Southern Slave Research Articles

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South Matthew Mason (bio) Loren Schweninger , ed. The Southern Debate over Slavery, vol. 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xviii + 424 pp. Abbreviations, glossary, bibliography, and index. $60.00 Lacy K. Ford . Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 688 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $34.95. While these two volumes differ in nature, they both reinforce the growing emphasis on complexity in the historiography of the Old South. Along with much other scholarship in recent decades, they challenge the view, whether in antebellum proslavery treatises or twentieth-century history, of the Old South as a stable, monolithically proslavery, agrarian order. Both at the level of ideas and politics in Ford's extended monograph, or in the ground-level conflicts highlighted by Schweninger's edition of court documents, readers will catch a view of a slave South that was far from simple or unchanging. Both books also center around Southerners speaking to other Southerners, which imposes some limits—especially on Ford's analysis—but has the virtue of stripping away the polemical glosses in which defenders of the slave South wrapped their message to the outside world. The 180 petitions in Schweninger's edition (out of more than 14,500 gathered for the larger project, on microfilm) were the product of a wide array of types of cases, and thus they touch on slavery in a variety of ways. But the petitioners are all bent not on bolstering an external defense of slavery, but rather on winning their respective cases. This lends weight to Schweninger's argument that these documents not only "provide direct, firsthand accounts about specific events," but do so "with remarkable candor" not exceeded by any other kind of source (pp. 3-4). Because the slaveholding petitioners spoke so directly and unequivocally in cases concerning the property value of their slaves, "the petitions reveal, in stark and graphic ways, what it meant for the slave-owning class to possess people as property" (p. 12). These sources thus [End Page 61] confirm the growing historiographical emphasis on the aspects of American slavery that treated African Americans primarily as fungible assets. And those masters whose petitions spoke frankly of freedom as the ultimate reward for faithful slaves, and otherwise expressed qualms as to the justice of slavery (see, for example, pp. 98 and 134), bolster the interpretations of scholars—including Ford—who dwell on Southern whites' tortured ambivalence about Southern bondage rather than on the unyielding logic of "positive-good" theoreticians. But the parts of Schweninger's introduction emphasizing the variegated within Southern slave society are themselves in tension with other interpretations he advances and, to my mind, with some of the documents themselves. The petitions for divorce from white slaveholding women, he argues, "reveal the harsh realities of plantation life, providing details" of tyrannical husbands and masters, details often "excluded from diaries, letters, recollections, and many other sources." The world they "reveal" to the courts is one of "adultery, interracial sex, alcoholism, violence, brutality, abandonment, incest, and insanity" far in excess of non-slaveholding societies (p. 6; see also 27-28). On the strength of these and other types of petitions, Schweninger also dismisses the work of "some historians" who have portrayed the master-slave relationship as one involving negotiation and compromise. "Petitions," he states directly, "provide very little evidence that such was the case" and much evidence of "the savage nature of human bondage" (p. 9). And if the petitions depict masters as brutal despots, they depict slaves as engaged in "a constant struggle" for their freedom (p. 10). The documents following the editor's introduction give the reader no reason to question this characterization of the frightful world they reveal. The question is how representative the documents are. The fact that these are legal documents would seem to mean that they would represent, by their very nature, the extremes of both masters and slaves. The less brutal slave drivers among the whites, and the less committed freedom fighters among the blacks, would be exponentially less likely to...

INTRODUCTION—TO BE HEARD IN BLACK AND WHITE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK PRINT CULTURE

The social and economic circumstances for enslaved and oppressed Africans and Americans in colonial North America and the early United States republic served as the historical context for the formation of the distinct American culture. Whereas the peoples of European descent who settled in North America and established the United States valued individualism, supremacy, and civil liberties, the enslaved Americans developed core values that emphasized freedom, resistance against unjust oppression, and black self-determination. (1) And since depriving enslaved workers of access literacy and schooling became a cornerstone of the southern slave regime, reading, writing, and education in general were highly valued among free and enslaved Americans. The historical record offers incontrovertible evidence of the strong desire for literacy among Americans from the colonial and antebellum periods when efforts were made convert the enslaved workers Christianity, through the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which witnessed entire race trying go school. (2) Testimonies from Americans who participated in the Exodus of 1879 and the first and second Great Migrations in the first half of the 20th century reveal that the desire for schooling for themselves and their children was a major factor pushing black southerners out of the rural areas and into urban areas in the North and South. It is only those unaware of the American history who would suggest that there is a lack of appreciation of the importance of education among U.S. Americans. (3) The major cultural institutions formed by Americans--the churches, the schools, social advancement and fraternal organizations, the press--were committed literacy training and educating Americans about their past and present conditions and future prospects in American society. Thus the acquisition of literacy was a communal rather than an individual endeavor. As recent studies of 19th century literacy practices make clear, African Americans' educational opportunities in reading, writing, and rhetoric were not offered them, but created by them, often by resisting restrictions that aimed at preventing such learning. (4) From the first newspaper, Freedom's Journal, black publications sought to plead our own cause and educate Americans, black and white, about the social objectives, economic institutions, and political desires of people of descent in the United States. From their beginnings black publications allowed enslaved and oppressed Americans to be heard in black and white. (v) This Special Issue of The Journal of American History offers new and original perspectives on the history of black print culture in the United States. While many black publications were aimed at informing those in the larger society about the racial discrimination and oppression facing people of descent, the more important objective was educate Americans themselves for individual and collective liberation. In the antebellum period, free Americans used their publications make clear their demands for full citizenship rights. In Pennsylvania in the colonial era and early years of the republic, free black male property owners were granted the right vote, but in 1837 the state constitution was amended and the franchise was limited white males only. As part of the campaign regain the franchise and other citizenship rights, free black newspapers and other publications attempted educate the black population about those activities that would demonstrate their worthiness for equal rights. In Vaccinating Freedom: Smallpox Prevention and the Discourses of American Citizenship in Antebellum Philadelphia, Dayle B. DeLancey demonstrates not only the inaccuracy of medical and other statistics suggesting that black Philadelphians were unwilling vaccinate themselves and family members against smallpox, but also that black print culture in the city was filled with articles and commentaries promoting smallpox vaccination. …

