slave power thesis

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The slave power : the free North and southern domination, 1780-1860

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Uploaded by station39.cebu on October 9, 2020

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Space, time, and sectionalism, the historian's use of sectionalism and vice versa, … with liberty and justice for whom.

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What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

I would like to thank David Dangerfield, Allen Driggers, Tiffany Florvil, Margaret Gillikin, Ramon Jackson, Evan Kutzler, Tyler Parry, David Prior, Tara Strauch, Beth Toyofuku, and Ann Tucker for their comments on an early version of this essay, and to extend special thanks to Mark M. Smith for perceptive criticism of multiple drafts. I would also like to thank Edward Linenthal for his expert criticism and guidance through the publication process and to express my gratitude to the four JAH readers, Ann Fabian, James M. McPherson, Randall Miller, and one anonymous reviewer, for their exceptionally thoughtful and helpful comments on the piece.

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Michael E. Woods, What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature, Journal of American History , Volume 99, Issue 2, September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

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Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular Civil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.” 1

Despite the impulse to close ranks amid the culture wars, however, professional historians have not abandoned the debate over Civil War causation. Rather, they have rightly concluded that there is not much of a consensus on the topic after all. Elizabeth Varon remarks that although “scholars can agree that slavery, more than any other issue, divided North and South, there is still much to be said about why slavery proved so divisive and why sectional compromise ultimately proved elusive.” And as Edward Ayers observes: “slavery and freedom remain the keys to understanding the war, but they are the place to begin our questions, not to end them.” 2 The continuing flood of scholarship on the sectional conflict suggests that many other historians agree. Recent work on the topic reveals two widely acknowledged truths: that slavery was at the heart of the sectional conflict and that there is more to learn about precisely what this means, not least because slavery was always a multifaceted issue.

This essay analyzes the extensive literature on Civil War causation published since 2000, a body of work that has not been analyzed at length. This survey cannot be comprehensive but seeks instead to clarify current debates in a field long defined by distinct interpretive schools—such as those of the progressives, revisionists, and modernization theorists—whose boundaries are now blurrier. To be sure, echoes still reverberate of the venerable arguments between historians who emphasize abstract economic, social, or political forces and those who stress human agency. The classic interpretive schools still command allegiance, with fundamentalists who accentuate concrete sectional differences dueling against revisionists, for whom contingency, chance, and irrationality are paramount. But recent students of Civil War causation have not merely plowed familiar furrows. They have broken fresh ground, challenged long-standing assumptions, and provided new perspectives on old debates. This essay explores three key issues that vein the recent scholarship: the geographic and temporal parameters of the sectional conflict, the relationship between sectionalism and nationalism, and the relative significance of race and class in sectional politics. All three problems stimulated important research long before 2000, but recent work has taken them in new directions. These themes are particularly helpful for navigating the recent scholarship, and by using them to organize and evaluate the latest literature, this essay underscores fruitful avenues for future study of a subject that remains central in American historiography. 3

Historians of the sectional conflict, like their colleagues in other fields, have consciously expanded the geographic and chronological confines of their research. Crossing the borders of the nation-state and reaching back toward the American Revolution, many recent studies of the war's origins situate the clash over slavery within a broad spatial and temporal context. The ramifications of this work will not be entirely clear until an enterprising scholar incorporates those studies into a new synthesis, but this essay will offer a preliminary evaluation.

Scholarship following the transnational turn in American history has silenced lingering doubts that nineteenth-century Americans of all regions, classes, and colors were deeply influenced by people, ideas, and events from abroad. Historians have long known that the causes of the Civil War cannot be understood outside the context of international affairs, particularly the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). Three of the most influential narrative histories of the Civil War era open either on Mexican soil (those written by Allan Nevins and James McPherson) or with the transnational journey from Mexico City to Washington of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis ). The domestic political influence of the annexation of Texas, Caribbean filibustering, and the Ostend Manifesto, a widely publicized message written to President Franklin Pierce in 1854 that called for the acquisition of Cuba, are similarly well established. 4

Recent studies by Edward Bartlett Rugemer and Matthew J. Clavin, among others, build on that foundation to show that the international dimensions of the sectional conflict transcended the bitterly contested question of territorial expansion. Rugemer, for instance, demonstrates that Caribbean emancipation informed U.S. debates over slavery from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) through Reconstruction. Situating sectional politics within the Atlantic history of slavery and abolition, he illustrates how arguments for and against U.S. slavery drew from competing interpretations of emancipation in the British West Indies. Britain's “mighty experiment” thus provided “useable history for an increasingly divided nation.” Proslavery ideologues learned that abolitionism sparked insurrection, that Africans and their descendants would become idlers or murderers or both if released from bondage, and that British radicals sought to undermine the peculiar institution wherever it persisted. To slavery's foes, the same history revealed that antislavery activism worked, that emancipation could be peaceful and profitable, and that servitude, not skin tone, degraded enslaved laborers. Clavin's study of American memory of Toussaint L'Ouverture indicates that the Haitian Revolution cast an equally long shadow over antebellum history. Construed as a catastrophic race war, the revolution haunted slaveholders with the prospect of an alliance between ostensibly savage slaves and fanatical whites. Understood as a hopeful story of the downtrodden overthrowing their oppressors, however, Haitian history furnished abolitionists, white and black, with an inspiring example of heroic self-liberation by the enslaved. By the 1850s it also furnished abolitionists, many of whom were frustrated by the abysmally slow progress of emancipation in the United States, with a precedent for swift, violent revolution and the vindication of black masculinity. The Haitian Revolution thus provided “resonant, polarizing, and ultimately subversive symbols” for antislavery and proslavery partisans alike and helped “provoke a violent confrontation and determine the fate of slavery in the United States.” 5

These findings will surprise few students of Civil War causation, but they demonstrate that the international aspects of the sectional conflict did not begin and end with Manifest Destiny. They also encourage Atlantic historians to pay more attention to the nineteenth century, particularly to the period after British emancipation. Rugemer and Clavin point out that deep connections among Atlantic rim societies persisted far into the nineteenth century and that, like other struggles over New World slavery, the American Civil War is an Atlantic story. One of their most stimulating contributions may therefore be to encourage Atlantic historians to widen their temporal perspectives to include the middle third of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding the hotly contested public memory of the Haitian Revolution, Rugemer and Clavin push the story of American sectionalism back into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, suggesting that crossing geographic boundaries can go hand in hand with stretching the temporal limits of sectionalism. 6

The internationalizing impulse has also nurtured economic interpretations of the sectional struggle. Brian Schoen, Peter Onuf, and Nicholas Onuf situate antebellum politics within the context of global trade, reinvigorating economic analysis of sectionalism without summoning the ghosts of Charles Beard and Mary Beard. Readers may balk at their emphasis on tariff debates, but these histories are plainly not Confederate apologia. As Schoen points out, chattel slavery expanded in the American South, even as it withered throughout most of the Atlantic world, because southern masters embraced the nineteenth century's most important crop: cotton. Like the oil titans of a later age, southern cotton planters reveled in the economic indispensability of their product. Schoen adopts a cotton-centered perspective from which to examine southern political economy, from the earliest cotton boom to the secession crisis. “Broad regional faith in cotton's global power,” he argues, “both informed secessionists' actions and provided them an indispensable tool for mobilizing otherwise reluctant confederates.” Planters' commitment to the production and overseas sale of cotton shaped southern politics and business practices. It impelled westward expansion, informed planters' jealous defense of slavery, and wedded them to free trade. An arrogant faith in their commanding economic position gave planters the impetus and the confidence to secede when northern Republicans threatened to block the expansion of slavery and increase the tariff. The Onufs reveal a similar dynamic at work in their complementary study, Nations, Markets, and War. Like Schoen, they portray slaveholders as forward-looking businessmen who espoused free-trade liberalism in defense of their economic interests. Entangled in political competition with Yankee protectionists throughout the early national and antebellum years, slaveholders seceded when it became clear that their vision for the nation's political economy—most importantly its trade policy—could no longer prevail. 7

These authors examine Civil War causation within a global context, though in a way more reminiscent of traditional economic history than similar to other recent transnational scholarship. But perhaps the most significant contribution made by these authors lies beyond internationalizing American history. After all, most historians of the Old South have recognized that the region's economic and political power depended on the Atlantic cotton trade, and scholars of the Confederacy demonstrated long ago that overconfidence in cotton's international leverage led southern elites to pursue a disastrous foreign policy. What these recent studies reveal is that cotton-centered diplomatic and domestic politics long predated southern independence and had roots in the late eighteenth century, when slaveholders' decision to enlarge King Cotton's domain set them on a turbulent political course that led to Appomattox. The Onufs and Schoen, then, like Rugemer and Clavin, expand not only the geographic parameters of the sectional conflict but also its temporal boundaries. 8

These four important histories reinforce recent work that emphasizes the eruption of the sectional conflict at least a generation before the 1820 Missouri Compromise. If the conflict over Missouri was a “firebell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson called it, it was a rather tardy alarm. This scholarship mirrors a propensity among political historians—most notably scholars of the civil rights movement—to write “long histories.” Like their colleagues who dispute the Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative of the civil rights era, political historians of the early republic have questioned conventional periodization by showing that sectionalism did not spring fully grown from the head of James Tallmadge, the New York congressman whose February 1819 proposal to bar the further extension of slavery into Missouri unleashed the political storm that was calmed, for the moment, by the Missouri Compromise. Matthew Mason, for instance, maintains that “there never was a time between the Revolution and the Civil War in which slavery went unchallenged.” Mason shows that political partisans battered their rivals with the club of slavery, with New England Federalists proving especially adept at denouncing their Jeffersonian opponents as minions of southern slaveholders. In a series of encounters, from the closure of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 to the opening (fire)bell of the Missouri crisis, slavery remained a central question in American politics. Even the outbreak of war in 1812 failed to suppress the issue. 9

A complementary study by John Craig Hammond confirms that slavery roiled American politics from the late eighteenth century on and that its westward expansion proved especially divisive years before the Missouri fracas. As America's weak national government continued to bring more western acreage under its nominal control, it had to accede to local preferences regarding slavery. Much of the fierce conflict over slavery therefore occurred at the territorial and state levels. Hammond astutely juxtaposes the histories of slave states such as Louisiana and Missouri alongside those of Ohio and Indiana, where proslavery policies were defeated. In every case, local politics proved decisive. Neither the rise nor the extent of the cotton kingdom was a foregone conclusion, and the quarrel over its expansion profoundly influenced territorial and state politics north and south of the Ohio River. Bringing the growing scholarship on both early republic slavery and proslavery ideology into conversation with political history, Hammond demonstrates that the bitterness of the Missouri debate stemmed from that dispute's contentious prehistory, not from its novelty. Just as social, economic, and intellectual historians have traced the “long history” of the antebellum South back to its once relatively neglected early national origins, political historians have uncovered the deep roots of political discord over slavery's expansion. 10

Scholars have applied the “long history” principle to other aspects of Civil War causation as well. In his study of the slave power thesis, Leonard L. Richards finds that northern anxieties about slaveholders' inordinate political influence germinated during the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Jan Lewis's argument that the concessions made to southern delegates at the convention emboldened them to demand special protection for slavery suggests that those apprehensions were sensible. David L. Lightner demonstrates that northern demands for a congressional ban on the domestic slave trade, designed to strike a powerful and, thanks to the interstate commerce clause, constitutional blow against slavery extension emerged during the first decade of the nineteenth century and informed antislavery strategy for the next fifty years. Richard S. Newman emphasizes that abolitionist politics long predated William Lloyd Garrison's founding of the Liberator in 1831. Like William W. Freehling, who followed the “road to disunion” back to the American Revolution, Newman commences his study of American abolitionism with the establishment of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in 1775. Most recently, Christopher Childers has invited historians to explore the early history of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. 11

Skeptics might ask where the logic of these studies will lead. Why not push the origins of sectional strife even further back into colonial history? Why not begin, as did a recent overview of Civil War causation, with the initial arrival of African slaves in Virginia in 1619? This critique has a point—hopefully we will never read an article called “Christopher Columbus and the Coming of the American Civil War”—but two virtues of recent work on the long sectional conflict merit emphasis. First, its extended view mirrors the very long, if chronically selective, memories of late antebellum partisans. By the 1850s few sectional provocateurs failed to trace northern belligerence toward the South, and vice versa, back to the eighteenth century. Massachusetts Republican John B. Alley reminded Congress in April 1860 that slavery had been “a disturbing element in our national politics ever since the organization of the Government.” “In fact,” Alley recalled, “political differences were occasioned by it, and sectional prejudices grew out of it, at a period long anterior to the formation of the Federal compact.” Eight tumultuous months later, U.S. senator Robert Toombs recounted to the Georgia legislature a litany of northern aggressions and insisted that protectionism and abolitionism had tainted Yankee politics from “ the very first Congress .” Tellingly, the study of historical memory, most famously used to analyze remembrance of the Civil War, has moved the study of Civil War causation more firmly into the decades between the nation's founding and the Missouri Compromise. Memories of the Haitian Revolution shaped antebellum expectations for emancipation. Similarly, recollections of southern economic sacrifice during Jefferson's 1807 embargo and the War of 1812 heightened white southerners' outrage over their “exclusion” from conquered Mexican territory more than three decades later. And as Margot Minardi has shown, Massachusetts abolitionists used public memory of the American Revolution to champion emancipation and racial equality. The Missouri-to-Sumter narrative conceals that these distant events haunted the memories of late antebellum Americans. Early national battles over slavery did not make the Civil War inevitable, but in the hands of propagandists they could make the war seem inevitable to many contemporaries. 12

Second, proponents of the long view of Civil War causation have not made a simplistic argument for continuity. Elizabeth Varon's study of the evolution of disunion as a political concept and rhetorical device from 1789 to 1859 demonstrates that long histories need not obscure change over time. Arguing that “sectional tensions deriving from the diverging interests of the free labor North and the slaveholding South” were “as old as the republic itself,” Varon adopts a long perspective on sectional tension. But her nuanced analysis of the diverse and shifting political uses of disunion rhetoric suggests that what historians conveniently call the sectional conflict was in fact a series of overlapping clashes, each with its own dynamics and idiom. Quite literally, the terms of sectional debate remained in flux. The language of disunion came in five varieties—“a prophecy of national ruin, a threat of withdrawal from the federal compact, an accusation of treasonous plotting, a process of sectional alienation, and a program for regional independence”—and the specific meanings of each cannot be interpreted accurately without regard to historical context, for “their uses changed and shifted over time.” To cite just one example, the concept of disunion as a process of increasing alienation between North and South gained credibility during the 1850s as proslavery and antislavery elements clashed, often violently, over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the extension of slavery into Kansas. Republican senator William Henry Seward's famous “irrepressible conflict” speech of 1858 took this interpretation of disunion, one that had long languished on the radical margins of sectional politics, and thrust it into mainstream discourse. Shifting political circumstances reshaped the terms of political debate from the 1830s, when the view of disunion as an irreversible process flourished only among abolitionists and southern extremists, to the late 1850s, when a leading contender for the presidential nomination of a major party could express it openly. 13

Consistent with Varon's emphasis on the instability of political rhetoric, other recent studies of Civil War causation have spotlighted two well-known and important forks in the road to disunion. Thanks to their fresh perspective on the crisis of 1819–1821, scholars of early national sectionalism have identified the Missouri struggle as the first of these turning points. The battle over slavery in Missouri, Robert Pierce Forbes argues, was “a crack in the master narrative” of American history that fundamentally altered how Americans thought about slavery and the Union. In the South, it nurtured a less crassly self-interested defense of servitude. Simultaneously, it tempted northerners to conceptually separate “the South” from “America,” thereby sectionalizing the moral problem of slavery and conflating northern values and interests with those of the nation. The intensity of the crisis demonstrated that the slavery debate threatened the Union, prompting Jacksonian-era politicians to suppress the topic and stymie sectionalists for a generation. But even as the Missouri controversy impressed moderates with the need for compromise, it fostered “a new clarity in the sectional politics of the United States and moved each section toward greater coherence on the slavery issue” by refining arguments for and against the peculiar institution. The competing ideologies that defined antebellum sectional politics coalesced during the contest over Missouri, now portrayed as a milestone rather than a starter's pistol. 14

A diverse body of scholarship identifies a second period of discontinuity stretching from 1845 to 1850. This literature confirms rather than challenges traditional periodization, for those years have long marked the beginning of the “Civil War era.” This time span has attracted considerable attention because the slavery expansion debate intensified markedly between the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Compromise of 1850. Not surprisingly, recent work on slavery's contested westward extension continues to present the late 1840s as a key turning point—perhaps a point of no return—in the sectional conflict. As Michael S. Green puts it, by 1848, “something in American political life clearly had snapped. … [T]he genies that [James K.] Polk, [David] Wilmot, and their allies had let out of the bottle would not be put back in.” 15

Scholars not specifically interested in slavery expansion have also identified the late 1840s as a decisive period. In his history of southern race mythology—the notion that white southerners' “Norman” ancestry elevated them over Saxon-descended northerners—Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. identifies these years as a transition period between two theories of sectional difference. White southerners' U.S. nationalism persisted into the 1840s, he argues, and although they recognized cultural differences between the Yankees and themselves, the dissimilarities were not imagined in racial terms. After 1850, however, white southerners increasingly argued for innate differences between the white southern “race” and its ostensibly inferior northern rival. This mythology was a “key element” in the “flowering of southern nationalism before and during the Civil War.” Susan-Mary Grant has shown that northern opinion of the South underwent a simultaneous shift, with the slave power thesis gaining widespread credibility by the late 1840s. The year 1850 marked an economic turning point as well. Marc Egnal posits that around that year, a generation of economic integration between North and South gave way to an emerging “Lake Economy,” which knit the Northwest and Northeast into an economic and political alliance at odds with the South. Taken together, this scholarship reaffirms what historians have long suspected about the sectional conflict: despite sectionalism's oft-recalled roots in the early national period, the late 1840s represents an important period of discontinuity. It is unsurprising that these years climaxed with a secession scare and a makeshift compromise reached not through bona fide give-and-take but rather through the political dexterity of Senator Stephen A. Douglas. 16

That Douglas succeeded where the eminent Henry Clay had failed suggests another late 1840s discontinuity that deserves more scholarly attention. Thirty-six years older than the Little Giant, Clay was already Speaker of the House when Douglas was born in 1813. Douglas's shepherding of Clay's smashed omnibus bill through the Senate in 1850 “marked a changing of the guard from an older generation, whose time already might have passed, to a new generation whose time had yet to come.” This passing of the torch symbolized a broader shift in political personnel. The Thirty-First Congress, which passed the compromise measures of 1850, was a youthful assembly. The average age for representatives was forty-three, only two were older than sixty-two, and more than half were freshmen. The Senate was similarly youthful, particularly its Democratic members, fewer than half of whom had reached age fifty. Moreover, the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster between March 1850 and October 1852 signaled to many observers the end of an era. In 1851 members of the University of Virginia's Southern Rights Association reminded their southern peers that “soon the destinies of the South must be entrusted to our keeping. The present occupants of the arena of action must soon pass away, and we be called upon to fill their places. … It becomes therefore our sacred duty to prepare for the contest.” 17

Students of Civil War causation would do well to probe this intergenerational transfer of power. This analysis need not revive the argument, most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, that the “blundering generation” of hot-headed and self-serving politicos who grasped the reins of power around 1850 brought on an unnecessary war. Caricaturing the rising generation as exceptionally inept is not required to profitably contrast the socioeconomic environments, political contexts, and intellectual milieus in which Clay's and Douglas's respective generations matured. These differences, and the generational conflict that they engendered, may have an important bearing on both the origins and the timing of the Civil War. Peter Carmichael's study of Virginia's last antebellum generation explores this subject in detail. Historians have long recognized that disproportionately high numbers of young white southerners supported secession. Carmichael offers a compelling explanation for why this was so, without portraying his subjects as mediocre statesmen or citing the eternal impetuousness of youth. Deftly blending cultural, social, economic, and political history, Carmichael rejects the notion that young Virginia gentlemen who came of age in the late 1850s were immature, impassioned, and reckless. They were, he argues, idealistic and ambitious men who believed deeply in progress but worried that their elders had squandered Virginia's traditional economic and political preeminence. Confronted with their state's apparent degeneration and their own lack of opportunity for advancement, Carmichael's young Virginians endorsed a pair of solutions that put them at odds with their conservative elders: economic diversification and, after John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, southern independence. Whether this generational dynamic extended beyond Virginia remains to be seen. But other recent works, including Stephen Berry's study of young white men in the Old South and Jon Grinspan's essay on youthful Republicans during the 1860 presidential campaign, indicate that similar concerns about progress, decline, and sectional destiny haunted many young minds on the eve of the Civil War. More work in this area is necessary, especially on how members of the new generation remembered the sectional conflict that had been raging since before they were born. Clearly, though, the generation that ascended to national leadership during the 1850s came of age in a very different world than had its predecessor. Further analysis of this shift promises to link the insights of the long sectional conflict approach (particularly regarding public memory) with the emphasis on late 1840s discontinuity that veins recent scholarship on sectionalism. 18

Recent historians have challenged conventional periodization by expanding the chronological scope of the sectional conflict, even as they confirm two key moments of historical discontinuity. This work revises older interpretations of Civil War causation without overturning them. A second trend in the literature, however, is potentially more provocative. A number of powerfully argued studies building on David Potter's classic essay, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” have answered his call for closer scrutiny of the “seemingly manifest difference between the loyalties of a nationalistic North and a sectionalistic South.” Impatient with historians who read separatism into all aspects of prewar southern politics or Unionism into all things northern, Potter admonished scholars not to project Civil War loyalties back into the antebellum period. A more nuanced approach would reveal “that in the North as well as in the South there were deep sectional impulses, and support or nonsupport of the Union was sometimes a matter of sectional tactics rather than of national loyalty.” Recent scholars have accepted Potter's challenge, and their findings contribute to an emerging reinterpretation of the sectional conflict and the timing of secession. 19

Disentangling northern from national interests and values has been difficult thanks in part to the Civil War itself (in which “the North” and “the Union” overlapped, albeit imperfectly) and because of the northern victory and the temptation to classify the Old South as an un-American aberration. But several recent studies have risen to the task. Challenging the notion that the antebellum North must have been nationalistic because of its opposition to slavery and its role in the Civil War, Susan-Mary Grant argues that by the 1850s a stereotyped view of the South and a sense of moral and economic superiority had created a powerful northern sectional identity. Championed by the Republican party, this identity flowered into an exclusionary nationalism in which the South served as a negative reference point for the articulation of ostensibly national values, goals, and identities based on the North's flattering self-image. This sectionalism-cum-nationalism eventually corroded national ties by convincing northerners that the South represented an internal threat to the nation. Although this vision became genuinely national after the war, in the antebellum period it was sectionally specific and bitterly divisive. “It was not the case,” Grant concludes, “that the northern ideology of the antebellum period was American, truly national, and supportive of the Union and the southern ideology was wholly sectional and destructive of the Union.” Matthew Mason makes a related point about early national politics, noting that the original sectionalists were antislavery New England Federalists whose flirtation with secession in 1815 crippled their party. Never simply the repository of authentic American values, the nineteenth-century North developed a sectional identity in opposition to an imagined (though not fictitious) South. Only victory in the Civil War allowed for the reconstruction of the rest of the nation in this image. 20

