Proslavery Writers Research Articles

The Morant War of Representation: Freedom and Whiteness in Jamaican Narratives of the Morant Bay Uprising

ABSTRACT This article approaches Jamaican responses to the Morant Bay uprising as part of the earlier ‘war of representation’ fought between abolitionists and pro-slavery writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Initial Jamaican responses to the rebellion and its suppression were firmly integrated into global print networks but, in the months and years that followed, narratives evolved in ways that expose ongoing tensions about the meanings of freedom after slavery. In particular, the article explores how articulations of whiteness were entangled within an ongoing war of representation. Extending histories of whiteness during slavery, the shifting narratives around Morant Bay capture how white Jamaicans were attempting to navigate their place in a post-emancipation landscape. Anxiety and vulnerability quickly gave way to more triumphant representations of the rebellion’s suppression, but for some commentators, especially those on and beyond the margins of whiteness, reactions were more complex. By the late nineteenth century, Jamaican representations were further fractured by increasing frustrations towards Crown Colony government, especially for Jamaica’s white population, for whom abolition had already been perceived as an affront to their traditional rights and liberties.

Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret

Reviewed by: Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret Kay Wright Lewis Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 530. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6111-1.) The centrality of violence to the institution of slavery has received considerable scholarly attention in the last half century, and Jeff Forret’s Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South makes a significant contribution to the field. This well-researched book provocatively traces the history of intraracial violence among those enslaved from approximately 1795 to 1865, focusing on Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. Forret adeptly uses violence as a lens to examine interpersonal relationships between enslaved people, the institution of slavery, and the emotional trauma that was part of their everyday experiences. In doing so, Forret successfully demonstrates that intraracial violence exposes the agency that existed within enslaved communities across the South. Forret uses a variety of sources. He has mined an abundance of court records to show how enslaved people were often not executed in manslaughter and other criminal cases in order to preserve slaveholders’ investments. Forret also observes that because enslaved people had no legal access to the courts, many slaves used violence to protect their property from theft, to recover debt, to defend themselves, and to settle disputes between real and fictive kin. Baptist church records reveal new ways that enslaved men operated as proxies to white authority by participating in colored conferences where they resolved conflict within their communities, functioning much the same as secret societies in West Africa. The need for love and affection, despite the brutality of chattel slavery, generated the emotional commitments depicted in the many slave narratives Forret uses. Forret powerfully demonstrates how black men and women used violence to preserve marriages, to protect their children, and to assert their gendered identities. The inclusion of proslavery writers like Charles Colcock Jones, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh, who argued that black people were inordinately violent and little more than savages, is somewhat problematic in my view. Fitzhugh, Hammond, and Jones are not credible witnesses to the lived experiences of those enslaved. Moreover, I would be careful in assigning this book to classes. At times the reader is led to believe that the enslaved were what white southerners said they were—that black women, for example, lived “outside the boundaries of respectable womanhood” (p. 334). This was not how enslaved women saw themselves. Forret later clarifies this point, but not with the vigor it deserves. Nor were black men exceptional in their domestic abuse and violence toward black women and children, which again Forret later acknowledges. Although a central goal of this work is to examine violence and its causes from the enslaved point of view, one does not get any real sense of their humanity until chapter 4. Thereafter, the book comes alive with rich examples from the enslaved perspective of what was at stake and the circumstances that caused violent behavior. In the epilogue, Forret asserts that intraracial violence did not increase until the late nineteenth century, the period after Reconstruction that Rayford W. Logan called “the nadir” of the black experience, when white violence was at its height in the American South (The Negro in American Life and [End Page 155] Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 [New York, 1954]). Furthermore, Forret’s claim that modern-day black-on-black crime has nothing to do with the prior condition of enslavement is difficult to understand. Certainly violence is part of the human experience, but if Forret’s work does nothing else, it sheds light on how oppression and pervasive violence shaped the behavior of those enslaved in ways that were destructive and harmful to their communities. Certainly modern-day racism, an institutional construct emanating from more than 350 years of chattel slavery, continues to do just that. Kay Wright Lewis Norfolk State University Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

