In this five-part review of Civil War Era literature at the Virginia History Blog, we will take a look at period topics in politics, war commands, home front, economy, slavery and memory. Turning to slavery, we begin with “The Mind of the Master Class” describing the worldview of slave holders.
“The Sounds of Slavery” treats the songs and speech of African Americans at work, worship, celebration and recreation. “Slavery and the Peculiar Solution” describes the American Colonization Society, and “An African Republic” explains the origins of the African American republic in Africa.
Finally, “Bitter Fruits of Bondage” is a prominent African American scholar’s analysis of the impact of slavery protection, white class divisions and slavery erosion on the failure of the Confederacy’s experiment in nationalism.
Current releases reviewed in Spring 2018 journals can be found at Civil War Era – Spring 2018.
Recent blogs include Civil War Era politics, Civil War commanders and commands, Civil War home front, and Civil War economy.
The Mind of the Master Class
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese wrote The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview in 2005. Available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
This intellectual history begins with the insight that the thinking of a ruling class is forged in the conflict with its enemies. The preoccupation of the ruling class of the South was to justify a slave holding society under attack from religious and political liberals, philosophical idealists, market capitalists and abolitionists. Not just defend it in an ivory tower, buy to transform the cultural capital from the Western intellectual heritage so that slavery would be taken for granted in the South. That required learning and intellectual debate that strengthened their worldview rationale.
Over time a cultural division split the North against the South with incompatible visions of society required to sustain Christianity in a sinful world. The Southerners seized upon ancient and medieval histories to uphold slavery and denounce the excesses of democracy. They held that only a society with unequal relations could guarantee order, liberty and social coherence. This is a companion volume to the TVH top 300 pick from Michael O’Brien, “Conjecture of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860”.
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The Sounds of Slavery
Shane White and Graham White wrote The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech in 2005. Available from the Beacon Press and online new and used.
The sounds of African-American speech and song persisting from contact were distinctive from the European. They were experienced as “functional, as part and parcel of daily life, rather than as something abstracted from it.” Nonlinear, lyrical black music that was vibrant and rhythmic was heard by whites as irregular and jarring because it was so unlike ballads. The collision of the two cultures created something new, yet black speechways were parodied by whites as uniform noise.
Nineteenth century accounts of the same styles of expression by both whites and blacks are reviewed, as well as summaries of twentieth-century interviews with ex-slaves. The book in accompanied with a compact disc with eighteen tracks of field calls, prayers, spirituals and sermons collected in the 1930s.
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Slavery and the Peculiar Solution
Eric Burin wrote Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society in 2005. Available from the Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Burin begins his study of the American Colonization Society (ACS) by examining interpretations that generally divide into those who see the ACS as a proslavery organization and those who view it as antislavery. Begun in contradiction and compromise, the ACS was founded in 1817 for the purpose of colonizing free blacks to Africa. Some masters were isolated examples of sponsoring free blacks, or experimentally preparing individuals for freedom then manumitting them. Some waited for the cover of a joint enterprise of “conjunctive liberations” where a number of slaves were freed for emigration by more than one master.
Blacks sought to use the ACS as a means of uniting families that were mixed free and slave, or to prevent the selling away of family members. White neighbors of manumitting slave owners occasionally ostracized them. While the ACS had support nationally North and South and secured some federal financing, there were various internal disputes among the membership between the sections and within them.
To buy “Slavery and the Peculiar Solution” on Amazon, click here.
An African Republic
Marie Tyler-McGraw wrote An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia in 2007. Available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Eleven thousand African Americans, one-third of them Virginians, settled in Liberia before the Civil War. They created a new but troubled American republic from scratch. Free blacks seeking true “liberty . . . the dearest right of man” and slaves pressing for manumissions for their entire family were assisted with antislavery Quakers, evangelicals, well connected Virginia elites and well-meaning insolvent planters. The debate over colonization informed debates in Virginia and beyond about the nature of race and citizenship.
The movement was begun in the nationalistic days following the War of 1812 amid continuing fears of servile rebellion following Gabriel’s Conspiracy. It was later denounced by William Lloyd Garrison as a proslavery conspiracy to remove troublesome blacks and by lower South politicians as the slippery slope to national manumission and the end of slavery. Data about the Virginian emigrants and 250 emancipators can be accessed online in a searchable database, “Virginia Emigrants to Liberia” (www.vcdh.virginia.edu/liberia), sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Virginia Center for Digital History.
To buy “An African Republic” on Amazon, click here.
Bitter Fruits of Bondage
Armstead L. Robinson wrote Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861-1865 in 2005. Available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
The former director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, Robinson argues that in order to shore up the eroding institution of slavery in the face of slave flight to Federal lines in the Mississippi Valley and along the coasts, the Confederate government diverted crucial strength away from its military effort, ensuring its defeat. Areas with heavy concentrations of slaves required substantial investments in local defense, requiring non-slave holders to carry the burden of the fight from the beginning.
Most non-slaveholders in the South enlisting in the secessionist cause saw slavery as central to their way of life. But the rebel regime exacerbated class tensions by unequal policies that preferenced the planter class, eroding the will to national independence. The purported equality of all white men was demonstrably contradicted by life under the Confederacy. Class legislation brought demoralization and eventually waves of desertion. In the planters pursuit of wartime profits, they refused to plant sufficient food crops. Efforts at enforced conscription were met with widespread bushwacker resistance. Robinson describes a rapid disintegration of nationalism in the four-year old Confederacy under the duress of political, class and military challenges.
To buy “Bitter Fruits of Bondage” on Amazon, click here.
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction, 1820-1883. Titles are organized by topics, political and economic Virginia, social history, gender, religious, African American, and Wars in Virginia 1750-1824.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.