If victory in the war obscured northern sectionalism, it was the defense of slavery, coupled with defeat, that has distorted our view of American nationalism in the Old South. The United States was founded as a slaveholding nation, and there was unfortunately nothing necessarily un-American about slavery in the early nineteenth century. Slavery existed in tension with, not purely in opposition to, the nation's perennially imperfect political institutions, and its place in the young republic was a hotly contested question with a highly contingent resolution. Moreover, despite their pretensions to being an embattled minority, southern elites long succeeded in harnessing national ideals and federal power to their own interests. Thus, defense of slavery was neither inevitably nor invariably secessionist. This is a key theme of Robert Bonner's expertly crafted history of the rise and fall of proslavery American nationalism. Adopting a long-sectional-conflict perspective, Bonner challenges historians who have “conflate[d] an understandable revulsion at proslavery ideology with a willful disassociation of bondage from prevailing American norms.” He details the efforts of proslavery southerners to integrate slavery into national identity and policy and to harmonize slaveholding with American expansionism, republicanism, constitutionalism, and evangelicalism. Appropriating the quintessentially American sense of national purpose, proslavery nationalists “invited outsiders to consider [slavery's] compatibility with broadly shared notions of American values and visions of a globally redeeming national mission.” This effort ended in defeat, but not because proslavery southerners chronically privileged separatism over nationalism. Rather, it was their failure to bind slavery to American nationalism—signaled by the Republican triumph in 1860—that finally drove slaveholders to secede. Lincoln's victory “effectively ended the prospects for achieving proslavery Americanism within the federal Union,” forcing slavery's champions to pin their hopes to a new nation-state. Confederate nationalism was more a response to the demise of proslavery American nationalism than the cause of its death. 21

Other recent studies of slaveholders' efforts to nationalize their goals and interests complement Bonner's skilled analysis. Matthew J. Karp casts proslavery politicians not as jumpy sectionalists but as confident imperialists who sponsored an ambitious and costly expansion of American naval power to protect slavery against foreign encroachment and to exert national influence overseas. For these slaveholding nationalists, “federal power was not a danger to be feared, but a force to be utilized,” right up to the 1860 election. Similarly, Brian Schoen has explored cotton planters' efforts to ensure that national policy on tariff rates and slavery's territorial status remained favorable to their interests. As cotton prices boomed during the 1850s, planters grew richer and the stakes grew higher, especially as their national political power waned with the ascension of the overtly sectional Republican party. The simultaneous increase in planters' economic might and decline in their political dominance made for an explosive mixture that shattered the bonds of the Union. Still, one must not focus solely on cases in which proslavery nationalism was thwarted, for its successes convinced many northerners of the veracity of the slave power thesis, helping further corrode the Union. James L. Huston shows that both southern efforts to nationalize property rights in slaves and the prospect of slavery becoming a national institution—in the sense that a fully integrated national market could bring slave and free labor into competition—fueled northern sectionalism and promoted the rise of the Republican party. Proslavery nationalism and its policy implications thus emboldened the political party whose victory in 1860 convinced proslavery southerners that their goals could not be realized within the Union. 22

As the standard-bearers of northern and southern interests battled for national power, both sides emphasized that their respective ideologies were consistent with the nation's most cherished principles. Shearer Davis Bowman has argued that “northern and southern partisans of white sectionalism tended to see their respective sections as engaged in the high-minded defense of vested interests, outraged rights and liberties, and imperiled honor, all embedded in a society and way of life they deemed authentically American.” In a sense, both sides were right. Recent scholarship in such varied fields as intellectual, religious, political, and literary history suggests that although often incompatible, the values and ideals of the contending sections flowed from a common source. Work by Margaret Abruzzo on proslavery and antislavery humanitarianism, John Patrick Daly and Mark A. Noll on evangelical Protestantism, Sean Wilentz on political democracy, and Diane N. Capitani on domestic sentimental fiction suggests that the highly politicized differences between northern and southern ideologies masked those ideologies' common intellectual roots. Some scholars have argued for more fundamental difference, maintaining that southern thinkers roundly rejected democracy and liberal capitalism, while others have gone too far in the other direction in presenting northern and southern whites as equally committed to liberalism. But the dominant thrust of recent work on sectional ideologies suggests that they represented two hostile sides of a single coin minted at the nation's founding. Since a coin flip cannot end in a tie, both sides struggled for control of the national government to put their incompatible ideals into practice. The nationalization of northern ideals was a hotly contested outcome, made possible only by armed conflict. Conversely, the sectionalization of white southern ideals was not inevitable. Proponents of both sections drew on nationalism and sectionalism alike, embracing the former when they felt powerful and the latter when they felt weak. “As long as the Government is on our side,” proslavery Democrat and future South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens wrote in 1857, “I am for sustaining it and using its power for our benefit. … [if] our opponents reverse the present state of things then I am for war .” 23

Together, recent studies of northern sectionalism and southern nationalism make a compelling case for why the Civil War broke out when it did. If the South was always a separatist minority and if the North always defended the American way, secession might well have come long before 1861. It is more helpful to view the sectional conflict as one between equally authentic (not morally equivalent) strands of American nationalism grappling for the power to govern the entire country according to sectionally specific values. Southern slaveholders ruled what was in many ways the weaker section, but constitutional privileges such as the infamous three-fifths clause, along with other advantageous provisions such as the rule requiring a two-thirds majority in the nominations of Democratic presidential candidates, allowed them to remain dominant prior to 1860, until their successes aroused a sense of northern sectionalism robust enough to lift the Republican party into power. Almost overnight, the proslavery nationalist project collapsed. Only then did decisive numbers of southern whites countenance disunion, a drastic measure whose use had long been resisted within the South. The Civil War erupted when northern sectionalism grew powerful enough to undermine southern nationalism. 24

In the model of Civil War causation sketched above, northern voters who joined the Republicans fretted over the fate of liberty in a slaveholding republic. But whose liberty was at stake? Recent scholarship powerfully demonstrates that for moderate opponents of slavery the most damnable aspect of the institution was not what it did to slaves but what it allowed slaveholders to do to northern whites. Popular antislavery grew from trepidation about the power of the slaveholding class and its threat to republican liberty, not from uproar against proslavery racism and racial oppression. And since this concern fueled the Republican party's rapid growth and 1860 presidential triumph, white northerners' indignant response to slaveholders' clout contributed significantly to the coming of the war by providing secessionists with a pretext for disunion. According to this interpretation of northern politics, slavery remains at the root of the sectional conflict even though racial egalitarianism did not inspire the most popular brands of antislavery politics and even though many of the debates over slavery, as Eric Foner has pointed out, “were only marginally related to race.” At the same time, recent scholarship on southern politics foregrounds slave agency and persuasively demonstrates that conflict between masters and slaves directly affected national affairs. If the fate of the enslaved did not preoccupy most northern whites, the same cannot be said of their southern counterparts, whose politics are intelligible only in the context of slave resistance. In sum, recent work confirms the centrality of slavery in the coming of the war in a very specific and nuanced way, showing that the actions and contested status of enslaved people influenced southern politics directly and northern politics more obliquely. This work reveals an asymmetry in the politics of slavery: in the South it revolved around maintaining control over slaves in the name of white supremacy and planters' interests, while in the North it centered on the problem of the slaveholding class. 25

Moral indignation at racial prejudice in the twentieth century does not necessarily provide the key to an understanding of the dispute between the sections in the nineteenth century. While some abolitionists were indignant at the slave system and what it did to black men, many more northerners became antisouthern and antislavery because of what the slave system did or threatened to do to them. A failure to recognize this can easily lead us into a blind alley of oversimplification, and to view the events of a hundred years ago as a morality play with heroes and villains rather than a plausible presentation of a human dilemma.

Many twenty-first century scholars have taken this point to heart while implicitly challenging Gara's stark contrast between moral and self-interested antislavery. They stress the primary importance of white liberty in popular antislavery critiques but show that slavery's “moderate” opponents were no less morally outraged than their “radical” counterparts. Slavery could be condemned on moral grounds for a wide variety of reasons, some of which had much to do with enslaved people and some of which—whether they stressed the degeneracy of southern society, the undemocratic influence of slaveholders' political clout, or the threat that proslavery zealots posed to civil liberties—did not. Thus, recent scholars have made Gara's “crucial distinction” while underlining the moral dimensions of ostensibly moderate, conservative, or racist antislavery arguments. Popular antislavery strove to protect democratic politics from the machinations of a legally privileged and economically potent ruling class. Slaveholders' inordinate political power was itself a moral problem. These findings may prompt historians to reconsider the relative emphasis placed on class and race in the origins and meanings of the Civil War, particularly regarding the political behavior of the nonabolitionist northern majority. 27

Numerous recent studies emphasize that perceived threats to white freedom pushed northerners to oppose the slave power, support the Republican party, and prosecute the Civil War on behalf of liberty and the Union. Nicole Etcheson's study of the violent struggle between proslavery and antislavery forces over Kansas during the mid-1850s contends that the key issue at stake was freedom for white settlers. During the Civil War many Kansans who had fought for the admission of their state under an antislavery constitution applauded emancipation, but Etcheson persuasively argues that “Bleeding Kansas began as a struggle to secure the political liberties of whites.” Racist pioneers from both sections battled to ensure that the plains would remain a haven for white freedom, disagreeing primarily over slavery's compatibility with that goal. Similarly, Matthew Mason shows that antislavery politics in the early national period, spearheaded by Federalists, thrived only when northern voters recognized “how slavery impinged on their rights and interests.” Russell McClintock's analysis of the 1860 election and northerners' reaction to secession and the bombardment of Fort Sumter indicates that anxiety over slaveholders' power encouraged a decisive, violent northern response. As the antislavery position edged closer to the mainstream of northern politics, critiques of slavery grounded in sympathy for enslaved people faded as less philanthropic assaults on the institution proliferated. Carol Lasser's study of the shifting emphasis of antislavery rhetoric demonstrates that between the 1830s and the 1850s, “self-interest replaced sin as a basis for antislavery organizing,” as antislavery appeals increasingly “stressed the self-interest of northern farmers and workers—mainly white and mainly male.” Ultimately, popular antislavery cast “free white men, rather than enslaved African American women,” as “the victims of ‘the peculiar institution.’” 28

Even histories of fugitive slave cases underscore the preeminence of white liberty as the activating concern for many northerners. As the historian Earl M. Maltz has pointed out, the fugitive slave issue was never isolated from other political controversies. Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which seemed to prove the existence of a southern plot to spread slavery onto previously free western soil, fugitive slave cases during and after 1854 aroused increased hostility among white northerners who suspected that slaveholders threatened the liberties of all Americans. Those fears intensified throughout the 1850s in response to cases in which free northerners stood trial for violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. In two of the three cases explored by Steven Lubet the defendants were not runaway slaves but predominantly white northerners accused of abetting fugitives from slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act's criminalization of noncompliance with slave catchers proved especially odious. “For all of its blatant unfairness,” Lubet argues, “the Act might have been considered tolerable in the North—at least among non-abolitionists—if it had been directed only at blacks.” It was not, of course, and some of the act's most celebrated cases placed white northerners in legal jeopardy for crossing swords with the slave power. Two recent studies of the Joshua Glover case reinforce this point. Formerly a slave in St. Louis, Glover escaped to Wisconsin and, with the help of sympathetic white residents, from there to Canada in 1854. But the dramatic confrontation between free-state citizens and the slaveholder-dominated federal government only began with Glover's successful flight, since the political reverberations of the case echoed for many years after Glover reached Canadian soil. Debates over the rights and duties of citizens, over the boundaries of state and federal sovereignty, and over the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act hinged on the prosecution of the primarily white Wisconsinites who aided Glover's escape. None gained more notoriety than Sherman Booth, the Milwaukee newspaper editor whose case bounced between state and federal courts from 1854 to 1859, and whose attorney, Byron Paine, capitalized on his own resulting popularity to win a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Long after attention left Glover, who was undoubtedly relieved to be out of the public eye, conflicts over northern state rights and individual rights highlighted the threat to white liberty posed by the slave power and its federal agents. 29

Of course, the white northerners prosecuted under proslavery law would have remained in obscurity if not for the daring escapes made by enslaved people. As Stanley Harrold has shown, runaway slaves sparked dozens of bloody skirmishes in the antebellum borderland between slavery and freedom. To stress the importance of conflicts over white liberty in the coming of the Civil War is not to ignore the political impact of slave resistance. Quite the reverse: recent studies of Civil War causation have deftly explored the relationship between slave agency and sectional antagonism, revealing that slave resistance provoked conflict between whites, even in situations where racial justice was not the main point of contention. Northern sectionalism was a reaction against proslavery belligerence, which was fueled by internal conflicts in the South. Narratives of Civil War causation that focus on white northerners' fears for their liberties depend on slave agency, for the aggressiveness of the slave power was, essentially, a response to the power of slaves. 30

Revealingly, recent works by John Ashworth and William W. Freehling both stress this theme. Both scholars published long-awaited second volumes of their accounts of Civil War causation in 2007. Beyond this coincidence, however, it would be difficult to find two historians more dissimilar than Ashworth, a Marxist who privileges labor systems and class relations, and Freehling, a master storyteller who stresses contingency and individual consciousness. For all their methodological and ideological differences, however, Ashworth and Freehling concur on an essential point: the struggle between masters and slaves accelerated the sectional conflict by forcing masters to support undemocratic policies that threatened northern liberties. The resulting hostility of northerners toward slaveholders provoked a fierce response, and the cycle continued. By weaving the day-to-day contest between masters and slaves into their political analyses, both authors fashion a “reintegrated” American history that blends the insights of social and political history. 31

According to Ashworth, class conflict forced ruling elites in both sections to pursue clashing political and economic policies. Thus, structural divergence in social and economic systems between North and South inflamed the political and ideological strife that resulted in disunion. Class conflict was especially problematic in the South, whose enslaved population did not accept proslavery principles in the same way that, by the 1850s, some northern workers embraced free-labor ideology. Instead, interminable slave resistance compelled southern masters to gag congressional debate over slavery, to demand stringent fugitive slave laws, and to agitate for a territorial slave code—in short, to act the part of an authoritarian slave power. “Behind every event in the history of the sectional controversy,” Ashworth argues in his first volume, “lurked the consequences of black resistance to slavery.” A dozen years of additional work confirmed this thesis. In his second volume, Ashworth contends that “the opposition of the slaves to their own enslavement is the fundamental, irreplaceable cause of the War.” The Civil War did not begin as a massive slave rebellion because southern masters managed to contain the unrest that threatened their rule, but the price of this success was a deteriorating relationship with northerners. By contending for their freedom, slaves obliged their masters to behave in ways that convinced even the most bigoted northern whites that slavery menaced their own liberties. 32

colliding democratic and despotic governing systems. The Old South combined dictatorship over blacks with republicanism for whites, supposedly cleanly severed by an All-Mighty Color Line. But to preserve dictatorial dominion over blacks, the slaveholding minority sometimes trenched on majoritarian government for whites, in the nation as well as in their section. … Northerners called the militant slavocracy the Slave Power, meaning that those with autocratic power over blacks also deployed undemocratic power over whites. Most Yankees hardly embraced blacks or abolitionists. Yet racist Northerners would fight the Slave Power to the death to preserve their white men's majoritarian rights.

Scholars who foreground northern concern for white liberty in a slaveholding republic underline the importance of class conflict between northern voters and southern elites in the coming of the Civil War. Moderate antislavery northerners condemned slaveholders for aristocratic pretensions and tyrannical policies, not for racial bigotry. But for many scholars, race remains the key to understanding antebellum sectional politics. The tendency remains strong to frame the sectional conflict and the Civil War as one campaign in a longer struggle for racial justice. Not surprisingly, studies of radical abolitionism are the most likely works to employ this framework. Radical abolitionists nurtured a strikingly egalitarian conception of race and fought for a social vision that most scholars share but one that the modern world has not yet realized, and therein lies their appeal. Moreover, those who foreground race in the coming of the war do not naïvely suggest that all northern whites were racial egalitarians. Since the 1960s, commitment to an admirable antiracist ideal, not wishful thinking, has given a powerful boost to a primarily racial interpretation of the sectional conflict. But the recent scholarly emphasis on issues of class and the slave power suggests that framing the sectional conflict as a clash over racial injustice is not the most useful approach to understanding Civil War causation. 34

The slave power was defined not by racism but by slaveholders' capacity to use federal law and muscle to advance their class interests. Proslavery racism was, like all racism, reprehensible, but it is easily, even when subtly, overstated in accounts of Civil War causation. It is, for example, hardly incorrect to refer to the proslavery ideologue James Henry Hammond as “a fiercely racist South Carolina politician,” but that characterization emphasizes a trait he shared with most northern voters rather than what alienated Hammond from them and thus hastened the rise of the Republican party and the outbreak of war. What distinguished Hammond from his northern antagonists was his “mudsill” theory of society (which he outlined in an 1858 Senate speech) and its implications for American class relations. Proceeding from the presumption that every functioning society must rest upon the labors of a degraded “mudsill” class, Hammond argued that the southern laboring class, because it was enslaved, was materially better off and politically less threatening than its northern counterpart. Hammond's highly public articulation of this theory outraged proponents of free labor and made him a particularly notorious proslavery propagandist. Illinois Republicans who rallied under a banner declaring “Small-Fisted Farmers, Mud Sills of Society, Greasy Mechanics, for A. Lincoln” recognized the deep-seated class dimensions of their party's conflict with Hammond and his ilk. Moreover, Hammond's comparison of the northern and southern working classes suggests a curious ambiguity in the relative importance of class and race in proslavery ideology. This subject demands further scholarly attention, but important advances have recently been made. On the one hand, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese have indicated that the irascible George Fitzhugh, who proclaimed that working people of all colors would be better off as slaves, was not alone in developing a defense of slavery compatible with racism but ultimately based on class relations. On the other hand, slaveholders, at least as much as any other antebellum Americans, benefited from portraying slavery as a fundamentally racial issue. As Frank Towers has shown, planters feared the day when nonslaveholding southern whites might begin to think in terms of class and shuddered at the prospect of working-class politics in southern cities. That one of the most strident articulations of the race-based proslavery argument—which promised that the subjugation of blacks made equals of all white men—appeared in 1860 was no coincidence, as southern elites sought to ensure regional white unity on the eve of a possible revolution. In pursuit of their interests, southern ideologues drew on both class- and race-based arguments, and if the latter stand out to modern readers, the former did more to alienate individuals in the free states. Slaveholders' conflict with northern voters, the collision that triggered secession and war, grew not out of clashing racial views but out of competition for political power. 35

The most broadly appealing brands of antislavery defined this competition as one between classes. Proponents of popular antislavery presented sectional issues in terms of class more often than race, and with tremendous effect. Their interpretation of sectional friction generated mass sympathy for a cause that otherwise would have remained a fringe movement. This moderate antislavery ideology is easily discounted if we attribute genuine antislavery sentiments only to those few northerners uncontaminated by racism. It grew from many sources: Jacksonian antipathy to concentrated economic and political power; an often-radical producerism that would guarantee to the worker the fruits of his labor; a demand for land reform that would reserve western soil for white farmers; and a morally charged concern about the fate of democracy in a nation dominated by slaveholders. Class-based Jacksonian radicalism thus informed the ideology of the Free Soil party and, crucially, the Republicans. Antislavery politicians such as New Hampshire's John P. Hale, a Democrat who drifted into the Republican ranks via the Free Soil party, “defined the controversy over slavery and its continuation as an issue between aristocratic slave owners and ‘sturdy republicans’ rather than between innocent slaves and sinful masters,” points out Jonathan H. Earle. It was this contest that aroused a northern majority to vote Lincoln into office and to enlist in the Union army. The issues of money, power, class, and democracy that concerned Jacksonian and other moderate antislavery northerners were not less morally charged because they focused on white liberty and equality in a republic. Nor should we forget that this class-based antislavery critique contained the seeds of a racial egalitarianism that sprouted, however feebly, during the Civil War. The experience of war often turned whites-only egalitarianism into a far more sweeping notion of human equality. To ignore this transformation is to discount the radicalizing influence that the Civil War had on many northern soldiers and civilians. 36

When coupled with an analysis of southern politics that emphasizes slave agency, this revival of scholarly interest in popular antislavery ideology offers not only a convincing interpretation of Civil War causation but also a politically and pedagogically important narrative about class and politics in American history. Adam Rothman's 2005 essay on the slave power is a model of this fresh and constructive approach. On one level, he presents an accessible introduction to the history and historiography of nineteenth-century slaveholders. But the chief contribution of the work lies in the context in which the essay was published: an anthology on American elite classes, from early national merchant capitalists to postwar anti–New Dealers, and their relationship with American democracy. Casting the slave power in this light gives the sectional conflict a bold new meaning, one that reveals the Civil War to have been both much more than and much less than a precursor to the civil rights movement. It appears as a struggle between (an imperfect) popular democracy and one of the most powerful and deeply rooted interests in antebellum politics. One might argue that Americans simply replaced one set of masters—southern planters—with another, the rising robber barons. Nevertheless, the Civil War offers one of precious few instances in American history in which a potent, entrenched, incredibly wealthy, and constitutionally privileged elite class was thoroughly ousted from national power. This makes the class-based issues that helped spark the war too important to forget. 37

That narrative may also aid in the quest for that holy grail of academic history: a receptive public audience. The neo-Confederate outcry against the alleged anti-southern bias of McPherson's 2000 “What Caused the Civil War?” essay and the ongoing controversy over the Confederate flag indicate that much of the public does not share in the scholarly consensus on slavery's central place in Civil War causation. Unfortunately, no quick fix exists for popular misconceptions about the war, but scholarship that frames the conflict over slavery as a struggle in which the liberties of all Americans were at stake may influence minds closed to depictions of the war as an antiracist crusade. This is not to argue that historians should pander to popular prejudice or that race is not a central theme in the history of the Civil War era. Rather, historians can and should capitalize on the political and pedagogical advantages of an important body of scholarship that sharpens our understanding of Civil War causation by explaining why even incorrigible northern racists voted and fought against southern slaveholders, and that reminds us that slavery impacted all antebellum Americans, North and South, black and white. When northerners urged the “necessity” of defending their liberty against the encroaching “tyranny” of a government “under the absolute control of an oligarchy of southern slave holders,” as Judge F. C. White of Utica, New York, wrote in 1858, they meant precisely what they said. To gainsay the salience of race in the causes, course, and outcome of the Civil War would be a terrible mistake, but it would be equally misleading to neglect the matters of class, power, and democracy at the heart of the slavery debate; these issues contributed mightily to the origins of the nation's bloodiest conflict and to its modern-day significance. 38

Whatever its ultimate fate in the classroom and public discourse, recent scholarship on the coming of the Civil War reveals an impatience with old interpretive categories, an eagerness to challenge the basic parameters that have long guided scholarly thinking on the topic, and a healthy skepticism of narratives that explain the war with comforting, simplistic formulae. The broad consensus on slavery's centrality has not stifled rapid growth and diversification in the field. Indeed, the proliferation of works on Civil War causation presents a serious challenge to anyone seeking to synthesize the recent literature into a single tidy interpretation. Rather than suggest an all-encompassing model, this essay has outlined three broad themes that could provide fertile ground for future debate. A reaction against the expanding geographic and temporal breadth of Civil War causation studies, for example, might prompt scholars to return to tightly focused, state-level analyses of antebellum politics. Recent political histories of antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana suggest that this approach has much to contribute to our understanding of how national debates filtered down to state and local levels. Other scholars might take an explicitly comparative approach and analyze the causes, course, and results of the American Civil War alongside those of roughly contemporaneous intrastate conflicts, including the Reform War (1857–1861) in Mexico and China's Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Comparative history's vast potential has been amply demonstrated by Enrico Dal Lago's study of agrarian elites and regionalism in the Old South and Italy, and by Don H. Doyle's edited collection on secession movements around the globe. Similarly, scholars undoubtedly will challenge the interpretive emphases on proslavery American nationalism, antislavery northern sectionalism, and the class dimensions of the sectional conflict that pervade much of the recent scholarship and receive close attention in this essay. But others might carry on this work by studying phenomena such as the disunionist thrust of radical abolitionism. The campaign for free-state secession never sank deep roots in northern soil. But by the late 1850s it was a frequent topic of editorials in abolitionist publications such as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and it captured mainstream headlines through events such as the 1857 Worcester Disunion Convention. And even if race, southern sectionalism, and northern Unionism dominate future narratives of Civil War causation, further debate will sharpen our analysis of an easily mythologized period of American history. 39

These debates will be no less meaningful because of scholars' near-universal acknowledgement of the centrality of slavery in the coming of the Civil War. Instead, they illustrate C. Vann Woodward's observation that “most of the important debates over history … have not been about absolute but about relative matters, not about the existence but about the degree or extent of the phenomenon in question.” Beneath a veneer of consensus lies interpretive nuance and healthy disagreement, which we can hope will inform both academic and popular commemoration of the Civil War sesquicentennial. 40

The title of this article borrows from Howard K. Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War,” Social Science Research Bulletin, 54 (1946), 53–102. Abraham Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (9 vols., New Brunswick, 1953–1955), VIII, 332–33; James M. McPherson, “What Caused the Civil War?,” North and South, 4 (Nov. 2000), 12–22, esp. 13. This consensus extends into college textbooks, many written by James McPherson, which “contain little debate over war causation since they recognize that slavery was the root cause of the war.” See William B. Rogers and Terese Martyn, “A Consensus at Last: American Civil War Texts and the Topics That Dominate the College Classroom,” History Teacher, 41 (Aug. 2008), 519–30, esp. 530. See also Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean, “A Book for Every Perspective: Current Civil War and Reconstruction Textbooks,” Civil War History, 51 (Sept. 2005), 317–24. Charles W. Joyner, “The Flag Controversy and the Causes of the Civil War: A Statement by Historians,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 24 (Winter 2001), 196–98, esp. 197. For lengthier exposés of slavery, secession, and postbellum mythmaking from recent years, see Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2001); and James W. Loewen and Edward H. Sebesta, eds., The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The “Great Truth” about the “Lost Cause” (Jackson, 2010).

Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill, 2008), 4. Edward L. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? Reflections on the South and Southern History (New York, 2005), 128. For Edward Ayers's call for reinvigorated debate on the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Civil War, see ibid. , 131–44.

For analyses of earlier literature, see Beale, “What Historians Have Said about the Causes of the Civil War”; Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York, 1962); David M. Potter, “The Literature on the Background of the Civil War,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, by David M. Potter (Baton Rouge, 1968), 87–150; and Eric Foner, “The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions,” Civil War History, 20 (Sept. 1974), 197–214. For more recent historiographical assessments of specific topics related to the sectional crisis, see Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, 2005), 25–200. For a reinterpretation of the full century and a half of scholarship on Civil War causation that briefly samples recent literature, see Frank Towers, “Partisans, New History, and Modernization: The Historiography of the Civil War's Causes, 1861–2011,” Journal of the Civil War Era, 1 (June 2011), 237–64. Several important bodies of literature are underrepresented in my historiography. One is work on the five months between Abraham Lincoln's election and the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which addresses the question of why and how secession sparked a shooting war. This outcome was not inevitable, because the causes of disunion were not identical to the causes of the Civil War itself. This essay focuses on the former topic. For recent interpretations of the latter, see Dew, Apostles of Disunion; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001); Larry D. Mansch, Abraham Lincoln, President-Elect: The Four Critical Months from Election to Inauguration (Jefferson, 2005); Nelson D. Lankford, Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861 (New York, 2007); Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill, 2008); Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter, 1860–1861 (New York, 2008); Lawrence M. Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis: The Effort to Prevent Civil War (Jefferson, 2009); William J. Cooper Jr., “The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (Feb. 2011), 3–16; Emory M. Thomas, The Dogs of War, 1861 (New York, 2011); and Adam Goodheart, 1861: The Civil War Awakening (New York, 2011). Biographies are also not explored systematically here. Recent biographies related to the coming of the Civil War include William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater (Columbia, S.C., 2001); John L. Myers, Henry Wilson and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, 2005); John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, 2005); Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2006); and Denton, William Henry Seward and the Secession Crisis . Thanks in part to the close proximity of Lincoln's bicentennial birthday and the Civil War sesquicentennial, scholarship on the sixteenth president continues to burgeon. For analyses of this vast literature, see James Oakes, “Lincoln and His Commas,” Civil War History, 54 (June 2008), 176–93; Sean Wilentz, “Who Lincoln Was,” New Republic, July 15, 2009, pp. 24–47; and Nicole Etcheson, “Abraham Lincoln and the Nation's Greatest Quarrel: A Review Essay,” Journal of Southern History, 76 (May 2010), 401–16. For an account of Lincoln historiography in the Journal of American History, see Allen C. Guelzo, “The Not-So-Grand Review: Abraham Lincoln in the Journal of American History, ” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 400–416. That biography and studies of the secession winter are thriving suggests a possible waning of the long-dominant “irrepressible conflict” interpretation, as both approaches emphasize contingency and individual agency. Collective biography, particularly on Lincoln's relationships with other key figures, has also flourished. On Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, see James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007); Paul Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union (New York, 2008); and John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2008). On Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, see Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (New York, 2008); and Roy Morris, The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln's Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America (New York, 2008). A third body of literature that needs further historiographical analysis relates to gender and the coming of the Civil War. See, for example, Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, 2003); Nina Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict (Chapel Hill, 2008); Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge, 2009); and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010). For discussions of the classic schools of scholarship, see Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” in The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, by Kenneth M. Stampp (New York, 1980), 191–245; Ayers, What Caused the Civil War?, 132–33; and Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History, 90 (June 2003), 78–79. For a call for a synthesis of the fundamentalist and revisionist interpretations, see Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? On the continued relevance of these camps, see James Huston, “Interpreting the Causation Sequence: The Meaning of the Events Leading to the Civil War,” Reviews in American History, 34 (Sept. 2006), 329. The coming of the Civil War has long shaped discussions of historical causation, including Lee Benson and Cushing Strout, “Causation and the American Civil War: Two Appraisals,” History and Theory, 1 (no. 2, 1961), 163–85; and William Dray and Newton Garver, “Some Causal Accounts of the American Civil War,” Daedalus, 91 (Summer 1962), 578–98.

Key works on the transnational turn include “Toward the Internationalization of American History: A Round Table,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–542; Carl J. Guarneri, “Internationalizing the United States Survey Course: American History for a Global Age,” History Teacher, 36 (Nov. 2002), 37–64; Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002); Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006); and Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Basingstoke, 2007). Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (2 vols., New York, 1947), I, 3–5; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), 3–5; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1976), 1–6. On continental expansion and sectional conflict, see Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 1997). On the divisive influence of sectionalized fantasies of tropical conquest, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973). For an early work on Haiti's transnational significance, see Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, 1988). On the relationship between the Ostend Manifesto and domestic politics, see Robert E. May, “A ‘Southern Strategy’ for the 1850s: Northern Democrats, the Tropics, and Expansion of the National Domain,” Louisiana Studies, 14 (Winter 1975), 333–59, esp. 337–42; and John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. II: The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (New York, 2007), 395–98.

Edward Bartlett Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 7; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia, 2010), 5. Other recent transnational studies of Civil War causation include Timothy Roberts, “The European Revolutions of 1848 and Antebellum Violence in Kansas,” Journal of the West, 44 (Fall 2005), 58–68; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave Trade (New York, 2007); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning; and Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens, Ga., 2011). Several recent dissertations explore the equally permeable boundary between North and South. See Joseph T. Rainer, “The Honorable Fraternity of Moving Merchants: Yankee Peddlers in the Old South, 1800–1860” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2000); Wesley Brian Borucki, “Yankees in King Cotton's Court: Northerners in Antebellum and Wartime Alabama” (Ph.D. diss., University of Alabama, 2002); Eric William Plaag, “Strangers in a Strange Land: Northern Travelers and the Coming of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2006); and Alana K. Bevan, “‘We Are the Same People’: The Leverich Family of New York and Their Antebellum American Inter-regional Network of Elites” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2009). On the “mighty experiment,” see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York, 2002). The compelling scholarship on global antislavery undoubtedly encouraged the internationalization of Civil War causation studies. David Brion Davis's contributions remain indispensable. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 –1823 (Ithaca, 1975); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006). For a work that places antebellum southern thought, including proslavery ideology, into an international context, see Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life in the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols., Chapel Hill, 2004).

Rugemer, Problem of Emancipation, 6–7; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War, 9–10.

Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore, 2009), 10; Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville, 2006). John Majewski offers a different perspective on slavery and free trade, acknowledging that slaveholders were hardly united in favor of protection and arguing that the moderate Confederate tariff represented a compromise between protectionists and free traders. See John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, 2009).

On the centrality of cotton exports in the economic history of the South—and the United States—see Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, 1961). On the Old South's place in world economic history and its dependency on the global cotton market, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, “The Slave Economies in Political Perspective,” in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (New York, 1983), 34–60. On the cotton trade and Confederate diplomacy, see Frank Lawrence Owsley Sr., King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago, 1931). On the early history of the cotton kingdom, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/159.html . The foundational text for “long movement” scholarship is Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233–63. An influential application of this paradigm is Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York, 2008). For a sharp critique of the long movement concept, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265–88. Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006), 5.

John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, 2007). For an accessible introduction to the early struggles over slavery, see Gary J. Kornblith, Slavery and Sectional Strife in the Early American Republic, 1776–1821 (Lanham, 2010). On slavery's post-Revolution expansion, see Rothman, Slave Country . For the social and intellectual history of early proslavery thought, see Jeffrey Robert Young, ed., Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740–1829: An Anthology (Columbia, S.C., 2006); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2008); and Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009).

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 28–51; Jan Lewis, “The Three-Fifths Clause and the Origins of Sectionalism,” in Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson, ed. Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon (Athens, Ohio, 2008), 19–46; David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven, 2006); Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002); Christopher Childers, “Interpreting Popular Sovereignty: A Historiographical Essay,” Civil War History, 57 (March 2011), 48–70. For a discussion of the temporal parameters of his own work, see William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York, 1990), vii.

Paul Calore, The Causes of the Civil War: The Political, Cultural, Economic, and Territorial Disputes between North and South (Jefferson, 2008). John B. Alley, Speech of Hon. John B. Alley, of Mass., on the Principles and Purposes of the Republican Party: Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, Monday, April 30, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 2; Robert Toombs, Speech of Hon. Robert Toombs, on the Crisis. Delivered before the Georgia Legislature, December 7, 1860 (Washington, 1860), 5. Emphasis in original. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 99; Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (New York, 2010). On the memory of the American Revolution in William Lloyd Garrison's proudly anachronistic rhetoric, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition's Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 2003). On abolitionists' use of public commemorations of British emancipation to recruit new activists, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, “‘No Occurrence in Human History Is More Deserving of Commemoration Than This’: Abolitionist Celebrations of Freedom,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York, 2006), 200–219. On the link between collective memory of the Texas Revolution and the growth of Confederate nationalism in Texas, see Andrew F. Lang, “Memory, the Texas Revolution, and Secession: The Birth of Confederate Nationalism in the Lone Star State,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 114 (July 2010), 21–36. On the memory of the Civil War, see, for example, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); William Alan Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2004); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, 2004); and Gary W. Gallagher, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 5, 17, 317–22, esp. 17, 5. Emphasis in original.

Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill, 2007), 3. Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 211.

Michael S. Green, Politics and America in Crisis: The Coming of the Civil War (Santa Barbara, 2010), 17–18. For recent studies of the slavery expansion issue in the late 1840s and early 1850s, see Joel H. Silbey, Storm over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York, 2005); Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2007); John C. Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History (Wilmington, 2003); Robert V. Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice: Henry Clay and the Compromise That Saved the Union (New York, 2010); and Steven E. Woodworth, Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War (New York, 2010). Also in the late 1840s, antislavery activists shifted away from efforts to abolish the interstate slave trade and toward the restriction of slavery's expansion. See Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power, 113–39. General histories that begin in the 1845–1850 period include Arthur Charles Cole, The Irrepressible Conflict, 1850–1865 (New York, 1934); Nevins, Ordeal of the Union; Potter, Impending Crisis; Ludwell H. Johnson, Division and Reunion: America, 1848–1877 (New York, 1978); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom; Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore, 1988); Robert Cook, Civil War America: Making a Nation, 1848–1877 (London, 2003); and Green, Politics and America in Crisis .

Ritchie Devon Watson Jr., Normans and Saxons: Southern Race Mythology and the Intellectual History of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008), 28. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence, 2000), 61–80; Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, 2009), 21–122. For accessible accounts of the Compromise of 1850, see Waugh, On the Brink of Civil War; and Remini, At the Edge of the Precipice.

Green, Politics and America in Crisis, 41. On the ages of representatives and senators in 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1964), 32, 40. On the deaths of John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York, 1987), 494. “Address, 1851, of the Southern Rights Association of the University of Virginia to the Young Men of the South” [Dec. 19, 1850?], folder 1, box 1, William Henry Gist Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia).

The classic statement of this “revisionist” interpretation is J. G. Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 27 (June 1940), 3–28. For a different psychological interpretation of generational influences on politics, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York, 1979). For a generational analysis of the rise of immediate abolitionism around 1830, see James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History, 56 (Nov. 1990), 633–35. Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill, 2005). Earlier works that emphasize secession's popularity among youthful southern whites include William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974); and Henry James Walker, “Henry Clayton and the Secession Movement in Alabama,” Southern Studies, 4 (Winter 1993), 341–60. Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York, 2003); Jon Grinspan, “‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln's 1860 Presidential Campaign,” Journal of American History, 96 (Sept. 2009), 357–78.

David M. Potter, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” in South and the Sectional Conflict, by Potter, 34–83, esp. 75, 65.

Grant, North over South, 6; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 42–74. See also Kevin M. Gannon, “Calculating the Value of Union: States' Rights, Nullification, and Secession in the North, 1800–1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 2002).

Robert E. Bonner, Mastering America: Southern Slaveholders and the Crisis of American Nationhood (New York, 2009), xv, 84, 217. On slaveholders' influence over national policy and their use of federal power to advance proslavery interests, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, completed and ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001); Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago, 2006); and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early Republic (Chicago, 2010). For a work that argues that the slave power thesis was not mere paranoia and disputes the dismissive interpretation of earlier historians, see Richards, Slave Power . Works that Leonard Richards disputes include Chauncey S. Boucher, “ In re That Aggressive Slavocracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 8 (June–Sept. 1921), 13–79; and David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, 1970). The painful shift from proslavery American nationalism to proslavery southern nationalism can be traced in the career of the Alabama Whig Henry Washington Hilliard. See David I. Durham, A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard, 1808–1892 (Baton Rouge, 2008).

Matthew J. Karp, “Slavery and American Sea Power: The Navalist Impulse in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 77 (May 2011), 283–324, esp. 290; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union, 197–259; James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003).

Shearer Davis Bowman, At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2010), 12. Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore, 2011); John Patrick Daly, When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 2002); Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006); Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), esp. xxii, 576, 791; Diane N. Capitani, Truthful Pictures: Slavery Ordained by God in the Domestic Sentimental Novel of the Nineteenth-Century South (Lanham, 2009). On the antidemocratic impulse behind secession in South Carolina and, ostensibly, the rest of the Confederacy, see Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000). See also Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (Tuscaloosa, 2009). On the southern rejection of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview (New York, 2005); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders' New World Order (New York, 2008). For the argument that both sections were equally dedicated to liberalism, see David F. Ericson, The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America (New York, 2000). For a compelling argument that secession stemmed from a fierce reaction against nineteenth-century liberal trends and from fealty to the true American republic, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 12–13. Francis W. Pickens to Benjamin F. Perry, June 27, 1857, folder 3, box 1, B. F. Perry Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Emphasis in original.

On the fragility of an antebellum nationalism built on ideals that developed clashing sectional characteristics, see Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, 2002), 8–9.

This work expands on a theme advanced in Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830–1860 (1949; East Lansing, 1964). Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010), 120.

Larry Gara, “Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction,” Civil War History, 15 (March 1969), 5–18, esp. 9, 6.

On the difficulty of placing antislavery activists on a spectrum of political opinion, see Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge, 2005), 265.

Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, 2004), 8; Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, 5; McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War, 26–28. On the importance of “the Union”—antebellum shorthand for an experiment in democratic self-government freighted with world-historical significance—in arousing the northern war effort, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011). Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic, 28 (Spring 2008), 113, 112.

Earl M. Maltz, Fugitive Slave on Trial: The Anthony Burns Case and Abolitionist Outrage (Lawrence, 2010), 54. Steven Lubet, Fugitive Justice: Runaways, Rescuers, and Slavery on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), 44. The white defendants Steven Lubet examines are Castner Hanway, charged with treason for his involvement in an 1851 Christiana, Pennsylvania, clash, and Simeon Bushnell, a participant in an 1858 Oberlin, Ohio, slave rescue. The third case Lubet looks at is that of the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. H. Robert Baker, The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War (Athens, Ohio, 2006); Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Runaway Slave (Madison, 2007).

Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010). On fugitive slaves and national politics, see R. J. M. Blackett, “Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery after 1850,” American Nineteenth Century History, 10 (June 2009), 119–36.

John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York, 1995); Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, II; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1961 (New York, 2007). For an exploration of their differences, see John Ashworth, “William W. Freehling and the Politics of the Old South,” American Nineteenth Century History, 5 (Spring 2004), 1–29. On the “reintegration” of political and social history, see William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994).

Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, I, 6, II, 1.

Freehling, Road to Disunion, II, xii, xiii. On the relationship between slave resistance and politics in antebellum Virginia, see William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2003). On the political consequences of mass panic over suspected slave revolts in 1860, see Donald E. Reynolds, Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (Baton Rouge, 2007).

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York, 2005); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2006); James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War (Amherst, 2008); Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, 2008).

Varon, Disunion!, 103. Elizabeth Varon mentions the speech but not its impact on northern workers. See ibid ., 308–10. For the class implications of James Henry Hammond's theory, see Samantha Maziarz, “Mudsill Theory,” in Class in America: An Encyclopedia, ed. Robert E. Weir (3 vols., Westport, 2007), II, 549–50. On northerners' response to the speech, see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982), 347. On the Republican banner, see McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 196–98. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, Slavery in White and Black . Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2004). J. D. B. DeBow, The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder: The Right of Peaceful Secession; Slavery in the Bible (Charleston, 1860). On elite secessionists' heavy-handed efforts to mobilize nonslaveholding whites behind secession and the only partial success of racist demagoguery, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–84.

In his vindication of Jacksonian antislavery, Daniel Feller criticizes the “fixation with race” that leads too many scholars “to question the sincerity or good intentions of any but the most outspoken racial egalitarians among the opponents of slavery.” Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History, 88 (June 2001), 50. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 92; Feller, “Brother in Arms”; Suzanne Cooper Guasco, “‘The Deadly Influence of Negro Capitalists’: Southern Yeomen and Resistance to the Expansion of Slavery in Illinois,” Civil War History, 47 (March 2001), 7–29; Sean Wilentz, “Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (Sept. 2004), 375–401. Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, 190–253; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York, 2007), 12, 221; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology during the Civil War,” in The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation, ed. Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia, 2002), 103–27.

Adam Rothman, “The ‘Slave Power’ in the United States, 1783–1865,” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 64–91. On the collapse of planters' national power, despite their continued regional dominance, see Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review, 95 (Feb. 1990), 75–98.

F. C. White to John P. Hale, Feb. 16, 1858, folder 8, box 12, John P. Hale Papers (New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord). On the response to McPherson's essay, see John M. Coski, “Historians under Fire: The Public and the Memory of the Civil War,” Cultural Resource Management, 25 (no. 4, 2002), 13–15. On the Confederate flag controversy, see J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, 2000); K. Michael Prince, Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag (Columbia, S.C., 2004); and John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000); John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2003). Enrico Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005); Don H. Doyle, ed., Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America's Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements (Athens, Ga., 2010). On the Worcester Disunion Convention, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1995), 140–41; and Ericson, Debate over Slavery, 74–79.

C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge, 1986), 79.

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The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780--1860 Paperback – August 1, 2000

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From the signing of the Constitution to the eve of the Civil War there persisted the belief that slaveholding southerners held the reins of the American national government and used their power to ensure the extension of slavery. Later termed the Slave Power theory, this idea was no mere figment of a lunatic fringe’s imagination. It was, as Leonard L. Richards shows in this innovative reexamination of the Slave Power, endorsed at midcentury by such eminent and circumspect men as Abraham Lincoln, William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, the editors and owners of the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, and the president of Harvard College. With The Slave Power, Richards reopens a discussion effectively closed by historians since the 1920s―when the Slave Power theory was dismissed first as a distortion of reality and later as a manifestation of the “paranoid style” in the early Republic―and attempts to understand why such reputable leaders accepted this thesis wholeheartedly as truth and why hundreds of thousands of voters responded to their call to arms. Through incisive biographical cameos and narrative vignettes, Richards explains the evolution of the Slave Power argument over time, tracing the oft-repeated scenario of northern outcry against the perceived slaveocracy, followed by still another “victory” for the South: the three-fifths rule in congressional representation; admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820; the Indian removal of 1830; annexation of Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso of 1847; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and more. Richards probes inter- and intraparty strategies of the Democrats, Free-Soilers, Whigs, and Republicans and revisits national debates over sectional conflicts to elucidate just how the southern Democratic slaveholders―with the help of some northerners―assumed, protected, and eventually lost a dominance that extended from the White House to the Speaker’s chair to the Supreme Court. The Slave Power reveals in a direct and compelling way the importance of slavery in the structure of national politics from the earliest moments of the federal Union through the emergence of the Republican Party. Extraordinary in its research and interpretation, it will challenge and edify all readers of American history.

Print length 208 pages
Language English
Publisher LSU Press
Publication date August 1, 2000
Dimensions 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
ISBN-10 0807126004
ISBN-13 978-0807126004
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ LSU Press (August 1, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807126004
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807126004
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
#464 in U.S. Abolition of Slavery History
#1,433 in General Elections & Political Process
#6,349 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

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Leonard l. richards.

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2. The “Slave Power” in the United States, 1783–1865

From the book ruling america.

Adam Rothman
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Chapters in this book (16)

Shattering the Slave Power: Northern Soldiers Interpret Their Civil War

"Shattering the Slave Power: Northern Soldiers Interpret Their Civil War," examines the durability of the so-called "Slave Power" conspiracy thesis during the Civil War era in maintaining motivation among Northern soldiers. In short, soldiers sprang to the defense of the Union because they believed that a Southern slaveholding oligarchy had created a domestic aristocracy, seized the levers of government in the Southern states, and sought to destroy republicanism. Such a belief allowed soldiers of different regional subcultures to interpret the Civil War in their own ways while continuing to fight the Confederacy. Crucially, the desire to depose the Southern oligarchy led soldiers to support enthusiastically emancipation of millions of enslaved African Americans as the best way to strike at the Southern leaders. Yet Northern soldiers' desire to end the institution of slavery entailed little contemplation of how the newly-freed African American population would fit within the country. Soldiers continued to believe that they had fought a republican struggle against a domestic aristocracy until they died, advancing the slave power thesis in print publications and public presentations well into the 20th Century.

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John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power (1862)

[Created: January 11, 2018]

The image is James Gillray, "The British Atlas, or John Bull supporting the Peace Establishment" (1816). [See a higher resolution image and the illustrated essay on " James Gillray on War and Taxes during the War against Napoleon ".

John Elliott Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to explain the Real Issues involved in the American Conflict. Second Edition. (New York: Carleton, 1862).

Chap. III. “Internal Organization of Slave Societies, ” pp. 46-63.
Chap. V. “Internal Development of Slave Societies,” pp. 77-92.

Editor’s Intro

Key words: "the (particular) class for whose special behoof it (slavery) exists," the class who keep slaves, servile régime, the upper classes, the ascendant class, the mean whites (a class at once degraded and dangerous) (white trash, crackers), free peasants, the three classes: the slaves, the slave-holders, the idle and lawless rabble, the Slave Power, the privileged (one) thirtieth part, one party, despotism of the wealthy few, the paramount power in the Union, uncontrolled despotism, a compact oligarchy, organised barabrism, a degraded class, the present ruling class.

CHAPTER III. INTERNAL ORGANIZATION OF SLAVE COMMUNITIES.

The explanation offered in the last chapter of the success and failure of slavery in different portions of North America resolved itself into the proposition, that in certain cases the institution was found to be economically profitable while it proved unprofitable in others. From this position—the profitableness of slavery under given external conditions—the inference is generally made by those who advocate or look with indulgence on the system, that slavery must be regarded as conducive to at least the material well-being of countries in which these conditions exist; and these conditions being admittedly present in the Slave States of North America, it is concluded that the abolition of slavery in those states would necessarily be attended with a diminution of their wealth, and by consequence, owing to the mode in which the interests of all nations are identified through commerce, with a corresponding injury to the material interests of the rest of the world. In this manner it is attempted to enlist the selfish feelings of mankind in favour of the institution ; and it is not impossible that many persons, who would be disposed to condemn it upon moral grounds, are thus led to connive at its existence. It will therefore be desirable, before proceeding farther with the investigation of our subject, to ascertain precisely the extent of the admission in favour of the system which is involved in the foregoing explanation of its success.

