Southern Slaveholders Research Articles

American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

Roberto Saba's new book offers a modernization saga integrating São Paulo province's more dynamic sectors with US Northern capitalists on a path that slowly converted Brazil from slavery to free labor during the second half of the nineteenth century. This capitalist odyssey started in the 1850s: US Northerners conceived of a mild transition for Brazil modeled on the acceptance of free labor and gradual emancipation. This proposal was unacceptable to leaders of the US Southern states, which seceded and fought a civil war to maintain slavery. On the Brazilian side, termination of Atlantic slave traffic made slavery's end inevitable. Some elites awakened to the need to adapt labor strategies in view of how a shortage of African slaves would negatively affect the imperial economy. As slave labor's political and social costs increased, more Brazilian elites looked to the US North for a strategy to increase productivity by growing entrepreneurship and spreading technical innovation. Their modernization efforts were rewarded in the late 1880s, when a broad abolitionist coalition ended slavery without major upheavals.The book's first part depicts US Southern slaveholders' failure to create a partnership with their Brazilian counterparts. By 1850, Brazil and the US South were the Western Hemisphere's two major independent slave societies, with a combined population of around six million enslaved people. Enslaved Africans and their descendants fueled both national economies, producing commodities for global markets and strengthening slaveholders' political position in their respective countries. A continental alliance might be expected from these convergent interests. US Secretary of State John C. Calhoun desired such a partnership, explaining in 1844 that “it is our policy to cultivate the most friendly relations with all the countries on this continent, and with none more than with Brazil” (p. 17). But in his well-researched evaluation of the correspondence produced by US diplomats serving in Rio de Janeiro, Saba shows that, despite the South's dominance in the US State Department, its partisans were incapable of creating a hemispheric alliance of slaveholders. Southern diplomats serving in Brazil during the 1840s and 1850s were too arrogant to establish a real partnership. They despised the empire's form of government and its racial mix, and publicly expressed a reckless imperialist impulse to annex the Amazon Basin. Ultimately, an alliance between slaveholding elites became impracticable. Deep, insightful research on US diplomatic dispatches shows that, after interacting with envoys like Matthew Fontaine Maury and politicians like Henry A. Wise, Brazilian elites lost hope in what the Confederacy could offer in terms of capital and expertise. Consequently, “Southern slaveholders . . . could not establish an effective foreign policy in defense of slavery” and “failed to convince” Brazilian slaveholders “to embark on a proslavery crusade” (pp. 18–19).After the debacle of the Confederacy, some 5,000 die-hard Southerners immigrated to Brazil, hoping to reestablish their slave society. One-third employed slaves on their farms. But the new settlers did not consider the transition taking place in the empire. By the time the Confederates had established themselves in Brazil, São Paulo's regional barons were coming to terms with the technological innovations taking place in the US North. The wealthy landowners were fascinated with the mechanization of agriculture, which promised improved land productivity despite slave labor's growing scarcity. Many of them would send their sons to study in the United States to learn new techniques and to gain entrepreneurial skills, thus increasing their commitment to develop modern work relationships under capitalist rules. Consequently, despite the Southerners' efforts to re-create a lost environment in the tropics, they ended up subsidizing Brazilian farmers with all kinds of professional expertise and enforcing coffee planters' modernization efforts.In the second part of the book Saba realizes an extensive and intensive archaeology of the era's political thought, recovering the opinions of both US travelers and Brazilian visitors from diaries, newspapers, letters, and published memoirs. His research shows that, by the 1870s, both groups agreed on the superiority of free labor over slave labor and the need to rapidly develop wage labor relationships in the empire. Saba, however, does not investigate how far such impressions were correct.Analyses connecting Brazil's antislavery turn with modernization are not new; they date from the 1960s, when pioneering works by Emília Viotti da Costa and Warren Dean pointed to Paulista capitalism as an alternative to the Brazilian/Northeast patriarchy. Saba's contribution lies in his emphasis on antislavery movements in the making of capitalism, as well as on reformers' lack of empathy for the formerly enslaved, who were incorporated as free and destitute laborers under the new order of things. The transition from slave to free labor had never been about creating an egalitarian society. Only a few abolitionists, such as André Rebouças and Andrew Jackson Lamoureux, denounced how postemancipation working relations affected dispossessed Brazilian workers.

