Expansion Of Slavery Research Articles

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (review)

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. By Michael William Pfau. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 248. Cloth, $59.95.)Reviewed by Frederick J. BlueThe controversy over the Slave Power Conspiracy divided antebellum Americans and has continued to divide historians who write about the ultimate cause of the Civil War. In this volume, a scholar of rhetoric adds his input to the ongoing controversy. The result is a study that will interest those who study the prewar years, but may receive greater attention from those in the field of rhetorical studies.It is Michael Pfau's contention that the claim of a Slave Power Conspiracy passed out of the hands of those on the fringe of sectional division to those in the mainstream during the 1840s and 1850s, in large part due to the efforts of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. The proponents of conspiracy argued that southern slaveholders and politicians conspired with northern Democrats and Whigs to control national politics and permit the expansion of slavery and the increase of their political and economic power in the process. In so doing, the conspirators threatened the basic principles of the Republic established by the Revolutionary founding fathers. Among the earliest proponents of such a claim were the Garrisonians, who argued from a fringe position in society and who were often dismissed as irrational fanatics. Richard Hofstadter and David Brion Davis described their ap- proach as the paranoid style, which used arguments that, if not false, were at least questionable.While some conspiracy theories remained the view only of extremists, others, argue Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America and, as such, entered the two-party system. Such was the direction of the Slave Power Conspiracy. Looking at the opposite poles of fringe and center, Pfau contends that the process of winning minds to the theory was a rhetorical one. Critics suggest that William Lloyd Garrison used lurid and exaggerated imagery to describe a vast and sinister effort that began with a proslavery Constitution. His was a holy war, says Pfau, which not only disdained politics but degenerated into Garrison's withdrawal and the violence of John Brown.While this was taking place, political antislavery activists moved the debate first into third-party politics and then into the two-party system. Some might question Pfau's choice of the three leading Republicans, especially when he suggests that the three were leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860; Sumner did not seek the office, nor did he receive serious consideration.Yet the speeches Pfau chooses to analyze are central in the Slave Power Conspiracy evolution. Beginning with Chase, Pfau shows how the Ohioan began to move away from the periphery of Liberty party politics with his 1845 Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention in Cincinnati, distancing the party from its more reform-minded religious element in an effort to form a coalition with northern antislavery Democrats. It was a secular approach stressing civic and republican ideology, in which Chase showed how southern aristocrats had strayed from their Jeffersonian roots. By 1854, when Chase joined with five other Free Soilers in authoring the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, the issue had become the Kansas Nebraska Act, the crowning proof of Slave Power Conspiracy. …

Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic Stephen E. Maizlish (bio) Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. By Matthew Mason. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 352. Cloth, $45.00.) Now that slavery has been restored to its rightful place in the historical literature as the fundamental cause of the American Civil War and as the key question in the war itself, historians have sought to determine when and how the slavery issue rose to such prominence in the years between the Revolution and the outbreak of sectional warfare. Matthew Mason, in Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, joins this effort to measure the growing significance of the slavery issue in the early nineteenth century. He forcefully argues that historians have mistakenly maintained, in what he calls the "out of nowhere interpretation," that the Missouri controversy had few roots in the political battles of the period between the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 and the divisions surrounding Missouri's petition for statehood (3). Mason carefully reviews the years before the Missouri crisis, demonstrating the growing importance of the slavery issue during a time that historians usually describe as dominated by national concerns and east–west conflicts. Slavery, Mason claims, never went "unchallenged" in this period, and northern opposition regularly brought predictable reactions from the South (5). He maintains that the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808 marked a turning point after which the slavery issue took on an increasingly central role in the political debate, particularly during the War of 1812, which Mason calls a "milestone" in the "politics of slavery" (88). [End Page 544] New England's Federalist opponents of the war frequently blamed the South's enhanced power in the House of Representatives for the conflict. In particular, they argued that the increased representation given to white southerners by the three-fifths clause enabled passage of the Embargo Act and other measures that New Englanders viewed as inimical to their interests. Furthermore, the British offer of freedom to runaway slaves during the war and the American demand for compensation for lost human property afterward heightened tensions surrounding the slavery issue. As a result of the war and its aftermath, Mason concludes, Americans "saw the bonds of their still-fragile Union attenuated by their disagreements over slavery" (105). Mason is quick to emphasize that African Americans played a critical role in the development of slavery as a political issue during the early national period. The white South's attempt to control increasingly rebellious slave behavior, especially its pursuit of fugitive slaves, became a source of North–South tension. The political activity of free blacks in both sections also contributed to the rising discord by encouraging and inspiring protest in the slave population. Following the War of 1812, northern fears of slavery expansion dominated that section's perception of the southern threat. The northern concern was that its own freedoms were at risk from an ever-expanding institution of human bondage. Mason even argues that this concern was so central that it contributed to the formation of a northern sectional identity. In the Mid-Atlantic states, anxiety arose from the presence of slave catchers who operated there. In the Old Northwest, alarm focused on the danger of the actual spread of slavery to the region. And all the North was shocked by the number of kidnappings of northern blacks that had been carried out to feed the labor needs of the growing and spreading cotton plantations of the South. The northern reaction to these perceived threats in turn provoked a southern reaction, which, Mason shows, was characterized by a waning of the lesser-of-two-evils position and even some early expressions of the positive-good argument and of strict constructionist, state-rights theory. The Missouri crisis obviously involved "an unusually sustained and intense" level of political debate over slavery, but for Mason it only "exposed and exacerbated but did not create" sectional tensions (179). "The legacy of a decade's worth of political combat involving slavery," he concludes, "was on display" (179). Key to northerners' concerns in the Missouri controversy, Mason explains...

Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War Joseph G. Dawson III Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War. By Joel H. Silbey . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 [ 2005]. ISBN 0-19-531592-8. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographic essay. Index. Pp. xx, 230. $15.95. Oxford University Press's "Pivotal Moments in American History" Series reexamines crucial issues that changed the direction of political discourse or social circumstances in the United States. In this book in the series, Joel H. Silbey contends that the process leading to the annexation of Texas and the state joining the Union set in motion a train of events causing the Civil War. Silbey explains in some detail that annexing Texas was a cause of the U.S.-Mexican War and, sooner or later, affected the views of many American politicians, newspaper editors, and voters. Rather than criticizing slavery, some northern politicians had tolerated the institution to maintain national unity as well as the party unity of both Democrats and Whigs. The struggle over annexing Texas as a slave state made some willing to oppose slavery's move into the western territories (as framed in the Wilmot Proviso) or even to consider supporting abolition. Silbey shows that, for some Americans, it took years for the multiple meanings of annexing Texas to crystallize. Some northern politicians left their old party and joined new parties opposed to slavery expansion, such as the Free Soilers in 1848 or the Republicans in 1856. Northern voters, often caught up in local issues (immigration policies, status of immigrants and Catholics, or temperance, for example) interpreted the expansion of slavery into the West as a matter of race, while others decided that slavery was a moral issue. Up to the annexation of Texas, Silbey describes how, for many Americans, slavery appeared to be firmly embedded in American political life. After 1845, more northerners were willing to look ahead to a time when slavery would be circumscribed in a limited region, not allowed to expand, or abolished. Silbey confirms that many white southerners, meanwhile, wanted Texas's annexation to be just one step in the expansion of slavery into the West and opposed emancipation. Silbey concludes that annexing Texas increased tension among North, South, and West, forced individual Americans to face difficult personal and political decisions for or against slavery and its expansion, and especially inflamed animosities within the Democratic party. All of these controversies helped to cause the Civil War. Silbey devotes great attention to the Democratic party's factions, leaders, and internal disagreements. As Silbey carefully discusses Democratic factionalism, he sometimes seems to allow social or political matters tangentially associated with Texas annexation to edge out the main focus of his work. Throughout, he offers the viewpoint that Martin Van Buren was significant as the conscience of the Democratic party, if not its presidential nominee or most important leader. Silbey's reexamination of Texas annexation will be helpful to students and to historians who have not kept track of the literature on the U.S.-Mexican War and Civil War causation. Joseph G. Dawson III Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Copyright © 2007 Society for Military History

Redemptive California? Re-thinking the post-Civil War

‘Redemptive California?’ asks about the role that California and the wider West played in post-Civil War America. Given that questions over the territorial expansion of slavery into the West hastened the coming of the Civil War, how did the wounded nation—and legions of wounded soldiers—look to the West after the war for convalescence, healing, even redemption? This essay suggests that historians have unaccountably ignored the impact of the Civil War on the West, c.1865 – 1910, and it poses one organizing theme—western convalescence—by which to begin to correct this scholarly blind spot.

Coalitions without Compromise: Reconsidering the Political Abolitionists

In 1848, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania explained why he opposed the expansion of slavery into the United States' western territories. Slavery, he argued, brought dishonor and degradation upon the poor man by placing him close contact with the servile labor of the black.1 Historians have long found statements such as Wilmot's to be revealing. His testimony demonstrates that the emergence of a political antislavery movement in the mid-nineteenth-century United States had its origins in concerns distinct from moral objections to slavery or sympathy toward African Americans. Students of American abolition generally portray antislavery's foray into politics as a story of decline. Their studies chart the movement's descent from the Liberty Party's principles of abolition and racial equality to the Free Soil and Republican Parties' calls for the protection of free labor through the non-extension of slavery.2 Specialists in antebellum politics, who rarely acknowledge a connection between abolition and political antislavery, locate the movement's origins in northern resentment of southern political power or in the racism of the North's electorate.3 Studies published in the 1990s, by shifting historians' attention to the issue of privilege within antebellum society, have intensified the sense that the demand for Free Soil was, at bottom, an inherently racist form of antislavery. In their hardest variants, these accounts examine the way in which the developing status of whiteness was invested with an array of privileges that were denied to people of color and which provided a form of psychological compensation to white workers in exchange for their subordination within the capitalist market.4 Statements like Wilmot's demonstrated that Free Soil represented a part of this larger cultural project. Bruce Laurie's Beyond Garrison offers an impressive challenge to these unflattering portrayals of political antislavery. In an argument akin to ones recently advanced in studies of the Democratic Party by Daniel Feller, Sean Wilentz,

No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (review)