And, in the first place, it must be remarked that the profitableness which has been attributed to slavery is profitableness estimated exclusively from the point of view of the proprietor of slaves. Profitableness in this sense is all that is necessary to account for the introduction and maintenance of the system (which was the problem with which alone we were concerned), since it was with the proprietors that the decision rested. But those who are acquainted with the elementary principles which govern the distribution of wealth, know that the profits of capitalists may be increased by the same process by which the gross revenue of a country is diminished, and that therefore the community as a whole may be impoverished through the very same means by which a portion of its number is enriched. The economic success of slavery, therefore, is perfectly consistent with the supposition that it is prejudicial to the material wellbeing of the country where it is established. The argument, in short, comes to this : the interests of slave-masters—or rather that which slave-masters believe to be their interests—are no more identical with the interests of the general population in slave countries in the matter of wealth, than in that of morals or politics. That which benefits, or seems to benefit, the one in any of these departments, may injure the other. It follows, therefore, that the economic advantages possessed by slavery, which were the inducement to its original establishment and which cause it still to be upheld, are perfectly compatible with its being an obstacle to the industrial development of the country, and at variance with the best interests, material as well as moral, of its inhabitants.

Further, the profitableness which has been attributed to slavery does not even imply that the system is conducive to the interests (except in the narrowest sense of the word) of the class for whose especial behoof it exists. Individuals and classes may always be assumed to follow their own interests according to their .lights and tastes ; but that which their lights and tastes point out as their interest will vary with the degree of their intelligence and the character of their civilization. When the intelligence of a class is limited and its civilization low, the view it will take of its interests will be correspondingly narrow and sordid. Extravagant and undue importance will be attached to the mere animal pleasures. A small gain obtained by coarse and obvious methods will be preferred to a great one which requires a recourse to more refined expedients; and the future wrell-being of the race will be regarded as of less importance than the aggrandisement of the existing generation.

But our admissions in favour of slavery require still further qualification. The establishment of slavery in the Southern States was accounted for by its superiority in an economic point of view over free labour, in the form in which free labour existed in America at the time when that continent was settled. Now, the superiority of slavery over free labour to which its establishment was originally owing, is by no means to be assumed as still existing in virtue of the fact that slavery is still maintained. Of two systems one may at a given period be more profitable than the other, and may on this account be established, but may afterwards cease to be so, and yet may nevertheless continue to be upheld, either from habit, or from unwillingness to adopt new methods, or from congeniality with tastes which have been formed under its influence. It is a difficult and slow process under all circumstances to alter the industrial system of a country; but the difficulty of exchanging one form of free industry for another is absolutely inappreciable when compared with that which we encounter when we attempt to substitute free for servile institutions. It is therefore quite possible—how far the case is actually so I shall afterwards examine—that the persistent maintenance of the system at the present day may be due less to its economical advantages than to the habits and tastes it may have engendered, and to the enormous difficulty of getting rid of it. Since the settlement of the Southern States a vast change has taken place in the American continent. Free labour, wrhich was then scarce and costly, has now in many of the large towns become superabundant; and it is quite possible that, even with external conditions so favourable to slavery as the southern half of North America undoubtedly presents, free labour would now, on a fair trial, be found more than a match for its antagonist. Such a trial, however, is not possible under the present régime of the South. Slavery is in possession of the field, and enjoys all the advantages which possession in such a contest confers.

The concession then in favour of slavery, involved in the explanation given of its definitive establishment in certain portions of North America, amounts to this, that under certain conditions of soil and climate, cultivation oy slaves may for a time yield a larger net revenue than cultivation oy certain forms of free labour. This is all that needs to be assumed to account for the original establishment of slavery. But the maintenance of the institution at the present day does not imply even this quantum of advantage in its favour; since, owing to the immense difficulty of getting rid of it when once established on an extensive scale, the reasons for its continuance (regarding the question from the point of view of the slaveholders) may, where it has once obtained a firm footing, prevail over those for its abolition, even though it be far inferior as a productive instrument to free-labour. The most, therefore, that can be inferred from the existence of the system at the present day is that it is self-supporting.

Having now cleared the ground from the several false inferences with which the economic success of slavery, such as it is, is apt to be surrounded, I proceed to trace the consequences, economic, social, and political, which flow from the institution.

The comparative anatomist, by reasoning on those fixed relations between the different parts of the animal frame which his science reveals to him, is able from a fragment of a tooth or bone to determine the form, dimensions, and habits of the creature to which it belonged; and with no less accuracy, it seems to me, may a political economist, by reasoning on the economic character of slavery and its peculiar connexion with the soil, deduce its leading social and political attributes, and almost construct, by way of a priori argument, the entire system of the society of which it forms the foundation. A brief consideration of the economic principles on which, as we have seen in a former chapter, slavery supports itself, will enable us to illustrate this remark.

It was then seen that slave labour is, from the nature of the case, unskilled labour; and it is evident that this circumstance at once excludes it from the field of manufacturing and mechanical industry. Where a workman is kept in compulsory ignorance, and is, at the same time, without motive for exerting hismental faculties, it is quite impossible that he should take part with efficiency in the difficult and delicate operations wThich most manufacturing and mechanical processes involve. The care and dexterity which the management of machinery requires is not to be obtained from him, and he would often do more damage in an hour than the produce of his labour for a year would cover. Slavery, therefore, at least in its modern form, has never been, and can never.be, employed with success in manufacturing industry. And no less plain is it that it is unsuited to the functions of commerce; for the soul of commerce is the spirit of enterprise, and this is ever found wanting in' communities where slavery exists: their prevailing characteristics are subjection to routine and contempt for money-making pursuits. Moreover, the occupations of commerce are absolutely prohibitive of the employment of servile labour. A mercantile marine composed of slaves is a form of industry which the wrorld has not yet seen. Mutinies in mid-ocean and desertions the moment the vessel touched at foreign ports would quickly reduce the force to a cipher.

Slavery, therefore, excluded by these causes from the field of manufactures and commerce, finds its natural career in agriculture; and, from what has been already established respecting the peculiar qualities of slave labour, we may easily divine the form which agricultural industry will assume under a servile régime . The single merit of slave labour as an industrial instrument consists, as we have seen, in its capacity for organization—its susceptibility, that is to say, of being adjusted with precision to the kind of work to be done, and of being directed on a comprehensive plan towards some distinctly conceived end. Now to give scope to this quality, the scale on which industry is carried on must be extensive, and, to carry on industry on an extensive scale, large capitals are required. Large capitalists will therefore have, in slave communities, a special and peculiar advantage over small capitalists beyond that which they enjoy in countries where labour is free. But there is another circumstance which renders a considerable capital still more an indispensable condition to the successful conduct of industrial operations in slave countries. A capitalist who employs free labour needs for the support of his labour force a sum sufficient to cover the amount of their wages during the interval which elapses from the commencement of their operations until the sale of the produce which results from them. But the capitalist employing slave labour requires not merely this sum—represented in his case by the food, clothing, and shelter provided for his slaves during the corresponding period—but, in addition to this, a sum sufficient to purchase the fee-simple of his entire slave force. For the conduct of a given business, therefore, it is obvious that the employer of slave labour will require a much larger capital than the employer of free labour. The capital of the one will represent merely the current outlay; while the capital of the other will represent, in addition to this, the future capabilities of the productive instrument. The one will represent the interest, the other the principal and interest, of the labour employed. [1] Owing to these causes large capitals are, relatively to small, more profitable, and are, at the same time, absolutely more required in countries of slave, than in countries of free labour. It happens, however, that capital is in slave countries a particularly scarce commodity, owing partly to the exclusion from such countries of many modes of creating it—manufactures and commerce for example—which are open to free communities, and partly to what is also a consequence of the institution— the unthrifty habits of the upper classes. We arrive therefore at this singular conclusion, that, while large capitals in countries of slave labor enjoy peculiar advantages, and while the aggregate capital needed in them for the conduct of a given amount of industry is greater than in countries where labour is free, capital nevertheless in such countries is exceptionally scarce. From this state of things result two phenomena which may be regarded as typical of industry carried on by slaves— the magnitude of the plantations and the indebtedness of the planters. Wherever negro slavery has prevailed in modern times, these two phenomena will be found to exist. They form the burthen of most of what has been written on our West Indian Islands while under the regime of slavery; and they are not less prominently the characteristic features of the industrial system of the Southern States. "Our wealthie* planters," says Mr. Clay, "are buying out their poorer neigh bours, extending their plantations, and adding to their slave force. The wealthy few, who are able to live on smaller profits, and to give their blasted fields some rest, are thus pushing off the many who are merely independent." At the same time these wealthier planters are, it is well known, very generally in debt, the forthcoming crops being for the most part mortgaged to Northern capitalists, who make the needful advances, and who thus become the instruments by which a considerable proportion of the slave labour of the South is maintained. The tendency of things, therefore, in slave countries is to a very unequal distribution of wealth. The large capitalists, having a steady advantage over their smaller competitors, engross, with the progress of time, a larger and larger proportion of the aggregate wealth of the country, and gradually acquire the control of its collective industry. Meantime, amongst the ascendant class a condition of general indebtedness prevails.

But we may carry our deductions from the economic character of slavery somewhat further. It has been seen that slave cultivation can only maintain itself where the soil is rich, while it produces a steady deterioration of the soils on which it is employed. This being so, it is evident that in countries of average fertility but a small portion of the whole area will be available for this mode of cultivation, and that this portion is ever becoming smaller, since, as the process of deterioration proceeds, more soils are constantly reaching that condition in which servile labour ceases to be profitable. What, then, is to become of the remainder—that large portion of the country which is either naturally too poor for cultivation by slaves, or which has been made so by its continued employment? It will be thought, perhaps, that this may be worked by free labour, and that by a judicious combination of both forms of industry the whole surface of the country may be brought to the highest point of productiveness. But this is a moral impossibility: it is precluded by what, we shall find, is a cardinal feature in the structure of slave societies—their exclusiveness. In free countries industry is the path to independence, to wealth, to social distinction, and is therefore held in honour; in slave countries it is the vocation of the slave, and becomes therefore a badge of degradation. The free labourer, consequently, who respects his calling and desires to be respected, instinctively shuns a country where industry is discredited, where he cannot engage in those pursuits by which wrealth and independence are to be gained without placing himself on a level with the lowest of mankind. Free and slave labour are, therefore, incapable of being blended together in the same system. Where slavery exists it excludes all other forms of industrial life. "The traveller," says De Tocqueville, "who floats down the current of the Ohio, may be said to sail between liberty and servitude. Upon the left bank of the stream the population is sparse; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering' in the half-desert fields; the primaeval forest recurs at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle, and nature alone offers a scene of activity and of life. From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests; the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the labourer; and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labour. Upon the left bank of the Ohio labour is confounded with the idea of slavery, upon the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement; on the one side it is degraded, on the other it is honoured; on the former territory no white labourers can be found, for they would be afraid of assimilating themselves to the negroes; on the latter no one is idle, for the white population extends its activity and its intelligence to every kind of employment. Thus the men whose task it is to cultivate the rich soil of Kentucky are ignorant and lukewarm; whilst those who are enlightened either do nothing, or pass over into the State of Ohio, where they may work without dishonour." [2]

Agriculture, therefore, when carried on by slaves, being by a sure law restricted to the most fertile portions of the land, and no other form of systematic industry being possible where slavery is established, it happens that there are in all slave countries vast districts, becoming, under the deteriorating effects of slave industry, constantly larger, which are wholly surrendered to nature, and remain for ever as wilderness. This is a characteristic feature in the political economy of the Slave States of the South, and is attended with social consequences of the most important kind. For the tracts thus left, or made, desolate, become in time the resort of a numerous horde of people, who, too poor to keep slaves and too proud to work, prefer a vagrant and precarious life spent in the desert to engaging in occupations which would associate them with the slaves whom they despise. In the Southern States no less than five millions of human beings are nowT said to exist in this manner in a condition little removed from savage life, eking out a wretched subsistence by hunting, by fishing, by hiring themselves out for occasional jobs, by plunder. Combining the restlessness and contempt for regular industry peculiar to the savage with the vices of the prolétaire of civilized communities, these people make up a class at once degraded and dangerous, and constantly reinforced as they are by all that is idle, worthless, and lawless among the population of the neighbouring States, form an inexhaustible preserve of ruffianism, ready at hand for all the worst purposes of Southern ambition. The planters complain of these people for their idleness, for corrupting their slaves, for their thievish propensities; but they cannot dispense with them; for, in truth, they perform an indispensable function in the economy of slave societies, of which they are at once the victims and the principal supports. It is from their ranks that those filibustering expeditions are recruited which have been found so effective an instrument in extending the domain of the Slave Power; they furnish the Border Ruffians who in the colonization struggle with the Northern States contend with Freesoilers on the Territories; and it is to their antipathy to the negroes that the planters securely trust for repressing every attempt at servile insurrection. Such are the "mean whites " or "white trash " of the Southern States. They comprise several local subdivisions, the " crackers," the " sandhillers," the " clay-eaters," and many more. The class is not peculiar to any one locality, but is the invariable outgrowth of negro slavery wherever it has raised its head in modern times. It may be seen, in the new State of Texas [3] as well as in the old settled districts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia; in the West India Islands [4] no less than on the Continent. In the States of the Confederacy it comprises, as I have said, five millions of human beings—about seven-tenths of the whole white population.

The industry of the Slave States, we have seen, is exclusively agricultural; and the mode of agriculture pursued in them has been represented as partial, perfunctory, and exhaustive. It must, however, be admitted that, to a certain extent, this description is applicable to the industrial condition of all new countries, and will find illustrations in the wrestern regions of the Free States; and it may therefore occur to the reader that the economical conditions which I have described are rather the consequence of the recent settlement of the societies where they prevail than specific results of the system of slavery. But it is easy to show that this view of the case is fallacious, and proceeds from confounding what is essential in slave-industry with an accidental and temporary feature in the industrial career of free communities. The settlers in new countries, whether they be slave-holders or free peasants, naturally fix in the first instance on the richest and most conveniently situated Boils, and find it more profitable to cultivate these lightly, availing themselves to the utmost of the resources which nature offers, than to force cultivation on inferior soils after the manner of high farming in old countries. So far the cases are similar. But here lies the difference. The labour of free peasants, though of course more productive on rich than on inferior soils, is not necessarily confined to the former; whereas this is the case with the labour of slaves. According, therefore, as free peasants multiply, after the best soils have been appropriated, the second best are taken into cultivation; and as they multiply still more, cultivation becomes still more general, until ultimately all the cultivatable portions of the country are brought within the domain of industry. But as slaves multiply, their masters cannot have recourse to inferior soils: they must find for them new soils: the mass of the country, therefore, remains uncultivated, and the population increases only by dispersion. Again, although the mode of cultivation pursued by free peasants in new lands is generally far from what would be approved of by the scientific farmers of old countries, still it does not exhaust the soil in the same manner as cultivation carried on by slaves. "I hold myself justified/' says Mr. Olmsted, "in asserting that the natural elements of wealth in the soil of Texas will have been more exhausted in ten years, and with them the rewards offered by Providence to labour will have been more lessened, than without slavery would have been the case in two hundred." . . . "After two hundred years' occupation of similar soils by a free-labouring community, I have seen no such evidences of waste as in Texas I have after ten years of slavery." [5] ... "Waste of soil and injudicious application of labour are common in the agriculture of the North; . . . but nowhere is the land with what is attached to it now less promising and suitable for the residence of a refined and civilized people than it was before the operations, which have been attended with the alleged waste, were commenced." The same is not true of Virginia or the Carolinas, or of any other district where slavery has predominated for an historic period. "The land in these cases is positively less capable of sustaining a dense civilized community than if no labour at all had been expended upon it." [6] The superficial and careless mode of agriculture pursued by free peasants in new countries is, in short, accidental and temporary, the result of the exceptional circumstances m which they are placed, and gives place to a better system as population increases and inferior soils are brought under the plough; but the superficiality and exhaustiveness of agriculture carried on by slaves are essential and unalterable qualities, rendering all cultivation impossible but that which is carried on upon the richest soils, and irremovable by the growth of population, since they are an effectual bar to this.

My position is, that in. slave communities agriculture is substantially [7] the sole occupation, while this single pursuit is prematurely arrested in its development, never reaching those soils of secondary quality which, under a system of free industry, would, with the growth of society, be brought under cultivation; and of this statement the industrial history of the Free and Slave States forms one continued illustration. The state of Virginia, for example, is the longest settled state in the Union, and for general productive purposes, one of the most richly endowred. It possesses a fertile soil, a genial climate; it is rich in mineral productions, in iron, in copper, in coal— the coal fields of Virginia being amongst the most extensive in the world, and the coal of superior quality; it is approached by one of the noblest bays; it is watered by numerous rivers, some of them navigable for considerable distances, and most of them capable of affording abundance of water power for manufacturing purposes. [8] With such advantages, Virginia, a region as large as England, could not fail, in a career of two hundred and fifty years, under a system of free industry, to become a state of great wealth, population, and power. Her mineral and manufacturing, as well as her agricultural, resources would be brought into requisition; her population would increase with rapidity, and become concentrated in large towns; her agriculture would be extended over the whole surface of the country. But what is the result of the experiment under a slave régime ? After a national life of two hundred and fifty years the whole free population is still under one million souls. [9] Eight-tenths of her industry are devoted to agriculture; and the progress which has been made m this, the principal pursuit, may be estimated by the significant fact, that the average price per acre of cultivated land, in Virginia is no more than eight dollars. Contrast this with the progress made in fifty years by the free state of Ohio—a state smaller in area than Virginia, and inferior in variety of resources. Ohio was admitted as a state into the Union in 1802, and in 1850 its population numbered nearly two millions. [10] Like Virginia it is chiefly agricultural, though not from the same causes, Ohio being from its resources and internal position adapted in a peculiar manner to agriculture, while the resources of Virginia would fit it equally for manufactures or commerce; but, while the average price of cultivated land per acre in Virginia, after an agricultural career of two hundred and fifty years, is eight dollars, the average price in Ohio, after a career of fifty years, is twenty dollars. The contrast will of course only become more striking, if, instead of a free state of fifty years' growth, we take one more nearly on a par in the duration of its career with the slave state with which it is compared. New Jersey, for example, was founded about the same time as Virginia. Its climate, Mr. Olmsted tells us, differs imperceptibly from that of Virginia, owing to its vicinity to the ocean, while its soil is decidedly less fertile; but such progress has been made in bringing that soil under cultivation that, against eight dollars per acre—the average price of land in Virginia—there is to be set in New Jersey an average of forty-four dollars. [11] Let us take another example. New York and Massachusetts are also, in relation to Virginia, contemporary states. In agricultural resources they are greatly its inferiors, the soil of Massachusetts in particular being sterile and its climate harsh. What then has been the relative progress made by these three states in bringing their respective soils under cultivation? In Virginia, 26J per cent, of her whole area had, in 1852, been brought under tillage; in New York, 41 per cent.; and in Massachusetts, 42| per cent. But these facts do not convey their full lesson till we add that, in bringing 26£ per cent, of her soil under cultivation, Virginia employed eight-tenths of her industrial population, while New York and Massachusetts, in bringing under cultivation much larger proportions of their areas, empkyed but six and four-tenths of their respective populations. [12] It thus appears that Virginia, with great agricultural resources and a population almost wholly devoted to agriculture, has been far outstripped in her own peculiar branch of industry by states of inferior resources, and whose industry has been largely or principally devoted to other pursuits. The same comparison might be continued throughout the other Free and Slave states wTith analogous results. The general truth is, that in the Free States, wdiere external circumstances are favourable, industry is distributed over many occupations—manufactures,mining, commerce, agriculture; while in the Slave States, however various be the resources of the country, it is substantially confined to one—agriculture; and in this one is prematurely arrested, never reaching that stage of development which in countries wdiere labour is free is early attained.

The reader is now in a position to understand the kind of economic success which slavery has achieved. It consists in the rapid extraction from the soil of a country of the most easily obtained portion of its wealth by a process which exhausts the soil, and consigns to waste all the other resources of the country where it is practised. To state the case with more particularity—by proscribing manufactures and commerce, and confining agriculture within narrow bounds, by rendering impossible the rise of a free peasantry, by checking the growth of population—in a word, by blasting every germ from which national well-being and general civilization may spring—at this cost, with the further condition of encroaching, through a reckless system of culture, on the stores designed by Providence for future generations, slavery may undoubtedly for a time be made conducive to the pecuniary gain of the class who keep slaves. Such is the net result of advantage which slavery, as an economic system, is capable of yielding. To the full credit of all that is involved in this admission the institution is fairly entitled.

The constitution of a slave society, it has been seen, is sufficiently simple : it resolves itself into three classes, broadly distinguished from each other, and connected by no common interest—the slaves on whom devolves all the regular industry, the slave-holders who reap all its fruits, and an idle and lawless rabble who live dispersed over vast plains in a condition little removed from absolute barbarism. These form the constituent elements of the society of which the Slave Power is the political representative. What the nature of that powrer is, now that we have ascertained the elements out of which it springs, we can have little difficulty in determining. When the whole wealth of a country is monopolized by a thirtieth part of its population, while the remainder are by physical or moral causes consigned to compulsory poverty and ignorance; when the persons composing the privileged thirtieth part are all engaged in pursuits of the same kind, subject to the influence of the same moral ideas, and identified with the maintenance of the same species of property—in a society so constituted political power will of necessity reside with those in whom centre the elements of such power—wealth, knowledge, and intelligence—the small minority for whose exclusive benefit the system exists. The polity of such a society must thus, in essence, be an oligarchy, whatever be the particular mould in which it is cast. Nor is this all. A society so organized tends to develop with a peculiar intensity the distinctive vices of an oligarchy. In a country of free labour, whatever be the form of government to which it is subject, the pursuits of industry are various. Various interests, therefore, take root, and parties grow up which, regarding national questions from various points of view, become centres of opposition, whether against the undue pretensions of any one of their number, or against those of a single ruler. It is not so in the Slave States. That variety of interests which springs from the individual impulses of a free population does not here exist. The elements of a political opposition are wranting. There is but one party, [13] but one set of men who are capable of acting together in political concert. The rest is an undisciplined rabble. From this state of things the only possible result is that which we find—a despotism, in the last degree unscrupulous and impatient of control, wielded by the wealthy few. Now it is this power which for half a century has exercised paramount sway in the councils of the Union. It is the men educated in the ideas of this system who have filled the highest offices of State, who have been the representatives of their country to European Powers, and who, by their position and the influence they have commanded, have given the tone to the public morality of the nation. The deterioration of the institutions and of the character of the people of the United States is now very commonly taken for granted in this country. The fact may be so; so far as the South is concerned I believe, and shall endeavour to prove, that it unquestionably is so. But it is very important that we should understand to what cause this deterioration is due. There are writers who would have us believe that it is but the natural result of democratic institutions working through the Federal system; and for this view a plausible case may be easily made out. Democratic institutions have admittedly exercised a powerful influence in forming the American character and in determining the present condition of the United States. It is only necessary, therefore, to bring this point strongly into view in close connexion with all that is most objectionable in the public morals, and all that is most discreditable in the recent history, of the Union, keeping carefully out of sight the existence in the political system of institutions the reverse of democratic and avoiding all reference to the cardinal fact, that it is these and not the democratic institutions of the North which, almost since its establishment, have been the paramount power in the Union,—to leave the impression that everything that has been made matter of reproach in transatlantic politics has been due to democracy and to democracy alone. According to this method of theorising, the abstraction of Florida, the annexation of Texas, the filibustering expeditions of Lopez and Walker, the attempts upon Cuba, have no connexion with the aggressive ambition of the Slave Power: they are only proofs of the rapacious spirit of democracy armed wkh the strength of a powerful federation. It is, indeed, quite astounding to observe the boldness with which this argument is sometimes handled. One would have thought that an advocate of the Southern cause would at least have shown some hesitancy in alluding to an attack made by a Southern bully, on the floor of the Senate-house, upon one of the most accomplished statesmen of the North. That attack was in all circumstances plainly branded witli the marks of its origin. It was committed by a slaveholder, acting as the champion of slaveholders, in revenge for an anti-slavery speech; it was characterized by that mingled treachery, cowardice, and brutality which are only to be found in societies reared in/the presence of slavery; it was adopted and applauded by the whole people of the South, recognized by testimonials, and rewarded by gifts: yet this act is deliberately put forward as an example of the "irreverence for justice" which is produced by democratic institutions, and is employed to prepossess our minds in favour, of the Southern cause ! [14] The present writer is far from being an admirer of democracy as it exists in the Northern States; but, whatever be the merits or demerits of that form of government, it is desirable that it should be judged by its own fruits, and not by the fruits of a system which is its opposite —a system which, in place of conferring political power on the majority of the people, gives it, free from all control, to a small minority whose interests are not only not identical with those of their fellow-citizens, but directly opposed to theirs. Democracy, beyond all doubt, has been a powerful influence in moulding the character of the Americans in the Northern States; it would be absurd to deny this; but it would be no less absurd, and would be still more flagrantly in defiance of the most conspicuous facts of the case, to deny that that character has also been profoundly modified by the influence of Southern institutions, acting through the Federal government, in the persons of Southern men—institutions which I repeat are the reverse of democratic. It is the Slave Power, and not the democracy of the North, which for half a century has been dominant in the Union. It is this Power which has directed its public policy; which has guided its intercourse with foreign nations, conducted its diplomacy, regulated its internal legislation, and which, by working on its hopes and fears through the unscrupulous use of an enormous patronage, has exercised an unbounded sway over the minds of the whole people. Whatever other agencies may have contributed to shape the course of American politics, this at least has been a leading one ; and whatever be the political character of the citizens, for that character this system must be held in a principal degree responsible.