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade

Catholic Paternalism and Slavery’s Capitalism: Bishop John England’s Defense of Domestic Slavery and the Interstate Slave Trade David Roach (bio) The 1840 presidential campaign between Democratic president Martin Van Buren and Whig challenger William Henry Harrison set the stage for the most sustained and most important American Catholic defense of slavery, Charleston bishop John England’s letters to Georgia politician and U.S. secretary of state John Forsyth.1 By then, the prelate had lived in South Carolina for the better part of two decades and overseen the gradual growth of his fledgling diocese. In 1820, the thirty-four-year-old Irish priest had been installed as the first Bishop of Charleston, a newly created diocese spanning all of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina but counting perhaps four churches and three other priests to minister to the small number of communicants scattered across the region.2 But when England died in 1842, the diocese boasted [End Page 205] fourteen churches, twenty priests, two female religious institutions, and some seven thousand members.3 (So small a community, it turned out, could not fund all these projects, and England left a much-indebted diocese to his successor, Ignatius A. Reynolds.4) While pastoral, administrative, and ecclesiastical duties occupied much of England’s time, he also dedicated himself to literary endeavors, most often by writing editorials in the United States Catholic Miscellany, the diocesan publication he had founded in 1822 and the country’s first Catholic newspaper. By dint of his brilliant and often acerbic pen, the bishop won a national reputation as the most articulate champion of the compatibility of American republicanism and Roman Catholicism.5 (His erudition won for the bishop some respect from the local literati, too, as was evident from his occasional participation in Charleston intellectual circles.6) Though ever eager to praise his country’s political institutions, he was more reluctant to defend slavery. He had imbibed his political ideology back in Europe and, as historians have demonstrated, never fully embraced the South’s synthesis of republican values and human bondage.7 Nevertheless, circumstances compelled him to defend the institution at length in 1840. That fall, John Forsyth had planned on stumping for Van Buren throughout Georgia, but illness forced him to stop in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he jotted off an article for his constituents that the Augusta, Georgia, Constitutionalist published on September 12, 1840. Eschewing more substantive matters of policy, Forsyth played upon [End Page 206] white southerners’ fears of English abolitionists, hoping to connect those much-reviled reformers to his American political opponents, the Whigs.8 The address may also have tapped into his readers’ nativism, for Forsyth suggested that “influences proceeding from the British isles” had set in motion the promulgation of In Supremo Apostolatus, Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 apostolic letter condemning the international slave trade. Southern Catholics, most notably Bishop England but also others, interpreted Forsyth to be implying that the Vatican was plotting with the British Parliament against slavery, and they feared such accusations impugned American Catholics’ loyalties to southern institutions.9 And so, as he had done on so many other occasions, John England took up the pen to demonstrate Catholics’ loyalty to their country’s political institutions, this time defending slavery, over the course of eighteen letters published between October 1840 and April 1841 in the United States Catholic Miscellany.10 Throughout this correspondence, England sought to place an ecclesiastical imprimatur on the specific customs and laws at the core of antebellum southern slavery, including, in his first missive, a roundabout defense of the domestic slave trade. The bishop began his argument by distinguishing the domestic slavery practiced in the American South from the transatlantic slave trade sustained by Spanish and Portuguese merchants, and most often, historians have understood the bishop’s rhetorical thrust as follows: the pope censured only avaricious Iberians and so neither endorsed immediatism nor criticized southern slaveholders.11 But England made another, more precise, distinction [End Page 207] between the international slave trade and the internal slave trade.12 His decision to do so was quite understandable, for the pontiff’s condemnation of “that inhuman trade by which negroes, as if...

State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South? Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks

