Slaveholding States Research Articles

Andrew Jackson, Southerner by Mark Cheathem (review)

Reviewed by: Andrew Jackson, Southerner by Mark Cheathem Robert Bonner (bio) Keywords Andrew Jackson, American South, Jacksonian politics, Southern honor Andrew Jackson, Southerner. By Mark Cheathem. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 312. Cloth, $39.95.) Back in 1996, the late Bertram Wyatt-Brown marked SHEAR’s Nashville-based conference with a Presidential Address on “Andrew Jackson’s Honor.” That paper, subsequently published in the Journal of the Early Republic, forged a link between Old Hickory’s dueling, Indian-fighting, and general orneriness and the traits of “southern” honor that so fascinated Wyatt-Brown. Mark Cheathem’s new book takes a cue from Wyatt-Brown’s classic piece even as he moves beyond the most clearly sensational parts of “Old Hickory’s” career (there were many) so as to apply the “southern honor theme” to the entire life of this seminal political figure. If Jackson has often been treated as a “representative of the trans-Appalachian frontier,” Cheathem insists that a Waxhaw upbringing and a subsequent Tennessee political apprenticeship made him “truly a southerner” (4). His political appeal across the slaveholding states thereby can be seen as a function of Jackson’s “southern identity,” as evidenced in his well-known “propensity toward violence, defense of honor, enslavement of African-Americans, embrace of kinship, and pursuit of Manifest Destiny.” With such powerful associations came a cross-class appeal, with the willful old General earning the plaudits of “many contemporary white southerners, elite and non-elite” (4). The merits of Cheathem’s approach are most evident in areas where he has the greatest expertise. His earlier work on Jackson nephew and namesake A. J. Donelson lends considerable authority to this new book’s treatment of the patriarchal Jackson. The Hermitage, we learn in vivid detail, was situated as the central node of a far-flung network of kin ties, local political alliances, and plantation initiatives. This dense social and cultural web of interconnections linked Jackson’s impulsive and often arbitrary political style not simply to his command of the frontier militia but to the world of the Middle Tennessee gentry. Like Wyatt-Brown, Cheathem sees this world of “gentlemanly” honor and hyper-masculine [End Page 510] assertiveness as a regional ideal. More specifically still, this integrated complex of cultural values, perspectives, and imperatives yielded a certain political style that set the slave states apart from the rest of the country. Jackson’s standing with his peers (which at first meant fellow slaveholding gentry but would eventually would encompass all white republican patriarchs entrusted with the franchise) rested on the ways he exercised authority over household white dependents, political subordinates, and the enslaved workers whose labor formed the basis of Jackson’s own considerable (though remarkably precarious) wealth. The greatest challenge of Cheathem’s approach is to show how the “private” Jackson informed the actions of that domineering “political” figure associated since with an entire era of democratic assertiveness. His emphasis on regional traits as a vital link between local and national power is buttressed by citations to Wyatt-Brown, David Hackett Fisher, Kenneth Greenberg, T. H. Breen, and others. Harkening back to this late-twentieth-century scholarly corpus appears fresher than it otherwise might, in that the theme can be revivified by our current tendency to divide political maps (especially those involving presidential politics) between dyed-in-the wool neo-Jacksonian “Red States” and the “Blue State” northern, coastal, and urban enclaves where selective elements of a Whiggish ethos have prevailed as a distinctive cultural style. Jackson’s presidential ambitions and his two-term “Red State” presidency span fully eight of the book’s twenty chapters. This coverage is where Cheathem’s main theme seems strained. What happens in these years was crucial, given the extraordinary influence that Jackson had over the office of the American presidency. His martyrdom as the frustrated “People’s choice” of 1824 de-legitimized John Quincy Adams’s single term; Jackson’s victories in 1828 and 1832 consolidated his appeal so as to put a Van Buren succession in place for 1836; as a political finale, Jackson threw his vital support to Polk in 1844. In his sway over national executive politics, Jackson, and his...

Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861 by David F. Ericson (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861 by David F. Ericson Richard R. John (bio) Keywords Slavery, Federal government, Politics, State development Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791-1861. By David F. Ericson. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Pp. ix, 298. Cloth, $37.50.) The relationship of slavery and American politics is a historical perennial. In Slavery in the American Republic, political scientist David F. Ericson joins the discussion by emphasizing the positive role that the presence of slavery in the American republic played the development of the federal government. In the "traditional narrative," Ericson contends, slavery had little to do with the development of the American state, or, at most, slowed its rise (17). Ericson finds this narrative mistaken. The mordant warnings of slaveholders John Randolph and Nathanial Macon that federal public-works spending might establish precedents that could doom the "peculiar institution" were overblown and unrepresentative. More characteristic was the long involvement of the army in the Second Seminole War, a conflict that, in Ericson's view, was less about land hunger or anti-Native American prejudice than the elimination of a popular haven for escaped slaves. To make his point, Ericson proposes a number of counterfactuals that take the form of a syllogism: no slavery, less (federal) government. Ericson freely concedes that his linkage of slavery and federal public policy is not exactly novel. Indeed, it is not altogether obvious how many historians, as opposed to political scientists, he would lump together in the "traditional" category. Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic (Oxford, UK, 2001) covered many of the same topics with greater authority, while Robin E. Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006) deftly probed the relationship of slavery [End Page 368] and federal taxation. Ericson's innovation, rather, is to demonstrate quantitatively that slavery hastened "state development," a term of art for political scientists that Ericson equates not with the capacity of the state to attain specific goals, as earlier political scientists contended, but, rather, with the ability of federal officeholders to operate independently of constituent pressure. Ericson opens his narrative in 1791, a convenient starting point, since it permits him to sidestep the vexed debate over the relationship of slavery to the federal Constitution. Following an opening chapter in which he distinguishes his approach from the various "politics and history" scholars (2) who persist in downplaying the power of the federal government in the early republic, Ericson devotes chapters to the cost of federal government involvement in the suppression of the international slave trade, the relocation of ex-slaves in Liberia, the capture of fugitive slaves, slavery-related military ventures, and the employment of slaves by the federal government. In the 1791-1861 period, Erickson contends, lawmakers devoted 2.8 percent of federal expenditures ($51 million) to slavery-related tasks. Of this total, over half—$30 million—went to the prosecution of the Second Seminole War, with an additional $10 million for Texas debt relief—an expenditure that he throws into the mix even though he is agnostic as to whether slaveholder-driven land hunger precipitated the Mexican-American War. While Ericson displays considerable ingenuity in number crunching, his interest extends beyond the merely quantitative. How, he asks, did the presence of slavery hasten changes in state behavior that "in turn" led to state development (16)? To answer this question, he ventures a number of speculative claims. Proslavery federal activism, Ericson posits, probably increased the legitimacy of the federal government in the slaveholding states; the hiring of slaves at the Norfolk, Virginia, navy yard almost certainly emboldened middle-level federal administrators to invent novel protocols that increased their autonomy vis à vis their superiors; and the frequent deployment of the military to defend slaveholders' property rights explains the "fit" between the trajectory of state development in the United States and Europe (106). The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 posed a special interpretative challenge, since it perversely underscored the integral relationship of slavery to the expanding mandate of the federal government in the realm of civil rights: "The federal enforcement of the constitutional rights of Southern slaveholders to the return of their...

Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders' Terrain

Over the course of two and a half centuries, slaveholders on the North American mainland came to preside over the largest, wealthiest and most powerful slave society in the Atlantic world (1). Until their destruction as a class, they exercised power and authority far disproportionate to their numbers. By 1860, a mere 7 percent of the total white population of the South owned 75 percent of the slaves. Slaveholding power rested on the power of the nation-state and an array of economic institutions—from banks and merchant houses to factories, railroads, and shipping concerns—and from an unprecedented growth of the slave population. It likewise derived from a disproportionate control of the federal government: by the time of the Civil War, 11 out of 16 presidents, 17 of 28 Supreme Court justices, 14 of 19 attorneys-general, and 23 of 33 speakers of the House had come from slaveholding states...

Alter-Rights: Haiti and the singularization of universal human rights, 18042004

To rethink human rights when they have become little more than hollow ideology in the hands not only of nation-states but of the UN as well requires a radical change in perspective. This article will thus look back to one of the key moments in the history of human emancipation the Haitian Revolution to ask whether it might hold, in its unfulfilled potential, implications for overcoming the contemporary impasse of human rights discourse. Unlike the earlier French and US revolutions, which extended putatively universal rights only to limited categories of citizens (typically white, adult, male property-holders) Haiti was alone in the early-modern world in its implementation of an unqualified, immediate ban on human slavery. For all its daring originality, however, the Haitian intervention never lived up to its historical promise. Both internal political divisions and the international pressure of contemporary slave-holding states such as France and the United States consistently undermined the Haitian initiative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the second part of this article, analysis of this historical process will lead me to consider the ways in which the works of Edwidge Danticat and Peter Hallward stand as contemporary interventions that remain faithful to this unfulfilled legacy of 1804.

Seeking "An Immutable Pledge from the Slave Holding States": The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and Black Resettlement

Seeking "An Immutable Pledge from the Slave Holding States": The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and Black Resettlement

Seeking "An Immutable Pledge from the Slave Holding States": The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and Black Resettlement

Seeking "An Immutable Pledge from the Slave Holding States": The Pennsylvania Abolition Society and Black Resettlement

"In Pressing Need of Cash": Gender, Skill, and Family Persistence in the Domestic Slave Trade