Reviewed by: No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics Michael A. Morrison No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics. By Frederick J. Blue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii, 301 pp. Cloth $54.95, isbn 0-8071-2976-3.) Fredrick Blue's collective biography of ten antislavery activists adds a fresh and important dimension to our understanding of the antislavery movement in the 1840s and 1850s. Focusing on less-prominent figures, Blue greatly enhances our understanding of the antislavery movement generally and the politics of sectionalism in particular. Examining the private and public lives of individuals as diverse as Alvan Stewart and Jessie Benton Frémont and Charles Langston and David Wilmot, Blue analyzes their motivation to become politically active in politics, their antislavery ideology, and their varying commitments to equal rights for African Americans. He places them on a spectrum that ranges from an early commitment to the Liberty Party (Stewart and John Greenleaf Whittier, for example) to those who came to the antislavery movement later with the advent of the Republican Party (Frémont and Benjamin Wade). Each, however, was intensely committed to stopping the expansion of slavery and saw politics as the means to that end. Common threads bind together the lives of these activists. Central to their commitment to antislavery was a religious background that issued in the conviction that slavery was immoral. This sets them apart from other more conservative—or less enlightened—opponents of slavery who were largely concerned about the institution only as it affected white society and republican politics. These activists found their commitment to antislavery [End Page 154] politics a difficult one, occasioned as it was by hostility and threats from those less sympathetic to the plight of the enslaved. Save for David Wilmot, they also distanced themselves but were not entirely free from nineteenth-century racial stereotypes. Although they varied in their commitment to the enfranchisement of blacks, all (again, save for Wilmot) were determined to grant African Americans basic human and political rights. What most united these ten and set them apart from abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison was their conviction that political activism best served the antislavery movement. And here the Mexican-American War seemed to be a turning point, and an ironic one at that. On the one hand, it raised and made salient the question of slavery extension and thus heightened sectional tensions that focused on the institution. On the other, Wilmot's proviso had the effect (though not the intent) of blunting more radical antislavery activity by shifting its focus to restriction (not abolition) and making politics (not moral suasion) the broad-based grounds on which that contest would be fought. What Blue suggests is that "radical" antislavery activism is less a category than a continuum: if Whittier, Jane Swisshelm, and Owen Lovejoy were less extreme in their attacks on slavery than Garrison or Wendell Phillips, they were certainly no less committed to its elimination and to the advancement of equal rights. Blue's analysis of this antislavery cohort also illuminates and gives substance to the positions of those radicals and conservatives who opposed them. Thus, he expands and enriches the political landscape of the Middle Period. Separately and together, these biographies begin to map a path by which the moral element of abolitionism intersects with the antislavery politics of Free Soil Democrats and Republicans. Finally, Blue reminds us that abolitionism and the politics of antislavery were deeply personal, intensely felt, and mutually reinforcing. This is the rare collective biography in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. [End Page 155] Michael A. Morrison Purdue University Copyright © 2007 The Kent State University Press

"To Forget and Forgive": Reconstructing the Nation in the Post-Civil War Classroom

In John Bonner's A Child's History of the United States, published in 1866, schoolchildren read about the brave actions freedmen took on behalf of the Union cause. They read, for instance, about a "black man, Tillman, a steward on board a [Union] vessel seized by a rebel privateer, and left on board of her with the prize crew, [who] rose one dark night, . . . and killed the prize captain and mate with an axe, and brought the vessel safely to the port of New York." Students were also introduced to a freedwoman washing the floors at a Union hospital who saved the life of a wounded and sick Union soldier whom doctors insisted was going to die. After days and weeks of caring for him "carefully and tenderly," feeding him with a spoon "as though he had been a baby," and sleeping on the floor while the sick soldier occupied her bed, the woman "had the pleasure of seeing her soldier completely restored to health." These and other events, Bonner explained, "dispel[led] the prejudice" against freedmen and opened the door for freedmen to serve as soldiers. Stories of brave freedmen and women convinced wartime Americans, and presumably Bonner's young readers, that "there was something manly in the negroes after all."1 [End Page 282] Written in the heady days after Appomattox, Bonner's classroom history was similar to many texts written in the North before and immediately after the American Civil War. In the midst of heated political battles about the Mexican War and slavery's expansion, slavery played a central role in classroom histories of the nation. Texts sought to establish an emancipationist legacy for the nation, and Bonner's history celebrated the realization of this legacy in the wartime enlistment of black soldiers. Samuel Goodrich had similar intentions in his Pictorial History of the United States. A picture portraying the arrival of the first slaves to Virginia in 1619 is included in the 1846 edition (fig. 1). The accompanying text describes the slave trade and the emancipationist energy that followed the Revolutionary war and suggests that resistance to slavery grew in proportion to the extension of the trade. Recognizing slavery's central role in the narrative of American history, Goodrich wanted young schoolchildren to remember their ancestors who worked to end slavery and to block colonization schemes to send freedmen back to Africa.2 But whereas the images and stories of individual slaves—and Northern abolitionists—grace the pages of antebellum Northern texts and texts written in the first decade after the war, slaves and slavery are conspicuously absent from later classroom histories. Indeed, the image of the first slaves arriving in the colonies was unceremoniously removed from the 1877 edition of Goodrich's Pictorial. Later editions of the text eliminated slavery altogether, an editorial decision that gave Goodrich the space to add glowing predictions for the nation's future rather than burdening his history text with the weight of the nation's slave past. In the 1877 edition of Pictorial, all images of slaves and slavery were gone, and Goodrich applauded national reconciliation efforts, because "the time had come to bury the past [for] both North and South were ready to forget and forgive."3 In the thirty-one years between editions of Goodrich's popular school history, Americans on the battlefield and on the home front argued about the end of slavery and the meaning of American nationalism. Wartime government policies such as emancipation and freedmen's civil rights, the wartime draft, and the income tax extended the scope and the powers of the federal government, permanently redefining the relationship between the individual citizen and the nation. The postwar nation that emerged held great possibilities for freedmen. Congress considered legislation requiring [End Page 283] Click for larger view Figure 1 [End Page 284] federal monitoring of elections and a generous aid to education bill...

Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South

Slave Country tells the tragic story of the expansion of slavery in the new United States. In the wake of the American Revolution, slavery gradually disappeared from the northern states and the importation of captive Africans was prohibited. Yet, at the same time, the country's slave population grew, new plantation crops appeared, and several new slave states joined the Union. Adam Rothman explores how slavery flourished in a new nation dedicated to the principle of equality among free men, and reveals the enormous consequences of U.S. expansion into the region that became the Deep South. Rothman maps the combination of transatlantic capitalism and American nationalism that provoked a massive forced migration of slaves into Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. He tells the fascinating story of collaboration and conflict among the diverse European, African, and indigenous peoples who inhabited the Deep South during the Jeffersonian era, and who turned the region into the most dynamic slave system of the Atlantic world. Paying close attention to dramatic episodes of resistance, rebellion, and war, Rothman exposes the terrible violence that haunted the Jeffersonian vision of republican expansion across the American continent. Slave Country combines political, economic, military, and social history in an elegant narrative that illuminates the perilous relation between freedom and slavery in the early United States. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in an honest look at America's troubled past.

Making the Deep South "Southern"

Adam Rothman has written an important and suggestive book on the expansion of slavery into the Old Southwest. More than any other single factor, the rapid and wholesale expansion of slavery into the geographic area that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana created the entity modern historians call the Cotton South (as well as the much-smaller Sugar Country along the lower Mississippi). The development of large-scale, slave-based staple agriculture in these regions did much to sectionalize slavery, and hence the politics of slavery, and created the sectional dynamics that eventually produced the American Civil War. Prior to the making of what Rothman terms the Slave Country, slavery had flourished chiefly in tidewater and alluvial enclaves like the Chesapeake region of Virginia and Maryland and the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, where the geographic limitations and specific crops (tobacco and rice respectively) effectively slowed the expansion of local slaveholding and slave cultures into other parts of the South. With the rise of short staple cotton as a major cash crop between 1790 and 1820, however, staple agriculture based on slave labor flowed over, around, and through its figurative tidewater levees and flooded across the lower South, creating new cadres of slaveholders who brought more and more slaves into the region through forced migration and purchase. To a lesser degree, the disruption of the Caribbean sugar economy by slave unrest and the migration of sugargrowing expertise to the Orleans territory in southern Louisiana created a sugar bowl where the white wealth and the concentration of slaves rivaled that of South Carolina's rice coast.

Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (review)

Reviewed by: Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America Peter A. Coclanis (bio) Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. By Angela Lakwete. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+232. $45. The appeal of counterfactual history ebbs and flows among academic historians, but undergraduate students almost invariably are intrigued by the approach. Professors have long been cognizant of this, and, as a result, have regularly used counterfactuals in the classroom. For example, there cannot be more than a handful of specialists in one of my own areas of interest—southern history—who, hoping to enlighten, enliven, or maybe just awaken a class, have not at one time or another floated the counterfactual about Eli Whitney, the cotton gin, and the course of southern history. In simplest form, this counterfactual invites students to ponder what would have happened to the institution of slavery, which was purportedly on the ropes in the South during the era of the American Revolution, had not that Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney, snagged a tutoring job near Augusta, Georgia, in the fall of 1792. Once in Georgia, Whitney begged off from the tutoring job and instead became an "inventor," introducing, allegedly almost singlehandedly, "a machine for ginning cotton," which invention, allegedly almost singlehandedly, transformed southern history. How? By solving the purported supply bottleneck limiting the expansion of the short-staple cotton industry and, thereby, the expansion of slavery into the interior of the South. Without this invention, the story goes, ginning short-staple cotton (separating the cotton fiber from the seed) would have been too slow and costly to allow for the massive expansion of cultivation that was to become virtually synonymous with the history of the American South in the nineteenth century. Slavery was teetering, the cotton economy was bottled up, and then that Whitney character came down South, and—depending on one's point of view—either saved the region's economy or sped the South down the road to perdition. What if Whitney had remained up in New England? One intriguing possibility is [End Page 834] that he might have been able to begin his famous second act, his "pioneering" role in the establishment of mass-production technology in America, a bit sooner. In Inventing the Cotton Gin, Angela Lakwete, who teaches history at Auburn University in Alabama, takes all of the air out of this counterfactual balloon. Indeed, after reading her book one must, however regretfully, retire the Whitney counterfactual from the pedagogical arsenal. Although Lakwete's impressively researched study is replete with revisionist insights, perhaps the most important of these holds that the "invention" of the cotton gin should be viewed as a complex, long-term, multiplayer process rather than as a discrete event pulled off by one individual, however talented and ambitious. More specifically, Lakwete demonstrates conclusively in the eight tightly focused chapters of Inventing the Cotton Gin that: (a) mechanical cotton ginning did not begin with Whitney's wire-tooth gin in 1794 but hundreds of years earlier in India and China; (b) mechanical (roller) gins were transferred from Asia to America in the seventeenth century; (c) various types of gins, particularly foot-powered roller gins, were developed and employed in the South prior to 1794; and (e) gins of various types, including supposedly retrograde roller gins, continued in use in the region well after 1794, before ultimately losing out to the saw gins that themselves superseded Whitney's wire-tooth technology because they proved more efficient "pullers" of cotton fiber. When viewed in this way, the history of the cotton gin takes on an entirely different cast. Whitney—or even Whitney along with his less-well-known partner Phineas Miller—becomes relatively less important, as does the putative importance of his/their invention both in saving slavery and in permitting the creation of the Cotton South. Other inventors, or, perhaps more to the point, other mechanics—pre- and post-Whitney, northern and southern, black and white—gain prominence. Southerners become more active agents in the making of their own history, and the South qua region is transformed from a technological backwater into a mainstream, dynamic, modernizing American place. And, arguably best...