State of the Field: A New Historiography for the Old South?Slavery and Capitalism, White Elites and Enslaved Blacks Lacy Ford (bio) For roughly a decade, historians’ understanding of the antebellum American South has been increasingly influenced by a new burst of scholarship collectively labelled “The New History of Capitalism.” Scholars leading the argument for the New History of Capitalism (NHC) contend with considerable, but sometimes reckless, vigor that the slaveholding South stood on the driving edge of the larger capitalist and imperialist project of the nineteenth century. There is much in these works to recommend an emphasis on capitalism and imperialism as creators of the Old South, certainly as it existed in the late antebellum era, and the region played a large role in the evolution of those two projects. But the core, or rather the heart, of the NHC’s argument places cotton and slavery together as the dominant driving force behind the expansion of both capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century world. Yet there are also scholarly cautions that must be acknowledged and even damaging misconceptions and erroneous assumptions that promise to limit the NHC’s influence on the historiography of the Old South over the long term. This new corpus of scholarship characterizes southern slaveholders as acquisitive, expansionist, and possessing a broad ambition for power reaching well beyond their control of enslaved Black people. Collectively, the new NHC literature attempts to radically transform our understanding of the slaveholders’ role in furthering capitalist and imperial designs, not only in the American South but also in other parts of the world. In the NHC’s view, as the South’s slaveholding elite committed itself to pursuing territorial expansion and extending slavery, its aspirations moved beyond mastery and profit toward the building of an empire for cotton and the creation of a truly global economy sustained to a large degree by cotton production in the American South.1 This essay examines the NHC corpus, acknowledging its value, especially as a debating point, but also probes its weaknesses as revealed by existing and contemporary scholarship. [End Page 442] An earlier work, Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), anticipated the coming turn in antebellum southern historiography by emphasizing the slaveholders’ seemingly unquenchable desire for territorial expansion and the acquisition of more and more enslaved Black people, but this book did not present deep South slaveholders as creators of the international capitalist enterprise. According to Rothman, Southern slaveholders and aspiring slaveholders rushed into the old Southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana), seeking more land and more enslaved labor (whether via the illegal international slave trade, the legal domestic trade, or in-migration from the upper South and older cotton states). Rothman embraced the notion that the slaveholders of the lower South had embarked upon an imperialist endeavor to establish an ever-growing empire for cotton centered in the lower South.2 Yet at the same time, as one reviewer noted, Rothman was “sensitive to the hundreds and even thousands of individual decisions involved in making the old Southwest a slave country.”3 Those decisions included choices by white people about whether to buy or sell slaves, and decisions by the enslaved over whether or not to run away from a new master in an attempt to preserve a family—and many other decisions large and small made by both slaveholders and the enslaved. Ultimately this sea of decisions led the region’s slaveholders to establish the lower South as a critical plantation periphery supplying needed raw material for the core of the world’s emerging capitalist economy. But the region remained largely on the margins of the industrial revolution that it sustained, Rothman argued, while its planter elite nonetheless developed and retained close connections with the core. The expansionist slaveholders built a new cotton empire in the old Southwest, but it was far less clear that these slaveholders had embarked upon a capitalist project for cotton to drive the world economy. On balance, Rothman’s book endorsed the notion that slaveholders led an expansionist, even imperialist, regime in terms of controlling cotton lands, but it did not endorse the idea that Southern slaveholders...

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner

Reviewed by: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner Mark Smith (bio) South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Alice L. Baumgartner. New York: Basic Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1541617780. 384 pp., cloth, $32.00. Fugitive slaves from the United States who ran to Mexico during the antebellum period “reorient our understanding of the Civil War, showing that one of the most distinctively ‘American’ events in US history was in part ignited” by these freedom seekers (4). Such is the central thesis of Alice L. Baumgartner’s brilliantly written but sometimes interpretively frustrating book. The stories of the fugitives are utterly compelling, but the extent to which runaways to Mexico “contributed to the outbreak of a major sectional controversy over the future of human bondage in the United States” remains murky (7). Those who made it to Mexico did so without the help of anything resembling an underground railroad. Their escapes were assisted by the occasional ally, not facilitated by a system or formal network. These fugitives escaped and made it to Mexico by their own wits, and it is these stories, the tales of courageous men and women, that Baumgartner captures brilliantly. Runaways were greeted with one of two options. Some joined the military outposts that the Mexican government had established to defend their nation’s northeastern frontier. Others traded their enslaved status for indentured servitude and worked as servants or on haciendas. In this respect, fugitives in Mexico were not unlike those who made it to the US North. After all, courtesy of the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, runaways who managed to get above the Mason-Dixon line found themselves in a condition of what Frederick Douglass called “doubtful liberty.” Still, differences abounded, and Baumgartner sagely reminds us of the powerful antislavery inflections at work in the Mexican national government. After the Texas Revolution, for example, the Mexican Congress abolished slavery; in 1849, it passed legislation making free any enslaved person from another country who stepped foot in Mexico. Nor did Mexico agree to any extradition treaties. Plainly, these antislavery currents perturbed Southern slaveholders not least because these policies threatened their expansion and held the real potential to disrupt slavery in the US borderlands. The backbone—interpretively and stylistically—of Baumgartner’s study is in the poignant, endearing, and inspiring stories of enslaved men and women who escaped to Mexico. Baumgartner has a superb eye for the revealing detail and evinces a deep tenacity when it comes to ferreting out stories long buried in far-flung archives. She is also extremely adept at unpacking the complicated legal [End Page 428] histories of slavery in the US and Mexico and does a superb job toggling between the two without losing sight of why slavery was and was not permitted in different places at different times. But historians interested in evidence beyond beautifully crafted stories will be disappointed. For example, Baumgartner cannot tell us how many enslaved people from the United States made it to Mexico. “My estimate,” she ventures, “based on scattered and incomplete Mexican sources, puts the number somewhere between three and five thousand” (4). While she is right to suggest this is far less than the tens of thousands who escaped to the US North, it is nonetheless frustrating that she offers nothing to document this guess. Yet for Baumgartner, the numbers do not matter, because while the “number of slaves who reached Mexico was undeniably small,” she believes that “each escape was important in its own right” (4). Critically, “their collective story had strategic and political significance out of all proportion to the numbers involved” (4). This may well be true. But while it is surely the case that fugitive slaves to Mexico “contributed” to the sectional tensions that led to the US Civil War, many things “contributed” to the coming of that war and to varying extents. Historians of the sectional conflict are under some obligation to stake their case about causality with more precision than Baumgartner’s interpretive framework can muster. Mark Smith University of South Carolina, Columbia Mark Smith MARK SMITH is...

Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker

Reviewed by: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker Viola Franziska Müller Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Edited by Timothy D. Walker. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 231. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-593-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-62534-593-6.) Slave flight is firmly back at the center of scholarly attention, and while publications on overland escapes have multiplied over the past several years, Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad makes a long overdue intervention by bringing the maritime world onto the stage. Timothy D. Walker's introduction and historiographical essay in chapter 1 both convincingly argue that, over time, we have come to disregard the importance of sea and water travel in U.S. history. This neglect has in turn contributed to the overlooking of maritime routes in the study of the Underground Railroad. Yet as this book makes clear, escapes by boat and ship were frequent in the antebellum era, and they firmly connected southern regions of departure with northern zones of refuge. One crucial observation, which runs through all the chapters, is the centrality of work. Enslaved and free Black people—especially men—often performed jobs and held positions in the maritime economy that enabled them to strategically build networks, broaden their horizons, and eventually plan and conduct escapes, be it for themselves or as allies of freedom seekers. To be sure, many of the networks of ferrymen, sailors, and stevedores discussed in this book are truly impressive. But the chapters do more than just illustrate how people used the context of work to facilitate escapes. They place Black Americans at the heart of antebellum maritime and economic life in both the southern and the northern states. As the backbone of a regional and national economy, Black maritime laborers encumbered the attempts of southern slaveholders to keep them confined. This heavy commercial dependence on Black maritime workers prevented large-scale restrictions on their mobility, as strict slave badge regulations, limits on hiring out, and increased surveillance of ports would by definition hamper economic activity. And so, the execution of these laws—practically the sole tool slaveholders had at their disposal—remained frequently ineffective. Over time, the growing volume of trade [End Page 771] increased the number of ships leaving southern ports, creating more opportunities for enslaved people to abscond. Contributions by Michael D. Thompson, David S. Cecelski, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, and Cheryl Janifer LaRoche explore slave flight from Charleston, coastal North Carolina, Norfolk, and Maryland, respectively. The authors do an excellent job of explaining the geographic characteristics of waterways and the sea and show that, no matter how challenging or peculiar the natural and social environment, many enslaved people found ways to slip through cracks in surveillance and onto boats and vessels that carried them out of slavery. Halfway through the book, the perspective shifts to the North, as Mirelle Luecke, Elysa Engelman, Kathryn Grover, and Len Travers focus on New York City, Connecticut, eastern Massachusetts, and New Bedford, as either destinations or places of transit. As these contributors vividly demonstrate, the maritime economy gave rise to sizable Black communities that fought on the front lines to rescue enslaved people and protect them from reenslavement. After all, despite the involvement of allies from all racial and social backgrounds, African Americans were the most important agents in these escapes. Collectively, Sailing to Freedom is an account of Black self-determination and successful resistance, which is truly remarkable since it also shows that obstacles, risks, and mutual suspicion among freedom seekers and their allies loomed large along these maritime routes. With a geographic focus on the East Coast, all cases presented deal with escapes to the northern states and Canada. Other routes of maritime flight, for instance, into the Caribbean or Mexico, are not covered in detail. Strictly speaking, the temporal scope also goes beyond the Underground Railroad, with some chapters discussing informal networks in the early republic. The contributions are first-rate. Drawing on personal accounts wherever possible and usually taking the perspective of the freedom seekers, each essay keeps lived experiences...

Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State by Christopher P. Lehman

Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State by Christopher P. Lehman