Charlotte grew up on a Rockingham County, Virginia, plantation with her parents and sixteen brothers and sisters. Her family somewhat favored by their slaveholder Charles L. Yancy because they represented nearly half of his enslaved population. They spent most of day in fields cultivating wheat, corn, rye, hemp, and tobacco; her father Novel head who managed agricultural laborers. Their lives changed when Yancy, who had developed a drinking problem, decided to employ an overseer. Suddenly, plantation profits decreased and Charlotte and her family were subjected to four overseers over course of two or three years. Unfortunately, Yancy's financial troubles continued and he himself in pressing need of cash, so Charlotte sold to highest bidder on auction block in Richmond. (1) Charlotte's sale greatly affected her parents and siblings. Her mother, Mary Francis, show[ed] all symptoms of a distracted mind and a broken heart and her father laboured under great distress. Yancy noticed a change in Novel and asked him to share his feelings; to he replied: Why, master, if I should see one of your daughters sold away from you, and you did not ever expect to see her again in life, I could give a pretty close guess how you felt; and now, if you can just place yourself in my stead, and think how you would feel at a separation such as I had to endure, and then my other children weeping around me, you can tell what matter is with me. (2) As dialogue continued, distressed father reminded slaveholder of his continued faithfulness, hoping that Yancy would understand reason for his sadness. Acknowledging Novel's loyalty, Yancy justified his decision to sell Charlotte, claiming, If I have to sell, and must sell, I have to sell to best advantage. At age 19, and a skilled field hand, Charlotte one of most valuable laborers on estate and brought the heaviest price; Yancy believed he had no choice but to sell her first. (3) Not quite convinced by rationale, Charlotte's brother J. A. Banks entered conversation and requested that Yancy sell him next so that his parents would not have to witness repeated acts of sale. To Yancy replied, You are about 19 years of age, and most valuable man I have on farm. I cannot spare you, but I have more young women than I need. I must sell some of them. (4) Southern slaveholders purchased, sold, and traded enslaved black laborers on a daily basis throughout antebellum period. Historians interested in economics of slavery have uncovered a wealth of material relating to domestic slave as well as transatlantic trade, and have debated overall profitability of inhuman bondage. (5) More recently, Steven Deyle's prizewinning study Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life examined both long-distance interstate trade and extensive local or intrastate trade. Far from being marginal to southern economy, slave system an essential element in commercial life. Deyle found that in 1860, commercial value of enslaved population was roughly three times greater than total amount of all capital, North and South combined, invested in manufacturing, almost three times amount invested in railroads, and seven times amount invested in banks. With regard to slaveholding states, By 1860 slave had even surpassed assessed value of real estate. Historian Herbert Gutman had argued in 1975 that once every 3.5 minutes, 10 hours a day, 300 days a year, for 40 years, a human being bought and sold in antebellum South. However, since that time, historians documenting domestic slave have estimated that Gutman's figures were too low. (6) One reason this species of property so valuable because from 1820 to 1860 prices were increasing. …

Le contrôle de la discrimination raciale au Canada

This article is divided into four parts: the first is a brief survey of race relations in Canada before the enactment of anti-discrimination legislation; the next two parts are devoted to an outline of the scope of this legislation and of the administration and enforcement of it ; finally, the last part suggests some current and possible future developments to make it more effective. Prior to the nineteenth century both the French and the British settlers in the colonies that have become a part of Canada had slaves. Slavery was not, however, very extensive due to lack of large agricultural holdings. At the end of the eighteenth century the legislature in Upper Canada and some judges in Lower Canada limited its expansion and helped to end its practice. The British Imperial Emancipation Act of 1833 brought it to an end. In the next few decades, up to the American Civil War, some Canadians helped run-away slaves from the slave-holding states in the United States, while others actively discouraged them from coming. By the end of the nineteenth century a new source of racial tension arose on the West Coast between the newer immigrants from Asia and the older immigrants from Europe. The result was the enactment of numerous discriminatory laws by the legislature of British Columbia and subsequently, on a lesser scale, by the other western provinces. Most of these remained on the statute books until after World War II. None of these laws were held invalid by the courts on the basis of their discriminatory nature. In addition, both the common law and the Civil Code were interpreted as not prohibiting private discrimination, except by hotel-keepers and common carriers. The change from this situation started in the I930's with a few specific legislative prohibitions of discrimination in specific instances. In the 1940's Ontario, with respect to signs and advertisements and Saskatchewan, with respect to a whole range of activities, enacted legislation prohibiting discrimination, enforcing their prohibitions with penal sanctions. The 1950's saw the introduction of fair employment and fair accommodation practices acts. By the I960's these were being consolidated into comprehensive human rights codes administered by human rights commissions. This trend has continued up to this year, with the result that all eleven jurisdictions have commissions charged with enforcing antidiscrimination codes or acts. The usual, but not invariable, procedure is the laying of a complaint, the investigation of it by the commission staff, an attempt to bring about a settlement and finally, failing that, a hearing before an adjudicative tribunal to determine whether an act of discrimination did occur and, if so, what redress is appropriate. In concluding, three suggestions are made regarding measures that could be taken to strengthen the effectiveness of anti-discrimination legislation: (I) contract compliance; (2) greater independence for the commissions from the government; and (3) giving the legislation paramountcy over other statutes.

Imagining "A Great Manufacturing Empire": Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff

Confederate support for free trade seems incontestable. The long movement for Southern independence began, after all, in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, which revolved around South Carolina's resistance to the "Tariff of Abominations." For the rest of the antebellum period, Southern economists, politicians, and editors frequently argued that protective tariffs transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from Southern planters to Northern manufacturers. South Carolina's 1860 "Address to the People of the Slaveholding States," for example, bitterly complained that Southerners had been taxed to support "Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufacturers." The great transfer of wealth—likened to the unjust taxation of the British Parliament in the Colonial period—"made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; whilst they are mere suburbs of Northern cities." 1 When the Confederacy formulated its new Constitution in April 1861, it reinforced its free trade image by prohibiting "any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations to be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry." With the passage of the Confederate revenue tariff of 15 percent the following summer—significantly lower than U.S. tariffs in the antebellum period— "the issue of the protective tariff was laid to rest, as far as the Confederacy was concerned." 2