“Deaf & Dumb, Blind, Insane, or Idiotic”: The Census, Slaves, and Disability in the Late Antebellum South

IN A DIARY SHE KEPT DURING A STAY ON HER HUSBAND'S COASTAL Georgia slaveholdings in the winter of 1838-1839, British actress Frances Anne Fanny Kemble famously expressed contempt for the institution of slavery. Her condemnation of slaves' appalling living conditions and the treatment they endured are well known. But she also commented on several disabled slaves she encountered, including an enslaved woman lying on the floor in a fit of epilepsy; a second poor half-witted creature, a female idiot; and a third bondwoman, named Patty, young but apparently too idiotic ... to move, whose tortured facial expressions elicited a combination of sympathy and revulsion. [A] more hideous and loathsome object I never beheld, Kemble remarked. These passages from Kemble's diary afford glimpses of slaves in the Old South stricken by various physical or mental impairments. (1) In contrast to Kemble's antislavery proclivities, proslavery writers harnessed the emotive power of disabled bondpeople to much different ends in antebellum discourse. Before the Civil War, masters' care of disabled slaves served as a strategic counterpoint to northerners' claims of free labor's superiority. protect the weak, explained southern intellectual and Caroline County, Virginia, slaveholder George Fitzhugh, we must first enslave The irony Fitzhugh pinpointed was grounded in the moral and ethical differences he identified as intrinsic to the economies of the North and the South. Whereas wage laborers in the North toiled under a ruthless economic system that callously discarded workers at the first sign of weakness, southern bondpeople benefited from a social safety net that emerged organically from the institution of slavery. To be sure, Fitzhugh conceded, masters shall be entitled to [slaves'] labor, but in exchange, owners were to provide for them, including the idiots and lunatics among them. More than any other scholar, Eugene D. Genovese popularized Fitzhugh's description of a web of mutual responsibilities and reciprocal obligations between master and slave. But physical or mental disabilities rendered some bondpeople unable to fulfill their end of the paternalistic bargain. Those whose conditions substantially reduced their profitability to their owners subjected slaveholder paternalism to some of its greatest strains. Disabled slaves tested the strength of the invisible chords of sympathy--so lauded by Fitzhugh--that bound master and slave. Despite slaveholders' self-congratulatory rhetoric about maintaining disabled slaves, market forces many times exposed the limits of masters' benevolence. (2) Remarkably little work has been done on bondpeople with disabilities. One reason is that disability studies is a relatively new, emerging field with ample opportunities for additional research. The existing scholarship rarely ventures further back in time than the twentieth century, and intersections between race and disability are only beginning to be explored. (3) Second, slavery as an institution was predicated upon slaves' soundness. Masters expected their chattel to be physically and mentally equipped to endure the rigors of plantation or other labor. With the exception of a small number of cultural studies of the domestic slave trade, the enslaved body, and slave health, practically all the historical scholarship on slavery presumes that bondpeople were sound. (4) Only two recent dissertations by Dea H. Boster and Jenifer L. Barclay, of which the former's has been published, have been devoted exclusively to the study of slaves with disabilities. Using disability as a distinct category of analysis, these works have shed light on the lives of slaves with a range of physical and mental impairments and explored the ways that race and disability entered antebellum discourses of law, medicine, abolitionism, and proslavery thought. (5) By the late 1830s, proslavery intellectuals had begun to embrace paternalism as an ideological antidote to radical abolitionists' condemnations of slavery's horrors. …