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

Introduction On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies

A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty

Reviewed by: A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America by Claire M. Wolnisty Cane West A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America. By Claire M. Wolnisty. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 159. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4962-0790-6.) In the mid-nineteenth century, as Americans looked westward across the continent, many white U.S. southerners also pursued expansion projects southward into Central and South America. Southern commentators such as Matthew Fontaine Maury felt that the future of the slaveholding U.S. South rested on the success of this sectional expansion into Latin America. Claire M. Wolnisty highlights "multiple southern expansionistic ideologies" pursued by filibusterers, commercial expansionists, and southern emigrants who developed increasingly hemispheric formulations of manifest destiny (p. xiv). She argues that these southern expansionists created political and economic networks between the U.S. South and South America through which the U.S. South could serve as the model for an "expansionistic, proslavery, and modern power poised to dominate the Western Hemisphere" (p. xiii). A Different Manifest Destiny: U.S. Southern Identity and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century South America builds [End Page 382] on recent scholarship by historians such as Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brian Schoen, and Matthew Karp emphasizing southern slaveholders' engagement with other nineteenth-century slaveholding societies in the Western Hemisphere. Wolnisty's study into the various nation-state and non-nation-state formulations of power in Central and South America demonstrates the possibility of "far more fluid spatial concepts" of an independent South than the eventual Confederacy (p. xv). The book's three chapters follow distinct groups of southern expansionists, primarily between the 1850s and 1870s, as they responded to European imperial projects in the hemisphere and domestic tensions over slavery. Chapter 1 focuses on the shifting rhetoric among military filibusterers in Nicaragua. Wolnisty draws from the writings of leading filibusterers, particularly William Walker, who first appealed to widespread anti-European sentiment before shifting to explicitly proslavery arguments that drew more sectional support. In chapter 2, her strongest chapter, she discusses the "economic infiltration" of commercial expansionists in Brazil (p. 37). She draws on letters and business ledgers from Americans in Brazil who created nonterritorial economic networks as an alternative to more high-profile military-backed territorial annexations. In chapter 3, Wolnisty follows newspapers and diaries of former Confederates who emigrated to Brazil after the Civil War. She argues that these immigrant communities carried their proslavery southern identity beyond the borders of the United States by adopting prewar southern expansion models. Readers of the Journal of Southern History will be drawn to the implications of a much more geographically fluid southern identity. Wolnisty's border-transcending southerners "became proslavery, modern economists within southern–South American networks" (p. xvii). Whether in Brazil or Nicaragua, these southern expansionists tied their identity to the promise of modern slave labor societies and settler-colonial communities modeled after the U.S. South. Wolnisty's conclusions also decenter cotton as the source of U.S. southerners' power. Cotton rarely appears in the text as Wolnisty focuses on themes of anti-European sentiment, slavery-driven capitalism, and geographic mobility. Though the study ostensibly covers the time frame of 1808 to 1877, to examine nearly a century of southerners looking toward South America, the study is largely focused on the years 1850–1877. This narrower time frame leaves readers with a limited understanding of how "expansionistic visions adapted to the shifting hemispheric environments" of the nineteenth century, with the notable exception of the post–Civil War emigrants to Brazil (p. xv). Material fluctuations in the volume of U.S.-Brazilian trade or the number of postwar southern emigrants to Brazil might provide some understanding of changes in hemispheric relations, but much of this evidence is listed only in the endnotes. A Different Manifest Destiny is helpful for scholars interested in the international dimensions of the nineteenth-century U.S. South and hemispheric case studies of southern, proslavery manifest destiny. The forms of non-state expansion show how southerners sought to develop global trade networks in the nineteenth century, and the attempted settler-colonies in Nicaragua...

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

Financial professionals and the formation of proprietarian ideology

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross

Reviewed by: Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross Felipe Alfonso and Paulo Henrique Rodrigues Pereira Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross. Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 295 pp. Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a comparative study on the interconnection between citizenship and racial subordination in slave societies. The book was cowritten by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross and builds on their previous work.1 Among the many contributions of the study, it is worth mentioning the authors' analytical shift from slavery to freedom. In Slave and Citizen (1946), Frank Tannenbaum explained the divergent modern race relations in the United States and Latin America as resulting from their distinct slave legal regimes.2 Over the years, revisionists criticized Tannenbaum for overemphasizing law at the expense of slave agency, whereas recent scholarship have been trying to synthesize these two variables. De la Fuente and Gross draw on the latter approach but reveal a major blind spot that have permeated the whole debate. For them, "it was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law" (4). The book covers three and a half centuries in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, locations that developed "successful, brutal slave societies" (223). This broad scope allows the authors to investigate the legal constructions of the Spanish, English, and French colonial enterprises, and to unveil how these structures induced the different historical paths taken by each society. Drawing on extensive primary research, De la Fuente and Gross demonstrate that the historical outcomes were above all conditioned by manumission and communities of free people of color, insofar as these factors resisted elite projects to restrict black freedom and citizenship and to associate blackness with slavery: "The larger the community, the greater the opportunities for freedom" (221). De la Fuente and Gross indicate multiple variables that shaped the differing trajectories taken by communities of free people of color in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Yet they devote particular attention to the "mutual constitutiveness" (9) between legal traditions, politics and culture, and the agency of historical actors. In Cuba, the right to manumission was not tied to race, as in Virginia and Louisiana, because Iberian traditions mostly applied [End Page 327] the practice to the liberation of Christian or Muslim captives. Consequently, "communities of free people of color attained significant numbers in Cuba, while those in Virginia and Louisiana dwindled" (7). However, if the size of these communities were key to the expansion of freedom, how come slavery lasted longer in Cuba than in the United States? Although the authors do not address this question directly, one could infer from their rationale that the answer would lie in the vicissitudes of American sectionalism. By the 1830s, as a direct response to Northern abolitionism, Southern slaveholders started to articulate an explicit defense of slavery framed around the idea of "positive good," which helped enlist nonslaveholding white men in the support of a Southerner way of life. As white supremacy gathered momentum, the terms of black subordination were gradually reframed from property or status (slavery) to race (citizenship). Thus, while it is true that slavery lasted longer in Cuba, the laws regulating free people of color in the United States "also served as templates for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place" (224). The book leaves research openings for scholars to further explore. How did black claims to citizenship differ when one compares Cuba (a colonial regime based on census suffrage) with the United States (a democratic, constitutional, federal, and representative republic)? Did the expelling of people of color from the Americas suggest the absence of a labor deficit in the United States? Has an Atlantic law, constituted by European legal traditions and local dynamics of American colonies, been formed along the centuries? By avoiding the traditional notion that slavery was the main social factor governing slave societies, the book to work as an alternative to formulations in which slavery is the...