THE MORPHOLOGY AND GROWTH OF GARNET, (Fe0.74Mg0.13Mn0.09Ca0.04)3Al2Si3O12, IN ARCHEAN SCHIST NEAR YELLOWKNIFE, NORTHWEST TERRITORIES, CANADA

Compositionally zoned crystals of garnet, on average (Fe0.74Mg0.13Mn0.09Ca0.04)3Al2Si3O12, occur locally in the cordierite zone of an Archean thermal dome in the southern Slave Province of the Canadian Shield, Northwest Territories. In one sample, crystals range in diameter from 0.19 to 1.7 mm and are bound by six-sided trapezohedral {211} faces and by smaller four-sided dodecahedral {110} faces. The 110 faces advanced more rapidly than 211 by a factor of 1.1. Topographic features revealed by an SEM examination of forty crystals are 1) irregular steps on 211 and 110, 2) a ridge-and-valley topography on 211 with ridges parallel to [111], 3) conical hills on 211 and 110, ~0.4 μm high (determined by AFM), 4) rare ringed and simple mounds < 0.4 μm in diameter with long axes parallel to [111], and 5) circular and elongate depressions with diameters 1.0 to 0.1 μm. The ridge-and-valley topography on 211 is viewed as a high density of alternating {110} planes [ e.g., (101) and (110)]; the hills could be points of emerging screw dislocations (as found on some synthetic crystals of garnet), and the depressions are interpreted as vacated fluid inclusions. As the chlorite → garnet reaction was in progress, a complex rearrangement of atoms occurred within a crystal-boundary phase, and for the given increase in temperature (to ~550°C), the rate of garnet growth was determined by the placing of atoms on garnet surfaces, which presumably occurred by the Frank mechanism of the spreading of layers anchored at emerging screw dislocations. This mechanism is expected to produce a rate of increase of crystal volume proportional to surface area, as deduced earlier from the nature of compositional zoning in the crystals.

"The Relics of Slavery": Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South

"The Relics of Slavery"Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South Jessica Millward (bio) As an undergraduate student in Professor Peggy Pascoe's course on women's history in spring 1994 at the University of Utah, I learned the foundational lesson that women are the architects of their own history and that we, as historians, have a responsibility to push the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is natural. As one of the only women faculty members in the Department of History, Dr. Pascoe embodied her message to her students that women should excel not only in the making of history but in the telling of that history as well. Therefore, this essay honors the contributions Dr. Pascoe has made as a colleague and mentor as it explores What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America.1 In What Comes Naturally Pascoe continues her rigorous commitment to exposing the complex interaction between gendered assumptions about private space and the manifestations of power in the public domain. Pascoe effectively demonstrates that laws governing interracial relationships served as mechanisms to determine and uphold notions of "difference."2 Indeed, her discussion of the laws governing sexual relationships between white men and black women in the slave South underscores this point. White men could legally marry white women and at the same time force their sexual desires upon enslaved women. While the laws of slaveholding supported violations by slave owners against enslaved women, legislation also erased evidence of bondwomen's intimate relationships with enslaved men. As human property, enslaved women and men were legally "incapable of civil marriage."3 As these examples and Pascoe's research suggest, definitions of marriage and family were inherently inequitable during much of the history of the United States. Moreover, trumpeting the end of antimiscegenation legislation during the twentieth century without acknowledging the complicated legacy of race and sex during the nineteenth century tells a partial history. One cannot celebrate the triumph of Loving v. Virginia without understanding the complicated and at times traumatic [End Page 22] history of interracial relationships in the American South. Taking a cue from Pascoe, this paper focuses on the relationship between interracial sex and slave manumissions in the American South. Specifically, this article focuses on manumission from the perspectives of slaveholders and of the women whom they held in bondage. I argue that laws governing manumission not only upheld pejorative notions of difference but also underscored the complex nature of choice and compliance within the Southern slave system. Enslaved women in the American South lived in constant fear of sexual exploitation by both white and black men. Bondpeople recounted the violence inflicted upon enslaved women in printed biographies and oral interviews. Frederick Douglass depicted the violent whipping of his aunt Hester.4 Harriet Jacobs detailed the psychological violence she endured from her owner, who often whispered his "indelicate" desires in her ear.5 Texas slave Rose Williams was confused at learning she had been paired with fellow bondman Rufus in order to make "portly children" for her owner.6 Williams did not understand that "marriage" for enslaved people often meant breeding more bondpeople for the ruling class, regardless of the feelings of the partners for each other.7 Williams strongly objected to the sexual terrain of her marriage. When Rufus first attempted to bed her, she stabbed him with the fire poker.8 This scene of sexual aggression and defiant resistance was replayed more than once during the course of Rose's arranged marriage to Rufus. Historian Nell Painter views these types of physical and psychological sexualized violence as contributing to the "soul murder" of African Americans.9 Likewise, scholars of African American studies such as Deborah Walker King argue that sexual violence during slavery acted as one of the key imprints in the African American "culture of pain."10 Admittedly, the relationships between white men and enslaved women were complicated. Some scholars of free and manumitted populations argue that at some level slaveholding men felt affection for the bondwomen with whom they had sexual relationships.11 These affective bonds are evidenced in the occasional manumissions of enslaved women and the children fathered by slaveholders. Given the...

