-differences and instrumental variable analysis of a balanced panel of 278 counties reveals only a small positive effect of rail access on population density but a large positive impact on urbanization as measured by the fraction of people living in incorporated areas of 2,500 or more. Our estimates imply that one-half or more of the growth in urbanization in the Midwest in the late antebellum period may be attributable to the spread of the rail network.

Balancing Act: Young America’s Struggle to Revive the Old Democracy

Balancing Act: Young America’s Struggle to Revive the Old Democracy Elizabeth R. Varon (bio) Yonatan Eyal. The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 252 pp. Notes and index. $75.00. This impressive first book challenges us to look anew at the Democratic party of the late antebellum period and thereby to appreciate the profound influence of the party’s self-styled progressive vanguard, the “Young Americans.” In the 1840s and 1850s, “Young America” had its heyday as a faction in the political party of Old Hickory. Led by men such as editor John O’Sullivan, whose Democratic Review was the organ of the new movement; politicians Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce; and New York financier August Belmont, this faction, Eyal explains, broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism. They defied, so Eyal seeks to prove, the “recurrent stereotype of the Democrats and racists and imperialists” and appeasers of the slaveocracy (p. 12). Eyal’s book, he notes early on, is a political, not a cultural, history. It is meant to complement the extensive scholarship on the literary branch of Young America—a New York-based movement of editors and writers who wanted to break free of dependence on European standards of high culture and to prove the excellence and exceptionalism of America’s own literary tradition.1 As important as they were, drawing into their orbit the likes of Hawthorne and Melville, literary Young Americans were eclipsed in prominence by political ones. Young Americans represented, literally, a new generation of political leaders. “Sons of the Jacksonians and grandchildren of the Founders,” they confronted a paradox: Jacksonians had promoted the idea that representatives should be accountable to their local constituents, but now in the 1840s, those constituents were demanding, in the name of localism, that Democratic politicians abandon some of the party’s most hallowed economic principles (p. 32). Around the country, but especially in western boomtowns, Democratic constituents wanted to tap the power of the market revolution in order to generate prosperity and [End Page 42] development—and that meant supporting the very sorts of state-sponsored “internal improvements” that Democrats had traditionally decried. Young Americans (or New Democrats), most prominently Stephen Douglas of Illinois, proved responsive to constituent pressures and skilled at justifying internal improvements in a political language that Democrats could call their own. To meet the mounting demands for the construction of railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, bridges, harbors, steamships and other vehicles of the market revolution, Young Americans advocated Congressional land grants to the states; this created the comforting fiction that internal improvements were locally rather than federally sponsored. They argued that improved transportation networks would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jefferson by allowing farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper. And they linked internal improvements to free trade: they accepted moderate tariffs as a necessary means to generate government revenue, and they defended the Independent Treasury (the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States) not as a “scheme to quash [the] special priviledge” of the Whiggish Northeastern eastern monied elite, but as a pro-growth instrument for promoting development and commerce (p. 79). With the economy booming in the mid-1840s and the first Young American president, James K. Polk, in office, reform-minded Democrats set their sights on exporting American democracy. Allying themselves with the “Young Europe” movements springing up on the continent, some New Democrats called for foreign intervention to support the revolutions of 1848. While such calls had little practical consequence, they do reveal, Eyal notes, the strong strain of idealism—a belief in the transcendent power of democracy—that animated Young Americans. Such idealism drove many influential New Democrats, such as Belmont, who became President Pierce’s minister at the Hague, into the foreign service. And it drove New Democrats to look to the American West and the Caribbean as fields where they might plant democracy. “Bringing Cuba and Mexico into the liberty-loving folds of Union seemed no different from helping Louis Kossuth to shrug off autocracy...

“The Law of the Descent of Thought”

In the antebellum era, literary addresses were a common form of public expression. Although legal historians have mined Fourth of July orations for their insight into legal thought, they have made virtually no use of literary addresses. This essay closely analyzes nearly forty addresses given at the University of Alabama from 1752 through 1768. It uses the addresses to create a picture of the world view of the orators and gauge the changes in thought in the antebellum South on political theory and jurisprudence.The addresses allow us to assess the orators’ intellect, interests, knowledge, and belief systems. The addresses illustrate a wide-ranging respect for ideas, including the abolition of capital punishment; the scholar’s search for truth against the tide of public opinion; republicanism, democracy, and radicalism in American politics; and the importance of slavery to Southern culture. They also illustrate the changes from Enlightenment ideas of moral and technological progress to the proslavery vision of the late antebellum period. A final section turns to judicial opinions in Alabama to make a preliminary sketch of the ways that some of the ideas expressed in the addresses correlate with the moral philosophical views of judges on issues such as utility.