Demanding a Voice among the Pettifoggers: Sojourner Truth as Legal Actor

American legal narratives of the nineteenth century tell us that slaves, free blacks, and women had no legal voice. (1) Nevertheless, Sojourner Truth, an African American woman and former slave, initiated successful lawsuits, attempted to vote, petitioned Congress, and in many other ways insisted upon a legal and political voice. Studying the traces we have of Truth's legal activism helps to complicate our picture of Sojourner Truth, often seen only as orator or as larger-than-life icon of early feminism, and helps to speak to some of the silences in the intentionally incomplete record of US slavery and resistance. Two years after the Union victory, instead of yielding to pressure to leave the painful issues of the war in the past, Troth insists on keeping slavery in the public eye. The American Equal Rights Association cheers when she takes the stage, but Truth warns, am rejoiced that you are glad, but I don't know how you will feel when I get through. She reminds her mostly white New York audience of their different origins: come from another field--the country of the slave. They have got their liberty--so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. She also assures this organization of woman suffragists: want women to have their rights. In the courts women have no right, no voice; nobody speaks for them. I wish woman to have her voice there the If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there. (2) While the law asserts otherwise, Truth's activism demonstrates the capacity of disfranchised Americans to seize legal agency, to demand a voice among the pettifoggers. Through her escape from slavery, on the eve of emancipation, her multiple lawsuits, and other examples of private and public activism, Truth functions as a legal actor, revealing the law as both an agent of oppression and a potential tool for resistance. Truth's relationship to the law anticipates the relationship described by critical race theorists more than a century later: law as both subordination and liberation. (3) A complete picture of Sojourner Truth is impossible, especially given the compromised textual record of her words, (4) but examining her persistent legal agency helps to provide another dimension to this iconic figure and helps to deconstruct the myth of all-powerful slave laws and silenced slaves. Like many early African American activists, Truth had escaped from slavery. The terms of her escape reveal the contradictions and pettiness in the rhetoric and behavior of lawmakers and slaveholders, even as they worked toward emancipation. Truth was born in the slaveholding state of New York at the end of the eighteenth century. She was to be officially freed under New York's emancipation legislation. The subtitle of her 1850 book gives the state credit for her freedom: Narrative of Sojourner Truth, A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York, in 1828. (5) The title page of the 1878 edition locates agency specifically in the state legislature and places her servitude and emancipation further in the past: Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century. In this description, Truth's bondage was olden and her freedom came early, thanks to the lawmakers of New York. In fact, Truth did not wait for the lawmakers. She escaped prior to the official date of emancipation, after her owner went back on his word to free her early. New York's 1817 emancipation statute provided gradual freedom for enslaved African Americans, revealing anxiety about creating a free black population too quickly. Slaves who were born before July 4, 1799, including Truth, would be free on July 4, 1827. Slaves born after that date, including Truth's children, would remain in servitude until age twenty-five for women and twenty-eight for men (Laws of NY 137: [section] 32 and [section] 4). …

The Papers of John C. Calhoun : Vol. XXVI, 1848–1849 , and: Calhoun and Popular Rule: The Political Theory of the Disquisition and Discourse (review)

On February 6, 1837, John C. Calhoun on the floor of the U.S. Senate declared that slavery was a "positive good." Senator William Rives of Virginia had referred to slavery as an evil that might become a "lesser evil" in some circumstances. Calhoun believed that conceded too much to the abolitionists: "I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good. . . . I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other." A year later in the Senate (January 10, 1838), Calhoun repeated this defense of slavery as a "positive good": "Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."

"The Skin of an American Slave": African American Manhood and the Marked Body in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Literature

When Civil War began in April 1861, African American men attempted in vain to volunteer for military service. As Jim Cullen writes, efforts of abolitionists to contrary, secession, not slavery, was pretext for outbreak of hostilities, and Lincoln administration assiduously courted slaveholding states still in Union by avoiding any appearance of restructuring existing race relations. (1) For all of their differences, most Northern and Southern white men agreed that this was, indeed, a white man's war, and objected to idea that black men, slave or free, should occupy a role formerly reserved only for white male citizens. Yet military necessity would accomplish what abolitionist politics could not. The Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, freed all slaves in states still in rebellion against Federal government; it also provided for lawful enlistment of African American men in Union army. (2) Eventually, 179,000 black men would serve in army, majority of whom came from Confederate and border slave states. (3) Black soldiers would play major roles in a number of battles, including those at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner, South Carolina. Abolitionists, black and white, and most African Americans were well aware that enlistment of black men into Union army would challenge fundamental notions of race, masculinity, and citizenship, and would have a significant impact on treatment of African Americans during and after Civil War. On July 4, 1863, seven months after Emancipation Proclamation took effect, Harper's Weekly responded to this controversial development with a drawing illustrating transformation of one black man from slave to contraband and finally to Union soldier (Figure 1). (4) Gordon, typical negro featured in drawing, is portrayed in three poses, from left to right. The first panel, labeled GORDON AS HE ENTERED OUR LINES, shows subject sitting in a chair with his legs crossed. His feet are bare and his clothes are tattered. In second panel, GORDON UNDER MEDICAL INSPECTION, Gordon wears only his pants and sits with his scarred back to audience, his face turned just enough to reveal his profile. He stands upright in third panel, wearing a uniform and holding a rifle in front of him; panel is labeled GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER. The purpose of illustration appears to be to demonstrate Gordon's ability to transform himself--or to be transformed--into a man and a soldier. However, curiously enough, final panel is not most conspicuous in series. Rather, second panel, depicting Gordon's scars, is largest and presumably first to attract observer's eye. Despite label, which asserts that this image is drawn from Gordon's medical examination while in Union camp, illustration and scars that it highlights were more likely to remind readers that Gordon had been a slave, and a harshly treated slave at that. (5) The accompanying text also emphasizes the degree of brutality which slavery has developed among ... whites, rather than significance of Gordon's military service. (6) While his skin color suggests that Gordon was a slave, scars are presented in drawing as proof of that fact. Gordon is ultimately labelled a slave because of his scars and smaller representations of him as contraband and Union soldier do little to dispel that label. FIGURE 1 OMITTED] This depiction of Gordon accents conflicts inherent in visual and literary use of scar in representations of African American men, both before and during Civil War. (7) Although GORDON IN HIS UNIFORM AS A U.S. SOLDIER marks a new opportunity for African American men, spectacle of Gordon's scarred back is representative of a long tradition in abolitionist literature. …

Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland

In Imperfect Equality, Richard Fuke has explores the immediate aftermath of slavery in Maryland, which differed in important ways from the slaveholding states of the South: it never left the Union; white radicals had a period of access to power; and even prior to legal emancipation, a large free black population resided there. Moreover, the presence of Baltimore, a major city and port, provided abundant evidence with which to compare the rural and the urban experience of black Marylanders. This state study is therefore uniquely revealing of the successes and failures of the post-emancipation period. The transition in Maryland from a slave to a free society, Fuke argues, presented to black Marylanders opportunities to achieve previously inaccessible goals. Blacks were able to realize some goals, such as greater land ownership, control over the labor of their children, education, and the formation of independent cultural and social organizations, through their own intrepidity combined with the support of white radicals as well as with the assistance of the Freedmen's Bureau, the United States Army, and some state-controlled agencies. Other goals-such as social equality, economic opportunity and advancement, and suffrage-remained beyond the reach of blacks, not only because of conservative white opposition, but also, Fuke argues, because of the attitudinal limitations of white radicals unable to confront the full range of post-emancipation possibilities. Calling upon a very broad range of sources, Fuke demonstrates that after emancipation, Black Marylanders neither enjoyed total freedom nor suffered absolute coercion, but their struggle made two things clear: much of whatever they might accomplish, they would have to do by themselves; and such efforts would remain confined by white attitudes determined to regulate them.

The Many Incarnations of Nat Turner

Near the end of her comprehensive study of literary portrayals of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave revolt of 18 31, Mary Kemp Davis sums up her argument thus: Styron 'signifies' upon Drewry's Nat Turner; Sherley Anne Williams upon Styron's Nat Turner; Mary Spear Tiernan upon G. P. R. James's Nat Turner; Pauline Bouve upon Harriet Beecher Stowe's Nat Turner; and Daniel Panger, like each of the novelists surveyed here, upon Thomas Ruffin Gray's Nat Turner, and perhaps what he had glimpsed of Styron's Nat Turner in Harper's magazine. This signi fying chain threatens to extend into infinity. And well it should (278 ? 279). As the list suggests, Nat Turner has intrigued many writers, and Mary Kemp Davis is no exception. Her study carefully traces the development of Nat Turner as a literary figure and an historical enigma. The Southampton, Virginia slave insurrection lasted for two days in late August, 18 31 and resulted in the deaths of approximately fifty-seven whites, mosdy women and children. The event triggered widespread panic throughout Virginia and spread to most other slaveholding states as well. Twenty slaves received the death penalty for their participation in the revolt, and scores of others were put to death by whites seeking ret ribution. Turner himself, who remained at large for ten weeks, was sent to the gallows on November 11, 18 31. The exact nature of the event is . difficult to define. What motivated Nat Turner and his small band of fol

Abolition, Compromise and "The Everlasting Elusiveness of Truth" in Melville's Pierre