Marc Egnal Responds

Edwin Perkins and Jason Phillips find much to praise in Clash of Extremes. Perkins calls this explanation of the Civil War "perhaps the most comprehensive argument to date for the role of economic forces," while Phillips declares the first two-thirds of the book a "taut economic interpretation." Nonetheless, Perkins leaves the book with the same assumptions he brought to the assignment: grave doubts about the validity of any economic explanation. And Phillips concludes that economic factors were "conditions that heightened sectionalism," not fundamental causes of the war. Still the questioners can be questioned. Much of Perkins's critique reflects a narrow, deterministic view of economic causation, while Phillips puts forth an idealistic analysis that lacks explanatory power. It is little wonder that Perkins began this book doubting the role of economic concerns: his approach emphasizes short-run calculations, not the broader ideological interpretation that underpins Clash of Extremes. For example, in discussing secession, he notes "the Southern slave economy in the 1850s was thriving" and concludes that "most Southerners were optimistic about the future of their businesses." I'd agree with the first part of his statement: short-run prosperity. But the second part optimistic planters and merchants is simply not the case. The leaders of the secessionist movement held a dark vision of

Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery , and: Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War , and: The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, and: Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War, and: The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War Steven Heath Mitton (bio) Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. By Rebecca J. Scott. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 392. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $18.95.) Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War. By David L. Lightner. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 228. Cloth, $45.00.) The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. By Edward Bartlett Rugemer. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Pp. 342. Cloth, $42.50.) Atlantic history as a field of study is old and yet immature. Unlike scholarship in women's and African American history, for example, fields that have far transcended early generational forms of "her-story" and "black achievement," Atlantic scholarship has yet to show comparable progress. From the earliest histories—Lowell Ragatz's The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (1928) and Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) surely qualify—to recent varieties, the principal explanatory mechanism remains largely the same. Now as then, a hero–villain dynamic takes center stage. Self-interest casts as villain. Ideals—particularly the egalitarian ethos—play the hero. Such considerations assume increasing importance today as the field widens its scope over time and space. In a departure from a traditional focus on colonial empires between 1500 and 1825 and conspicuous neglect of the independent American republic, Atlantic histories now incorporate the United States and extend their storyline into the twentieth century. The expansion of the field's geographical breadth and topics examined are welcome developments, as they broaden perspectives of the early republic and promise true Atlantic study rather than imperial history in another guise. Still, quantitative expansion holds little hope for the field's qualitative progress until scholars venture from timeworn plotlines and explore the more significant possibility that ideals are self-interested. At first glance, David Lightner's Slavery and the Commerce Power appears anything but Atlantic history. Yet the slave trade, more than slavery, is Lightner's focus, and he combines the two subjects in ways [End Page 565] certain to engage Atlantic scholars. At the heart of his book is the issue of whether the American federal government possessed regulatory power over the domestic slave trade, and, if so, why such authority remained dormant, unlike the federal government's assertion of the commerce power to prohibit the trans-Atlantic trade after 1808. Lightner shows the Constitutional Convention did not address the domestic trade. Still in its relative infancy, that trade had yet to assume the lucrative importance it would after the trans-Atlantic prohibition limited the South's slave market to domestic sources of supply. Lightner excels too in demonstrating that American abolitionists recognized that the failure to protect the domestic slave trade offered them an opportunity to attack "the great jugular vein of slavery" and they mobilized politically to do so—only to encounter insuperable opposition by the U.S. Supreme Court (102). As slave prices skyrocketed by 1830, American jurisprudence, dominated by slaveholders, blocked the abolitionists' goals. Whereas the Marshall Court had avoided pinpointing federal–state jurisdictional boundaries in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Taney Court provided crystal-clear delineation in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) by asserting that state-protected property rights extended beyond the reach of the federal commerce power. Accordingly, Lightner depicts a road to disunion paved with slaveholders' attentiveness to property rights. Lightner's insightful recounting of American jurisprudence, however, digs little deeper. In grounding his understanding of southern self-interest in the profits of slave sales, he hints only briefly at the domestic trade's far larger value: providing indispensable capital fluidity that underwrote southern slave investments as a whole, equity amounting to two-thirds of the South's immense wealth in 1860, or approximately $80 billion in 2009 dollars. Significantly, many northerners understood—and by 1860 voted against—this basis of southern political...