"They Are Very Much Interested in Obtaining an Unlimited Slavery": Rethinking the Expansion of Slavery in the Louisiana Purchase Territories, 1803-1805

By late 1804, discontent with United States government was growing among white inhabitants of newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territories. That fall, the representatives elected by of their respective districts in Upper Louisiana met in St. Louis protest their new territorial government: or, as they deemed it, privation of some of dearest rights enjoyed by freemen! The freemen especially feared that United States might deprive them of their right buy and hold slaves. They had good reason worry. The host of restrictions Congress placed on Louisiana slavery seemed calculated abolish slavery at a future day altogether.1In 1804 a Republican-controlled Congress defied testy demands of white Louisianans, recommendations of Thomas Jefferson, and interests of southern slaveholders by prohibiting both international and domestic slave trades Louisiana Purchase territories. White Louisianans from New Orleans St. Louis reacted these restrictions, which seemed tantamount a plan of gradual abolition, by insisting that they would consent American rule only if provided guarantees for slavery. Fearful that white Louisianans might act on their threats of rebellion and disunion, Congress quietly failed renew bulk of restrictions on slavery following year.The historical literature on slavery and expansion in early republic makes it difficult understand causes and significance of restrictions passed by Congress in 1804 and then rescinded in 1805. Historians generally agree that southern politicians controlled debates over expansion of slavery. Upper South planters defended expansion because it opened new markets for their surplus slaves, promising relief from their fearfully large slave populations and much needed income supplement their declining fortunes. Deep South planters, ready threaten disunion at first sign of dreaded entering wedge, resisted efforts restrict slavery's growth in Northwest territories. Southern politicians like Jefferson could afford temporize on expansion because, unlike discredited New England Federalists, northern Republicans proved unwilling challenge slaveholders on expansion because of fears of upsetting their fragile, bisectional party.2 When forced legislate for Louisianas in 1804, federal government supposedly did about slavery, permitting it to continue in Louisiana under American rule virtually as it had under Spanish and French rule.3The protests of white Louisianans demonstrate that Congress did something rather than nothing about slavery in Louisianas. Moreover, Louisiana slavery laws of 1804 involved much more than southern intransigence overwhelming northern Republican indifference in halls of Congress. While framing legislation for Louisiana Purchase territories it became clear that a majority in Congress might favor halting expansion of slavery west of Mississippi River. Equally important, antislavery wishes of some congressmen had compete with larger concerns for incorporating Louisianas peacefully and permanently into American Union. For Congress, securing Louisianas, and with it New Orleans and Mississippi River, remained key securing entire trans-Appalachian West. Fears centering on uncertain future of Louisianas in Union and ability of United States compete in power politics of territorial hegemony in Mississippi Valley limited how far certain congressmen were willing restrict slavery there.4Any plan for prohibiting slavery in Louisiana Purchase had involve two elements. First, Congress had deny white Louisianans access additional slaves. The Louisiana Ordinance of 1804 prohibited further introduction of any slaves territories, except by a citizen of United States, removing into said Territory for actual settlement, and being, at time of such removal, bona fide owner of such slave or slaves. …