“The Glory of the Nation”: Black Soldier-Historians and the Continuing African American Struggle for a Usable Past

Heated controversies in the United States over the 1619 Project’s construction of a race-centered master narrative of American history highlight the need to locate public debates over this topic in historical context. This article analyzes the concerted efforts of two black Union veterans, George Washington Williams and Joseph T. Wilson, to remember African Americans’ wartime military service at a critical moment in the progress of Civil War memory. By the late 1880s the northern victors’ account of the southern slaveholders’ revolt against the US government was fading fast under the challenge of new, hegemonic narratives that deprived African Americans of significant agency in the “War of the Rebellion”. The article contends that, while the two pioneer soldier-historians were unable to sustain a national memory of black men’s military patriotism into the Jim Crow era, their innovative narrative strategies helped to lay the foundations of an effective black counter-memory of the Civil War period in the twentieth century. DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2021.2

Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State

Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom and the African Colonization Movement

“Sustaining the Truth of the Bible”: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy

This article examines how the black Presbyterian minister James W. C. Pennington (1807–1870) and other black evangelicals engaged with German academic theology to challenge Southern slavery and demonstrate fitness for citizenship. It also shows that these black evangelical leaders strategically associated themselves with the same conservative German religious thinkers admired by Southern slaveholders. Recovering this transatlantic exchange reveals the surprisingly conservative character of many black evangelical abolitionists as well as the roots of an enduring black intellectual and theological tradition that explicitly linked religious orthodoxy with racial equality.

Colonizationism versus Abolitionism in the Antebellum North: The Anti-Slavery Society of Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary (1836) versus the Hanover College Officers, Board of Trustees, and Faculty

In March 1836, nine Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary students, almost certainly including Benjamin Franklin Templeton, a former slave enrolled in the seminary, formed an antislavery society. The society’s Preamble and Constitution set forth abolitionist ideals demanding an immediate emancipation of Southern slaves with rights of citizenship and “without expatriation.” Thus they encountered the ire of Hanover’s Presbyterian trustees—colonizationists who believed instead that free blacks and educated slaves, gradually and voluntarily emancipated by their owners, should leave the United States and relocate to Liberia, where they would experience greater opportunity, equality, and justice than was possible here in the United States and simultaneously exercise a civilizing and Christianizing influence on indigenous West Africans. By separating the races on two different continents with an ocean between them, America’s race problem would be solved. The efforts of the colonizationists failed, in part because of a lack of sufficient resources to transport and resettle three million African Americans. Then, too, few Southern slaveholders were willing to emancipate their slaves and finance those former slaves’ voyages, and most free blacks refused to leave the country of their birth. In Liberia, left largely to their own resources, colonists encountered disease, the enmity of local tribes, the threat of slavers, and difficulties in farming that left these former slaves struggling for existence, even if free blacks who engaged in mercantile trade there fared well. In the United States, the trustees’ conviction that American society was racist beyond reform, together with their refusal to confront the system of slavery in the South in hope of preserving the Union and their refusal to allow even discussion of the subject of slavery on the Hanover campus, left their central question unanswered: Would it ever be possible for people of color and whites to reside together in the United States peaceably and equitably? The trustees’ decision exerted another long-term impact as well. Although today the campus is integrated, Hanover College would not admit an African American student until 1948.