Although readers of Moby-Dick have often seen reflections on the American political landscape within Herman Melville's masterpiece, they have resisted reading Melville's subsequent novel, Pierre, or The Ambiguities as a similar meditation on the sectional crisis of 1850. Written just one year after Moby-Dick in 1851, Pierre has been mined almost exclusively for its autobiographical content, its psychological infrastructure, and its perceived artistic failures.(1) Consequently, Pierre has seemed for twentieth-century readers to be an overwrought love story tangled within a novel about literary achievement, a work that, as Henry Murray has argued, served for Melville as something of a spiritual autobiography.(2) Yet when its perspectives on and reform are brought into view, Pierre, like Moby-Dick, reveals Melville's ongoing concern with ideas of survival, faith, and adherence to a law. The consequences of compromise were still haunting Melville late in 1851. Pierre tells the story of an idealistic young hero's struggle to reconcile himself with a newly-discovered dark half-sister whose suffering he attributes directly to the sins of his father. What has gone unrecognized in this novel is what Toni Morrison has called the ghost in the machine, the preoccupation with the presence of a black in a white world that lies within much nineteenth-century American literature. Morrison suggests that on the subject of race, even canonical writers like Melville have much more to say than has been realized. Perhaps some were not so much transcending politics, or escaping blackness, as they were transforming it into intelligible, accessible, yet artistic modes of discourse.(3) From Morrison's perspective, Moby-Dick is not only a critique of the politics surrounding the Fugitive Slave Law and the 1850 Compromise, as Alan Heimert and others have argued; in the Pequod's relentless pursuit of the white whale, she beholds a critique of the underlying of race driving much of the politics of slavery in the republic.(4) We can find the same ideology of in Pierre. Melville uses his love story to address the competing doctrines of idealism and expediency at the center of political discourse among abolitionists and Northern politicians. Moreover and beyond the politics of these ideologies, he explores the influence of a deeply entrenched belief in white superiority on the aspirations of his presumably altruistic hero as that hero grapples with his dark sibling's claim to equality. Contrary to the hopes of advocates of the Compromise of 1850, the legislation passed that year did not succeed in resolving conflict between anti-slavery activists and those Northerners who preferred compromising with southern slave-holding states over risking the dissolution of the Union.(5) In 1851, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker continued to argue that slavery not only violated the principle for which the nation's founding fathers had struggled in the Revolution, but that to condone slavery anywhere in the Union was for the nation to transgress the higher law of God.(6) For these reformers, far more than secular justice was at stake; as Garrison once proclaimed, I will perish before an inch shall be surrendered, seeing that the liberties of mankind, the happiness and harmony of the universe, and the authority and majesty of Almighty God, are involved in the issue.(7) No compromise could be deemed acceptable in the pursuit of a cause ordained by God. Among the many who disagreed with the arguments of Garrison was Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who witnessed antislavery sentiment split his own Whig party and then the nation into Northern and Southern factions.(8) Webster did not conceive a legislative end to slavery to be feasible or even permissible under the Constitution. Although he was opposed to the expansion of slavery, his strategy was never to rid the nation of this great moral, social, and political evil, but to curtail it sufficiently so that it would not dominate the political scene. …

Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861.

The election of Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 initiated a heated debate throughout the South about what Republican control of the federal government would mean for the slaveholding states. During the secession crisis of the winter of 1860-61, Southerners spoke out and wrote prolifically on the subject, publishing their views in pamphlets that circulated widely. These tracts constituted a regional propaganda war in which Southerners vigorously debated how best to react to political developments on the national level. In this valuable reference work, Jon Wakelyn has collected twenty representative examples of this long-overlooked literature. Although the pamphlets reflect deep differences of opinion over what Lincoln's intentions were and how the South should respond, all indicate the centrality of slavery to the Southern way of life and reflect a pervasive fear of racial unrest. More generally, the pamphlets reveal a wealth of information about the South's political thought and self-identity at a defining moment in American history. The twenty items included here represent the views of leaders and opinion makers throughout the slaveholding states and are fully annotated. An additional sixty-five pamphlets are listed and briefly described in an appendix.Originally published in 1996.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Establishment of Louisville Municipal College: A Case Study in Racial Conflict and Compromise

By examining factors leading to the creation of Louisville Municipal College for Negroes in Louisville, Kentucky, this article presents a case study of a southern African American community's use of political power to achieve educational gains in the early decades of the 20th century. Three streams of historical development are traced as they relate to this development: (a) the history of African Americans in Kentucky, (b) the history of African American education in Kentucky, and (c) the history of education in Kentucky, particularly that of the city of Louisville and the University of Louisville, the parent institution of Louisville Municipal. INTRODUCTION Opened on February 9, 1931, as a segregated Black branch of the University of Louisville, Louisville Municipal College for Negroes was the product of decades of organized political pressure on the part of African American Kentuckians. This pressure--beginning before the Civil War, lasting through the Reconstruction period, and continuing until after World War I--contributed decisively to the founding of the college as well as to the advancement of other education goals shared by the African American community of Louisville and its leadership. The effective application of this pressure was possible due to the confluence of three streams of historical development, specifically: (a) the history of African Americans in Kentucky, ) the history of African American education in Kentucky, and (c) the history of education in Kentucky, particularly that of the city of Louisville and the University of Louisville. This article argues that the process of Louisville Municipal's establishment, indeed, the college's very existence and purpose, can be accurately understood only by examining these streams and their interactions. Moreover, it contends that examination of the factors surrounding the creation of this institution presents an excellent opportunity for the study of the effective use of African American political power to achieve educational gains. AFRICAN AMERICANS IN KENTUCKY African Americans entered the region of Virginia west of the mountains as early as 1751 and played important roles in the early settlement of what later became the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Clark, 1937; Lucas, 1992; Rice, 1975). Because soil and climatic conditions in Kentucky did not lend themselves to cotton cultivation and large-scale plantation agriculture, and because tillable land was scarce in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, African Americans came to be concentrated in what is known as the Bluegrass or central region of the commonwealth, where they worked primarily as enslaved laborers on small farms and as free or enslaved laborers or servants in urban areas (Clark, 1937; Lucas, 1992). By 1784, the roughly four thousand African Americans residing in Kentucky represented about 10% of the commonwealth's population (Coleman, 1940). By 1830, there were 165,213 enslaved and 4,917 free persons of African ancestry, 170,130 in total, representing nearly 25% of all Kentuckians (McDougle, 1918). Although Kentucky's African American population increased in absolute numbers over time, the state's White population increased far more significantly. For example, the number of African Americans held in bondage or residing freely in Kentucky increased to a total of 236,167 persons by 1860; however, the statewide percentage of African Americans declined to 20.4%. By 1890, Kentucky's 268,071 African Americans represented only 16.9% of its 1,590,462 citizens (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1974). These demographic trends rendered the threat of Negro domination--the typical rationale for the disenfranchisement of African Americans in other former slave-holding states--less ominous in Kentucky (Wright, 1992). Ironically, while this smaller proportionate number enabled Black Kentuckians to retain some limited freedom to exercise their right to vote by the turn of the century (Hudson, 1981), the franchise could be used effectively only in Louisville, with its high concentration of African Americans (19. …