Antislavery Women and the Origins of American Jurisprudence

“Antislavery Women and the Origins of American Jurisprudence is an essay review of Sarah Roth's Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014). It assesses Roth's account of the dialog between antislavery and proslavery writers. Roth finds that the antislavery and proslavery writers were joined in their depiction of enslaved people in the 1820s and early 1830s -- as savage people who threatened rebellion. But as antislavery writers shifted to portray enslaved people as humble citizens-in-waiting, the proslavery writers responded with an image of the plantation as a family. This critique turns to southern judges and treatise writers to provide a slightly different picture, which shows that while the public face of the proslavery movement may have been of happy enslaved people, the hard-nosed economic and legal side continued with the initial image of enslaved people. This became particularly salient as the south moved towards Civil War. Roth perceptively portrays the shift in the North that led to increasing calls for African American freedom and citizenship and the rise of empirical critiques of law, which became central to post-war jurisprudence. That is, the antislavery white women in Roth's study injected empirical as well as humanitarian considerations into jurisprudence. Meanwhile, in the southern courts the reaction to calls for citizenship resulted in increasingly dramatic efforts to deny citizenship -- and ultimately in a secession movement along the lines sketched by southern legal thinkers.

“Read Your Destiny!”: Kentucky Antislavery Sentiment and the Uses of Roman History

“Read Your Destiny!”:Kentucky Antislavery Sentiment and the Uses of Roman History Edward C. McInnis (bio) Nearly two thousand years before Cassius Marcellus Clay launched his attacks against the South’s “peculiar institution,” Plutarch wrote a work on Roman history that would significantly affect how Clay and other Kentuckians debated slavery. Plutarch’s history chronicled the travels of Tiberius Gracchus across Italy and Spain. Gracchus, a descendant of the famous Roman general Scipio Africanus, observed on his travels that small farms worked by freeholders had nearly disappeared from the countryside, replaced instead by large plantations employing slave labor.1 Disturbed that this condition threatened republicanism, Gracchus ran for and was elected as a tribune of the people. Using his excellent oratorical skills, he publicly called for the enforcement of Rome’s Licinia laws. These laws distributed land to poor citizens and restricted the amount of public land any one Roman could use. Members of Rome’s patrician class vehemently opposed enforcing the Licinia laws. For generations, they held public lands as their own and viewed the Licinia laws as a threat to their continued ability to exploit public land for profit. From their viewpoint, Gracchus was a demagogue who only sought power by promising commoners land that patrician families had controlled for decades. [End Page 199] In 133 BCE, to stop Gracchus and his land reform, the patrician class in Rome incited large mobs to attack and kill him and his followers. A decade later, when his younger brother Caius Gracchus supported similar land reforms, the patricians incited large mobs to kill him too, thus ending the attempts by these two brothers (together called “the Gracchi”) to preserve a sense of economic fairness in Rome. Although their reform initiatives caused their deaths, the Gracchi became champions to many Americans in the antebellum era. For some proslavery writers, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus were patriotic sons of Rome who supported slavery and were exemplars of republican virtue. Yet, conversely, their story was used by antislavery activists in Kentucky and other border states as proof of the negative impact of slavery on a republic.2 Historians have examined the place of the Gracchi in nineteenth-century American cultural history. Studies by Margaret Malamud and Carl Richard, for example, show that nineteenth-century activists and politicians frequently invoked ancient Greece and Rome (including the Gracchi) in selective ways to justify their policies and points of view at the national level.3 However, these scholars feature only a cursory analysis of how antebellum Americans used history to explain problems and offer solutions at the regional and state level, especially in the Ohio Valley region. Slavery supporters in the Lower South frequently invoked ancient civilizations, especially Rome, to support slavery. By contrast, in Kentucky, a state in which conflicting ideas about slavery existed, people deployed narratives of the past in different ways. In fact, commentators in the commonwealth often used histories of Greece and Rome, including the historical episodes involving Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, to illustrate the harmful effects of slavery on a republic. In doing so, they contributed to a process of reshaping history to advance contemporary social causes. By deploying simplified narratives of historical events from ancient [End Page 200] Greece and Rome, especially the lives and deaths of the Gracchus brothers, antislavery Kentuckians believed they could demonstrate how slaveholding both threatened free-labor values and contradicted the ideals of republicanism. History for Americans was not a quaint story of a bygone era but a device that aided in bringing change. During the Revolutionary era, writers urged young readers not only to read the classics but also to emulate the actions of “heroes and patriots” from ancient Greece and Rome. This pattern continued into the antebellum period as political leaders and social reformers used these histories to advance their causes in a number of different forums and mediums. In addition, schools were already exposing readers to key events and actors from classical times. As early as the 1770s, some textbooks featured comprehensive histories of ancient Greece and Rome. In addition, translations of Plutarch as well as histories of Rome by Barthold Georg Niebuhr during the 1820s and George Bancroft during the 1850s provided readers...