Slavery's Reach

Review of: Slavery's Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State, by Christopher P. Lehman

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

Reviewed by: This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp Donald A. Rakestraw This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. By Matthew Karp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $31.00. ISBN: 978-0-6747-3725-9. In This Vast Southern Empire Matthew Karp adds his convincing voice to those recasting the profile of southern planter elites in antebellum America. Far removed from the traditional image of myopic states' rights agriculturalists devoted to the static forms of the past, these southern power brokers were sophisticated champions of an advancing global market structure centered on the proliferation [End Page 363] of African slave labor. They were, Karp contends, "cosmopolitan in outlook" and "practical visionaries" who "warmly embraced the global dimensions of their struggle" and believed that "the growth of slavery" was intrinsic to the march of civilization (3, 2, 4, resp.). Karp notes that southern proslavery statesmen such as Andrew Jackson, John Tyler, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, Abel Upshur, and Jefferson Davis held the reins of both the military and foreign policy apparatus for most of the antebellum period. During these years, they were not, as commonly assumed, married to states' rights but were intentional in their application of federal power and the promotion of "a strong outward state" through which, Karp contends, they could summon "federal authority not only to secure their immediate property rights, but also to extend the power of the United States on an international stage" (6). Southerners' carping about states' rights only appeared on occasions that served their immediate interests. For much of the period, they found those interests better served by a powerful federal authority over which they exerted significant influence. These southern leaders at the national helm, Karp argues, constructed "a foreign policy of slavery," the orchestration and implementation of which was essential, in their view, not just for the South but for the entire nation. "From their international perspective," in Karp's estimation, "'this vast Southern Empire' was, quite simply, the United States" (8). In pursuit of their vision this slaveholding coterie found partners in the hemisphere with fellow slave states Cuba, Brazil, and, prior to annexation, the Republic of Texas. An obvious and looming impediment to the southern plan emerged when the British announced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, ending slavery in most of the empire. More importantly for American observers, the act promised emancipation to over three quarters of a million bound servants in the Western Hemisphere. This act, Karp notes, "would transform the way southern elites thought about foreign affairs more forcefully than any other global event between the American Revolution and the Civil War" (12). Southern slaveholders now found their vision threatened not just in theory but in action. Soon, southern slave "property" was forfeited [End Page 364] to a British determination to free any slaves who arrived on their West Indian shores no matter the circumstance or the flag of the transport---the most notable example of which involved the slaves of the Creole, whose escape from the United States to the Bahamas raised a number of festering issues of international law and property rights. Britain's commitment to abolition reflected in such affronts to the legality of bound servitude formed an adhesive for proslavery advocates across the hemisphere that southern internationalists could exploit to secure and advance their economic model. Karp notes that southern elites understood that the key to securing the future of the slave system and implementing the foreign policy of slavery was a strong U.S. military, especially its naval arm. The connection of the extension of the U.S. military footprint to the South's determination to propagate a modern capitalist structure based on slave-produced southern cotton (pre-annexation Texas included), Cuban sugar, and Brazilian coffee weaves its way throughout the book. Contrary to traditional thinking that connected the military buildup to the fetish of U.S. expansionism, Karp makes it clear that the goal was not expansion of slavery but protection of the institution itself. He notes early on and reinforces throughout the book that, apart from Texas, the southern priority during the antebellum period...

Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court by Paul Finkelman

Reviewed by: Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court by Paul Finkelman Dinah Mayo Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court. By Paul Finkelman. The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 287. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-05121-8.) In addition to editing, coediting, and cowriting volumes on topics in U.S. cultural, political, and legal history, Paul Finkelman is the author of several books on the politics of slavery. In Supreme Injustice: Slavery in the Nation’s Highest Court, he turns to the proslavery decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall, Associate Justice Joseph Story, and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court’s most famous antebellum jurists. Although historians have looked closely at Taney’s superfluously racist defense of slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Finkelman maintains that that case was the culmination of proslavery judgments that began in 1801. Together the justices facilitated the deterioration of sectional harmony and, by extension, the deaths of more than 600,000 Americans. Any of them could have, Finkelman argues, taken advantage of language in the Constitution that could have been used to combat slavery, protect the rights of free African Americans, and effectuate a peaceful, political resolution of slavery. Finkelman provides concise yet informative examinations of the justices’ proslavery jurisprudence through case law, statutes, speeches, letters, archival and historical society collections, newspapers, and scholarly literature. Each chapter contains a short biography and a historiographical discussion that explain how historians have insulated Marshall, Story, and to an extent, Taney from slavery. This trend is especially odd in Marshall’s case, since he was a Virginia slaveholder who crafted jurisprudence that protected criminal slave traders, wrote court opinions to reverse successful lower court freedom suits, sending freed persons back to slavery, and belonged to the American Colonization Society. Story was more complex. He was a New Englander, did not own slaves, and publicly opposed slavery. His time on the Court began during Marshall’s tenure and ended nearly a decade after Taney’s appointment in 1836. Even Story’s early opinions while he was on the Court opposed slavery, including a vote to free the Amistad Africans. However, Story’s ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) nationalized slavery and left free African Americans open to kidnapping. He was labeled the “slave-catcher-in-chief” by abolitionists (p. 170). Taney, like Marshall, was a southern slaveholder who was castigated for the Dred Scott decision. But Taney even experienced a brush with scholarly expiation in the early twentieth century, when historians tried to revise his image. Finkelman debunks these revisions by presenting the proslavery decisions and racist statements that Taney made throughout his career. A welcomed addition is Finkelman’s exposure of Taney’s flawed historical thinking in his Dred Scott opinion. Regrettably, history is still often viewed through a lens that ignores the diverse history of the founding, which included [End Page 155] African Americans’ right to vote in several states and the antislavery position of many of the Framers. Supreme Injustice accomplishes its primary goal by exposing how each justice furthered the interests of slavery. It also introduces readers to freed persons, slaveholders, governors, kidnappers, and abolitionists to exemplify the human cost of Supreme Court rulings. General readers, college students, and professional historians will gain a deeper understanding of the Court and the crisis over slavery. Yet the book is not without shortcomings. Finkelman never fully explains how the justices, especially the slave owners, could have drawn antislavery conclusions from a proslavery Constitution. Additionally, conclusions about Story’s views of Virginians and his transformation from an antislavery to a proslavery position are less than satisfying. In the chapter dedicated to Story, Finkelman determines that Story’s nationalism and fears over disunion instigated the justice’s proslavery rulings after the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833. However, in the book’s coda, Finkelman questions the validity of a similar interpretation offered by a leading biographer of Story. These flaws do not diminish the book’s contributions. Supreme Injustice is readable, well-documented, and amply researched scholarship that offers a fresh look at the nineteenth-century Supreme Court, with...