Contextualizing African American Characters in Glasgow's The Battle-Ground

The Battle-Ground, published in 1902, was Ellen Glasgow's fourth novel, but only the second of her seven novels chronicling the social history of Virginia. It is novel that divides naturally into two parts, the first detailing the lives of two antebellum families of the planter aristocracy: the Lightfoots, owners of Chericoke plantation, and the Ambiers, owners of the nearby Uplands plantation. The second half of the work follows Dan Montjoy, grandson of the Lightfoots and heir Chericoke, through his experiences as an infantryman in the Civil War, but is punctuated by brief narrative returns Chericoke and Uplands focusing mostly on the character development of Betty Ambler, younger daughter of Peyton and Julia Ambler. At core, The Battle-Ground is bildungsroman: in the novel Betty Ambler and Dan Montjoy are both initiated into adulthood during crucial period in United States history, beginning with the late antebellum period, continuing through the Civil War, and ending immediately after the South's surrender. At the same time, Glasgow portrays the South itself, specifically Virginia, the battle-ground alluded in the novel's title, experiencing pronounced growing pains as it confronts pre- and post-Civil War contingencies, especially those implications of radically changing economy based on the South's being forced relinquish slave labor, the very core of its antebellum existence. The characterization of African Americans in the novel is, therefore, crucial integral the novel's theme, one that has not been fully explored in previous criticism of The Battle-Ground. (1) In plantation fiction, much of the propaganda about the pervasive attitudes among slaves is accomplished through particularization of characters, from whom the audience is expected generalize. Through such representations, readers might discover that slaves are comfortable in their bondage, that house slaves disdain field hands, that all slaves shun free blacks, and, of course, that slaves admire and are devoted their benevolent masters and mistresses, often mimicking their mannerisms and dress. The Battle-Ground is not devoid of such renderings. For example, Congo, Major Lightfoot's driver, is Simon Legree-like in his zeal hogtie runaway slave and deliver his brother into bondage (88). And prior the onset of the Federal invasion of the South, Congo suggests his master that if the Yankees descend on Virginia we'll des loose de dawgs on em (87). Further, Cupid, Lightfoot butler, relates Betty Ambler his sense of social hierarchy within the slave community with what the narrator describes as a social pride befitting the Major. In answer Betty Ambler's query about the health and welfare of the field workers, Cupid answers, [don't] mix wid no fiel' han's. Dar ain no use mixin' en I [don't] mix. Day stay in dere place en I stay in my place--en dere place hit's in de quarters, en my place hit's de dinin' 'oom (201). Recent historical and sociological studies, along with countless slave narratives published before and after the war, discount such general attitudes among slaves. William Julius Wilson describes the main lines of inquiry concerning slave development, based on the premise that slaves had enough autonomy develop mechanisms or strategies of survival, enabling them to preserve their humanity, resist complete personal degradation, prevent total identification with masters, and stave off infantilism (33). To her credit, Glasgow depicts blacks in variety of situations in The Battle-Ground, allowing several exhibit the qualities necessary for developing these strategies of self-actualization. The Lightfoots' cook, Aunt Rhody, depicts the characteristics necessary insure her own well-developed self-consciousness. Elizabeth FoxGenovese points out that cooks occupied positions of considerable prestige on plantations; they were respected by black as well as by the white folks (160). …

The Law of Descent of the Mind: Law, History, and Civilization in Antebellum Literary Addresses

In the antebellum era, literary addresses were a common and popular form of public expression. Legal historians have profitably mined Fourth of July orations and addresses in Congress for insight into the intellectual worlds of the antebellum era. Yet, they have made virtually no use of the literary address, which are aimed at a different and more elite audiences. This essay employs a close analysis of nearly forty addresses given at the University of Alabama from 1832 through 1860 to gauge the changes in thought in the antebellum South on political theory and jurisprudence. It uses the addresses to create a picture of the world view of the judges. The addresses, moreover, illustrate the changes from Enlightenment ideas of moral and technological progress to a static, proslavery vision of the late antebellum period. They allow us to assess the orators' intellect, interests, knowledge, and belief systems. The addresses illustrate a wide-ranging respect for ideas, including the abolition of capital punishment, the scholar's search for truth against the tide of public opinion, republicanism, democracy, radicalism in American politics, and the importance of slavery to Southern culture. A final section turns to judicial opinions in Alabama to make a preliminary sketch of the ways that some of the ideas expressed in the addresses correlate with the moral philosophical views of judges. The addresses, thus, emerge as important windows into antebellum Southern thought and as vehicles for mapping in detail the intellectual world of moral and political philosophy inhabited by southerners, particularly judges and legislators in the years leading into Civil War. Finally, the essay begins to sketch key pieces of jurisprudence (such as considerations of utility, the importance of history and culture, and morality), as it provides a model of how to mine the hundreds of addresses delivered to other literary societies, north and south, in the years before Civil War for insights into legal thought.