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 350. Chronology, illustrations. Cloth, $30.00.)Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause shares both strengths and weaknesses of Roger G. Kennedy's other forays into history of early republic-Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study In Character (2000), Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (1994); and Orders from France: The Americans and French in a Revolutionary World (1990). A swirl of environmental, intellectual, political, diplomatic, business, and social history, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause is written in a style that is unmistakably Kennedy's own. Intended for both a popular and an academic audience, it will probably intrigue and infuriate each in its own way.What Kennedy does especially well in this book, as in all of his books, is to revisit a familiar story with an eye to hitherto unseen connections and forgotten characters. Accordingly, this book is as much about Creek nationalism, American expansionism, and British mercantilism as its ostensible topic: spread of plantation slavery and cotton agriculture across American South. Kennedy develops often-unexpected linkages between these-and other-developments, creating a rich web of stories. And he finds individuals who personify these linkages. may receive top-billing in this book, but Kennedy devotes nearly as much attention to self-proclaimed Creek chief Alexander McGillivray, powerful Indian trader William Panton, and minor American diplomat Fulwar Skipwith.But this book also suffers from same shortcomings as its predecessors. The organization is idiosyncratic, with author generally providing little advance warning of its many twists and turns. The citations are to what Kennedy describes, with joyous disdain for standard scholarly practice, as the most accessible source-generally partial quotations reproduced in monographs and articles rather than complete documents in microfilmed or published collections (307). As a result, many of his quotes lack context that would help to explain them. The book also is rife with basic factual errors. Kennedy discusses end of slavery in Delaware as something that occurred at turn of nineteenth century (54), refers to Federalist domination of Congress in 1783 (65), and suggests that was angling for presidency in 1785 (75). And, even though all of his quotes on subject come from early 1804, Kennedy dates Hillhouse debates over slavery in Louisiana to 1805-06 (210-13). Most distressingly, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause displays Kennedy's tendency to dismiss any evidence that contradicts his own view. The moralizing is heavy-handed, and any mitigating circumstances that rescue its targets from opprobrium are either heavily discounted or entirely ignored.Kennedy directs his anger at Jefferson, blaming him for spread of slavery and, ultimately, for Civil War. According to Kennedy, the most important choices made by any single statesman for future of South arose from preferences, prejudices, and policies of Thomas Jefferson (236). Different outcomes in various contests over expansion of slavery in opening decades of nineteenth century, he argues, might have . …

'...and six hundred thousand men were dead.'

The dispute that resulted in the secession of eleven Southern states from the Union and the ensuing Civil War proximately concerned the geographical expansion of slavery, but ultimately bore on the existence of the institution of slavery itself. This paper asks why in 1861 after seventy years of artful compromises over slavery Northern and Southern interests were not able to avoid secession and war. The paper seeks an answer that goes beyond a description of the breakdown of compromises based on existing constitutional arrangements. Instead the paper focuses on the failure of attempts to negotiate a new compromise. Combining theoretical and historical analysis the paper suggests that the increasing importance of the dispute over slavery for both Northern and Southern interests in the years leading up to 1861 was the critical development that led to war. The analysis also formalizes the role of overoptimism about the prospects for a quick and cheap victory as a contributing cause of the war.

Hindus Beyond the Hindu Kush: Indians in the Central Asian Slave Trade

AbstractHistorical analyses of slavery in India generally emphasize the escalation of this social institution during the era of Muslim domination in north India. The present study is not an exception to this rule. However, while historical records make it clear that the Delhi Sultans and Mughal emperors retained slavery in order to suit their political and economic needs, it should be emphasized that Muslim rulers did not introduce slavery to the subcontinent. Sources such as the Arthaśāstra, the Manu-smrti and the Mahābhārata demonstrate that institutionalized slavery was well established in India by the beginning of the common era. Earlier sources suggest that it was likely to have been equally widespread by the lifetime of the Buddha (sixth century BC), and perhaps even as far back as the Vedic period. Furthermore, just as slavery was common in India long before the eighth-century Islamic conquests in Sind, recent work demonstrates that the institution continued, in various manifestations, well after the decentralization of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Still, it is argued here that the expansion of slavery in Muslim India is an important component of the medieval and early modern history of the region and, at least in terms of its role in the commercial and cultural relations of India and Central Asia, it is a subject that would benefit from further historical analysis.

Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. By Steven A. Epstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 215. $32.50.

Stephen Epstein is one of a growing group of scholars who are proposing a new interpretation of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The subject itself is not new. In the case of Italy, over the past century a few scholars have studied Italian slavery in local or regional studies, and it was the subject of a major work by Charles Verlinden (L'Esclavage dans l'Europe mA©diA©vale, vol. 2: Italie – olonies italiennes du Levant – Levant latin – Empire byzantine. Ghent: Rijsuniversiteit te Gent, 1977) and featured prominently in general surveys by Jacques Heers (Esclaves et domestiques au moyen A¢ge dans le monde mediterranean. Paris: Fayard, 1981) and the present reviewer (Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Nevertheless, the historical profession has tended to ignore post-Roman slavery in the Mediterranean world, or to consider it either an attenuated relic from classical times or as a shadowy prelude to the great expansion of slavery in the colonial Americas. The numbers and percentages of slaves in Italy never approached those of true slave societies, in which more than 30 percent of the population was unfree. Common conclusions heretofore have been that slavery was not too important in the Italian economy, because most slaves were domestics; that slaves were not treated too harshly, because most lived in the households of their owners; and that slavery died out without leaving much of a trace in modern Italian society.

Paradoxes of modernity: imperial Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821

This paper examines the spatial dynamics of urbanism in Rio de Janeiro during the early nineteenth century. Conventional narratives of modernisation fail to capture the complexities of this moment, between 1808 and 1821, when the city replaced Lisbon as the capital of the Portuguese empire. The position of colony and metropolis were inverted, Portuguese absolutism was bolstered by British liberalism, and a market-economy arose alongside the expansion of slavery. As the newly-created imperial capital, Rio felt the effects of these various transformations: the physical boundaries of the city rapidly expanded, its economy diversified and the cultural life of the city was re-shaped. Our aim in this paper is to understand this particular moment of urban transformation as a product of the intersection of global networks of trade, slavery and industrial capitalism. Rather than depicting the historical geography of the city as a passive space for European conquest and expansion, we consider the extent to which its urban dynamics were shaped by a distinct local geography of globalisation. In particular, we examine the interrelated spatialities that are part and parcel of the modernising process.