The Republican Rhetoric of a Frontier Controversy: Newspapers in the Illinois Slavery Debate, 1823-1824

This essay uses the printed debate over legalizing slavery in Illinois to examine local leaders' rhetorical and ideological approach to bondage in the early 1820s. Though the controversy over slavery was more heated in Illinois than almost anywhere else, the printed debate reveals a remarkable degree of consensus in the way leaders on both sides approached the issue. Those favoring slavery believed it would hasten the state's development, a motive that became both widespread and pressing in the wake of a severe economic depression. But they were categorically unwilling to argue that bondage would serve Illinois's long-term social or political interests. This reluctance became glaring as the debate entered the press, where proslavery writers attempted to clothe the powerful economic motives for introducing bondage in high minded, republican terms. Though Americans in this era read their newspapers in the same grog-soaked taverns that hosted local political disputes, they expected arguments in the press to appeal to republican principles rather than material interests. Certainly, the two could be combined; antislavery writers proved adept at doing just that. But proslavery writers were considerably less successful. As leaders on both sides of the Illinois slavery contest turned to the newspapers to persuade the electorate, they inevitably brought the debate into this high-minded framework, encouraging those who had demanded slavery as hard-pressed residents on the frontier to consider it as disinterested citizens of a republic. Although history provides many examples of proslavery writers defending slavery in these terms, they were unwilling to do so in Illinois.

Adam Smith's Moral Economy and the Debate to Abolish the Slave Trade

Adam Smith's contribution to antislavery rhetoric has been well-documented by scholars. However, few have thought to examine his impact on the writing of slavery advocates. In the late eighteenth-century debate to abolish the slave trade in Great Britain, abolitionists appropriated Smith's rhetoric to create a “moral economy” that could not tolerate the practice of slaving. Proslavery writers, perceiving the sincere threat to their livelihood, also manipulated Smith's rhetoric and the concept of “moral economy” to formulate arguments in defense of the slave trade. This article complements and expands analyses of Smith's rhetorical and economic theories as well as the rhetoric of the first abolitionist campaign in order to open avenues of inquiry that examine both sides of the debate.

Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean Doris Y. Kadish Reinhardt, Catherine A. . Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. ISBN 1-84545-079-5. I am eager to call Catherine A. Reinhardt's Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean to the attention of readers of NCFS, despite the fact that it does not focus specifically on the years from 1800 to 1899. Rather, the author chooses to treat materials from the second half of the eighteenth century and the last decade of the twentieth century. Claims to Memory is an important book for [End Page 657] nineteenth-century scholars nonetheless: first, because Reinhardt's book illuminates the "long nineteenth century," a term that reminds us that the issues that arise in the beginnings and ends of centuries overlap and are inextricably linked; and second, because Claims to Memory illuminates colonial history, which is so crucial for an understanding of nineteenth-century French history and literature. The wealth of information that Reinhardt provides, which derives from archival research and field work in the Caribbean, justifies including Claims to Memory on a list of important new works that nineteenth-century scholars should consult. The theoretical underpinning of Reinhardt's book and the basis of its coherence are provided by Pierre Nora's notion of realms of memory, or "microhistories," which symbolize a community's heritage but which also often tend to become atrophied and accordingly to play a dominant but distorting role. In the five chapters of the book, devoted to five such realms – the enlightenment, the maroon, freedom, assimilation, and memory – Reinhardt takes on the task of providing a more accurate account of the heritage of Francophone communities today. As Reinhardt explains in her introductory chapter, in 1998 the descendants of slaves raised fundamental questions about who and what was being celebrated and whether there was cause to celebrate the single date of emancipation in 1848 from among all the events connected with slavery. As she sums up one of her key points, "Celebrating the abolitionary decree as a symbol of France's commitment to freedom and democracy, the commemoration honored contributions of French individuals to the exclusion of Caribbean initiatives" (4). Chapter 1 juxtaposes the writings of anti-slavery philosophes such as Montesquieu and Voltaire with those of pro-slavery writers: for example, Le Romain's essay in the Encylopédie; and writings by white planters. By showing the commonalities among pro- and anti-slavery writers, Reinhardt succeeds in questioning "the received notion that the philosophes constituted an uncompromising front against slavery" (17). Even the most enlightened writers of the late eighteenth century, Raynal and Condorcet, who articulate the slaves' right to freedom or the need to destroy slavery, deem slaves unfit for emancipation in the near future. Reinhardt concludes that ultimately the concerns of the philosophes were more economic than humanitarian. Chapters 2–4 shift focus to the role that blacks played in the construction of their own destinies. Chapter 2 considers the figure of the maroon. Reinhardt begins by tracing the history of the resistance that this figure embodies and then turns to showing how maroons were mythicized through their depictions in eighteenth-century writings as either brutishly violent (Saint-Lambert, Mercier, Raynal, Prévost) or as amenable to "civilization" (Mailhol, Gouges, Pigault-Lebrun). Reinhardt deconstructs both depictions as ways of undermining the notion of resistance by the oppressed. Her analysis echoes the revisionist representations of the maroon that, as Reinhardt emphasizes, numerous Martinicans and Guadeloupeans have constructed in recent times, a topic discussed more fully in Chapter 5. Chapter 3 juxtaposes letters and political pamphlets produced by three disparate groups during the French revolutionary period: the French abolitionist Société des amis des noirs, Martinican planters, and Martinican slaves. By showing in this chapter that all three of these groups brought the notion of freedom to the forefront of political thought – and thus not just whites – Reinhardt succeeds in demonstrating the need to redefine the realm of freedom in terms that include black agency. Her analysis of the "independent, insubordinate, and even aggressive [End Page 658...

Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends

My dear Aminadab, wrote William Wirt to his friend Dabney Carr in 1804, I look to you as one of those few, well tried and dearly beloved friends, who will often relax my `brow of care', and checker with soft and genial light, dusky path of Dabney Carr was only one member of Wirt's closeknit of lawyers, relatives, and friends in early nineteenthcentury Virginia. In addition to William Wirt and Dabney Carr, group included Virginians St. George Tucker, Peachy Gilmer and his brother Francis Walker Gilmer, Billy Pope, John Coalter, William H. Cabell, Littleton Waller Tazewell, and Marylander Benjamin Edwards, who had served as Wirt's surrogate father. Intense, lifelong friendships were vital to these men's lives. Bound together by kinship and by a common profession, William Wirt and his friends also enjoyed lifelong ties of love and support similar to bonds that nineteenth-century women experienced in what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has labeled a world of love and ritual.1 Letters written by men in this group offer important new evidence about male friendship and masculinity in early national South. First, they demonstrate that southern white men enjoyed close ties with each other. Second, they reveal that, for at least some men, male intimacy was important at stages of life. Finally, they suggest that male friendship could enable southern men to explore alternative models of masculinity. Although recent studies have demonstrated importance of male friendship to middle-class white men in Northeast, southern men's intimate relationships with each other have not yet received attention they deserve. Although their economic and political alliances-reinforced by kinship-have received some attention, studies of such power relationships rarely address personal rewards of male friendship-what St. George Tucker once referred to as all Ardor & Sincerity of Friendship. A close study of William Wirt and his friends, however, reveals that these southern men cherished warmth and affection of their friends and colleagues.2 E. Anthony Rotundo's recent research on manhood indicates that romantic friendships northern white men were limited to youth. According to Rotundo, most important distinction between female friendships and male friendships was that among males, romantic friendship was a product of one distinct phase in life cycle-youth. Although male friends, like female friends, shared their innermost thoughts and emotions and occasionally caresses, their friendships ended as they achieved manhood through a career and marriage. After a brief youthful period, mature men instead participated in the male culture of workplace, in which competition and cooperation replaced romantic intimacy. By contrast, Donald Yacovone's study of male abolitionists, Drew Gilpin Faust's study of a sacred circle of southern proslavery writers, and Samuel J. Watson's study of army professionals suggest that men who lived on margins of their society often fostered more enduring intimacy. This logic seems pertinent to men in this study. The constant flow of advice within this of upwardly mobile, urban-dwelling, wage-earning lawyers in a world dominated by elite plantation masters reveals tenuous grasp they had on public success and importance that they attached instead to love and friendship. As William Wirt signed a letter to Peachy Gilmer, a true friend was Yours through every vicissitude of life.3 For these southern men, friendship was vital at stages of life, from youth to old age. White southern men are understood primarily in terms of their relationships with their social inferiors: women, poor whites, and slaves. Planter-class males usually are described as ruling patriarchs of southern household and as social, economic, and political leaders of a region bound for secession and Civil War. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his influential study of male culture in Old South, portrays southern men as concerned, above all, with demonstration of their honor in political displays and public combat. …

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

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

Averting a Crisis: The Proslavery Critique of the American Colonization Society

Averting a Crisis: The Proslavery Critique of the American Colonization Society Douglas R. Egerton "The hatred of an Abolitionist is never so intense," sighed Philip Slaughter in 1 855, "as when a colonizationist is the object ofit."1 Except, Slaughter might have added had he lived in a different century, when modern scholars of the abolitionist movement write about the American Colonization Society. Following the lead of William Jay and William Lloyd Garrison, who charged that the Society was a "conspiracy" to hold Southern slaves "more securely in bondage," recent writers have alleged that "the movement had no antislavery goals" and that racism "served as one of the main bulwarks" of the organization, which "probably strengthened the hold of racial prejudice on the minds of white Americans." As a "Southern dominated organization," the Colonization Society wished only to remove free blacks, "those thorns in the side of slavery." Unfree labor was "not its true target," for human bondage was, "after all, a solution" to racial control inAmerica. In short, the "American Colonization Society was not antislavery."2 These eminent scholars are of course right—but only to a point. For all of its institutionalized racism, all of its spectacular inaction regarding slavery, the 1 Philip Slaughter, The Virginian History ofAfrican Colonization (Richmond: MacFarlane and Fergusson, 1855), vii/12. 2 William Jay, Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-Slavery Societies (New York: R. G. Williams, 1838); and William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston: Leavitt, 1832), 10. These historians are, respectively, C. Peter Ripley, ed.. The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3:7; Merton Dillon, "The Failure oftheAmericanAbolitionists," Journal ofSouthern History 25 (May 1959): 166; Merton Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (New York: Norton, 1979), 22; Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Strugglefor Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1981), 66; Charles I. Foster, "The Colonization of Free Negroes in Liberia, 1816-1835," Journal ofNegro History 38 (Jan. 1953): 47; William E. Cain, ed., William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selectionsfrom The Liberator (New York: St. Martin's, 1995), 9. Civil War History, Vol. xmi. No. 2 © 1997 by The Kent State University Press THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETYI43 Colonization Society was hardly the planter-run organization its Northern critics (and their modern chroniclers) depicted it to be. This essay argues that the greatest challenge facing the border South businessmen who ran the organization was the bitter enmity of their deep South planter brethren. Proslavery writers correctly understood Society leaders to be politically powerful advocates of a diversified free labor market economy, in which black Americans, bond or free, would play no role. Not content merely with refusing to debate the liberation and colonization of their slave labor force, cotton state politicians excoriated the Society in the most brutal terms and even threatened its advocates with physical violence. By focusing on the clamorous rift between the Garrisonians and the colonizationists, or on the enormous disdain with which the majority of blackAmericans regarded the Society, historians have tended to ignore the even larger gulf between the upper South politicians, most of them National Republicans, who created and ran the organization in its early decades , and Southern Democrats, who loudly depicted the Society as a treasonous abolitionist organization, thereby forcing Southern moderates and urbanités to remain silent on the question of colonization.3 Founded by just such Southern moderates and urbanités in December 1816, the American Colonization Society proved to be precisely the kind of morally repugnant enterprise that ideologues on both sides of the slavery question could fear and despise. Ostensibly founded to promote the "colonizing [of] the free blacks of the United States," the Society's leadership boasted some of the wealthiest and most influential names in the young republic. Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington served as its figurehead president. House Speaker Henry Clay acted as vice president and chaired most of its meetings. Georgetown banker John Stull and Maryland Federalist senator Robert H. Goldsborough added their wealth and prestige, whileWashington attorneys Francis Scott Key and Elias B. Caldwell labored on the board of managers...