To sum up in a few words the general results of the foregoing discussion :—the Slave Power—that power which has long held the helm of government in the Union—is, under the forms of a democracy, an uncontrolled despotism, wielded by a compact oligarchy. Supported by the labour of four millions of slaves, it rules a population of five millions of whites—a population ignorant, averse to systematic industry, and prone to irregular adventure. A system of society more formidable for evil, more menacing to the best interests of the human race, it is difficult to conceive.

[1.] The operation of the economic principle which I have endeavoured to explain is well illustrated in the following case put by Mr. Olmsted —

"Let us suppose two recent immigrants, one in Texas, the other in the young free State of Iowa, to have both, at the same time, a considerable sum of money— say five thousand dollars—at disposal. Land has been previously purchased, a hasty dwelling of logs constructed, and ample crops for sustenance harvested. Each has found communication with his market interrupted during a portion of the year by floods; each needs an ampler and better house; each desires to engage a larger part of his land in profitable production; each needs some agricultural machinery or implements; in the neighbourhood of each, a church, a school, a grist-mill, and a branch railroad are proposed. Each may be supposed to have previously obtained the necessary materials for his c^sired constructions; and to need immediately the services of a carpenter. The Texan, unable to hire one in the neighbourhood, orders his agent in Houston or New Orleans to buy him one: when he arrives, he has cost not less than two of the five thousand dollars. The Iowan, in the same predicament, writes to a friend in the East or advertises in the newspapers, that he is ready to pay better wages than carpenters can get in the older settlements; and a young man, whose only capital is in his hands and his wits, glad to come where there is a glut of food and a dearth of labour, soon presents himself. To construct a causeway and a bridge, and to clear, fence, and break up the land he desires to bring into cultivation, the Texan will need three more slaves—and he gets them as before, thereby investing all his money. The Iowan has only to let his demand be known, or, at most, to advance a small sum to the public conveyances, and all the labourers he requires—independent small capitalists of labour—gladly bring their only commodity to him and offer it as a loan, on his promise to pay a better interest, or wages, for it than Eastern capitalists are willing to do. The Iowan next sends for the implements and machinery which will enable him to make the best use of the labour, he has engaged. The Texan tries to get on another year without them, or employs such rude substitutes as his stupid, uninstructed, and uninterested slaves can readily make in his ill-furnished plantation workshop. The Iowan is able to contribute liberally to aid in the construction of the church, the school-house, the mill, and the railroad. His labourers, appreciating the value of the reputation they may acquire for honesty, good judgment, skill, and industry, do not need constant superintendence, and he is able to call on his neighbours and advise, encourage, and stimulate them. Thus the church, the school, and the railroad are soon in operation, and with them is brought rapidly into play other social machinery, which makes much luxury common and cheap to all. The Texan, if solicited to assist in similar enterprises, answers truly, that cotton is yet too low to permit him to invest money where it does not promise to be immediately and directly productive. The Iowan may still have one or two thousand dollars, to be lent to merchants, mechanics, or manufacturers, who are disposed to establish themselves near him. With the aid of this capital, not only various minor conveniences are brought into the neighbourhood, but useful information, scientific, agricultural, and political; and commodities, the use of which is educative of taste and the finer capacities of our nature, are attractively presented to the people. The Texan mainly does without these things. He confines the imports of his plantation almost entirely to slaves, corn, bacon, salt, sugar, molasses, tobacco, clothing, medicine, hoes, and plough-iron. Even if he had the same capital to spare, he would live in far less comfort than the Iowan, because of the want of local shops and efficient systems of public conveyance which cheapen the essentials of comfort for the latter."— Texas , pp. viil-x.

[2.] Democracy in America , vol. ii. pp. 222, 223. "The negroes," says Mr. Olmsted, "are a degraded people—degraded not merely by position, but actually immoral, low-lived; without healthy ambition; but little influenced by high moral considerations; and, in regard to labour, not at all affected by regard for duty. This is universally recognized, and debasing fear, not cheering hope, is in general allowed to be their only stimulant to exerticm. . . . Now, let the white labourer come here from the North or from Europe—his nature demands a social life—shall he associate with the poor, slavish, degraded, low-lived, despised, unambitious negro, with whom labour and punishment are almost synonymous? or shall he be the friend and companion of the white man, in whose mind labour is habitually associated with no ideas of duty, responsibility, comfort, luxury, cultivation, or elevation and expansion either of mind or estate, as it is where the ordinary labourer is a free man—free to use his labour as a means of obtaining all these and all else that is to be respected, honoured, or envied in the world? Associating with either or both, is it not inevitable that he will be rapidly demoralized—that he will soon learn to hate labour, give as little of it for his hire as he can, become base, cowardly, faithless—' worse than a nigger?' . . When we reflect how little the great body of our workingmen are consciously much affected by moral considerations in their movements, one is tempted to suspect that the Almighty has endowed the great transatlantic migration with a new instinct, by which it is unconsciously repelled from the demoralizing and debilitating Influence of slavery, as migrating birds have sometimes been thought to be from pestilential regions. I know not else how to account for the remarkable indisposition to be sent to Virginia* which I have seen manifested by poor Irishmen and G-ermans, who could have known. I think, no more of the evils of slavery to the whites in the Slave States, than the slaves themselves know of the effect of conscription in France, and who certainly could have been governed by no considerations of self-respect."

[3.] Olmsted's Texas , p. xvii.; note.

[4.] Merivale's Colonization and the Colonies , p. 83; note, new ed.

[5.] Olmsted's Texas , p. xiv.

[6.] Ibid. p. xviil; note.

[7.] I do not mean to assert that there is no mechanical or manufacturing industry carried on in the Slave States. In some of the principal towns, no doubt, there is, though to a limited extent, and here it is chiefly the result of Northern enterprise. What I intend to say is, that the amount of industry of this kind is so small, that in speaking of the resources of national wealth, it need not be taken account of.

[8.] Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States , pp. 165, 166.

[9.] The actual numbers were in 1850:—

"Whites .... 894,800 Free coloured .... 54,333 Total free . . . 949,133

[10.] The actual numbers were, 1,980,329.

[11.] Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States , p. 1*71. In connexion with this question Mr. Weston ( Progress of Slavery ) gives the following striking statistics, p. 17 :—"The following were the prices per acre in the states and counties named, and the percentage of slaves in Kentucky and the counties named:—

Value per acre. Per ct. of slaves.

Ohio $19-99 Indiana 10-66 Illinois 7-99 Kentucky 9-03 22 Ohio counties adjoining Kentucky . . . 32-34 Kentucky counties adjoining Ohio ... 18-27 10 Indiana counties adjoining Kentucky . . 11-34 Kentucky counties adjoining Indiana . . 10-44 21 Illinois counties adjacent to Kentucky . 4-65 Kentucky counties adjacent to Illinois . 4-54 18"

[12.] These facts are given in an "Address to the Farmers of Virginia," by the Virginia State Agricultural Society , which, after having been twice read, approved, and adopted, was finally rejected on the ground that "there were admissions in it which would feed the fanaticism of the abolitionists;" but "no one argued against it on the ground of the falsity or inaccuracy of its returns." It is quoted at length by Olmsted, Seaboard Slave States , pp. 167-170.

[13.] There is one exception to this statement. Between the breeding and working states a difference of interest has been developed which has resulted in the formation of two parties within the Slave States. But (as will hereafter be shown) this difference of interest has never been sufficient to produce any serious discordance among the politicians of the South. The sympathies which bind the breeding and working states together are far stronger than any interests which separate them; and in the main they have always acted as a single party.

[14.] Spence's American Union , pp. 65-6, 14-5. Mr. Spence states the act, omitting to mention the occasion, or whether the actors were Northern or Southern men, but in the same paragraph, having alluded to the case of Mr. Sickles, he adds that the man "who committed a deliberate and relentless murder in open day . . . . is now a Brigadier-General in the Northern army." Is the mention of the criminal's origin in one case, and its suppression in the other, an accident?

In a later portion of the volume a still more striking instance occurs of Mr. Spence's candour. "A French writer, Raymond, comments upon the singular fact that whilst between England and France but one serious quarrel has occurred since 1815, there have arisen during the same period twelve or thirteen most serious difficulties between the United States and ourselves ... We have had minor wars with China, conducted on the principle of throwing open to the world every advantage obtained by ourselves. On one occasion we invited the co-operation of the American Government, but in vain, and every opportunity was seized to thwart our policy. Even the Chinese know they may expect to see the flag of any other power in union with our own, but never that of America. There was, indeed, a moment when our men were falling under a murderous fire, that for once an American %was heard to declare that 'blood was thicker than water.' It would ill become us to forget the noble conduct of Commodore Tatnall on that occasion. He was a Southerner, and is now a 'traitor and rebel' " (pp. 294-296). Let the reader note the art with which the facts are here manipulated. We are asked to refuse our sympathies to the North, because, since 1815 we have had frequent difficulties with the United States (which the North now represents)—the circumstances that during almost the whole of this period the Government of the United States was in the hands of Southern statesmen being suppressed as of no importance in the case. On the other hand a single instance in which a Southerner has performed an act of a friendly nature towards Great Britain is brought prominently forward as a ground for giving our sympathies to the South. It is evident that the contrast thus instituted between the friendly conduct of Commodore Tatnall—a Southerner—and the hostile spirit which had just, been commented on as manifested by the Government of the Union, can, taken in connexion with the general tenor of the argument, have no other effect than to leave readers unacquainted with the facts (a rather numerous class unfortunately in this country) under the impression that, as the friendly demonstration was the act of a Southerner, so the hostile manifestations proceeded from the North. The spirit evinced in this passage, which is merely a specimen of the main argument of the work from which it is taken, is all the more remarkable in a writer who in his preface bespeaks the confidence of his readers on the ground that "personal considerations and valued friendships incline him without exception to the Northern side," which he has been compelled reluctantly to abandon by "convictions forced upon the mind by facts and reasonings."

CHAPTER V. INTERNAL DEVELOPMENT OF SLAVE SOCIETIES.

It may be well here to trace briefly the salient features of the system which in the previous chapters it has been attempted to describe. A race superior to another in power and civilization holds that other in bondage, compelling it to work for its profit. The enslaved race, separated broadly from the dominant one in its leading physical and moral attributes, is further distinguished from it by the indelible mark of colour, which prevents the growth of mutual sympathy and transmits to posterity the brand of its disgrace. Kept in compulsory ignorance and deprived of all motive for intelligent exertion, this people can only furnish its possessors with the crudest form of manual labour. It is thus rendered unfit for every branch of industry which requires, in any but the lowest forms, the exercise of care, intelligence, or skill, and is virtually restricted to the pursuit of agriculture. In agriculture it can only be turned to profitable account under certain special conditions—in raising crops of a peculiar kind and upon soils of more than average fertility; while these by its thriftless methods it tends constantly to exhaust. The labour of the enslaved race is thus in practice confined to the production of a few leading staples; but, through the medium of foreign trade, these few commodities become the means of furnishing its masters with all the Conveniences and comforts of life—the product of intelligence and skill in countries where labour is free. Further, it was seen that the defects of servile labour are best neutralized, and such advantages as it possesses best turned to account, where the scale of the operations is large,—a circumstance, which, by placing a premium on the employment of large capitals, has gradual^ led to the accumulation of the whole wealth of the country in the hands of a small number of persons. Four million slaves have thus come into the possession of masters less than one-tenth of their number, by whom they are held as chattel property; while the rest of the dominant race, more numerous than slaveholders and their slaves together, squat over the vast area which slave labour is too unskilful to cultivate, where by hunting and fishing, by plunder or by lawless adventure, they eke out a precarious livelihood. Three leading elements are thus presented by the economy of the slave states —a few planters cultivating the richest soils, a multitude of slaves toiling for their profit, the bulk of the white population dispersed in a semi-savage condition over a vast territory. In course of time the system begins to bear its fruit. The more fertile soils of the country, tasked again and again to render the same products, at length become exhausted, and refuse any longer to yield up their riches to servile hands; but there are new soils within reach which the plough has not yet touched, regions of high fertility, pre-eminently fitted for the cultivation of slave products, bordering however on the tropics, and unfavourable to human life when engaged in severe toil. At this point a new phase of the system discloses itself. A division of labour takes place. A portion of the slaveholders with their slave bands move forward to occupy the new territory, while the remainder, holding to their old seats, become the breeders of slaves for those who have left them, and take, as their part, the repairing from their more healthy populations the waste of slave life produced by tropical toil. Thus, as the domain of slavery is extended, its organization becomes more complete, and the fate of the slave population more harsh and hopeless. Slavery in its simple and primitive form is developed into slavery supported by a slave trade—into slavery expansive, aggressive, destructive of human life, regardless of human ties, —into slavery in its most dangerous and most atrocious form; and for the system thus matured a secure basis is afforded by the principles of population. Such is an outline of the economy of society in the Slave States of North America, as I have ventured to describe it; and the condition of facts which it discloses goes far, as it seems to me, to establish the conclusion that it is a structure essentially different from any form of social life which has hitherto been known among progressive communities, and one which, if allowed to proceed in its normal development undisturbed by intervention from without, can only conduct to one issue—an organized barbarism of the most relentless and formidable kind.

But it may be well to pursue this inquiry somewhat further. If the germs of a future civilization are contained in the social system which has been described, in what department of it are they to be found? Among the mean whites? Among the slaves? Among the slave masters?

The mean whites, as has been shown, are the natural growth of the slave system; their existence and character flowing necessarily from two facts—the slaves, which render the capitalists independent of their services, [15] and the wilderness, the constant feature of slave countries, which enables them to exist without engaging in regular work. There is no capital to support them as hired labourers, and they have the means of subsisting, in a semi-savage condition, without it. Under these circumstances, by what steps are they to advance to an improvement of their condition?

It will perhaps be thought that with a vast unappropriated territory around them the mean whites may be expected in time to become peasant proprietors, and to cultivate the districts which they now merely occupy. This is undoubtedly what would happen with an influx of Northern settlers. But the mean whites lack for such a lot two indispensable requisites, capital and industry. Had they the latter, they might perhaps in time acquire the former; but regular industry is only known to them as the vocation of slaves, and it is the one fate which above all others they desire to avoid. They will for a time, indeed, when pressed for food, their ordinary resources of hunting or plunder failing them, hire themselves out for occasional services; but, so soon as they have satisfied the immediate need, they hasten to escape from the degradation of industry, and are as eager as Indians to return to their wilds.

Another means of redemption is sometimes imagined for the mean whites. It is thought that, with the progress of population in the Slave States, they will ultimately be forced into competition with the slaves, and that, this competition once effectually commenced, the whites once engaged in regular industry, the superiority of free to servile labour will become manifest, and will gradually lead to the displacement of the latter. In this way, it is anticipated, the problem of abolishing slavery, and that of elevating the white population, may in the natural course of events be effectually solved by the same process. Unfortunately this cheering view is entirely unsustained by any foundation of fact. Population in slave communities follows laws of growth of its own. It increases, it is true, but by dispersion, not by concentration, and consequently the pressure upon the poor white, which it is assumed will force him into competition with the slave, is never likely to be greater than at the present moment. In fact it has now in many districts reached the starvation point, but without producing any of the effects which are anticipated from it. But, again, the free labour of the South possesses none of that superiority to slave labour, which is characteristic of free labour when reared in free communities. This is a distinction which in economic reasonings on slavery is frequently overlooked, [16] but which it is all-important to bear in mind. The free labourer reared in free communities, energetic, intelligent, animated by the impulse of acquiring property, and trained to habits of thrift, is the best productive agent in the world, and, when brought into competition with the slave, will, except under very exceptional circumstances (such as existed when the continent was first settled), prove more than a match for him. But the free labourer of the South, blighted physically and morally by the presence of slavery, and trained in habits more suited to savage than to industrial life, easily succumbs in the competition. In fact the experiment is being constantly tried in the Southern States, and always with the same result. On the relative merits of slave and free labour—such free labour as the Slave States can produce—there is but one opinion among the planters. It is universally agreed that the labour of the mean whites [17] is more inefficient, more unreliable, more unmanageable than even the crude efforts of the slaves. If slavery in the South is to be displaced by free industry, it can never be through the competition of such free industry as this.

It does not appear, therefore, in what manner habits of regular industry can ever be acquired by the mass of the population of the Southern States while under a slave régime . The demoralization produced by the presence of a degraded class renders the white man at once an unwilling and an inefficient labourer; and the external incidents of slavery afford him the means of existing without engaging in regular toil. The question has, in truth, passed beyond the region of speculation. For two hundred years it has been submitted to the proof; and the mean whites are as far now from having made any progress in habits of regular industry as they were at the commencement of the period.

The result, then, at which we arrive is, that regular industry is not to be expected from the mass of the free people of the Southern States while slavery continues. Let us for a moment reflect upon some of the consequences involved in this single fact.

And, first, it is evident that under these conditions population in the Slave States must ever remain sparse; for density of population is the result of concentrated wealth, and concentrated wealth flows from the steady pursuit of systematic industry. What are the facts? Over the whole area of the Slave States the average density of population does not exceed 11.29 persons to the square mile. It is true a large portion of the region included in this average has but recently been acquired, and cannot be considered as having yet received its full complement of inhabitants. Let us, then, confine our observations to the older states. If population be capable of becoming dense under slave institutions, it should have realized this condition in Yirginia. This state has been for two hundred and fifty years the seat of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the chosen field of its industry: it abounds in natural advantages; its climate is remarkably salubrious. What, then, is the result of the experiment in Virginia? It appears from the census of 1850, that, after an industrial career of two hundred and fifty years, this country contained an average of 23 persons to the square mile! This, however, does not adequately represent the case; for of these 23 persons one-third on an average were slaves. Deducting these, the density of population in Yirginia—-of population among whom knowledge is not considered contraband, of population who are capable of mixing together as fellow-citizen (which is the point essential totmr argument) —the density of this population is represented by the proportion of 15 persons to the square mile! Compare this with the progress of population in an area of the Free States naturally less favourable to the multiplication of people and not so long settled,—with the area comprised by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania —and what do we find? Population has here, in a shorter time, and under external conditions less favourable, reached an average density of 82 persons to the square mile. For equal areas in the Free and Slave States there are thus considerably more than five persons capable of taking part in the business of civilized life in the former for one in the latter. Population under slave institutions, in fact, only increases by dispersion. Fifteen persons to the square mile represent the maximum density which population under the most favourable circumstances is, with slavery, capable of attaining. [18] Now, this state of things is incompatible with civilized progress. Under such conditions social intercourse cannot exist; popular education becomes impracticable; roads, canals, railways, must be losing speculations; in short, all the civilizing agencies of highest value are, by the very nature of the case, excluded. Among a people so dispersed, for example, how is popular education to be carried on? Not to dwell upon the obstacles presented to the diffusion of knowledge by the mental habits of a people accustomed to the life of the mean whites—a life alternating between listless vagrancy and the excitement of marauding expeditions—the mere physical difficulties of the problem —the task of bringing together from a population so dispersed the materials of a school—would' be such as might well discourage the most determined zeal. In point of fact, all attempts at conveying education to the bulk of the people in the Southern States have proved costly failures. Experiments have been made in some of the states, and always with the same result. [19] The moral and physical difficulties of the problem have proved insuperable; and the mass of the people remains, and under the present social system ever must remain, entirely uninstructcd.

Nor is this the only way in which sparseness of population operates unfavourably on the intellectual progress of a people. Scarcely less important than school teaching, as instruments of popular education, are the societies established for the mutual improvement of those who take part in them, such as mechanics' institutes, and literary and scientific associations, of which, such extensive use is made in this country and in the Northern States. But from this efficacious mode of awakening intelligence, a people, whose social institutions prevent it from attaining greater concentration than is reached by the people of the South, is entirely excluded. [20]

Lastly, how are the means of communication to be developed under such conditions? How are railways to be made profitable in a population of fifteen persons to the square mile? Railways, no doubt, have been made in the South, but with more advantage to the travellers than to the shareholders. In South Carolina a train has been known to travel a hundred miles with a single passenger. [21]

The mean whites seem thus, under an inexorable law, to be bound to their present fate by the same chain which holds the slave to his. Slavery produces distaste for industry. Distaste for industry, coexisting with a wilderness which is also the fruit of slavery, disperses population over vast areas as the one condition, of its increase. Among such a people the requisites of progress do not exist; the very elements of civilization are wanting.

If, then, society is to advance in the South, we must look somewhere else than among the mass of the white population for the motive principle which is to propel it. And where are we to look? Southern society furnishes but two other elements —the slaves and their masters. What germ of hope does either of these present? If civilization is to spring up among the negro race, it will scarcely be contended that this will happen while they are still slaves; and if the present ruling clasl are ever to rise above the existing type, it must be in some other capacity than as slaveholders. The whole question therefore turns ultimately on the chances of slave emancipation. Slave emancipation may, of course, be forced upon the South by pressure from without; but the point which we have now to consider is the prospect of this result being attained in the natural course of its internal development.

And first let us observe the inherent difficulty of the problem. It was shown in a former chapter that in the system of North American slavery, obstacles exist to the emancipation of the slave which had no place among the ancients. It may now be added that the difficulties of slave emancipation in the present Slave States are far greater than those which were successfully encountered in the Northern. Owing to causes already explained, slavery had never taken very firm root in the North: it was becoming, with the growth of society, constantly less profitable: the total number of slaves formed but a small fraction of the whole population: above all, the Northern States had in the markets of the South a ready means of ridding themselves, at trifling loss, of a class which had become an incumbrance. For, to borrow the words of De Tocqueville, the overthrow of slavery in the Northern States was effected "by abolishing the principle of slavery, not by setting the slaves free." The Northern people did not emancipate negroes who were enslaved, but they provided for the future extinction of slavery by legislating for the freedom of their offspring. The operation of this plan may be readily supposed. The future offspring of the slave having by the law of a particular state been declared free, the slave himself lost a portion of his value in that state. But in the South these laws had no force, and consequently in the South the value of the slave was unaltered by the change. The effect, therefore, of the Northern measures of abolition was, for the most part, simply to transfer Northern slaves to Southern markets. In this way, by an easy process, without incurring any social danger, and at slight pecuniary loss, the Northern States got rid of slavery. The problem of enfranchisement in the South is of a very different character. Slavery, instead of being, as it always was in the North, but one, and an unimportant one, among many modes of industry, is there virtually the sole industrial instrument: instead of comprising an insignificant fraction of the whole population, it comprises throughout the whole South one-third, and in some States one-half: it numbers altogether four millions of people: lastly, the South is wholly without that easy means of shuffling off slavery which its own markets provided for the North. The two cases are thus wholly unlike, and the spontaneous disappearance of slavery from the Northern section of the Union gives little ground to hope for a similar result in the present Slave States.