“The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists”: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois

“The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists”: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois

Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sara Pamela Williams

BOOK REVIEWS Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives: The Florida Reminiscences of George Gillett Keen and Sara Pamela Williams. Edited by James M. Denham and Canter Brown Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 215. Illustrations, maps. $39.95.) Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida. Edited by Jane G. Landers. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Pp. 219. Illustrations, maps. $49.95.) Other works by the editors of these collections have generated a growing interest in colonial and frontier Florida. Jane G. Landers's Black Society in Spanish Florida (1999) and James M. Denham's A Rogue's Paradise: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, 1821-1861 (1997) connect Florida history to two larger worlds of historical interpretation: the Spanish plantation era and the frontier era of the Old Southwest. But these two larger worlds have important connections to the early republic as well, for struggles over control of Florida were the source of much contention between the United States and Spain and contributed to the rise of Andrew Jackson. In addition, the expanding frontier of the plantation South revived slavery, and, in future years, would provoke conflict with Mexico and force the issue of slavery expansion. Understanding the world of one of these frontier regions, Florida, contributes to our knowledge of these larger processes. These books contribute to this growing academic concern in significant, but very different ways. Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives consists of the reminiscences of two Florida pioneers from the frontier era, both collected in the late nineteenth century. George Gillett Keen first settled in northern Florida as a child, when his parents relocated from Georgia in the 1820s. Much of his life experience was as a Floridian, and in 1899 the Florida Index, published in Lake City, began to publish his reminiscences in serial form. The editors have compiled these essays as part one of this volume. While Lake City, a town in northeastern Florida near the Georgia border, might seem an obscure locale, Keen's experiences read with a remarkable familiarity for those already familiar with the Old Southwest. His tales of unsolved murders, duels, and fistfights, along with the obligatory yarns of political and legal trickery, are all exemplary of an old Southwest tradition of storytelling filled with wit, irony, and satire. With one exception, Keen reminisced about events between the 1830s and the 1850s. These reminiscences can be read as the ramblings of an old settler, but they are much more. His stories, most committed to print only at the beginning of the twentieth century, were decades old, preserved through an oral culture that perpetuated itself late in the evening around campfires and hearths. Keen's reminiscences are an artifact of a culture of storytelling that was replaced by print and never took the same form. In addition to the storytelling of the Old Southwest, Keen related his experiences in the Second Seminole War from 1835 to 1842. As a youth of only eight years when the war broke out, Keen's experiences were quite personal, for friends and relatives were involved on both sides of the conflict. Keen described attacks and counterattacks, mostly from his own memory. Fortunately, in this edition, the editors have provided annotations verifying or correcting incidents and dates. Keen's perceptions of the war are influenced by an unfortunately common antipathy to the Seminoles and Creeks; however, having witnessed a violent conflict as a youth and lost friends and relatives, the prejudice is unsurprising. Equally unsurprising and unfortunate is his use of derogatory epithets for African Americans; however, the editors have done a fine job of contextualizing Keen's language without attempting to justify it. The second, and briefer, part of Cracker Times and Pioneer Lives consists of the diary of Sara Pamela Williams, born near Picolata (not far from St. …

Manifest Destiny, Manifest Domesticity, and the Leaven of Whiteness in Uncle Tom's Cabin

ISABELLA FÜRTH Manifest Destiny, Manifest Domesticity, and the Leaven of Whiteness in Onde Tom's Cabin Another glow than sunset's fire Has filled the west with light, Where field and garner, barn and byre, Are blazing through the night. John Greenleaf Whittier, "At Port Royal" The west that glows so in John GreenleafWhittier's "At Port Royal" signifies more than the scorched-earth retreat of Southerners in the face of the Union army's occupation of the town. Coming as it does in the midst of a poem that celebrates the liberation of the local slave population and the commencement of "that work of civilization which was accepted as the grave responsibility of those who had labored for freedom," the glow in the west marks not only the rout of a confederacy "wild with fear and hate," but also the light of the nation's progress towards the day "ob jubilee."1 As such, it functions as a sign among signs in keeping with the abolitionist movement's traditional reliance on typological exegesis. The millennium of freedom has been foretold by God sing the "dusky gondoliers" of the poem, and all of nature concurs in pronouncing its inevitable arrival: "De norf-wind tell it to de pines, / De wild-duck to the sea. . . . / De rice-bird mean it when he sing, / De eagle when he scream" (lines 61-68). That a glow in the west should stand among these signs as harbinger of emancipation is Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Isabella Fürth hardly surprising, but it does raise questions as to the extent and nature of the "progress" heralded by the poem, for Whittier's light-filled west also invokes the golden West, rich in natural resources and "luminous with the accumulated lights of European and American civilization" that is one of manifest destiny's signal promises (Benton 46). As political ideologies, the predominantly Republican espousal of abolitionism and the predominantly Democratic invocation of manifest destiny display some striking convergences. Each doctrine was indebted to a sense of the United States as a chosen land and Americans as chosen people, and adherents of each tended to present their mission as an inexorable progress mandated by God, a progress that would culminate in the conversion of the entire country into a redeemed nation —one free of slavery or one that would extend republican institutions across the American continents. Just as John O'Sullivan declares that the United States is driven by "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence" and prophesies the day when "two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions —[are] destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars, in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945!" (28, 30; emphasis added), for Harriet Beecher Stowe emancipation serves as a sign of the millennium. It is, she says, "one of the predicted voices of the latter day, saying under the whole heavens, 'It is done: the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and ofhis Christ'" ("Reply" 285). Likewise, both the discourse of abolition and that of manifest destiny emphasize the link between physical migration across the landscape and spiritual migration towards a perfected nation. In Stowe's account , the nation's movement towards perfection would have been an unstoppable progress if not for Southern extremism. In her defense of Union policy, she recounts the Republican rationale for prohibiting slavery's expansion rather than eliminating it altogether as based on a teleological evolutionary logic: "They reasoned thus: Slavery ruins land, and requires fresh territory for profitable working. Slavery increases a dangerous population, and requires an expansion of this population for safety. Slavery, then, being hemmed in by impassable limits, emancipation in each State becomes a necessity" (274-75). hn this optimistic view, both territorial expansion and emancipation are presented more as divinely ordained forces of nature than as matters requiring direction through policy. The most telling congruence of all, however, is that by ?a??/est Destiny, Manifest Domesticity33 the 1850s proponents of both ideologies, both manifest destiny's boosters and abolitionist...