"Over and above... There Broods a Portentous Shadow,--The Shadow of Law": Harriet Beecher Stowe's Critique of Slave Law in "Uncle Tom's Cabin"

Southern proslavery writers recognized that the powerful imagery employed by abolitionist writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe was among the abolitionists' most potent weapons in fighting slavery. Southern reviewers of Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin criticized Stowe most frequently for mischaracterizing the harshness of slavery. William Gilmore Simms, who published his novel Woodcraft as a proslavery answer to Stowe in 1854, thought her novel was a gross misrepresentation of the South:There is a work of fiction, recently published by Mrs. Stowe, which is just now the rage with the abolitionists; the great error of which, throughout, consists in the accumulation of all the instances that can be found of cruelty or crime among the slaveholders. … She shows us a planter of Louisiana, as one of the most heartless, bloody, brutal, gross, loathsome and ignorant wretches under the sun. … [B]ut in doing so, she herself isolates him. She shows that he resides in a remote, and scarcely inaccessible swamp region, where his conduct comes under no human cognizance. How is society answerable for his offenses? How does he represent the condition and character of the slaveholder?

Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860

IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, GARRISONIAN ABOLITIONISTS EMbodied radicalism. Their uncompromising stances on the immediate abolition of slavery, on racial equality, and on women's rights kept them at the fringes of society even as the increasing visibility of slave catchers on Northern soil led to a rise in Northern antislavery sentiment after 1850. The Garrisonians' gender beliefs contributed to their marginalization. When their detractors derided the Garrisonians as racial amalgamationists, white Northerners living in predominantly white communities could view the possibility of racial mixing from a relatively comfortable distance. However, if, as their opponents argued, the Garrisonians intended to desex society, nobody's identity was safe. 1 Proslavery writers eagerly took advantage of the Garrisonians' radical gender beliefs. They attempted to discredit the entire abolitionist movement by juxtaposing scenes of patriarchal harmony in the South with reports of the Garrisonians' promiscuous meetings and female speakers. Slavery apologists depicted Southern plantations as havens from the feminist ideas espoused by the unsexed Garrisonians. They hoped to persuade the nation that the abolitionists' threat to Victorian social mores was so radical that the long-established institution of

Myth and Metaphor in Orthodox Economics

End of the pseudo-debate between capitalism and socialism These are interesting times to think anew about orthodox neoclassical economics. With the collapse of communism, the bipolar economicpolitical order is breaking down. Suppose that the proslavery writers had managed to pose 'The Slavery Question as a question of whether slave plantations should be publicly or privately owned. Instead of being privately owned and exploited for private greed (the Athens model), shouldn't the slave plantations be publicly owned and operated for the Public Good (the Sparta model)? Public ownership of plantations would, however, be inefficient. Pub

The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860.