And still less warranted are we in expecting a policy of emancipation from the South by the history of British emancipation in the West Indies; for that event was not brought about in the natural course of social improvement in those islands, but was forced upon them by the mother nation, in the face of the protests and remonstrances of their ruling classes. Instead of being the natural result of principles called into action under slave institutions, it was only accomplished with difficulty through the direct and forcible interposition of an external authority.

So far as to ancient and modern precedents: they are palpably inapplicable to the present case. But there are those who anticipate the growth of a liberal policy in the South from the gradual operation of economic causes in ultimately identifying the interests of planters with those of the general community. [22] It will be worth while briefly to examine the argument which is founded upon this view of the case. It is said that free labour (regarded from a purely economic point of view—moral considerations apart) being superior to slave labour, and this principle being exemplified by the whole industrial history of the Northern and Southern States—the former, though naturally less fertile, having far outstripped the latter in the race of material prosperity—the truth must ultimately be recognised by the slaveholders themselves, and that, so soon as this happens, they will be led by self-interest to adopt a policy of emancipation. The case may indeed be put more strongly than this; for slavery has not merely thwarted the general prosperity of the South, it may even be shown to have operated to the special detriment of the particular class for whose exclusive behoof it is maintained. For the slaveholders of the South are also its landed proprietors, and the uniform effect of slavery (as has been shown in a former part of this essay) has been, by confining cultivation to the rich soils, to prevent the growth of rent. So powerfully, indeed, has this cause operated, that it has been calculated, apparently upon good grounds, [23] that the mere difference in rent between the returns from lands of equal quality in the Free and Slave States, would be more than sufficient to buy up the whole slave property of the South. By the abolition of slavery in that country, therefore, not merely would the general prosperity of the inhabitants be promoted, but, by the rise of rent which would be the consequence of this measure, there would result to slaveholders a special gain—a gain which, it may reasonably be thought, would form a liberal compensation for any temporary inconvenience they might suffer from the change. Considerations so obvious, it is argued, must in the end have their effect on the minds of the ruling class in the South, and must lead them before long to abolish a system which is fraught with such baleful effects to the country and to themselves.

To the soundness of this reasoning, so far as it proves the beneficial results which would follow from the abolition of slavery, I do not think that any valid objection can be offered. It appears to me as demonstrable as any proposition in Euclid, that, extending our view over some generations, slavery has acted injuriously on every class and every interest in the South, and that its continued maintenance is absolutely incompatible with the full development of the resources of the country. Nevertheless it would, I conceive, be infinitely precarious from this position to infer that slaveholders will ever be induced voluntarily to abolish slavery. The slaveholders of the South are perfectly aware of the superior prosperity of the Free States: it is with them, a subject of bitter mortification and envy; but, with the most conclusive evidence before their eyes, they persist in attributing this to every cause but the right one. Supposing, however, that they are in the end convinced, by such arguments as I have referred to, of the injurious effects of their system, and that they are satisfied that the immediate loss from the abolition of slavery would be more than made good to their descendants in the future increase in the value of their land, still I apprehend that they would be as far as ever from being won over to a policy of abolition. For, whatever be the future advantages which may be expected from the change, it is vain to deny that the transition from slavery to freedom could not be effected without great inconvenience, loss, and, doubtless, in many cases, ruin, to the present race of slave-holders. The accumulated results of two hundred years of tyranny, cruelty, and disregard of the first of human rights are not thus easily evaded. A sacrifice there would need to be. [24] And it is vain to expect that slaveholders, of whose system selfishness is the fundamental principle, and whose profits are purchased, not merely at the cost of misery to the whole race of living men, but at the cost of the future prosperity of their own descendants, whose interests in the soil their spendthrift system anticipates—it is vain to expect that they of all men should voluntarily devote -themselves for the good of their country. So long, therefore, as slaveholders have at their disposal an unlimited extent of fertile soil suited to slave products, it is, I think, vain to hope that the question of slavery will ever find its solution in economic motives. But, in truth, it is idle to argue this question on purely economic grounds. It is not simply as a productive instrument that slavery is valued by its supporters. It is far rather for its social and political results—• as the means of upholding a form of society in which slaveholders are the sole depositaries of social prestige and political power, as the " corner stone" of an edifice of which they are the masters—that the system is prized. Abolish slavery and you introduce a new order of things, in which the ascendancy of the men who now rule in the South would be at an end. An immigration of new men would set in rapidly from various quarters. The planters and their adherents would soon be placed in a hopeless minority in their old dominions. New interests would take root and grow; new social ideas would germinate; new political combinations would be formed; and the power and hopes of the party which has long swayed the politics of the Union, and which now seeks to break loose from that Union in order to secure a free career for the accomplishment of bolder designs, would be gone for ever. It is this which constitutes the real strength of slavery in the Southern States, and which precludes even the momentary admission by the dominant party there of any proposition which has abolition for its object.

And in view of this aspect of North American slavery, we may see how perfectly futile, how absolutely childish, is the suggestion, that the Slave party should be bought over by the Federal government through the offer of a liberal compensation, after the precedent of Great Britain dealing with her West Indian possessions. Putting aside the magnitude of the sum, which, at the price of slaves which recently prevailed, would certainly not be less than £300,000,000 sterling, and the impossibility of raising it in the present state of American credit, who that knows anything of the aims of the Southern party can suppose that the proposal, if made, would not be rejected with scorn ? [25] The suggestion supposes that men who have long held paramount influence over the North American continent, and who are probably now meditating plans of annexation and conquest, would at once abandon their position as the chiefs of an independent confederacy, and forego their ambitious schemes, for what ?—for a sum of money which, if well invested, might perhaps enable them and their descendants to vegetate in peaceful obscurity!

But there is yet another influence to be taken account of in arguing this question. Slavery has not merely determined the general form and character of the social and political economy of the Southern States, it has entered into the soul of the people, and has generated a code of ethics and a type of Christianity adapted to its peculiar requirements.

At the epoch of the revolution, as has been already intimated, slavery was regarded by all the eminent men who took part in that movement as essentially an evil—an evil which might indeed be palliated as having come down to that generation from an earlier and less enlightened age, and which, having intwined itself with the institutions of the country, required to be delicately dealt with—but still an evil, indefensible on moral and religious grounds, and which ought not to be permanently endured. The Convention of 1774 unanimously condemned the practice of holding slaves. The Convention of 1787, while legislating for the continuance of slavery, resolved to exclude from the constitution the word " slave," lest it should be thought that the American nation gave any sanction to "the idea that there could be property in men." Washington, a native of the South and a slaveholder, declared it to be among his first wishes to see slavery abolished by law, and in his will provided for the emancipation of his slaves. Jefferson, also a native of the South and a slaveholder, framed a plan of abolition, and declared that in the presence of slavery "he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just;" that in the event of a rising of slaves, "the Almighty had no attribute which could take side with slaveowners in such a contest." The other leading statesmen of that time, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Patrick Henry, the Randolphs, Monroe, wrhether from the North or from the South, whether agreeing or not in their views on the practical mode of dealing with the institution, alike concurred in reprobating at least the principle of slavery.

But it seems impossible that a whole people should live permanently in contemplation of a system which does violence to its moral instincts. One of two results will happen. Either its moral instincts will lead it to reform the institution which offends them, or those instincts will be perverted, and become authorities for what in their unsophisticated condition they condemned. The latter alternative is that which has happened in the Southern States. Slavery is no longer regarded there as a barbarous institution, to be palliated with whispering humbleness as an inheritance from a ruder age; but rather as a system admirable for its intrinsic excellence, worthy to be upheld and propagated, the last and completest result of time. [26] The right of the white man to hold the negro in permanent thraldom, to compel him to work for his profit, to keep him in enforced ignorance, to sell him, to flog him, and if need be, to kill him, to separate him at pleasure from his wife and children, to transport him for no crime to a remote region where he is in a few years worked to death—this is now propounded as a grand discovery in ethical and political science, made for the first time by the enlightened leaders of the Southern Confederation, and recommended by that philanthropic body to all civilized nations for their adoption. This Confederation, which is the opprobrium of the age, puts itself forward as a model for its imitation, and calmly awaits the tardy applause of mankind. "The ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution," says the Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, "were that the enslavement of the African race wras in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. Our new government is founded on exactly opposite ideas ; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and moral condition. This our Government is the first in the history of the world oased upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth . It is upon this our social fabric is firmly planted, and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of the full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized aird enlightened world. . . . This stone which was rejected by the first builders 'is become the chief stone of the corner' in our new edifice." [27] Opinion in the South has long passed beyond the stage at which slavery needs to be defended by argument. The subject is now never touched but in a strain such as the freedom conquered at Marathon and Platsea inspired in the orators of Athens. It is "the beneficent source and wholesome foundation of our civilization;" an institution, " moral and civilizing, useful at once to blacks and whites." "To suppress slavery would be to throw back civilization two hundred years." "It is not a moral evil. It is the Lord's doing, and marvellous in our eyes. . . It is by divine appointment."

But slavery in the South is something more than a moral and political principle: it has become a fashionable taste, a social passion. The possession of a slave in the South carries with it the same sort of prestige as the possession of land in this country, as the possession of a horse among the Arabs: it brings the owner into connexion with the privileged class and forms a presumption that he has attained a certain social position. Slaves have thus in the South acquired a factitious value, and are coveted with an eagerness far beyond what the intrinsic utility of their services would explain. A Chancellor of South Carolina describes slavery as in accordance with " the proudest and most deeply cherished feelings" of his countrymen—" feelings, which others, if they will, may call prejudices." A governor of Kansas declares that he "loves " the institution, and that he votes for it because he "loves" it. Nor are these sentiments confined to the slaveholding minority. The all-important circumstance is that they are shared equally by the whole white population. Far from reprobating a system which has deprived them of the natural means of rising in the scale of humanity, they fall in with the prevailing modes of thought, and are warm admirers, and, when need arises, effective defenders, of an institution which has been their curse. To be the owner of a slave is the chief object of the poor white's ambition; " quot servos pascit ?" the one criterion by which he weighs the worth of his envied superiors in the social scale.

Such has been the course of opinion on the subject of slavery in the Southern States. The progress of events, far from conducing to the gradual mitigation and ultimate extinction of the system, has tended distinctly in the opposite direction—to the aggravation of its worst evils and the consolidation of its strength. The extension of the area subject to the Slave Power and the increase in the slave population have augmented at once the inducements for retaining the institution and the difficulty of getting rid of it; while the ideas of successive generations, bred up in its presence and under the influence of the interests to which it has given birth, have provided for it in the minds of the people a moral support. The result is, that the position of the slave in the Southern States at the present time, so far as it depends upon the will and power of his masters, is in all respects more hopeless than it has ever been in any former age, or in any other quarter of the world. A Fugitive Slave law, which throws into shade the former atrocities of slavery, has been enacted, and until the recent disturbances was strictly enforced. The education of the negro is more than ever rigorously proscribed. Emancipation finds in the growth of fanatical pro-slavery opinions obstacles more formidable even than in the laws. Propositions have been entertained by the legislatures in some states for reducing all free coloured persons to slavery by one wholesale enactment; in others these people have been banished from the state under pain of this fate. Everything in the laws, in the customs, in the education of the people, has been contrived with the single view of degrading the negro to the level of the brute, and blotting out from his mind the hope and even the idea of freedom.

The thoroughness—the absolute disregard of all consequences with which this purpose has been pursued, is but little understood in this country. History can supply no instance of a despotism more complete and searching than that which for some years past has prevailed in the Southern States. Since the attempt of John Brown at Harper's Ferry, its oppression has reached a height which can only be adequately described as a reign of terror. It is long since freedom of discussion on any question connected with slavery would have been tolerated. But it is not merely freedom of discussion which is now prohibited. The design seems, to have been formed of putting down freedom of thought, and of banishing from the South every trace of dissentient opinion. A system of espionage has been organized. The mail bags have in many states been freely opened, and the postmasters of petty villages have exercised a free discretion in giving or withholding the documents entrusted to their care. In the more southern states vigilance committees have been established en permanence . Before these self-constituted tribunals persons of unblemished reputation and inoffensive manners have been summoned, and, on a few days' notice, for no other offence than that of being known to entertain sentiments unfavourable to slavery, have been banished from the state where they resided; and this in direct violation of a specific provision of the Constitution of the United States. [28] Clergymen, who have broken no law, for merely discharging their duties according to their consciences, have been arrested, thrown into prison, and visited with ignominious punishment. Travellers, who have incautiously, in ignorance of the intensity of the popular feeling, ventured to give temperate expression to anti-slavery opinions, have been seized by the mob, tarred and feathered, ducked, flogged, and in some instances hanged. Nay1, so sensitively jealous has the feeling of the South become, that the slightest link of connexion with a suspected locality— to have resided in the North, to have sent one's children to a Northern school—is sufficient to secure expulsion from a slave state. An abolitionist in the ethics of the South is the vilest of all human beings, and every one is an abolitionist who does not reside in a slave state and share to the full the prevailing proslavery sentiment. [29] Such is the point which civilization has reached under slave institutions. At this cost the system is maintained. [30]

[15.] "The rich," said General Marion, and in these few words he sketched the whole working of slavery, "have no need of the poor, because they have their own slaves to do their work."

[16.] Thus a writer in the Saturday Review (Nov. 2, 1861), in noticing a work of Mr. Olmsted's, reasons as follows:—"It would be hasty to infer, as a great many philanthropists have done, that free labour would answer better than slave labour in the South. The Southern planters are keen enough speculators to have discovered the fact if it were true. In reality the experiment has been tried and resulted in favour of slave labour." The experiment no doubt has been tried, and with the result alleged; but how far the experiment, as it has been conducted, is conclusive, the reader will be enabled to judge when he reads the following passage from Mr. Olmsted, in a review of one of whose works the above argument occurred:—" The labourer, who in New York gave a certain amount of labour for his wages in a day, soon finds in Virginia that the ordinary measure of labour is smaller than in New York: a 'day's work' or a month's does not mean the same that it did in New York. He naturally adapts his wares to the market. . . . The labourer, finding that the capitalists of Virginia are accustomed to pay for a poor article at a high price, prefers to furnish them the poor article at their usual price, rather than a better article, unless at a more than correspondingly better price. . . . Now let the white labourer come here from the North or from Europe—his nature demands a social life—shall he associate with the poor, slavish, degraded negro, with whom labour and punishment are almost synonymous? or shall he be the friend and companion of the white man? . . . Associating with either or both, is it not inevitable that he will be rapidly demoralized—that he will soon learn to hate labour, give as little of it for his hire as he can, become base, cowardly, faithless,—' worse than a nigger'?" The case is simple. The moral atmosphere generated by slavery in the South corrupts the free labourer, whether native or imported: thus corrupted, he fails m competition with the slave; but does it follow from this that, if slavery no longer existed, free labour would be less efficient in the South than slave labour is at present? For that is the point.

[17.] And it may be added, of such free labourers as will consent to the degradation of living in a slave community.

[18.] The density of population in Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky, is no doubt greater than this; but it is because these States are occupied, over considerable districts, with a free labouring peasantry, because in fact in these districts slavery has been abolished. This is the case with Western Virginia also to a considerable extent, and doubtless raises the average of the whole country above what a purely servile regime would produce.

[19.] See Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States , pp. 291, 292, 366, 361, 503.

[20.] Some statistics bearing upon tfris aspect of the question have been given by Mr. Helper, which are sufficiently striking. It appears that the number of public libraries throughout the whole of the Slave States are only 695 against 14,911 in the Free States; or about 1 public library in the South for 21 in the North. Again, the number of volumes in public libraries in the Slave States is 649,577; while the number in public libraries in the Free States is 3,888,284; that is to say, in the proportion of about 1 to 6.—(Helper's Impending Crisis , p. 337.) Probably, were the quality of the literature as well as the quantity given, the result would be still more significant.

[21.] See Stirling's Letters from the Slave States , p 265.

[22.] Mr. Stirling relies upon the following considerations as containing the solution of the problem. "Within the last ten or fifteen years the value of slaves has risen fifty per cent, at least. During the same time the price of bacon has risen 100 to 200 percent. Let this process only be continued for ten years longer, and where will be the profits of the cotton-planter? And here we may perhaps find the longlooked-for solution of the nigger question. When slave-labour becomes unprofitable the slave will be emancipated. South Carolina herself will turn abolitionist when slavery ceases to pay. When she finds that a brutalized race cannot and will not give as much efficient labour for the money as a hired class of superior workers, it is possible that she may lay aside the cowhide, and offer wages to her niggers."—Letters from Slave States, pp. 182, 183. The argument is palpably fallacious. It is the same as if one were to argue that the high rent of land must ultimately destroy agriculture. In each case the high price of the natural agent—land or slaves—results from the comparative profitableness of capital invested in the employment of one or the other. When the high price of land leads landlords to throw up their estates, an analogous course of conduct may be expected from slaveholders from an analogous inducement. The high price of the slave's food is scarcely to the point, since this must tell also against the free labourer: at all events, so long as the slave fetches any price, it is a proof that he is considered to be worth at least more than his keep.

[23.] See Olmsted's Seaboard Slave States , pp. 170, 171.

[24.] The West Indian experiment, I conceive, proves this as conclusively as it proves that the ultimate and permanent results of emancipation are beneficial to the whole country in the highest degree.

[25.] I am speaking, of course, of the reception which the proposition would meet with while the Slave party were yet triumphant. What it might be induced to accept if thoroughly beaten by the North, is another question which it is not necessary here to discuss.

Since these observations were written, the news of Mr. Lincoln's project of emancipation has arrived. It will be seen that the condition stated in the last sentence —the subjugation of the South—is precisely the circumstance which gives to that scheme the least chance of success. Mr. Lincoln knew too well the men with whom he had to deal to think of making such an offer till he was, or thought himself, in a position to enforce it.

[26.] It is instructive to observe the gradation by which this advanced point has been reached. Thirty years ago it was contended "that there was not the slightest moral turpitude in holding slaves under existing circumstances in the South."— Quarterly Review , Sept. and Dec, 1832.

[27.] Speech of Mr. A. H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy, delivered March, 1861.

[28.] "The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states."

[29.] It may readily be conceived that Southern intolerance did not relax as the great social schism approached its crisis. M. Cuchevah-Clarigny gives the following vivid sketch of the measures by which unionist sentiment was overborne in the South; —" Chaque jour on voyait arriver, dans les etats du centre ou de l'ouest, des gens qui avaient ete denonces comme mal pensans, et qui avaient recu, par lettre anonyme, l'invitation d'emigrer dans les vingt-quatre heures, sous peine de voir leur maison incendiee et de recevoir un coup de couteau. Les journaux de la Nouvelle-Orleans, qui combattaient la separation, furent contraints l'un apres l'autre de cesser leur publication ou de changer completement de langage. Dans les villes un peu importantes du sud, des bandes armees parcouraient les rues, precedees d'un drapeau avec le palmier, et des menaces de mort etaient proferees devant les maisons des gens suspects d'attachement a l'Union. Quand une legislature paraissait hesiter devant un vote belliqueux, on tenait des reunions publiques pour gourmander sa lenteur, et on lui adressait des objurgations. On ne parlait de rien moins en effet dans certains etats que de faie voter des mesures d'exception, l'emprisonnement ou l'exile des suspects, et la confiscation de leurs biens."— Annuaire des Deux Mondes , 1860, p. 617.

[30.] The Reign of Terror in the South,etc. pasim ; also Reports of the American Anti Slavery Society , for the years 1857-:60.

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Atlantic slavery and the slave trade: history and historiography.

Daniel B. Domingues da Silva Daniel B. Domingues da Silva History Department, Rice University
and Philip Misevich Philip Misevich Department of History, St. John’s University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.371
Published online: 20 November 2018

Over the past six decades, the historiography of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade has shown remarkable growth and sophistication. Historians have marshalled a vast array of sources and offered rich and compelling explanations for these two great tragedies in human history. The survey of this vibrant scholarly tradition throws light on major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and indicates potential new pathways for future research. While early scholarly efforts have assessed plantation slavery in particular on the antebellum United States South, new voices—those of Western women inspired by the feminist movement and non-Western men and women who began entering academia in larger numbers over the second half of the 20th century—revolutionized views of slavery across time and space. The introduction of new methodological approaches to the field, particularly through dialogue between scholars who engage in quantitative analysis and those who privilege social history sources that are more revealing of lived experiences, has conditioned the types of questions and arguments about slavery and the slave trade that the field has generated. Finally, digital approaches had a significant impact on the field, opening new possibilities to assess and share data from around the world and helping foster an increasingly global conversation about the causes, consequences, and integration of slave systems. No synthesis will ever cover all the details of these thriving subjects of study and, judging from the passionate debates that continue to unfold, interest in the history of slavery and the slave trade is unlikely to fade.

slave trade
historiography

From the 16th to the mid- 19th century , approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly embarked on slave ships, of whom only 10.7 million survived the notorious Middle Passage. 1 Captives were transported in vessels that flew the colors of several nations, mainly Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Ships departed from ports located in these countries or their overseas possessions, loaded slaves at one or more points along the coast of Africa, and then transported them to one or more ports in the Americas. They sailed along established trade routes shaped by political forces, commercial partnerships, and environmental factors, such as the winds and sea currents. The triangular system is no doubt the most famous route but in fact nearly half of all slaves were embarked on vessels that traveled directly between the Americas and Africa. 2 Africans forced beneath the decks of slave vessels were captured in the continent’s interior through several means. Warfare was, perhaps, the commonest, yielding large numbers of captives for sale at a time. Other methods of enslavement included judicial proceedings, pawning, and kidnappings. 3 Depending on the routes captives traveled and the ways they were captured, Africans could sometimes find themselves in the holds of ships with people who belonged to their same cultures, were from their same villages, or were even close relatives. 4 None of this, however, attenuated the sufferings and appalling conditions under which they sailed. Slaves at sea were subjected to constant confinement, brutal violence, malnutrition, diseases, sexual violence, and many other abuses. 5

Upon arrival in the Americas, Africans often found themselves in equally hostile environments. Slavery in the mining industry and on cash crop plantations, especially those that produced sugar and rice, significantly reduced Africans’ life expectancies and required owners to replenish their labor force through the slave trade. 6 By contrast, slave systems centered on less intensive crops and the services industry, particularly in cities, ports, and towns, often offered enslaved Africans better chances of survival and even the possibility of achieving freedom through manumission by purchase, gift, or inheritance. 7 These apparent advantages did not necessarily mean that life was any less harsh. Neither did the prospect of freedom significantly change slaves’ material lives. Few individuals managed to obtain manumission and those who did encountered many other barriers that prevented them from fully enjoying their lives as free citizens. 8 In spite of those barriers, slaves challenged their status and conditions in many ways, ranging from “quiet” forms of resistance—slowdowns, breaking tools, and feigning illness at work—to bolder initiatives such as running away, plotting conspiracies, and launching rebellions. 9 Although slavery provided little room for autonomy, Africans strove to maintain or replicate aspects of their cultures in the Americas. Whenever possible, they married people with their same backgrounds, named their children in their own languages, cooked foods using techniques, styles, and ingredients similar to those found in their motherlands, composed songs in the beats of their homelands, and worshipped ancestral spirits, deities, and gods in the same fashion as their forbears. 10 At the same time, slave culture was subject to constant change, a process that over the long run enabled enslaved people to better navigate the dangerous world that slavery created. 11

This overview may seem rather free of controversy, but it is in fact the result of years of debates, some still raging, and research conducted by generations of historians of slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps no other historical fields have been so productive and transformative over such a short period of time. Since the 1950s, scholars have developed and refined new methods, created new theoretical models, brought previously untapped sources to light, and posed new questions that shine bright new light on the experiences of enslaved people and their owners as well as the social, political, economic, and cultural worlds that they created in the diaspora. Although debates about Atlantic slavery and the slave trade go back to the era of abolition, historians began grappling in earnest with these issues in the aftermath of World War II. Early scholarship focused on the United States and tended to articulate views of slavery that reflected elite sources and perspectives. 12 Inspired by the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and wider global decolonization campaigns, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of approaches to the study of slavery rooted in new social history, which aimed to understand slaves as central historical actors rather than mere victims of exploitation. 13 Around the same time, a group of scholars trained in statistical analysis sparked passionate debates about the extent to which quantitative assessments of slavery and slave trading effectively represented slaves’ lived experiences. 14 To more vividly capture those experiences, some historians turned to new or underutilized tools, particularly biographies, family histories, and microhistories, which provided windows into local historical dynamics. 15 The significance of the penetrating questions that these fruitful debates raised has been amplified in recent decades in response to the growing influence of transnational and Atlantic approaches to slavery. Atlantic frameworks have required the gathering and analysis of new data on slavery and the slave trade around the world, encouraging scholars from previously underrepresented regions to challenge Anglo-American dominance in the field. Finally, the digital turn in the 21st century has provided new models for developing historical projects on slavery and the slave trade and helped democratize access to once inaccessible sources. 16 This article draws on this rich history of scholarship on slavery and the slave trade to illustrate major theoretical and interpretive shifts over time and raise questions about the future prospects for this dynamic field of study.