Frank Blair: Lincoln's Conservative (review)

BOOK REVIEWS29I clearly views guerrilla violence as the most significant factor in determining East Tennessee's fate, both during the war and afterwards. The partisan war split virtually every institution in East Tennessee, including the churches; only the courts remained to some degree autonomous. As Fisher notes, the violence perpetrated in East Tennessee was appalling. Yet it did not occur outside an ideological context; on the contrary, both sides realized clearly that guerrilla warfare would largely determine control of the region. After Federal forces occupied East Tennessee, Unionists were given leeway to settle old scores. This extended even into the postbellum era, which resulted in an exodus of prominent secessionists. Yet Reconstruction splintered the loyalists in East Tennessee, as some firmly embraced Republican policies while others objected to emancipation and the disfranchisement offormer foes. Fisher concludes that East Tennessee remained a region in search of an identity for years after the war, albeit one tied to Republicanism at the local level. These are both important works. If Noe and Wilson have tantalized scholars with the vast potential found in studying Civil WarAppalachia, Noel Fisher has provided a sterling benchmark for those writers to emulate. Christopher Losson St. Joseph, Missouri Frank Blair: Lincoln 's Conservative. By William E. Parrish. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Pp. xv, 318. $29.95.) William E. Parrish, the author of several books on Missouri history, continues his scholarly endeavors with an outstanding biography of Frank Blair. Parrish traces the political career of Blair from the 1840s through the 1870s. Blair became a noteworthy figure because of his oratorical abilities, which could either mesmerize or infuriate audiences. Parrish asserts that Blair's all-consuming passion for politics dominated his entire life. Although Blair tried practicing law and working as a Union Pacific railroad commissioner, his devotion to political affairs cost him time with his family. Financial troubles deepened due to bad business investments and providing for a household of eight children. He also experienced health problems because of his heavy drinking and smoking. According to Parrish, Blair's obsession with politics stems from his family background. His father, Preston, had been the editor ofthe Washington Globe, a Jacksonian newspaper. Family members were ardent supporters of the Democratic party during the 1 830s and 1840s. However, with the question of slavery expansion into the western territories, their zeal for the party began to wane. The Blairs shifted loyalties to the growing Free Soil movement because they feared a growing slavocracy in the West—a black labor force threatened white economic interests. The family believed blacks were inferior, and racist sentiments were reflected in their political ideas. Frank supported colonization efforts, 292CIVIL WAR HISTORY and his speeches and writings on the subject earned him recognition within the Republican party. Eventually, the free labor platform was adopted by the Republicans , and the Blairs supportedAbraham Lincoln's 1 860 bid for the presidency. The Civil War brought new political and military challenges for Blair. His first concern was that Missouri, as a border slave state, should remain with the Union. However, many of Blair's subsequent political actions left him with enemies. He alienated German voters and Radical Republicans over the immediate emancipation policy that John C. Fremont enacted while Missouri was under martial law. He wanted a gradual emancipation policy along with colonization , but he decided to support Lincoln's compensation plan. Blair also rejected the idea ofallowing blacks tojoin the military, but Parrish fails to explain why he later changed his mind on this policy. By 1 862 Blair was Lincoln's chief conservative spokesman in Congress and emerged as the Radicals main opponent . Moreover, Parrish believes that Blair was one of the better political generals . He proved himself to be a very capable and fearless leader atVicksburg. He also established a good rapport with General William T. Sherman during the Atlanta Campaign and, as commander of the 17th Corps during the March to the Sea, helped bring total warfare to the deep south. Blair resumed political activity in the post-war period to challenge Radical Reconstruction. Angered by Radical congressional control, he began aligning himself with the Democrats once again. He later helped form a Democratic alliance...