Roundtable Issue: Conversations about Race and Ethnicity in Advertising

Roundtable Issue: Conversations about Race and Ethnicity in Advertising Fath Ruffins (bio), Bernadette Calafell (bio), William O’Barr (bio), Jack Tchen, Zan Ng (bio), Jennifer Mak (bio), Byron Lewis (bio), and John Kuo Wei Tchen (bio) A group of scholars and practitioners met in New York City on March 2, 2005 for a roundtable discussion on the subject of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism in advertising. Fath Ruffins, curator of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution, moderated the discussion. Ruffins was the Head of the Smithsonian’s Advertising History Collections in the Archives Center from 1988–2000. Members of the Roundtable were Bernadette Calafell, Assistant Professor of Communications and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse University; William M. O’Barr, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University; Jack Tchen, Professor of History, New York University; Byron Lewis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of UniWorld Group; Zan Ng, Chairman and Founder of New-A; and Jennifer Mak, marketing manager for Admerasia. Also participating in these discussions was Paula Alex, Executive Director of the Advertising Educational Foundation. The format for the Roundtable was as follows: the scholars, Ruffins, Calafell, O’Barr, and Tchen, met for two hours in the morning to discuss the topic and to formulate issues for discussion. The advertising professionals joined the group over an informal lunch and continued the discussion in the afternoon. The morning session began with introductory statements by Ruffins, Calafell, and Tchen. Statement by Fath Ruffins (Smithsonian Institution) Advertising and marketing are key aspects of what constitutes mediascapes1 today, in the United States, and in the rest of the world. In the United States, over the last 120 years, the role of advertising has changed—particularly the role of advertising as it has related to various ethnic and racial minority communities. Looking back thirty-five years, to the late 1960s, we see that the pace of change really increased. We all know that stereotypical images dominated mass-market advertising, particularly before World War II. This continued certainly after World War II and there are continuities even today. Before World War II, back into the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, stereotypical imagery—which was really based on traditional forms of American humor and directed at predominately white, nativist, American audiences—was common. Humor was used to sell products. Humor and sentimentality were really the major modes of advertising visually and conceptually. This humorous form, as well as aspects of the sentimental form, stereotyped, to use our modern word, these racial and ethnic communities. For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to use the term “ethnicity” as one general word to talk about communities that are defined by race, by language, by national origin, or by religious distinctions. This is only because it’s easier to say one word. Other people in this conversation may use other words to define these differences. Advertising originated in religious publications in the late antebellum period, the 1840s through 1860s. When we look at the origins of what we might call modern advertising in the late 1880s and 1890s, advertisers, retailers, and manufacturers moved to mass-marketing strategies that constituted or sought to constitute a mass market of presumably middle-class consumers who shared various kinds of racial attitudes. These racial attitudes were in development at the very same time. We’re looking at the era of Jim Crow, the era of legal segregation in the United States, in which various racial and ethnic communities were defined in a very strict hierarchy, with no sense of blending or connection between them. Although there were racial and ethnic differences in every nation in the Americas, the United States is the only nation that institutes such a formal system of segregation. This very strict system of legal segregation is developing at the very same time that advertising is changing and markets are changing. Markets are becoming national; they are becoming mass; manufacturers are able to unify buyers across the country. They are using techniques that we know of today, although they did not use the same words, such as direct mail coupons, including various kinds of free trinkets and collecting trade cards. Branding is new, so various kinds of brands begin...

Industrial slavery in the United States: the North Carolina turpentine industry 1849–61

The operation of the North Carolina turpentine industry in the late Antebellum period (1849–61) depended upon labour supplied by slaves who were either owned or hired. The nature of the work, which covered thousands of acres of forestland, led to the use of a task system whereby each slave was assigned a large tract of forest that was worked with little supervision over several months. An important finding is the content and significance of the production records for the slaves assigned to these long-term tasks. The slaves, like those in other industries and on plantations, could earn a certain amount of money for themselves by taking on extra chores. Details of those payments appear in these records. The conditions of life, including food, clothing, and the forest environment are reconstructed where possible. The records raise some questions about the relationship between the payments, extra work and slave behaviour which however, remain unanswered.