Models of Slavery and Resistance

While each country in the Americas has its own national historiography on slavery, from a 21st-century perspective, it is hard to overestimate the role that US-based scholars played in shaping the agenda of slavery studies. Analyses of American plantation records began around the turn of the 20th century . Early debates emerged in particular over the conditions of slavery in the American South and views of the relationship between slaves and owners. Setting the foundation for these debates in the early- 20th century , Ulrich Bonnell Phillips offered an extraordinarily romanticized vision of life on the plantation. 17 Steeped in open racism, his work compared slave plantations to benevolent schools that over time “civilized” enslaved peoples. Conditioned by the kinds of revisionist interpretations of Southern slavery that emerged in the era following Reconstruction, Phillips saw American slavery as a benign institution that persisted despite its economic inefficiency. His work trivialized the violence inherent in slave systems, a view some Americans were eager to accept and, given his standing among subsequent generations of slavery scholars, one that prevailed in the profession for half of a century.

Early challenges to this view had little immediate impact within academic circles. That primarily black intellectuals, working in or speaking to white-dominated academies, offered many of the most sophisticated objections helps explain the persistence of Phillips’ influence. In the face of looming institutional racism, several scholars offered bold and fresh interpretations that uprooted basic ideas about the slave system. Over his illustrious career, W. E. B. Du Bois highlighted the powerful structural impediments that restricted black lives and brought attention to the dynamic ways that African Americans confronted systematic exploitation. Eric Williams, a noted Trinidadian historian, took aim at the history of abolition, arguing that self-interest—rather than humanitarian concerns—led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. Melville Herskovitz, a prominent white American anthropologist, turned his attention to the connections between African and African American culture. 18 Though many of these works were marginalized at the time they were produced, this scholarship is rightfully credited with, among other things, shining light on the relationship between African and African American history. Turning their attention to Africa, scholars discovered a variety of cultural practices that, they argued, shaped the black experience under slavery and in its aftermath. Even those scholars who challenged or rejected this Africa-centered approach pushed enslaved people to the center of their analyses, representing a radical departure from previous studies. 19

Similarly, works focused on the history of slavery and the slave trade in other regions of the Americas, especially those colonized by France, Spain, and Portugal, were often overlooked. The economies of many of these regions had historically depended on slave labor. The size of the captive populations of some of them rivaled that of the United States. Moreover, they had been involved in the slave trade for much longer and far more extensively than any other region of what became the United States. Researchers in Brazil, Cuba, and other countries often noticed these points. 20 Some of them, like the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, received training in the United States and produced significant research. However, because they published mainly in Portuguese and Spanish, and translations were hard to come by, their work had little initial impact on Anglo-American scholarship. The few scholars who did realize the importance of this work used it to draw comparisons between the Anglophone and non-Anglophone worlds of slavery, highlighting differences in their patterns of colonization and emphasizing the distinctive roles that Catholicism and colonial legal regimes played in shaping slave systems across parts of the Americas. A greater incidence of miscegenation and slaves’ relative accessibility to freedom through manumission led some scholars to argue that slavery in the non-Anglophone New World was milder than in antebellum America or the British colonies. 21

In the United States, the dominant narratives of American slavery continued to emphasize the absolute authority of slave owners. Even critics of Phillips, who emerged in larger numbers in the 1950s and vigorously challenged his conclusions, thought little of slaves’ abilities to effect meaningful change on plantations. Yet they did offer new interpretations of American slavery, as the metaphors scholars used in this decade to characterize the system attest. Far from Phillips’ training school, Kenneth Stampp argued that plantation slavery more appropriately resembled a prison in which enslaved people became completely dependent on their owners. 22 Going even further, Stanley M. Elkins compared American slavery to a concentration camp. 23 The experience of slavery was so traumatic that it stripped enslaved people of their identities and rendered them almost completely helpless. American slavery, in Elkins’ view, turned African Americans into infantilized “Sambos” whose minds and wills came to mirror those of their owners. While such studies drew much needed attention to the violence of plantation slavery, they all but closed the door on questions about slave agency and cultural production. Emphasizing slave autonomy ran the risk of minimizing the brutality of slave owners, and for those scholars trying to overturn Phillips’s vision of American slavery, that brutality was what defined the plantation enterprise.

It took the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s to move slavery studies in a significantly new direction. Driven by their hard-fought battles for political rights at home, African Americans and others whom the civil rights movement inspired added critical new voices and perspectives that required a rethinking of the American past. Scholars who emerged during this period largely rejected the overwhelming authority of the planter class and instead turned their attention to the activities of enslaved people. Slaves, they found, created spaces for themselves and exercised their autonomy on plantations in myriad ways. While they recognized the violence of the slave system, historians of this generation were more interested in assessing the development of black society and identifying resistance to plantation slavery. Far from the brainwashed prisoners of their owners, enslaved people were recast as producers of dynamic and enduring cultures. One key to this transformation was a more careful analysis of what occurred within slave quarters, where new research uncovered the existence of relatively stable—at least under the circumstances—family life. Another emphasized religion as a tool that slaves used to improve their conditions and forge new identities in the diaspora. The immediate post-civil rights period also saw scholars renew their interest in Africa, breathing new life into older debates about the origins and survival of cultural practices in the Americas. 24

What much of the scholarship in this period shared was the idea that no matter how vicious the system, planter power was always incomplete. Recognizing that reality, slaves and their owners established a set of ground rules that granted slaves a degree of autonomy in an attempt to minimize resistance. Beyond mere brutality, slavery thus rested on unwritten but widely understood slave “rights”—Sundays off from plantation labor, the cultivation of private garden plots, participation in an independent slave economy—that both sides negotiated and frequently challenged. This view was central to Eugene Genovese’s magisterial book, Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made , which employed the concept of paternalism to help make sense of 19th-century Southern slavery. 25 Paternalist ideology provided owners with a theoretical justification for slavery’s continuation in the face of widespread criticism from Northern abolitionists. Unlike in the urban North, Southerners claimed, where free African Americans faced deplorable conditions and had little social support, slave owners claimed to take better care of their “black and white” families. Slaves also embraced paternalism, though toward a different end: doing so enabled them to use the idea of the “benevolent planter” to their own advantage and make claims for incremental improvements in slaves’ lives. Slavery, Genovese argued, was thus based on the mutual interdependence of owners and slaves.

The degree of intimacy between slaves and owners that paternalism implied spoke to another question that occupied scholars writing in the 1960s and 1970s: given the violence of the slave system, why had so few large-scale slave rebellions occurred? For Phillips and those whom he influenced, the benevolent nature of Southern slavery provided a sufficient explanation. But undeniable evidence of the violence of slavery required making sense of patterns—or the seeming lack—of slave resistance. Unlike on some Caribbean islands, where slaves far outnumbered free people and environmental and geographic factors tended to concentrate the location of plantations, conditions in the United States were less conducive to widespread rebellion. Yet slaves never passively accepted their captivity. The literature on resistance during this period deemphasized violent forms of rebellion, which occurred infrequently, and reoriented scholarship toward the variety of ways that enslaved people challenged the domination of slave owners over them. Having adjusted their lenses, historians found evidence of slave resistance seemingly everywhere. Enslaved people slowed the paces at which they worked, feigned illnesses, broke tools, and injured or let escape animals on plantations. Such “day-to-day” resistance did little to overturn slavery but it gave some control to captives over their work regimes. In some cases, slaves acted even more boldly, committing arson or poisoning those men and women responsible for upholding the system of bondage. Resistance also took the form of running away, a strategy that long preceded the famous Underground Railroad in North America and posed unique problems in territories with unsettled frontiers, unfriendly environmental terrain, and diverse indigenous populations into which fleeing captives could integrate. 26

This shift in scholarship toward slave agency and resistance was anchored in the creative use of sources that had previously been unknown or underappreciated. Although they had long recognized the shortcomings of Phillips’s reliance on records from a limited number of large plantations, historians struggled to find better options, particularly those that shed light on the experiences and perspectives of enslaved people. Slave biographies provided one alternative. In the 1970s, John Blassingame gathered an exhaustive collection of runaway slave accounts to examine the life experiences of American slaves. 27 Whether such biographies spoke to the majority of slaves or represented a few exceptional black men became the subject of considerable disagreement. Scholars who were less trusting of biographies turned to the large collection of interviews that the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration conducted with former slaves. 28 Though far more numerous and representative of “typical” slave experiences, the WPA interviews had their own problems. Would former slaves have been comfortable speaking freely to primarily white interviewers about their lives in bondage? The question remains open. Equally pressing was the concern over the amount of time that had passed between the end of slavery and the period when the interviews were conducted. Indeed, some two-thirds of interviewees were octogenarians when federal employees recorded their stories. Despite such shortcomings, these sources and the new interpretations of slavery that they supported pushed scholarship in exciting new directions. Slaves could no longer be dismissed as passive victims of the plantation system. The new sources and approaches humanized them and reoriented scholarship toward the communities that slaves made.

Across the Atlantic, scholars of Africa began to grapple in earnest with questions about slavery, too. Early contributions to debates over the role of the institution in Africa and its impact on African societies came from historians and anthropologists. One strand of disagreement emerged over whether slavery existed there at all prior to the arrival of Europeans. This raised more fundamental questions about how to define slavery. The influential introduction to Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff’s edited volume, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives , took pains to distinguish African slavery from its American counterparts. It rooted slavery not in racial difference or the growth of plantation agriculture but rather in the context of Africa’s kin-based social organization. According to the coauthors, the institution’s primary function in Africa was to incorporate outsiders into new societies. 29 So distinctive was this form of captivity that Miers and Kopytoff famously deployed scare quotes each time they used the word “slavery” in order to underscore its uniqueness.

Given their emphasis on incorporation, the process by which enslaved people over time became accepted insiders in the societies into which they were forcibly introduced, and their limited treatment of the economically productive roles that slaves played, Miers and Kopytoff came in for swift criticism on several fronts. Neo-Marxists were particularly dissatisfied. Claude Meillassoux, the prominent French scholar, responded with an alternative vision of slavery in Africa that highlighted the violence that was at the core of enslavement. 30 That violence made slavery the very antithesis of kinship, which to many scholars invalidated Miers and Kopytoff’s interpretation. Meillassoux and others also pointed to the dynamic economic roles that slaves played in Africa. 31 Studies in various local settings—in the Sokoto Caliphate, the Western Sudan, and elsewhere—made clear that slavery was a central part of how African societies organized productive labor. 32 This reality led some scholars to articulate distinct slave, or African, modes of production that, they argued, better illuminated the role of slavery in the continent. 33

In addition to these deep theoretical differences, one factor that contributed to the debates was the lack of historical sources that spoke to the changing nature of slavery in Africa. Documentary evidence describing slave societies is heavily concentrated in the 19th century , the period when Europe’s presence in Africa became more widespread and when colonialism and abolitionism colored Western views of Africans and their social institutions. To overcome source limitations, academics cast their nets widely, drawing on methodological innovations from anthropology and comparative linguistics, among other disciplines. 34 Participant observation, through which Africanists immersed themselves in the communities they studied in order to understand local languages and cultures, proved particularly valuable. 35 Yet the enthusiasm for this approach, which for many offered a more authentic path to access African cultures and voices, led some scholars to ignore or paper over its limitations. 36 To what extent, for example, did oral sources or observations of social structures in the 20th century reveal historical realities from previous eras? Other historians projected back in time insights from the more numerous written sources from the 19th century , using them to consider slavery in earlier periods. 37 Those who uncritically accepted evidence from such sources—whether non-written or written—came away with a timeless view of the African past, including as it related to slavery. 38 It would take another decade, during which the field witnessed revolutionary changes to the collection and analysis of data, until scholars began to widely accept the fact that, as in the Americas, slavery differed across time and space.

The Cliometric Debates

Around the same time that some scholars in the Americas were pushing enslaved people to the center of slavery narratives, a separate group of academics trained in economics began steering the focus of studies of slavery and the slave trade in a different direction. While research on planter power and slave resistance allowed historians to infer broad patterns of transformation from a limited collection of local records, this new group of scholars turned this approach upside down. They proposed to assess the underlying forces that shaped slavery and the slave trade to better contextualize the individual experiences of enslaved people. This big-picture approach was rooted in the quantification of large amounts of data available in archival sources spread across multiple locations and led ultimately to the development of “cliometrics,” a radically new methodology in the field. Two works were particularly important to the establishment of this approach: Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census and Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery . 39

Philip Curtin’s “census” provided the first quantitative assessment of the size, evolution, and distribution of the transatlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries . Previous estimates of the magnitude of the transatlantic trade claimed that it involved somewhere between fifteen and twenty million enslaved Africans—or in some cases many times that amount. 40 However, upon careful examination, Curtin found that such estimates were “nothing but a vast inertia, as historians have copied over and over again the flimsy results of unsubstantial guesswork.” 41 He thus set out to provide a new figure based on a close reading of secondary works that themselves had been based on extensive archival research. To assist in this endeavor, Curtin enlisted a technology that had only recently become available to researchers: the mainframe computer. He collected data on the number of slaves that ships of every nation involved in the traffic had embarked and disembarked, recorded these data on punch cards, and used the computer to organize the information into time series that allowed him to make projections for the periods and branches of the traffic for which data were scarce or altogether unavailable. Curtin’s findings posed profound challenges to the most basic assumptions about the transatlantic traffic. They revealed that the number of Africans forcibly transported to the Americas was substantially lower than what historians had previously assumed. Curtin also demonstrated that while the British were the most active slave traders during the second half of the 18th century , when the trade had reached its height, the Portuguese (and, after independence, Brazilians as well) carried far more enslaved people during the entire period of the transatlantic trade. 42 Furthermore, while the United States boasted the largest slave population by the mid- 19th century , it was a comparatively minor destination for vessels engaged in the trade: the region received less than 5 percent of all captive Africans transported across the Atlantic. 43

Curtin’s assessment of the slave trade inspired researchers to flock to local archives and compile new statistical data on the number and carrying capacity of slaving vessels departing or entering particular ports or regions around the Atlantic basin. Building on Curtin’s solid foundation, these scholars produced dozens of studies on the volume of various branches of the transatlantic trade. Virtually every port that dispatched slaving vessels to Africa or at which enslaved Africans were disembarked in the Americas received scholarly attention. What emerged from this work was an increasingly clear picture of the volume and structure of the Atlantic slave trade at local, regional, and national levels, though the South Atlantic slave trade remained comparatively understudied. 44 Historians of Africa also joined in these discussions, providing tentative assessments of slave exports from regions along the coast of West and West Central Africa. 45 The deepening pool of data that such research generated enabled scholars to use quantitative methods to consider other aspects of the transatlantic trade. How did mortality rates differ on slave vessels from one national carrier to another? 46 Which ports dispatched larger or smaller vessels and what implications did vessel size have for participation in the slave trade? 47 Which types of European commodities were most highly sought after in exchange for African captives? 48 As these questions imply, scholars had for the first time approached the slave trade as its own distinctive topic for research, which had revolutionary consequences for the future of the field.

Time on the Cross had an effect on slavery scholarship that was similar to—indeed, perhaps even greater than—that of Curtin’s, especially among scholars focused on the antebellum US South. Inspired by studies that challenged the view of plantation slavery as unprofitable, Fogel and Engerman, with the help of a team of researchers, set out to quantify nearly every aspect of that institution in the US South, from slaves’ average daily food consumption to the amount of cotton produced in the US South during the antebellum era. 49 Consistent with the cliometricians’ approach, Fogel and Engerman listed ten findings that “contradicted many of the most important propositions in the traditional portrayal of the slave system.” 50 Their most important—and controversial—conclusions were that slavery was a rational system of labor exploitation maintained by planters to maximize their own economic interests; that it was growing on the eve of the Civil War; and that owners were optimistic rather than pessimistic about the future of the slave system during the decade that preceded the war. 51 Further, the authors noted that slave labor was productive. “On average,” the cliometricians argued, a slave was “harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.” 52

While cliometrics made important contributions to the study of slavery and the slave trade, the quantitative approach came in for swift and passionate criticism. Curtin’s significantly lower estimates for the number of enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic were met with skepticism; some respondents even charged that his figures trivialized the horrors of the trade. 53 Although praised for its revolutionary interpretation, which earned Fogel the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1993 , Fogel and Engerman’s study of the economics of American slavery was almost immediately cast aside as deeply flawed and unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Critics pointed not only to carelessness in the authors’ data collection techniques but also to their mathematical errors, abusive assumptions, and insufficient contextualization of data. 54 Fogel and Engerman, for example, characterized lynching as a “disciplinary tool.” After counting the number of whippings slaves received at one plantation, they concluded that masters there rarely used the punishment. They failed to note, however, the powerful effect that such abuse had on slaves and free people who merely watched or heard the horrible spectacle. 55 More generally, and apart from these specific problems, critics offered a theoretical objection to the quantitative approach, which, they argued, conceived of history as an objective science, with strong persuasive appeal, but which silenced the voices of the individuals victimized by the history of slavery and the slave trade.

Nevertheless, the methodology found followers among historians studying the history of slavery in other parts of the Atlantic. B. W. Higman’s massive two-volume work, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 , remains an unparalleled quantitative analysis of slave communities on the islands under British control. 56 Robert Louis Stein’s The French Sugar Business in the Eighteenth Century also makes substantial use of cliometrics and remains a valuable reference for students of slavery in Martinique and Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti). 57 But outside of the United States, nowhere was cliometrics more popular than Brazil, where scholars of slavery, including Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Herbert Klein, Francisco Vidal Luna, Robert Slenes, and others, applied it to examine many of the same issues that their North American counterparts did: rates of profitability, demographic growth, and economic expansion of slave systems. 58 Africanists also found value in the methodology and employed it as their sources allowed. Patrick Manning, for instance, used demographic modeling to examine the impact of the slave trade on African societies. 59 Philip Curtin compiled quantitative archival sources to analyze the evolution of the economy of Senegambia in the era of the slave trade. 60 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson traced the circulation of cowries, the shell money of the slave trade, noting that “of all the goods from overseas exchanged for slaves, the shell money touched individuals most widely and often in their day-to-day activities.” 61

In many ways, the gap between quantitative and social and cultural approaches to slavery and the slave trade that opened in the 1970s has continued to divide the field. Concerned that cliometrics sucked the dynamism out of interpretations of the slave community and reduced captives to figures on a spreadsheet, some scholars responded by deploying a variety of new tools to reclaim the humanity and individuality of enslaved actors. Microhistory, an approach that early modern Europeanists developed to recover peasant and other everyday people’s stories, offered one such opportunity. 62 Biography provided another. By reducing its scale of observation and focusing on individuals, families, households, or other small-scale units of analysis, such research underscored the messiness of lived experiences and the creative and often unexpected ways that slaves fashioned worlds for themselves. 63 But such approaches raised a separate set of questions: do biographical accounts reveal typical experiences? In an era when few slaves were literate and even fewer committed their stories to paper, any captives whose accounts survived—in full or in fragments, published or unpublished—were by definition exceptional. Moreover, given the clear overarching framework that decades of quantitative work on the slave trade had developed, one would be hard-pressed to ignore completely the cliometric turn. As two quantitatively minded scholars noted, “it is difficult to assess the significance or representativity of personal narratives or collective biographies, however detailed, without an understanding of the overall movements of slaves of which these individuals’ lives were a part.” 64 While an emphasis on what might be described as the quantitative “big picture” is not by nature antagonistic toward social and cultural historians’ concerns with enslaved people’s lived experiences, the two approaches offer different visions of slavery’s past and often feel as if they sit on opposite ends of the analytical spectrum.

Women, Gender, and Slavery

In the roughly two and a half decades that followed the major interpretive shifts that Kenneth Stampp and Stanley Elkins introduced into scholarship on slavery, the field remained an almost exclusively male one. With rare exceptions, men continued to dominate the profession during this period; their work rarely probed with any degree of sophistication the experiences of women in plantation societies. While second-wave feminism inspired women to enter graduate programs in history in larger numbers beginning in the 1960s, it took time for published work on women’s history, at least as it related to slavery, to appear in earnest. Revealingly, it was not until 1985 that the Library of Congress created a unique catalog heading for “women slaves.” Yet in the three decades since then, women’s (and later gendered) histories of slavery have been published at an ever-increasing pace. Scholars in the 21st century would struggle to take seriously books written about slavery that fail to show an appreciation for the distinctive experiences of men and women in captivity or more generally across plantation societies.

Several forces worked against the production of studies on enslaved women. If sources detailing slaves’ lives are in general sparse, evidence on women slaves is particularly spotty. Deborah Gray White’s pioneering work, Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , the first book-length study of enslaved women, triumphantly pieced together fragments of information from Federal Writers’ Project interviews with scattered plantation records to breathe life into the historiography of black women. It revealed the powerful structures that served to constrain enslaved women’s lives in the 19th century United States. As White famously concluded: “Black in a white society, slave in a free society, women in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Antebellum Americans.” 65 Yet publishers and academic peers did not immediately take seriously work focused on women slaves. White noted, for example, how colleagues in her department warned her that she would be unlikely to earn tenure writing about such a topic. This environment was hardly the type of nurturing one required for sustained research. 66

Though it was an uphill struggle, an influential group of scholars gradually developed a framework for understanding slavery’s realities for women. Early work focused on the foundational tasks of recovering female voices and using them to challenge standard narratives of the plantation system. It made clear the complex and multifaceted roles of women captives—as mothers, wives, fieldworkers, and domestics—and in the process reshaped scholarly understanding of the dynamics of the plantation enterprise. Social relations within plantation households commanded particular attention. Some scholars emphasized bonds between black and white women whose lives, they argued, were conditioned by a shared and oppressive patriarchal culture. Catherine Clinton, for example, characterized white mistresses as “trapped” within plantation society. “Cotton was King, white men ruled, and both white women and slaves served the same master,” she argued. 67 While she sympathized with the plight of plantation mistresses, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another leading figure of American women’s history, offered a contrary view of gendered relations within Southern households, one that highlighted division. Far from sharing common interests with enslaved women, mistresses clearly benefitted from slavery’s continuation. Their status as white and elite took priority over the bonds of womanhood. 68

The first sustained studies of women’s resistance to slavery also appeared in the 1980s. The historiographical pivot toward day-to-day resistance, which more effectively revealed the sophisticated ways that enslaved Africans and their descendants challenged their captivity, also opened a window of opportunity to view women as disruptors of the slave system in their own right. No longer dismissed as, at most, timid supporters of male-led revolts, women were in this period redefined as “natural rebels” who exploited white perceptions of female docility for their own benefit. Enslaved women, for example, were not generally chained onboard slave vessels, which gave them greater opportunities to organize revolts. Those few women who worked in privileged positions within plantation households took on responsibilities that gave them unique access to white families and exposed them to white vulnerabilities. Cooks could theoretically poison their owners, a threat that seemed all too real given the world of violence that underpinned the plantation. And while the coercive realities of slavery rooted every sexual relationship between white men and black women in violence, some scholars pointed to the possibility that women slaves who endured such abuse saw marginal improvements in their material circumstances or the prospects for their children. 69

Within a decade of the publication of Deborah White’s book, scholarship began to shift away from analyses of women and toward investigations of the worlds that men and women made together under slavery. Scholars of Africa brought valuable insights into this issue, drawing on decades of careful research into local constructions of gender and, in particular, the gendered division of labor within Africa. Women, Africanists illustrated, performed many of the most important tasks in agricultural regimes across the continent. 70 Some historians argued that it was their physical rather than biological roles that led slave owners in Africa to prefer and retain female captives, challenging earlier rigid emphases on women’s childbearing capacities. 71 These polarized debates eventually gave way to local and more nuanced analyses that revealed the complex range of contributions that enslaved women made to African societies: Women had children that increased the sizes of households; they cultivated and marketed crops that fed and enriched kingdoms and other less centralized societies; they served as bodyguards to local elites; and they even bought, retained, and traded their own captives. 72 If slavery in Africa was widespread, it was precisely because women had such wide-ranging productive and reproductive value.