In one volume, these essentially unabridged selections from the works of the proslavery apologists are now conveniently accessible to scholars and students of the antebellum South. The Ideology of Slavery includes excerpts by Thomas R. Dew, founder of a new phase of proslavery militancy; William Harper and James Henry Hammond, representatives of the proslavery mainstream; Thornton Stringfellow, the most prominent biblical defender of the peculiar institution; Henry Hughes and Josiah Nott, who brought would-be scientism to the argument; and George Fitzhugh, the most extreme of proslavery writers. The works in this collection portray the development, mature essence, and ultimate fragmentation of the proslavery argument during the era of its greatest importance in the American South. Drew Faust provides a short introduction to each selection, giving information about the author and an account of the origin and publication of the document itself. Faust's introduction to the anthology traces the early historical treatment of proslavery thought and examines the recent resurgence of interest in the ideology of the Old South as a crucial component of powerful relations within that society. She notes the intensification of the proslavery argument between 1830 and 1860, when southern proslavery thought became more systematic and self-conscious, taking on the characteristics of a formal ideology with its resulting social movement. From this intensification came the pragmatic tone and inductive mode that the editor sees as a characteristic of southern proslavery writings from the 1830s onward. The selections, introductory comments, and bibliography of secondary works on the proslavery argument will be of value to readers interested in the history of slavery and of nineteenth-century American thought.

Racial Stereotypes in Antislavery Fiction

N THEIR IMPASSIONED DEFENSE of the peculiar institution, proslavery writers freely exploited racist ideas. Slavery was morally justifiable, they argued, because Negroes were essentially different. They were inherently childish and easily contented, and their only wish was for a good song or a gay dance or a hearty laugh. They had no desire for freedom and would be ill-prepared, if they ever attained it, to deal with liberty's difficult responsibilities. Those who pretended otherwise, who would thrust an unwelcome freedom upon a backward race and take the slave from the watchful supervision of his paternal master-such men did not understand the nature of Negroes. Men in antebellum America and many historians since have made the easy mistake of assigning to those who opposed slavery whatever characteristics, ideals, and beliefs were required to make them exactly opposite to their opponents. It makes a neater package if enemies can be opposites; then no matter how profound or superficial the differences, this law of opposition holds steady. If slave-owners were visualized as patrician gentlemen who loved and understood Negroes, then abolitionists must be seen as irresponsible agitators. If slave-owners were regarded as power-mad tyrants, then abolitionists had to be selfless idealists dedicated to freedom. And-to come to the central question of this article-if proslavery advocates believed Negroes to be racially in. ferior and if they portrayed them that way, then, the antislavery spokesmen must have believed only in human equality and the value of every man regardless of the color of his skin. Unfortunately, the facts cannot be so neatly packaged. At least those antislavery writers who chose to enlist support for slaves through fiction manipulated the very same stereotypes employed by their opposition. Those who attacked slavery in fiction portrayed the races in precisely the same terms as those who defended it.

George Frederick Holmes and the Genesis of American Sociology

G. F. Holmes, a Virginian, was the most original theorist among those ante-bellum proslavery writers who attempted to create a sociology sanctioning a paternalistic slave system along Aristotelian lines and directly opposed to nineteenth-century liberalism. An early, if hostile, critic of both Comte's positivism and Spencer's individualism, he later summarized his position in a pioneer textbook, The Science of Society, which appeared in 1883, simultaneously with Ward's Dynamic Sociology.