New Studies in the History of American Slavery (review)

New Studies in History of American Slavery. Edited by Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Pp. 306. Cloth, $54.95; Paper, $22.95.)Reviewed by Sergio LussanaSlavery studies in American history have continued to develop at such an extraordinary pace that simply keeping up to date with current historiography has become a full-time job in itself. Fortunately, Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp's edited collection, New Studies in History of American has succeeded admirably in a task that has long been needed. Modestly acknowledging that articles presented in their volume hardly provide first new thoughts about history of slavery in Americas (1), anthology brings together ten extremely well-written articles by some of most dynamic and important historians of slavery working today. With exception of four entries, essays in volume are concerned primarily with slavery in late antebellum southern United States.The collection is introduced with an informative historiographical essay in which editors trace progression of slavery studies throughout last century. Baptist and Camp contend that in a bid to explore paradoxical qualities in lives of enslaved people, many scholars of slavery now dissolve dichotomous choices. complex nature of slavery, editors argue, cannot be understood through an either/or (3). Moreover, they proclaim that three major developments have significantly shaped much new work in slavery studies: influence of gender history, issue of race, and cultural history. These intellectual trends provide framework for book, with ten contributing essays divided thematically under each of three headings (12).The first section, and Slavery, contains three excellent essays by Jennifer L. Morgan, Sharia M. Fett, and Camp. Morgan's and Camp's essays are chapters from their respective books, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004) and Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), while Fett's essay develops arguments made in her monograph, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002). Morgan's essay is a fascinating exploration of how development of racialist discourse was profoundly influenced by gendered notions of difference created by European travelers to Africa and English settlers in America. Morgan finds gender located at heart of European encounter with Africa. As male travelers gazed upon bodies of African women, they constructed notions of civility, morality, and race, which ultimately justified turn to enslaved African labor in New World.Of particular interest is Camp's essay, The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in Plantation South, 18301861. First published in Journal of Southern History (August 2002), this essay is a ground-breaking study of gender and resistance. Influenced by James C. Scott's theory of everyday forms of Camp draws attention to secret parties held by enslaved people at night, away from eyes of slaveholder, whereby participants would dance, drink, court, and play music. For Camp, these parties did not function as safety valves working to advantage to owner. Instead, bodily pleasures that accompanied these parties were profound sites of resistance, enjoyment, and potentially transcendence from dehumanizing effects of slavery (90). Camp's work demonstrates merits of dissolving dichotomies, arguing that the body, so deeply personal, is also a political arena (91). Hence, enslaved women, whose bodies were unique sites of domination under slavery, were able to reclaim (93) their bodies from planter control and view, and use them as sites of resistance. …

:Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic.Volume 2: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861

In a time when many Americans studying United States history have jettisoned the concept of class as a primary category of historical analysis, John Ashworth argues in this volume that class was central to the coming of the Civil War. Those who look for a revival of Charles and Mary Beard here, however, will find Ashworth calling for “a more subtle notion of class” (p. 4) and a “far more subtle and complex .… relationship between ideas and interests” (p. 6) than many readers might expect from one who employs class as his organizing concept. For Ashworth, both the cause and the consequence of the American Civil War were tied inextricably to the weaknesses of the southern slave system. The economic underperformance of the South stemmed directly from the central class conflict of this book, that between masters and slaves. Slaves' desire for freedom lay at the root of all sectional controversies, not only the obvious ones surrounding the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act but also the more central ones relative to northerners' civil liberties and the expansion of slave territory. He thus begins his group-by-group analysis with southern fire-eaters, for whom worries about outside forces—from the federal government to free blacks and non-slaveholding white southerners—intervening in the master-slave relationship ever and always went back to anxieties over slave resistance. Their need to preserve their control over this class relationship shaped their political behavior within the Union and the drive for secession. Their solicitude to protect slavery was only evidence of its weakness, for northern employers of wage labor did not need to go to such lengths to preserve their class system.

Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (review)

Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (review)

The social contract in America: from the revolution to the present age

Because most Americans believe that government requires the consent of the governed, the idea of the social contract may come as close to a public philosophy as we've ever had. And, as Mark Hulliung reminds us, we have frequently fought our greatest political battles by wielding one or another version of social contract theory. Hulliung's book is the first to examine the role of the social contract across the entire sweep of American history, well beyond the Revolution and Founding periods. While he pays close attention to the contested versions of the social contract from 1765 to 1861, he also underscores its relevance after the Civil War, from late nineteenth-century land reform to the rights revolution of the late twentieth century. By considering this lengthy timeline, Hulliung demonstrates the life and death of what may be the most expansive and persistent form in our country's political discourse, one that has figured in virtually all major controversies in American history. He shows how it has been enlisted by advocates of seemingly every major cause, from Henry George to Martin Luther King and Justice Clarence Thomas, whose view that constitutional authority rests in the consent of the people of each individual state, rather than of the nation as a whole, echoed the version of the social contract once held by southern slave owners. Hulliung treats the social contract as not one theory but several, considering the Americanization of Grotius and Pufendorf as well as Locke. He examines alternative readings of the contract in the struggles between claims of alienable versus inalienable rights; between consent given once and for all versus consent reaffirmed with each generation; and between the sovereignty of the people in various states versus the sovereignty of the people of the nation. Innovative and provocative, Hulliung's study clearly shows that, until we come to terms with the centrality of the social contract in American history - and the significance of its possible demise - something essential will be missing from our accounts of the past and our understanding of the present.

Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest by Alan D. Gaff

156 Michigan Historical Review also an invaluable work for researchers interested the expansion of American suburbs in the twentieth century. Walter D. Greason Department of History Ursinus College Alan D. Gaff. Bayonets in theWilderness: Anthony Wayne's Legion in the Old Northwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Pp. 419. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $39.95. Given the awesome might of the armed forces that won the Civil War and both World Wars, it is easy to forget that the United States Army was once a humble, ragtag force hindered by a great many obstacles: a lack of resources, recruiting difficulties, American hostility to standing armies, and nearly constant pressure from both unfriendly Natives and European interlopers. In an elegantly written and eminendy readable book, Alan D. Gaff successfully documents this chapter inAmerican military history. On November 4, 1791, American military power ebbed to its lowest point when a confederacy of northwestern Indians defeated General Arthur St. Clair in the Battle of Wabash River. President George Washington had to pick up the pieces from this disastrous defeat and rebuild. Gaff traces this process, from the painstaking choice of a new commander, through the recruitment and training of new troops, and finally to the ultimate victory of the U.S. Army over the northwestern confederacy. It is a compelling drama full of intrigue, political maneuvering, desperation, and chicanery. Besides serving as a tighdy constructed history of the early years of the American army, Gaffs book doubles as a biography of Anthony Wayne, best known by the moniker "Mad Anthony." The nickname was used byWayne's men as a term of affection, but over the centuries it has encouraged the easy?and lazy?assumption that he was imbalanced, or at the very least incompetent. Gaff is careful to correct this false impression, building a persuasive case thatWayne was a skillful soldier who played an instrumental role in the growth and professionalization of the American military. There is also another poorly understood part of American history woven in among the events Gaff documents. Less is known about the tribes of the Old Northwest than those of any other region. Here, regrettably, Bayonets in theWilderness has little new to offer. Gaff himself Book Reviews 157 acknowledges asmuch, observing that "the lack of awritten language has hamstrung any attempt to relate to the Indian version of events. It is an immeasurable loss to history" (p. xiv). Alan Gaff is an independent scholar and is careful to define his audience broadly. His clear prose, skillful use of anecdotes, and unobtrusive footnotes will certainly appeal to readers outside of academia. The book is not lacking in scholarly rigor, however. Indeed, thanks to the time Gaff spent examining previously unused newspaper accounts, the book surely sits on a firmer evidentiary basis than any previous work on this topic. Consequendy, Bayonets in theWilderness will find a place both in survey courses on early American history and in the libraries of military enthusiasts. Christopher Bates University of California, Los Angeles Sharon A. Roger Hepburn. Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 272. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $40.00. The past few years have seen an outpouring of writing on black Canadian history and black migration studies. Among these texts is Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. A substantive book with a brief introduction and ten complex chapters, Crossing the Border has four notable features. First, Hepburn squarely takes on the espousal by abolitionists that Canada was a promised land of black freedom and equality as well as the fable touted by Southern slave owners that it was barren, frozen tundra. Second, Hepburn offers a comprehensive profile of the Reverend William King, the founder and primary financier of Buxton, the main community she examines. Third, Crossing the Border explains the inner workings of the Elgin Association and the Buxton Mission, the two rather distinct administrative entities that comprised the Buxton setdement. Finally, Hepburn sustains a narrative throughout her text that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary people who transformed Buxton from a setdement into a community. Crossing the Border illustrates that Buxton was a...

Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada by Sharon A. Roger Hepburn

Book Reviews 157 acknowledges asmuch, observing that "the lack of awritten language has hamstrung any attempt to relate to the Indian version of events. It is an immeasurable loss to history" (p. xiv). Alan Gaff is an independent scholar and is careful to define his audience broadly. His clear prose, skillful use of anecdotes, and unobtrusive footnotes will certainly appeal to readers outside of academia. The book is not lacking in scholarly rigor, however. Indeed, thanks to the time Gaff spent examining previously unused newspaper accounts, the book surely sits on a firmer evidentiary basis than any previous work on this topic. Consequendy, Bayonets in theWilderness will find a place both in survey courses on early American history and in the libraries of military enthusiasts. Christopher Bates University of California, Los Angeles Sharon A. Roger Hepburn. Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 272. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $40.00. The past few years have seen an outpouring of writing on black Canadian history and black migration studies. Among these texts is Sharon A. Roger Hepburn's Crossing theBorder:A Free Black Community in Canada. A substantive book with a brief introduction and ten complex chapters, Crossing the Border has four notable features. First, Hepburn squarely takes on the espousal by abolitionists that Canada was a promised land of black freedom and equality as well as the fable touted by Southern slave owners that it was barren, frozen tundra. Second, Hepburn offers a comprehensive profile of the Reverend William King, the founder and primary financier of Buxton, the main community she examines. Third, Crossing the Border explains the inner workings of the Elgin Association and the Buxton Mission, the two rather distinct administrative entities that comprised the Buxton setdement. Finally, Hepburn sustains a narrative throughout her text that emphasizes the experiences of the ordinary people who transformed Buxton from a setdement into a community. Crossing the Border illustrates that Buxton was a complicated, highly ambitious undertaking. The settlement was founded in 1849, it comprised more than seven thousand acres by the end of its first five years, and it lasted formally for more than twenty years. However, even though the 158 Michigan Historical Review Buxton story is about its successful transformation into a true community where residents lived, worked, worshiped, and studied, there is a discernable tension in its history. Hepburn is not able to resolve fully the contradictions created by William King's management of the community. In a variety of ways, King's purpose was to make Buxton residents as independent as possible. At the same time, King not only helped manage the settlement's finances, but also directed the people's spiritual and educational development. What Hepburn does make clear, however, is that Buxton was not a homogeneous society. Its residents were male and female, fugitive and free-born, literate and illiterate, destitute and propertied. Its small number of interracial families meant that from the very beginning Buxton was not even a truly all-black settlement. To its credit, Crossing the Border is a thorough study that features a highly readable narrative drawn from primary sources including Canadian census returns, Elgin Association records, church histories, family papers, newspaper articles, and personal correspondence. The Buxton setdement's significance to Michigan history is twofold. Buxton's proximity to the Michigan/Canadian border?a border that was much more fluid than it is today?makes the study pertinent to Michigan history. Also, although itmay not have seen the human traffic of Buffalo, New York, Detroit was a gateway to freedom in Ontario towns and cities likeWindsor, Amherstburg, and Sandwich. Hepburn's analysis of the ways in which race and class shaped Buxton's history is strong, but gender analysis falls short in comparison. Maureen Elgersman Lee Old Dominion University Mark Hoffman. 'My Brave Mechanics": The First Michigan Engineers and Their Civil War. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Pp. 470. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Tables. Cloth, $44.95. Mark Hoffman's (My Brave Mechanics" details the service of the First Michigan Engineers throughout America's most pivotal war. What separates this regimental history from other examples of the genre...

Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (review)

Reviewed by: Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis E. Arnold Modlin Jr. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. David Brion Davis. Oxford University Press, New York, 2006. 464pp., 21 halftones, 8 maps, notes, and index. $30.00 cloth. (ISBN 0-19-514073-7). New World Slavery is a broad but still somehow under-covered theme in the scholarly literature. Works on slavery tend to be either very general or very focused. How does one consider such an expansive subject, both geographically and historically, in one volume without leaving out important themes? David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale, and Directory Emeritus of the Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, delivers a solid attempt to cover all the major themes in Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Davis helps the reader appreciate the major concepts of slavery in the New World without leading the reader to think that slavery was a monolithic experience. Inhuman Bondage is not an encyclopedia on New World Slavery. Davis’s purpose is to place American slavery within the context of the Atlantic slave system and to help us develop a better understanding of American slavery—and I think Davis accomplishes his mission. Chapter 1 examines many of the key themes such as racism, international and national law, justice, and politics by considering the case of the Cuban slave ship, La Amistad. In 1839, Cinqué an illegally captured and enslaved African led a revolt on the slave ship La Amistad, killed a number of crew members and forced one of the surviving slave owners to plot a course for Africa. Instead of doing that, the ship’s newly forced pilot steered the ship toward the U.S., ending up in New York; the boat and all on board were taken to Connecticut starting a legal battle that would pit former President John Quincy Adams against the administration of President Van Buren. Chapters 2 and 3 consider the theoretical context of modern, post Age of Exploration, slavery. Modern, New World slavery differed from earlier forms of human bondage in that it was economically and industrially based, while many forms of pre-modern slavery were centered on war plunder or debt. Davis argues that slavery is different from servitude by pointing out that enslaved people throughout history have been dehumanized, stripped of citizenship, and treated as property. Here the discussion turns to examples of pre-modern slavery among the Sumerians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Tupinamba of pre-conquest Brazil. He also lays out many of the foundational concepts and ideologies leading to the uniqueness of American slavery including slavery among the Israelites, the often-quoted Biblical scriptures, including the cursing of Canaan, and the Greek and Roman philosophical views often used to justify slavery. Many wealthy, early-American slaveholders, particularly in the antebellum South, viewed slavery not only as moral, but also critical to democracy. Some southern slave owners saw themselves as modern parallels of ancient Roman senators of the Republic, evidently as a result of their Classical education. In Chapter 4, the author [End Page 378] further reflects on how racially based African enslavement became incorporated into the exploitation of the New World. In Chapters 5 and 6, Davis helps us appreciate the regional differences of slavery within Brazil and the United States, and between the Caribbean islands controlled by various European countries. I found the comparisons of slavery within Brazil and the U.S. particularly interesting. More so than their counterparts in the Caribbean, slave owners in Brazil and the southern U.S. emphasized their “paternalistic patronage” while developing harsh industrialized forms of agricultural production. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the issues raised by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Each of these convulsions had an impact on the lives of slaves and slave owners throughout the New World. Within the territory that would become the U.S., slaveholders worried about whether to arm slaves to assist in fighting the British. In both North America and the Caribbean, the British increasingly used black soldiers to fend off...