The Spine of the Nation

This essay is a response to Paul Metcalf's I-57 (LongRiver Books, 1988), a narrative hieroglyph constructed from written artifacts that culminates in a journey by car from the vicinity of Cairo, Illinois to Chicago. am sitting in the Blue Sea Lodge in San Diego, California, listening to the Pacific Ocean over my left shoulder and thinking of I-57, over my right. We landed in O'Hare Airport, Chicago, Illinois, about six hours ago, and flew over Interstate Highway 57. remember printing an excerpt from I-57 in a little magazine with a name stolen out of Melville's Pierre, i.e., SARCOPHAGUS. remember pieces of I-57 well. Paul and Nancy Metcalf spent a winter in San Diego, about a mile from where now sit. I'm in their old neighborhood, the beach. It is a strange feeling to sit this side of the continent thinking of Metcalf's book while watch TOUR OF DUTY the television. It seems more than slightly schizophrenic. East/West-West/East. ate dinner in NYPD's 2nd Precinct -- in San Diego. listened to Marvin Gaye sing What's Going on CBS. have the urge to open the door, step out to the beach, walk the water once asked Metcalf if he was trying to literalize the geography of Melville's The Confidence-Man in I-57. He said, no. Metcalf did go to Cairo, and in I-57 he quotes Dickens: the hateful Mississippi, circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course, a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hot bed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it, such is this dismal Cairo. Herman Melville had gone to Galena, Illinois in 1840, with one Eli James Murdoch Fly. It was an exploratory trip west, that included a visit with Herman's uncle Thomas Melville, in Galena. A Melville scholar, Tom Quirk, has written: the emphasis |in the novel~ would have been a voyage following the course of the Mississippi from the falls of St. Anthony toward the sea -- as Melville himself had probably followed it to the mouth of the Ohio in 1840 . Shortly after the publication of The Confidence-Man Melville gave up the life of gentleman-author-farmer, sold Arrowhead, and moved to New York City. On July 15, 1856, Lemuel Shaw Jr. sent news to his brother Samuel of the completion of their brother-in-law Herman's last commercial novel and writes: I know nothing about it; but have no great confidence in the success of his productions. Four or five years earlier Melville had discarded a chapter of this book entitled THE RIVER: As the word Abraham means the father of a great multitude of men so the word Mississippi means the father of a great multitude of waters. His tribes stream in from east and west exceeding fruitful the lands that enrich. In this granary of a continent this basin of the Mississippi will not the nations be greatly multiplied and blest. Above the Falls of St. Anthony for the most part he winds evenly in between banks or flags or tracts of pine over marble sands in waters so clear that the deepest fish espy the uninterrupted flight of the bird. Undisturbed as the lowly life in its bosom feeds the lowly life its shore, the coronetted elk & the deer while in the watery form of some couched rock in the channel, furred over with moss, the furred bear the marge seems to eye his amphibious brothers, wood & wave wed, man is remote. From I-57: But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven!) has no young children like him? An enormous ditch. (p. 37) from the slaveholding states there now poured a fresh stream of immigrants for whom the atmosphere of human slavery became as suffocatingly intolerable as any economic and political oppression in the old world. Many belonged to the uneducated, non-slaveholding poor white class …

From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South (review)

