In this Virginia History Blog, we look at five titles on the Antebellum Civil War Era. “A Nation Without Borders” studies the international setting in an age of 19th century civil wars. “Luxurious Citizens” addresses the politics of consumption in the 1800s.
“Owning Ideas” considers the development of intellectual property. Before “Dred Scott” analyzes American slavery and legal culture before the Civil War. “Society Ties” is a cultural history of the student Jefferson Society.
A Nation Without Borders
Steven Hahn wrote A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 in 2016. It is available from the Viking Press, on Kindle, on Audiobook, and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal of the Civil War Era.
In this volume of the U.S. from 1830-1910, Hahn attempts an analysis of trends and processes that transcend the American Civil War, toggling between social and political history. It describes how the U.S. transformed from a coalition of agricultural societies with a weak central government into a consolidated nation state characterized by urbanization and industrialization with a global reach.
Despite divergent plans advanced by proslavery and antislavery American factions, the participants were in agreement to adhere to early ambitions for the continent and western hemisphere. From this perspective, Native American resistance was a series of domestic rebellions.
Beginning and ending with Mexican borders, the first four chapters address the incorporation of the trans-Mississippi West, the second a nation-state consolidation with the South at the “Great Rebellion”, and the last four account for the U.S. rise as world power of the Western Hemisphere, closing the narration at the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Hahn develops themes of the rise of nation-state capitalism after the Northeastern “Market Revolution”, the spread of wage labor and the rise of class-based institutions and associations, and reform efforts by Populists and Progressives.
Buy “A Nation Without Borders” on Amazon here.
Luxurious Citizens
Joanna Cohen wrote Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth Century America in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History, Summer 2018. It is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press, and online new and used. A companion to Jennifer Van Horn The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2007).
The consumer has been key in political culture since the onset of the 19th century. Cohen posits that 19th century American capitalism was both an economic system of consumption shaping the development of class, gender and race, and an economic system with influential agents of capitalist finance and industrialized production. The issues revolved around questions about the relationship between consumption and civic virtue, advantaging one section over another, and who should have access to consumer goods by class or race.
Major public debates of the period revolved around citizenship, consumer interest and national interest. Shopping consumerism by an individual citizen was transformed from a symbolic action of patriotic sacrifice to a civic duty of individual choice in the marketplace. This ascent of public good by satisfying consumer desire was fashioned by a consortium of merchants, manufacturers, advertisers, auctioneers, consumers and their politicians seeking votes.
In the Revolution and War of 1812 these centered on luxury items and non-consumption. Public auctions became a contentious issued in the 1810s and 1820s. Tariffs preoccupied the economic landscape from the 1820s to the 1850s. Retail advertising developed as an issue in the 1840s and 1850s. During the Civil War, the debate focused on patriotic consumption and luxury items. The tension between consumption as a civic duty versus a civil right was by the emergence of the modern capitalist state, with individual consumption becoming a right of citizenship.
While members of the middle class were not the only consumers, they became the consumer type representing empowered citizenship. Nevertheless, women’s consumerism did not immediately lead to enfranchisement.
Buy “Luxurious Citizens” on Amazon here.
Owning Ideas
Oren Bracha wrote Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909 in 2016. It is available from the Cambridge University of Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal American History. See also Ronan Deazley Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (2006).
In the modern American economic landscape, ideas and creative endeavors made by inventors and authors are a form of property that deserves protection by the state. Bracha seeks to describe the complex and often contradictory evolution that developed over the 19th century.
In the early patent and copyright law found in England and its American colonies, legal protection was a type of discretionary privilege granted to a politically favored few. In the 1800s in the United States, there emerged a universal right to patents and copyrights administered by the national government and protected in the federal courts. This involved the transformation of ideas and creative endeavors from a kind of distributed privilege to intangible property that was rightfully owned by the author or inventor.
Buy “Owning Ideas” on Amazon here.
Before “Dred Scott”
Anne Twitty wrote Before “Dred Scott”: Slavery and Legal Culture in the American Confluence, 1787-1857 in 2016. It is available from the Cambridge University of Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Reviewed in the Journal of the Civil War Era. A companion to Kelly M. Kennington In the Shadow of “Dred Scott”: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (2017), Lea VanderVelde Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (2014), and Dylan Penningroth The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South (2003).
Chief Justice Taney came to the conclusion that Dred Scott was a slave in a way that contradicted previous freedom suits held in Antebellum federal Territories and in Missouri in particular. In a way, the institution of slavery had been on trial under the assault of enslaved petitioners on legal, economic, political and moral grounds.
Twitty narrates a context of Saint Louis, Missouri, in the “American Confluence”, a region where various forms of unfree labor coexisted.
This story is played out on a local level, free of any framework provided by the U.S. Supreme Court on the subject of slavery and the law. Freedom petitioners relied on a folklore of legal procedure and doctrine that the used to resist slavery in the courthouse. They relied on effective lawyers who rarely appealed to the courts on antislavery grounds. They often seized on unforeseen opportunities to take advantage of subterfuge and gamesmanship. It was the local practice of law, not a fixed set of rules and legal precedent that determined the outcomes in each case. Access to the courts became restricted, and petitions numbering over a hundred a year in the 1830s shrunk to a dozen a year in the 1850s.
Buy “Before Dred Scott” on Amazon here.
Society Ties
Thomas L. Howard III and Owen W. Gallogly wrote Society Ties: A History of the Jefferson Society and Student Life at the University of Virginia in 2017. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, and online new and used. Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. A companion to other studies of university literary societies: Mary Kelley Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2008), Cristine A. Ogren The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (2005), and Anrea G. Radke-Moss Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (2008).
Howard and Gallogly, both past presidents of the Jefferson Society at UVA, have written a narrative of the university’s literary society established in 1825 and active today. During the 19th century, college men used literary societies to prepare themselves to become social and political leaders. On most American campuses, they were subsequently eclipsed by athletics and fraternities.
However in 1879 while attending the UVA Law School, Woodrow Wilson became president of the society and inaugurated a debate forum among the membership that addressed pressing issues of the day. In the early 20th century, debates were sponsored with other colleges, and prominent public figures were invited to speak. In the 1960-70s, the society racially integrated, the expanded membership to graduate students, and included women.
Buy the “Society Ties” on Amazon here.