Lincoln's Resolute Unionist: Hamilton Gamble, Dred Scott Dissenter and Missouri's Civil War Governor

As provisional governor of Missouri during the Civil War, Hamilton Gamble (1798-1864) worked closely with the Lincoln administration to keep the state from seceding from the Union. Without Gamble and other loyal Unionist governors, the war in the West might have been lost. Dennis Boman's full-scale account of Gamble's life tells the little-known story of a prominent frontier lawyer who became chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and boldly dissented in the infamous Dred Scott decision. Revealing how Gamble, one of the wealthiest and most renowned citizens of pre-Civil War Missouri, fought to end slavery and to protect the integrity of the Union, Lincoln's Resolute Unionist corrects prevailing notions about solidarity among the South's antebellum elite on these issues. The slaveholding border state of Missouri figured greatly in the sectional crisis from the time of its controversial admission to the Union up through the war itself, when it was the site of internecine battles between Unionists and Confederates. The complexities of the period and of the political alliances formed then emerge clearly in Boman's biography of Gamble. A fundamental conservatism - Gamble believed judges should interpret, not make, law - led the southern slave owner to dissent from his colleagues' proslavery decision in Scott v. Emerson. These same principles, along with Gamble's Whig affiliation and Christian convictions, made firm his antisecessionist stance despite his proslavery predilections. Boman provides a groundbreaking analysis of Lincoln's involvement in Missouri's affairs, including his assistance to Gamble in maintaining security and passing a state ordinance for gradual emancipation. Lincoln's Resolute Unionist brings to light in a compelling fashion the meaning - and the drama - of the life of a key figure at a critical time in American history.

Erratum: Geochemical and metallogenic relations in volcanic rocks of the southern Slave Province: implications for late Neoarchean tectonics

Erratum: Geochemical and metallogenic relations in volcanic rocks of the southern Slave Province: implications for late Neoarchean tectonics

Louisa Picquet c. 1829–1896

In May 1860, the Reverend Hiram Mattison, a native of the Herkimer County, New York, hamlet of Norway, was the pastor of Union Chapel on Mercer Street in lower Manhattan. At forty-nine years old, he was the author of a number of books and essays on topics as various as astronomy, spiritualism, hymn singing, and the Roman Catholic Church. He was also a well-known antislavery agitator who recently had been responsible for--in whole or in part--organizing the submission of 125,000 signatures from correspondents in New York state and Great Britain to the Annual General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church protesting the Church's tacit support of and praying that body to extirpate slavery (Vansant 176 ff.). On this day, the Reverend Mattison was awaiting a visitor from Cincinnati, a woman who had once been a slave in New Orleans and who was seeking help in redeeming her mother from bondage in Texas. Mattison had been in contact with fellow antislavery agitators in the city of Buffalo and had been notified of this woman's imminent arrival in New York City. However, he was not prepared for the woman who was ushered into his study. When she announced herself as Louisa Mattison was struck by how indistinguishable she was from any other person walking up and down Broadway. Mrs. Picquet was of only one-eighth African ancestry. Indeed, it appears that Mattison had some trouble resolving her story with her appearance--he simply found it hard to believe that she could ever have been a slave. In fact, it was such an issue that Mattison's cousin, a Buffalo businessman, wired the Cincinnati bank where Picquet's money was deposited in order to confirm her identity (Mattison 43-44). One result of that meeting was the slave narrative entitled Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon, A Tale of Southern Slave Life, which Mattison transcribed and commented upon in an attempt to help Picquet raise money to purchase her mother's freedom. (1) Dion Boucicault's drama, The Octoroon, playing in New York at the same time Mrs. Picquet was in town, also exploited the idea that a person who appeared to be white but who had once been a slave was a slave for life. Although the stage was anathema to many religious people of the period, it is possible that to Mattison Louisa Picquet seemed to have stepped off the stage of the Winter Garden Theatre and into his study on Mercer Street--she had lived a life that only could be imagined, only could be staged. Indeed, Picquet's whiteness is the prevailing theme of the narrative that resulted from their meeting: a number of chapters involve former slaves, who, having escaped from slavery, were living among whites, as whites. Mattison may have thought that the sensationalism of the topic, as implied by the title, could sell more pamphlets. (2) As Mattison learned, Louisa Picquet had been born on a plantation in Lexington County, South Carolina, just outside the capital city of Columbia, sometime around 1829 or 1830. (3) She was the daughter of a fifteen-year-old slave girl of mixed ancestry named Elizabeth Ramsey. Elizabeth was a house slave, a seamstress, who was evidently a quadroon, or of one-fourth African ancestry, and was lighter skinned than most slaves. As her daughter later observed, upon Mattison's prompting, Yes, she pretty white; not white enough for white people. She have [sic] long hair, but it was kind a wavy (8). Working indoors, Elizabeth was under the constant scrutiny of the owner, a man referred to in Louisa's narrative as John Randolph, but who was more likely James Hunter Randolph (1792-1869), a lawyer and planter of Columbia. (4) According to Picquet's narrative, soon after the mistress of the house gave birth, she discovered that her husband had also fathered the child born in the slave quarters just two weeks before. (5) She forced her husband to sell Elizabeth and her infant to a plantation owner in Georgia (6-7), David R. …

Geochemical and metallogenic relations in volcanic rocks of the southern Slave Province: implications for late Neoarchean tectonics

