In this Virginia History Blog, we present a digest of five reviews related to Virginia in both the New Nation and Antebellum periods. Particularly New Nation time frame are “The Framer’s Coup” in making the Constitution, and “Ties That Bound”.
Three journals recently reviewed “Ties That Bound” concerning First Ladies and slaves, and two books were featured by Paul Harvey were reported in the Journal of Southern History, “Christianity and Race in the American South” and “Bounds of Their Habitation”.
White men and slavery were studied in “Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery” and in “The Secret Life of Bacon Tait”, a successful slave trader.
The Framer’s Coup
Michael J. Klarman wrote The Framer’s Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History. It is available from Oxford University Press, on Kindle and online in Audiobook, hardcover and paperback.
In a fusion of recent scholarship, Klarman writes a narrative embracing the conditions leading up to the Constitutional Convention, the debates there, and debates among the state ratifying conventions leading to the Bill of Rights. A group of political elites decided on a radically new foundational document of governance, then convinced a majority in each of the kaleidoscope of shifting post-revolutionary politics among thirteen emerging states to adopt it. At every step, events challenged a successful outcome.
By the mid 1780s, the Continental Congress of the Articles of Confederation was failing. To make a more perfect union of slave and non-slave holding states, the Constitutional Convention provided for the continuation of a slave-holding republic. The ratification debates allowing adoption of the Constitution required a synthesis in the Bill of Rights immediately on launching the new government.
To buy “The Framer’s Coup” on Amazon, click here.
Ties That Bound
Marie Jenkins Swartz wrote Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of American History, and the William and Mary Quarterly. It is available from the University of Chicago Press, eTextbook and online new and used.
Swartz explores the domestic negotiations creating the unique family worlds among Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Jefferson’s daughter and hostess Patsy Jefferson Randolph, and Dolley Madison. The book presents a richer story of these elite women and their husbands that illuminate the worlds of class, race and gender in the New Nation era.
The First Families’ slaves emerge as individuals with their own stories, contributing to the successes of the mistresses of each household and seeking individual freedoms. Slaves were vital to the First Families economic interests, as well as socially in political receptions. The Washingtons had slave family, as did the Jeffersons, and none of the women studied freed any of their slaves, with Dolley Madison perhaps contravening a second will of James Madison to do so.
To buy “Ties That Bound” on Amazon, click here.
Christianity and Race
Paul Harvey wrote Christianity and Race in the American South: A History in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of the Civil War Era. It is available from the University of Chicago Press, eTextbook, and online new and used.
In this survey of four hundred years of southern racial and religious history, Harvey develops the region’s complexity and diversity in race, class and creed. It was never monolithically revivalistic and evangelical as a stereotyped “Bible Belt”. The racial egalitarianism of revolutionary ideology and evangelism challenged the region’s impulse towards racial and social hierarchy, and they were eclipsed by the South’s conservatism with an emphasis on order and obedience. Religious interpretation of the Civil War yielded distinctly different worldviews among black and white Southerners.
While the South was never socially parochial entirely, it did enter an historical moment of isolation during the period from Jim Crow to emerging Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In this period, white evangelical Christianity had its greatest impact, advocating for deep racial intolerance and rigid segregation on religious grounds.
To buy “Christianity and Race” on Amazon, click here.
Bounds of Their Habitation
Paul Harvey wrote Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History. It is available from Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, on Kindle and online new and used.
In Acts 17:26, there are two elements that partisans secularize for political dogma. The first is that God made “of one blood” all nations – which is used by abolitionists and pluralists; the second is that He then “determined the bounds of their habitation” – which is used by advocates of racial separation. Americans both sought to erect racial boundaries with a religious justification, and Americans challenged and undermined those boundaries found within their republic.
The book summarizes previous scholarship and not only looks at African American segregation in the South, but also considers the forcible removal of the Cherokees in the context of the Protestant missionary movements. That is a story of competing religious endeavors, ambitions for civilization, and violent expulsion.
To buy “Bounds of Their Habitation” on Amazon, click here.
Masterless Men
Keri Leigh Merritt wrote Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History. It is available from Cambridge University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
Merritt estimates that by 1860, at least one-third of the antebellum South’s white population were poor, that is, without land or any meaningful property such as tools with which to pursue a trade.
She argues that the Southern white elite slaveholding class actively perpetuated an economic and social system that perpetuated poor white subordination, withholding education and intimidating by manipulating the law to jail, beat and exile. Disadvantaged poor whites seeking to avoid the Confederate draft followed fugitive slave examples by seeking refuge in swamps, forests and mountains.
To buy “Masterless Men” on Amazon, click here.
The Secret Life of Bacon Tait
Hank Trent wrote The Secret Life of Bacon Tait, a White Slave Trader Married to a Free Woman of Color in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of Southern History. It is available from the LSU Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
This is a biography of a Virginia slave trader and in his social, intimate and work experiences. From an ambitious youth to a lonely death, Tait had few close friends and an unsuccessful courting life. On his common law marriage to a free woman of color he established his mixed race family in Massachusetts, and continued his Virginia enterprise buying and selling slaves at market.
Growing wealthy in Richmond, Virginia, Tait divided his identity as a businessman in the South and that of a husband and father in an antislavery community in the North. The children transitioned from “illegitimate mulattoes to refined white young men and women”.
To buy “Secret Life of Bacon Tait” 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.