356CIVIL WAR HISTORY lification era and on the eve of the Civil War, Love of Order is the first book-length work on the secession crisis of 1850-1851 in fifty years. And it admirably meets the need for a new study. Initial examination of the work might suggest an imbalance of coverage , for only 70 of its 190 pages of text deal directly with the two-year crisis. But a closer reading will remove most objections about the lengthy background, aimed at showing why SouthCarolina was, among the slaveholding states, sui generis. The demography of the state, marked from an early day by a black majority, created anxieties among whites in a degree far greater than elsewhere. The aristocratic political structure, which gave to the legislature control over all other parts of government, enabled the gentry planters to create and sustain a consensus that made the defense of slavery the paramount goal. The isolation of the state during nullification showed that other southern states did not share its degree of anxiety, and the image of unique radicalism was a central legacy in the following years. Thus Calhoun was unable to unite the South in a radical response to the Wilmot Proviso or stave off the forces of compromise in 1850. The distinctive contribution of Love of Order, in this context, is its richly documented account of the struggle within the state among three groups. The "secessionists" wanted the state to leave the Union at once. The "Unionists" argued, by contrast, that the protection of the national government gave the best security to slavery. The "cooperationists" believed the defense of slavery ultimately required a separate confederacy , but they opposed any unilateral action by the state at the time. Their victory in the elections of late 1851 thus meant, as James Hammond put it, that a "love of order" (p. 187) overrode the impulse to revolutionary action without the concert of other states. But Love of Order makes it clear that the nature of the consensus over the goal of defending slavery in 1851 could also extend to a consensus over revolutionary means by the end of the decade. Close students of South Carolina will doubtless find particular points to challenge; and the general reader might wish the narrative of events had been given a somewhat sharper focus. But Love of Order will be welcomed as an important work, rich in texture and convincing in its overall argument. If Peterson's Olive Branch and Sword focuses on the arts of compromise, this work points just as surely to other aspects in the national experience which defy the peaceful arts. Major L. Wilson Memphis State University From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South. Edited by Walter J. Fraser, Jr. and Winfred B. Moore, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Pp. xiii, 286. $35.00.) The nineteen essays in this volume were chosen for publication from BOOK REVIEWS357 among the over one hundred papers presented at The Citadel Conferences on the South in 1978 and 1979. As is the nature of thebeast, they include "think pieces" by eminent historians, excerpts from recently completed Ph.D. dissertations, and parts of works in progress by authors who have already published at least one book. The editors have divided the essays somewhat arbitrarily into eight sections. Each section contains a brief introduction that summarizes the main points of the articles and places them in a broader context, though this latter role is better performed in an especially useful fifteen page bibliographical essay. The overall quality of the essays is well above that found in most anthologies, but this is not surprising given the high quality of the papers and participants at the two conferences. The volume thus provides an excellent status report onwhere wehave been and where we are heading in the study of the New South. What emerges most clearly is the current preoccupation with the question of continuity vs. changein the shift from the Old South to the New, particularly for the years from 1850 to 1900 in the areas of race relations, leadership patterns, violence, and intellectual life. There is no consensus though there does seem to be...

Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 , and: Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS355 tor has presented an impressive and exhaustive case, but the magnitude of the charge leaves at least one juror unconvinced. James I. Robertson, Jr. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833. ByMerrillPeterson. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. 132. Cloth, $15.00.) Love of Order: South Carolina's First Secession Crisis. By John Barnwell . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Pp. x, 258. Cloth, $25.00.) Olive Branch and Sword is based on the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures given at Louisiana State University in 1980. It actually offers little new material on the background ofnullification or on the formulation of the compromise. There is also a certain imbalance in the presentation. While admitting that Henry Clay's tariff measure succeeded "only because Jackson wielded the sword behind him," the volume devotes much more space to the olive branch part of the compromise than to Jackson's Force Bill. Clay thus emerges as a more"masterful strategist" (p.84) than some students might allow. More new material is to be found in the third lecture. Here are drawn together the varied perceptions contemporaries had of the compromise during the following decade. The greatest value of the work lies in the many wise judgments historians have come to expect of Merrill Peterson. Resisting the temptation to claim long-run influences for the compromise reaching to the Civil War, he reminds us that such events are too complex and multidimensional for any straight-line analysis. In the context of the early 1830s Clay's efforts reflected a desire to salvage something of his beleagured American System; the compromise did serve to resolve an immediate crisis; and it bore more directly on Jackson's Bank War than many studies suppose. Jackson's determination in 1833 to remove the deposits from the national bank was in part, at least, a political response to the Clay-Calhoun coalition formed in the nullification crisis. More generally Peterson finds the event worthy of further study because it illustrated the positive features of the arts of compromise. Other elements were involved, yet his focus on the "factor of personality" properly reasserts the truth that events are at last made by men. "The history of the compromise of 1833 is largely the history of Clay and Calhoun, Jackson and Webster . . . "(p.126). In these terms students will look forward to a larger work on the Great Triumvirate, of which the presentvolume is a part. While recent studies have been done on South Carolina during the nul- 356CIVIL WAR HISTORY lification era and on the eve of the Civil War, Love of Order is the first book-length work on the secession crisis of 1850-1851 in fifty years. And it admirably meets the need for a new study. Initial examination of the work might suggest an imbalance of coverage , for only 70 of its 190 pages of text deal directly with the two-year crisis. But a closer reading will remove most objections about the lengthy background, aimed at showing why SouthCarolina was, among the slaveholding states, sui generis. The demography of the state, marked from an early day by a black majority, created anxieties among whites in a degree far greater than elsewhere. The aristocratic political structure, which gave to the legislature control over all other parts of government, enabled the gentry planters to create and sustain a consensus that made the defense of slavery the paramount goal. The isolation of the state during nullification showed that other southern states did not share its degree of anxiety, and the image of unique radicalism was a central legacy in the following years. Thus Calhoun was unable to unite the South in a radical response to the Wilmot Proviso or stave off the forces of compromise in 1850. The distinctive contribution of Love of Order, in this context, is its richly documented account of the struggle within the state among three groups. The "secessionists" wanted the state to leave the Union at once. The "Unionists" argued, by contrast, that the protection of the national government gave the best security to slavery. The "cooperationists" believed the defense...