The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home by Eugene D. Genovese

Reviewed by: The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home by Eugene D. Genovese Matthew Karp (bio) The Sweetness of Life: Southern Planters at Home. By Eugene D. Genovese. Edited by Douglas Ambrose. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 275. Paper, $29.00.) Eugene Genovese died in 2012, leaving behind what is probably the most influential body of scholarship produced by a historian of the slaveholding South. Over almost half a century of writing—an epoch fully as long as the antebellum era itself—Genovese's books virtually defined the field. From The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (1965) through to Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), and, with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983) and The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (2005)—Genovese unspooled a distinctive and powerful interpretation of antebellum slave society. In a preface to this posthumously published volume, Douglas Ambrose offers a succinct summary of Genovese's fundamental insight, which continued to anchor his work even as his political commitments moved from the Marxist left to the Catholic right: "The master–slave relation—an unequal but nonetheless contested struggle—provided the foundation of the southern social order and 'permeated the lives and thought of all who lived in the society it dominated'" (xiv). Like most truly powerful historical interpretations, the significance of Genovese's view of the Old South has become clearer through intense argument, not unanimous assent. In the last twenty years, even as much scholarship has overturned key elements of the Genovese interpretation—in particular, the idea that southern masters were innately hostile to capitalist modernity—much of the debate has unfolded on Genovese's terms. Antebellum planters, we see today more vividly than ever, were a class defined not by region, agriculture, or even race, but by their ownership of slaves. While the supposed intimacy of that class conflict remains subject to fierce dispute, its ubiquity and foundational centrality does not. Before his death, Genovese had almost completed a final book on the lifestyle habits and everyday cultural world of the master class. Lightly edited and insightfully introduced by Ambrose, this volume now takes [End Page 800] its place on the shelf as the great historian's final contribution to the history of the South. And in many ways, as Ambrose is at some pains to argue, The Sweetness of Life fits comfortably within Genovese's larger oeuvre. Like most of his major works, including Roll, Jordan, Roll and The Mind of the Master Class, the book is structured not by chronology or geography but by theme. A topic is introduced—here, they include dining, hunting, dancing, and courtship—and a cascade of episodes is enumerated. Seldom does an episode or a character last more than a paragraph; most, in fact, earn no more than a sentence, although several favored witnesses (from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson) recur throughout the text. This thematic discussion ranges far across time and place, attentive to peculiarities and transformations, but nevertheless approaching the Old South as an essentially cohesive unit, from Virginia in the 1770s to Texas in the 1850s. "Nothing much changed in Georgia or anywhere else in the first half of the nineteenth century," Genovese says of the southern mania for horse racing (238). This is not quite his verdict on every subject covered here, but it is often the guiding assumption. At its best, The Sweetness of Life presents a collage of vivid and striking images from an oligarchic society, in which even the lightest pleasures depended on the heavy weight of bondage. The rollicking celebrations at the Georgia racetrack were ever darkened by the possibility that gambling losses might cause the sale of slaves. In the heat of South Carolina or Louisiana, a summer feast of venison patty, palmetto cabbage, and terrapin stew was endurable only thanks to the enslaved workers sweatily propelling the "punkah" fan on the ceiling (32). In all his works, it would be hard to find a better metaphor for Genovese's view of...