These insights had wider implications for the study of the slave trade and the Atlantic World. African conceptions of gender conditioned the supply to Europeans of men and women captives along the coast, illustrating the close relationship between gender issues and economic concerns. 73 Gendered identities that emerged in Africa were adapted and transformed in the Americas depending on demographic, economic, or cultural concerns. 74 Whereas in low-density slave systems, African women and their descendants might follow work regimes that resembled those of their homelands, the gendered division of labor in large slave societies often more closely reflected European attitudes toward women and work. 75 Grappling with such complex realities required historians to dig into local records across a staggering variety of geographic settings. It was in that context that scholars began to broaden their horizons and embrace an increasingly Atlantic orientation—a trend that mirrored broader changes in studies on slavery and the slave trade in the 1990s. 76

The Atlanticization of Slavery Studies

It may seem redundant to identify a shift toward the Atlanticization of slavery studies. Enslaved Africans, after all, were brought to the Americas from across the Atlantic. How, then, could these studies be anything but Atlantic? The reality is that historians have generally looked at the institution through rather parochial eyes, as something limited by regional, national, or cultural boundaries. There were several early and noteworthy exceptions to this trend. Indeed, calls for studies to look at the societies surrounding the ocean as an integral unit of analysis date as far back as the late 1910s. Several scholars took up that call, the most notable perhaps being Fernand Braudel in his 1949 masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . 77 However, in an increasingly polarized world, the idea faced significant resistance and obstacles. Following World War II, Atlanticization could be easily read as a stand-in for imperialism or westernization. It was only toward the end of the Cold War that historians were able to move past these ideological barriers and understand the value of looking at the Atlantic as “the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores,” an interaction that was the result of “a sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.” 78

This realization deeply shaped subsequent studies of the history of slavery and the slave trade, some of them reviving earlier debates about cultural continuity and change in the African diaspora. One of the most successful examples to focus on the influence of Africans in shaping slavery on both sides of the ocean is John Thornton’s Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World . In it, Thornton argues that slavery was the only form of “private, revenue-producing property recognized in African law.” 79 Consequently, African political and economic elites had significant leverage over the institution, giving them some control over the transatlantic traffic. Thornton’s argument offered a new logic for African participation in the slave trade while also providing a new interpretation of African culture in Africa and the Americas. Although enslaved Africans came from several different regions and societies, Thornton stresses the similarities between their cultures and languages. Based on research on the traffic’s organization, he notes that slave ships rarely purchased captives in more than one port and that they normally sailed along very specific routes. 80 Such an organization favored the transmission of some of the cultural practices enslaved Africans brought with them to the Americas. Nevertheless, Thornton points out, “slaves were not militant cultural nationalists who sought to preserve everything African but rather showed great flexibility in adapting and changing their culture.” 81 His approach thus emphasized the systematic linkages that the transatlantic slave trade forged while leaving space for creolization within slave communities.

Another important contribution that emphasized cultural transformation was Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America . 82 Looking to identify the first generations of blacks who chartered their descendants’ fate in mainland North America, Berlin located them among a group he called “Atlantic creoles,” people who traced their beginnings to the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa, but who ultimately emerged from the world that Europe, Africa, and the Americas collectively created. Cosmopolitan by experience or circumstance, familiar with the commerce of the Atlantic, and fluent in its languages and cultures, these individuals laid down the foundations for black life in the New World. 83 They arrived not as Africans desperate to replicate their culture, or flexible to adapt, but rather as profoundly changed individuals. Although they permeated most of the colonial societies of the Americas, Berlin claims that in mainland North America at least they were soon swept away by subsequent generations born under the expansion of large-scale commodity production, which ended the porous slave system of the early years of European and African settlement. 84

Although these were important contributions, the Atlanticization of slavery studies opened many more avenues to understand the experiences of Africans and their descendants during the years of bondage. It allowed for comparisons between Africans’ trajectories with those of other players in the formation of the Atlantic world. Paul Gilroy’s well-known Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness is in a way a precursor, expressing “a desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity.” 85 Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan’s edited volume, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal , views a handful of European nations—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands—as creating this new world centered around the Atlantic, but it also places Africans as well as the indigenous populations of the Americas in comparative perspective. 86 One immediate problem with this approach is that it conflates several hundreds of groups, nations, or peoples into a single category, “Africans,” a term that gained traction only as the slave trade expanded and, consequently, recognized by just a fraction of the people it intended to describe.

A more adequate approach, favored by the Atlantic framework of analysis, would focus on specific African regions or peoples. Here historians have made some progress, mainly in the form of edited volumes. Linda M. Heywood’s edited book, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora , looks at how Kikongo and Mbundu speakers, often times grouped under designations such as Angola, Benguela, or Congo in places in the Americas as distant from one another as Havana, Montevideo, New Orleans, Recife, and Port au Prince, culturally shaped the African diaspora. 87 Rebecca Shumway and Trevor R. Getz’s volume attempts a similar approach, centered on the societies of precolonial Ghana, mainly the Asante and Fante. 88 Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs’s book, by contrast, focuses on a single African people, the Yoruba. 89 Not only were they a sizable group forced into the Atlantic, but they also left an indelible mark in several regions of the Americas. Interestingly, the Yoruba started calling themselves as such, that is, through their language name, only years after the transatlantic slave trade had ended, probably as a result of religious encounters leading up to the colonization of Nigeria. 90 During the period of the slave trade, the Yoruba lived divided into a number of states like Oyo, Egba, Egbado, Ijebu, and Ijesa, located in Southwest Nigeria, and were called outside the region by different terms, such as Nagô in Bahia, Lucumí in Cuba, and Aku in Sierra Leone. 91

Not only did the Atlantic approach contribute to the development of new historical frameworks and perspectives, it also encouraged historians to use traditional sources and methods in more creative and interesting ways. In Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation , Rebecca J. Scott and Jean Hébrard trace the paper trail that members of the Tinchant family left behind to reconstruct over multiple generations the saga of an African woman and her family from slavery to freedom. 92 In addition to tracing individuals and families, historians have also paid greater attention to cultural practices embedded in traditions of agriculture, healing, and warfare, which were disseminated around the Atlantic during the period of the slave trade. Judith A. Carney, for example, looked at the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas, connecting particular rice growing regions in Upper Guinea to their counterparts in places like South Carolina in the United States and Maranhão in Bazil; James H. Sweet examined the intellectual history of the Atlantic world by following the uses and appropriations of African healing practices from Dahomey to Bahia and Portugal; and Manuel Barcia explored the similarities and differences between warfare techniques employed by West African captives, especially from Oyo, in Bahia, and Cuba. 93 Although urban history has a long tradition among historians, most studies have focused on cities and ports in Europe and the Americas. 94 Historians, including Robin Law, Kristin Mann, Mariana Cândido, and Randy Sparks, however, are redressing that imbalance with studies focused on African ports—Ouidah, Lagos, Benguela, and Anomabu—that emerged or expanded during the slave trade era. 95

Finally, although removed from the Atlantic, the very effort of looking at slavery and the slave trade from a broader perspective has influenced studies on these issues in other parts of the world or even within a global framework. Research on the intra-American slave trade has gained a renewed interest with publications like Greg O’Malley’s Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 . 96 The same could be said of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean with works like Richard Allen’s European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850 . 97 One central debate that has recently been revived concerns the relationship between capitalism and slavery. 98 Inspired by Eric Williams’s path-breaking work and, more recently, by Dale Tomich’s concept of “second slavery,” which highlights the creation of new zones of slavery in the United States and other parts of the continent during the 19th century , historians, including Sven Beckert, Edward Baptist, and Seth Rockman, are now enthusiastically assessing the connections between the expansion of slavery in that period and the formation of global financial markets and industrial economies in Europe and North America. 99 Clearly, the scholarly potential occasioned by the Atlanticization of slavery studies is still unfolding and should not be underestimated.

Into the Digital Era

The digital revolution sparked a radical change across the historical profession that has had particularly important ramifications for the study of slavery and the slave trade. Despite the major theoretical, methodological, and interpretive differences that divided scholars throughout the 20th century , the means of scholarly communication and dissemination of research during that period remained virtually unchanged: books, journal articles, and very occasionally interviews, opinion pieces, and documentary films enabled scholars to explain their work to each other and, to a much lesser extent, a wider public. The emergence of the internet and its rapid infiltration of academic and everyday life has disrupted this landscape, opening new and once inconceivable opportunities to engage in open-ended inquiry unencumbered by publication deadlines, and to share the fruits of that labor with anyone who has access to the web. The digital turn has also inspired scholars to offer creative visual interpretations of the history of both slavery and the slave trade. Perhaps most importantly, the web has provided a site for the presentation and preservation of digitized archival sources that would previously have been accessible to only those people with the means to visit the repositories that hold them. While the consequences of the digital turn are being actively discussed and debated, it is clear that digital history is here to stay.

Digital projects focusing on slavery and the slave trade emerged in the 1990s and tended to be somewhat rudimentary in both their aims and scope, reflecting the limited capacity of the internet itself and, perhaps more appropriately, scholars’ limited comfort using it. These projects had as their main purpose the collection and presentation of primary sources—scanning and loading onto a web page images of captives, owners, slave ships, and forts that teachers or students had collected for pedagogical purposes. Among the first large-scale initiatives to bring together these scattered materials was Jerome Handler and Michael A. Tuite’s website, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas . 100 Created first as a portal to search through images that Handler had used in lectures, this website grew exponentially over time. From the roughly 200 images organized into ten categories with which the site first launched, it now provides access to 1,280 images arranged under eighteen topical headings. Other digital projects focused on the presentation of scanned archival documents. Libraries and historical societies used the web to advertise their holdings and entice interested viewers to further examine their collections. Many of these sites were free of charge, democratizing access to rare scholarly records—at least for those individuals who had access to the internet.

As the technology associated with digitization has improved, a number of organizations have dedicated vast resources to scaling up digital projects. Though its focus goes well beyond slavery and the slave trade, Google Books has been among the most prominent players in the field. 101 Beginning in the early 2000s, Google quietly began scanning published volumes held in major academic libraries. By 2015 , Google estimated that it had scanned 25 million books—nearly one-fifth of the total number of unique titles ever published. Though copyright laws limit full access to the collection, Google Books is nevertheless unparalleled in its scope and offers unrivaled access to published sources on slavery from the pre-copyright era. Other companies have taken more targeted approaches. The Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice portal, for example, offers access to original archival materials focused primarily, though not exclusively, on the Atlantic World that covers the period between 1490 and 2007 . The project enables users to interface with scans of primary sources and use keyword searches to find relevant materials. 102

As this implies, digitization initiatives have not been limited to the Western world, even if, at times controversially, Western institutions have funded the majority of them. Indeed, one of the enduring consequences of the Atlanticization of slavery scholarship has been the growing dialogue it helped generate between scholars living in or working on areas outside of the Anglo-American world. The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme is one example: it has supported the digitization of entire archival collections in repositories situated in developing countries, where resources for preservation are extremely limited. 103 Local archivists have become valuable collaborators; young students with interests in digital preservation have gained important training and exposure to scanning methods and technologies. Since the early 2000s, major digital initiatives have been launched or completed in places as wide-ranging as Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, and Saint Helena, with important implications for slavery scholarship. 104 One such example is the Slave Societies Digital Archive , directed by Jane Landers and hosted at Vanderbuilt University, which preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and people of African descent. 105 Since 2007 or so, a truly global conversation about slavery and its long-term effects has been nurtured by more widespread access to relevant archival sources.

The growing sophistication of the internet and its users has transformed digital projects on slavery and the slave trade. Websites now go well beyond mere presentations of scanned primary sources. They tend to emphasize interactivity, encouraging site visitors to search through and manipulate data to generate new research insights. Some projects employ “crowdsourcing,” partnering with the public or soliciting data or assistance from site visitors to further a project’s reach. African Origins , for instance, provides to the public some 91,000 records of captives rescued from slave ships in the 19th century , including their indigenous African names. 106 Historians, with the help of other researchers, particularly those people familiar with African languages, have been identifying to which languages these names belong and thereby tracing the inland, linguistic origins of thousands of slaves forced into the Atlantic during the 19th century . 107 This has helped expand insights into slavery and the slave trade well beyond the limited confines of the ivory tower. Moreover, the internet has the added benefit of providing a space for individuals who are passionate about history but whose careers limit their abilities to publish books and articles to share their knowledge with a large pool of readers.

Few digital initiatives have done more for slavery scholarship than Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database . The Voyages site is the product of decades of collaborative research into the transatlantic slave trade. Building on Curtin’s Census , it now provides access to information on nearly 36,000 unique slave voyages that operated between the 1510s and 1867 . The site is made possible by the basic reality that, given the vast amount of money they laid out, owners and operators of slave vessels carefully documented many aspects of slaving excursions. Some of the details captured in written records lend themselves to coding and quantification: the names of captains and owners; the places to which slave ships went; the numbers of enslaved people loaded onto and forced off of slave ships; the ratios of males to females and adults to children among captives; and the prices paid for enslaved people. The vast amount of data to which the site provides free access has enabled scholars focused on virtually any aspect of the slave trade or slavery to benefit from and contribute to the Voyages project. Among its most important features is the site’s capacity to expand or revise its records based on contributions from users who uncover new or contradictory evidence. 108

Based in part on the Voyages model—or, in some cases, as a critical response to it—since the 2000s, historical research has witnessed the creation and expansion of important digital projects about enslaved Africans and their descendants. Slave Biographies: Atlantic Database Network , a project spearheaded by Gwendolyn M. Hall and Walter Hawthorne from Michigan State University, offers an open access data repository of information on the identities of enslaved people in the Atlantic World. 109 Liberated Africans , developed by Henry Lovejoy at the University of Colorado, Boulder, brings together information about the lives of some 250,000 Africans rescued from slave ships between 1807 and 1896 . 110 Final Passages , a project under development by Greg O’Malley and Alex Borucki at the University of California system, plans to provide a database of the intra-American slave trade to be deployed on the same platform as Slave Voyages . 111 And what to say of Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade , winner of a $1.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation? The project seeks to bring such digital resources together by focusing on individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading at any time between the beginning and the end of the transatlantic slave trade. 112 It is no doubt the epitome in amassing and interconnecting historical data. Conversations about long-term institutional support for these sites and the data on which they are based—a central and underappreciated aspect of digital history—have also begun to take place in earnest. That they are happening at all is indicative of the revolutionary impact that the digital turn has had on the profession.

All in all, it is no easy task to synthesize decades of research on the history of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. Although relatively new in comparison to more established fields of Western history, it has grown quickly, amassing a significant body of literature that incorporates some of the most sophisticated methodologies available. Historians have proven so adaptable in their approaches and uses of sources that it is nearly impossible to indicate the direction in which the field is moving. Moreover, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, public interest has turned again to the complex and thorny issue of reparations. Consequently, historians have had an unprecedented opportunity to engage with the public on this question and related ones concerning how societies represent and memorialize the history of slavery. In 2013 , Laurent Dubois noticed in an opinion piece in The New York Times that calls for reparations for slavery and the slave trade in the Caribbean offered an important opportunity to face the multiple ways in which the past continues to shape the present. 113 In the following year, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover article in The Atlantic making a powerful case for reparations in the United States. According to him, “until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” 114 A leading advocate for public memorializing of slavery, Ana Lúcia Araújo, has recently published a book dedicated exclusively to the issue of reparations for slavery and the slave trade. 115 While the most recent iteration of this debate draws on fresh materials and perspectives, Araújo notes that “since the eighteenth century, enslaved and freed individuals started conceptualizing the idea of reparations in correspondence, pamphlets, public speeches, slave narratives, and judicial claims, written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.” 116 That such issues continue to spark passionate debates and scholarship provides a strong indication of the enduring relevance of slavery’s past to the shaping of the present.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Alex Borucki, David Eltis, Greg O’Malley, and Nicholas Radburn for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All interpretations and conclusions reached here are, of course, the authors’ responsibility.

The Power of the ‘Planet of the Apes’

Why is this long-running film series so gripping and effective? Because it doesn’t monkey around.

A chimpanzee, a woman and an orangutan stand in a clearing near a forest.

By Alissa Wilkinson

When the very first “Planet of the Apes” movie opened in 1968, the movie critic at The Times, Renata Adler, found it unremarkable . “It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch,” she wrote, deeming it an “anti-war film and a science-fiction liberal tract,” with the apes representing “militarism, fascism and police brutality.” It’s probably safe to say she wasn’t expecting it to become one of the longest-running science-fiction franchises in Hollywood history.

I cannot quite blame her — and not just because endless sequels weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. Watching the 1968 film, you see how close it could have veered toward a quick extinction. At times the whole thing has the quality of a skit. Actors wear monkey suits and masks (“wonderful anthropoid masks,” as Adler put it), and the attempt to draw a parallel between the apes’ civilization and the viewers’ can feel a little clumsy. It’s 1968, so there are winking catchphrases like “you can’t trust the older generation” and “never trust anyone over 30,” slogans that had been adopted by the counterculture. Had I been the reviewer back then, I might have called it “sometimes hamfisted.”

Yet with regrets to Adler, the movie does work on its own terms, and it has held up extraordinarily well over the past 56 years. Charlton Heston stars as the captain of a four-person space crew that crash-lands on a planet that feels unfamiliar, where talking apes rule and humans, such as they are, have been enslaved. (One member of the crew is female, which I suppose was meant to suggest something futuristic; the first American woman didn’t go into space until 15 years after “Planet of the Apes” premiered.)

The movie was based on a 1963 satirical novel by the French author Pierre Boulle, who also wrote the novel “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Rod Serling, the creator of the wildly popular science-fiction TV show “The Twilight Zone,” was brought on to adapt the book for the screen. Serling’s influence is obvious from the first moments, which involve Heston in monologue about philosophical matters. More time has passed on Earth than in the spacecraft, since they’re moving at the speed of light. “Seen from out here, everything seems different,” he says. “Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely.”

“Tell me, though,” he continues. “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who has sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keep his neighbor’s children starving?”

This introduction is a thesis in a thimble for the whole franchise, which combines an intriguing premise — what if apes evolved beyond men — with a host of other social and political concerns. Serling, for instance, purposely injected ideas about the Cold War and nuclear weapons into the film. As Adler noted, police brutality, militarism and fascism also make appearances, a good reminder that our time is hardly unique in those concerns. There are questions about free speech and religious fundamentalism, mythmaking and liberty, technology and scientific study, race, viral pandemics, animal rights and a whole lot more woven throughout the movies.

And there are a lot of movies. In the 1970s, the first “Apes” was followed by four more, plus a live-action TV show, then an animated one. In 2001, an ill-conceived remake directed by Tim Burton starred Mark Wahlberg in a version of the Heston role, and then a reboot series followed, starting in 2011. There have also been several “Apes” video games.

That reboot trilogy — “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014) and “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017) — is widely considered some of the best franchise cinema ever, and I heartily concur. The trilogy posits that a cure for Alzheimer’s developed by humans had grave unintended consequences when it escaped its lab: It turned apes supersmart, but had the opposite effect on humans, killing vast swaths of the population and then mutating to turn most of humanity mute and less intelligent. A saga then follows in which the human characters change (none repeat across the three films) but the apes do not; they’re the main characters, and it’s their story. It’s masterful.

Sometimes this opinion surprises people. Really? The movies with the apes?

Yes, really. Part of the reason the films succeed is simply their artistry, especially notable in bigger-budget blockbuster fare. We’ve gotten used to rushed, sloppy action and muddy cinematography, so there’s something invigorating in seeing detail, emotion, shadow and rich color that feels real. It’s all led by Andy Serkis’s compelling and dynamic motion-capture performance as Caesar, leader of the apes. (He’s so good that it sparked a mini-movement for an Oscar nomination.)

Serkis, as Caesar, speaks and emotes with the kind of gravitas that we associate with people playing world-historical leaders — which, in a sense, is what he is doing. But that also points to part of why this trilogy, and indeed the entire “Apes” series, is so gripping: It is serious.

Serious, in the sense that it takes its characters seriously. Each has a personality and genuine emotions, and when they mourn, we mourn too. But serious also in the import of the issues at hand, spun throughout stories that are intriguing and grim. There’s a sense of grief in every “Apes” movie, and in the reboot trilogy it’s almost palpable. (I’m pretty sure Steve Zahn’s “Bad Ape” character was a studio addition to lighten the mood in “War,” and while he starts to veer a little Jar Jar Binks-ward, the director Matt Reeves manages to hold it all together.)

Why do these films grieve? It’s not about the lost world of humans, not really — it’s always been clear, even from the famous conclusion of the 1968 film, that humanity has only itself and its hubris to blame for its own destruction. Instead, the grief stems from the very issues that the films raise — the fascism, the nuclear war, the brutality — and the deep pessimism of the series about those issues ever being eradicated for long.

Apocalyptic films are increasingly obsessed with a question posed to the viewer, similar to Heston’s query at the start of “Planet of the Apes”: In light of humanity’s treatment of the planet and of one another, does the species really deserve to survive? Most of the time, the movie comes up with a way to say yes (most expensively, in “Avengers: Endgame”).

But the “Apes” movies (so far) say no, not really. Since they’ve shifted focus from humans to the apes that replace them, that works. Even in the newest installment, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” the humans who show up are not presented as heroes or even particularly worthy defenders of their own species.

Yet, as “Kingdom” also reveals, the “Apes” movies aren’t so sure that any other sentient, reasoning species will be better. Though Caesar taught a way of living that would produce more harmony and protect the planet, in “Kingdom” we already see power-hungry apes reproducing the sins of humanity, finding ways to perpetuate oppression and repression.

The 1968 film is set many centuries after the reboot trilogy and “Kingdom,” so we already know where things are headed, and it’s not great. That may be part of why the “Apes” movies have resonated for so long, across so many moviegoing decades. They are telling a truth in science fiction that’s hard to face in reality: There’s no perfect way to run a civilization, no way to fix things forever, no teacher so profound that their words won’t be twisted for someone else’s gain. Every generation has its own struggles and saints — and there is nothing new under the sun.

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of years between the premiere of “Planet of the Apes” and the first American woman heading into space. It was 15 years, not 25.

How we handle corrections

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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Slave Power
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power found in womanhood and motherhood. While Anyanwu and the creature live in patriarchal societies, this thesis argues that they both discover the power of female agency that lies within the patriarchal institutions of womanhood and motherhood. Through the analysis of the master/slave power dynamic, this thesis will argue that while
Capitalism and Slavery
Capitalism and Slavery is the published version of the doctoral dissertation of Eric Williams, who was the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. It advances a number of theses on the impact of economic factors on the decline of slavery, specifically the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies, from the second half of the 18th century.
The Power of the 'Planet of the Apes'
When the very first "Planet of the Apes" movie opened in 1968, the movie critic at The Times, Renata Adler, found it unremarkable. "It is no good at all, but fun, at moments, to watch ...