Late Neoarchean volcanic belts in the southern Slave Province include (1) in the east, the Cameron River – Beaulieu River belts, which are characterized by stratigraphically thin, flow-rich, classic calc-alkaline, arc-type sequences with accompanying syngenetic volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits; and (2) in the west, the Yellowknife belt, which is characterized by stratigraphically thick, structurally complex, pyroclastic-rich, adakitic, back-arc basin-type sequences, with accompanying epigenetic lode-gold deposits. The volcanic belt association bears persuasive chemical evidence of subduction-initiated magma generation. However, the greenstone belts, together with coeval matching patterned belts in Superior Province of the southern Canadian Shield, bear equally persuasive evidence of prevailing autochthonous–parautochthonous relations with respect to component stratigraphic parts and to older gneissic basement. The eastern and western volcanic belts in question are petrogenetically ascribed to a "westerly inclined" (present geography) subduction zone(s) that produced shallower (east) to deeper (west), slab-initiated, mantle wedge-generated, parent magmas. This early stage microplate tectonic process involved modest mantle subduction depths, small tectonic plates, and small sialic cratons. In the larger context of Earth's progressively cooling, hence subduction-deepening mantle, this late Neoarchean greenstone belt development (2.73–2.66 Ga) merged with the massive end-Archean tonalite–trondhjemite–granodiorite–granite (TTGG) "bloom" (2.65–2.55 Ga), resulting in greatly enhanced craton stability. Successive subduction-deepening, plate-craton-enlarging stages, with appropriate metallotectonic response across succeeding Proterozoic time and beyond, led to modern-mode plate tectonics.

SHARLA M. FETT. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii, 290 pp., illus. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).

SHARLA M. FETT. Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiii, 290 pp., illus. $39.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper).

Carry me back: the domestic slave trade in American life

Originating with the birth of the nation itself, in many respects, the story of the domestic slave trade is also the story of the early United States. While an external traffic in slaves had always been present, following the American Revolution this was replaced by a far more vibrant internal trade. Most importantly, an interregional commerce in slaves developed that turned human property into one of the most valuable forms of investment in the country, second only to land. In fact, this form of property became so valuable that when threatened with its ultimate extinction in 1860, southern slave owners believed they had little alternative but to leave the Union. Therefore, while the interregional trade produced great wealth for many people, and the nation, it also helped to tear the country apart. The domestic slave trade likewise played a fundamental role in antebellum American society. Led by professional traders, who greatly resembled northern entrepreneurs, this traffic was a central component in the market revolution of the early nineteenth century. In addition, the development of an extensive local trade meant that the domestic trade, in all its configurations, was a prominent feature in southern life. Yet, this indispensable part of the slave system also raised many troubling questions. For those outside the South, it affected their impression of both the region and the new nation. For slaveholders, it proved to be the most difficult part of their institution to defend. And for those who found themselves commodities in this trade, it was something that needed to be resisted at all costs. Carry Me Back restores the domestic slave trade to the prominent place that it deserves in early American history, exposing the many complexities of southern slavery and antebellum American life.

Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (review)

Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South. By Jonathan D. Martin. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 237. Cloth, $39.95.)Despite the stubborn pretenses of southern slave owners to their own paternalism, at its core American slavery was always about the commodification of human beings. Slaves were not simply coerced laborers. In both a legal and a practical sense, they were capital itself, which is why they were routinely bought and sold, submitted as collateral for loans, and used to pay debts. A slave's worth was ultimately determined not by how much an owner felt an obligation toward him or her as an individual, but by whatever the market would bear. And with market imperatives constantly impinging on slave owners' calculations of how to deploy enslaved capital in a way that maximized profits, the ability of those owners to hire and rent slaves to other whites formed a critical-if often overlooked-component of the southern economy.As Jonathan D. Martin details in Divided Mastery, slave hiring was ubiquitous throughout the South. Although precise figures are impossible to determine, Martin suggests a slave was three to five times more likely to be hired out than sold and that most slaves probably experienced being rented to someone other than their owners at least once during a lifetime. It is not hard to see why. By mediating between owners who found themselves with more slaves than they could use and individuals who wanted additional laborers, slave hiring increased the regional efficiency of using an enslaved labor force. It democratized access to slave labor among white southerners, as yeomen lacking the resources to own slaves might rent the slaves of others as the first step toward joining the master class in their own right. And it enabled white southerners to adapt the slave regime to changing economic conditions and market demands across space and over time. The ability to hire out excess slaves in an increasingly diversifying economy, for example, eased the transition made by plantation owners in the revolutionary-era Chesapeake from growing tobacco to growing a less labor-intensive wheat crop, while nineteenth-century migrants to the cotton frontiers of the Old Southwest regularly hired slaves out to finance their migrations and used hired slaves for the extra labor necessary to get plantations up and running. By meeting practical needs, expanding opportunities for partaking in the benefits of mastery, and introducing flexibility to the southern political economy as it confronted shifting national and international markets, slave hiring held obvious financial and cultural benefits for white southerners.But slavery was nothing if riot an endlessly paradoxical institution. Although the practice of slave hiring clearly strengthened the system, it also strained it significantly, as the introduction of a third party to the normally dyadic master-slave relationship created all sorts of tensions among white southerners. Slave hiring divided the prerogatives and powers of mastery between a slave's owner and a hirer, but it did so awkwardly, as the goals each desired from a rental transaction worked at cross-purposes. An owner wanted to make as much money as possible from hiring a slave, but he wanted simultaneously to minimize the chances that his property would be damaged or destroyed by a cruel or careless hirer who lacked long-term interest in that property. As a consequence, owners fundamentally distrusted hirers. They tried to circumscribe the mastery they transferred at hire through contracts that stipulated everything from the price and method of payment to be received by the owner to the location and types of work to be performed by the slave to the amount and kinds of food and clothing he or she was to receive. …