Nancy Isenberg. Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Isenberg locates the roots of Antebellum feminism in discussions and activism predating the Seneca Falls convention. She also considers the broader goals of antebellum feminists, who saw suffrage as a means to an end rather than a particular goal in its own right. And that end was to achieve "co-equality", a concept which posited that in a republican society women needed to be allowed the ability to speak for themselves and defend their personal sovereignty--including control over their own bodies--while at the same time living in a separate, gendered sphere. Antebellum feminists were engaged in a complex struggle to redefine the role of women both in their private lives and in the public sphere.
This struggle was complicated because feminists understood that the implications of republican thought--particularly in a society which had sanctioned race-based chattel slavery--on those regarded as "dependents" was fraught with challenges. Women had to find ways in which to engage in a public sphere which was gendered as a (white) male theater of action.
The push for "personhood", then, had to contend both with societal norms restricting the legitimacy of feminine engagement with politics, and longstanding legal norms denying women the agency and legal autonomy to speak or act on their behalf. The push for rights--the right to divorce, the right to own property, guardianship of their own children, etc.--was the real goal of antebellum feminism. Suffrage and appeals to abstract notions of citizenship were a means to an end.
Sunday, April 30, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Many Thousands Gone
Ira Berlin. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
This synthetic history of slavery in the United States from the early Virginia colony through the Revolutionary period at the very end of the eighteenth century divides the (future) United States into four main areas for the purposes of slave societies--the North, the Chesapeake/Upper South, the Lowcountry/Lower South, and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Berlin acknowledges that other divisions could have been possible--the Upper South could have been split between Tidewater and Piedmont, for one example--but makes a convincing argument that his categories are both valid and useful. Any further delineation might very well have made the study too complex.
Berlin also makes a distinction between a "society with slaves" versus a "slave society." The latter is completely organized around slave holding both as a central economic activity and an organizing social principle, while the former describes a society in which slave holding is legal and possibly even widely practiced but does not dominate social and economic life.
Within those spatial and conceptual frames, Berlin summarizes the state and development of slavery in each region, over the course of three different time periods. Part One recounts the "Charter Generations", the experience of the early slaves in North America, who were frequently creoles who were cosmopolitan natives of the Atlantic World. Part Two recounts the "Plantation Generations" who experienced the slow development of indigenous slavery in mainland North America. Part Three recounts the "Revolutionary Generation" who experienced the disruptions of the late-18th century revolutions--revolutions which both offered new avenues for freedom yet paradoxically led to Northern "free"states in which African-American life was increasingly compromised and constricted; and a rapid growth and spread of plantation slavery across the Lower South, a region which would ultimately encompass both the old Lowcountry and the Lower Mississippi.
The book ends at the dawn of the 19th century and the cotton revolution which would exacerbate the spread of slavery and lead the southern United States to ever more aggressively defend the slave society cotton helped create.
This synthetic history of slavery in the United States from the early Virginia colony through the Revolutionary period at the very end of the eighteenth century divides the (future) United States into four main areas for the purposes of slave societies--the North, the Chesapeake/Upper South, the Lowcountry/Lower South, and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Berlin acknowledges that other divisions could have been possible--the Upper South could have been split between Tidewater and Piedmont, for one example--but makes a convincing argument that his categories are both valid and useful. Any further delineation might very well have made the study too complex.
Berlin also makes a distinction between a "society with slaves" versus a "slave society." The latter is completely organized around slave holding both as a central economic activity and an organizing social principle, while the former describes a society in which slave holding is legal and possibly even widely practiced but does not dominate social and economic life.
Within those spatial and conceptual frames, Berlin summarizes the state and development of slavery in each region, over the course of three different time periods. Part One recounts the "Charter Generations", the experience of the early slaves in North America, who were frequently creoles who were cosmopolitan natives of the Atlantic World. Part Two recounts the "Plantation Generations" who experienced the slow development of indigenous slavery in mainland North America. Part Three recounts the "Revolutionary Generation" who experienced the disruptions of the late-18th century revolutions--revolutions which both offered new avenues for freedom yet paradoxically led to Northern "free"states in which African-American life was increasingly compromised and constricted; and a rapid growth and spread of plantation slavery across the Lower South, a region which would ultimately encompass both the old Lowcountry and the Lower Mississippi.
The book ends at the dawn of the 19th century and the cotton revolution which would exacerbate the spread of slavery and lead the southern United States to ever more aggressively defend the slave society cotton helped create.
Sunday, February 26, 2017
From Resistance to Revolution
Pauline Maier. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991, 1972
The process by which once-loyal British subjects in the North American colonies became radicalized and turned against the government of a "mother country" in just a decade is the subject of Maier's now-classic study. By looking at published writings from the era as well as correspondence, she places the rise of the Patriot movement in the larger context of both British imperial history and the legal tradition colonists inherited.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One, "Traditions", recounts the heritage of acceptable resistance and public demonstrations against perceived governmental overreach which British law and custom had long tolerated and even protected. Understanding the forms in which colonial opposition to such British initiatives as the Stamp Act and so forth took is much easier when the reader is aware of this legacy.
Part Two, "Resistance", studies the early years of post-French and Indian War discontent and increasingly organized dissent in the context of British law and colonial conditions. The need to justify resistance in terms of social and cultural norms guided many of the actions taken. The Sons of Liberty and other early Patriots operated within colonial societies still wedded to traditional, corporate forms, so the importance of consensus (or at least the outward appearance of such) and propriety were stressed. "Mobs" were often restrained and even the most rabble-rousing leaders spoke out against the violations of norms.
Part Three, "From Resistance to Revolution", begins by putting the colonial resistance movement as it stood in the late 1760's in a broader context, stressing the connection between the colonists and their perceived allies in Parliament, the City of London, Ireland, and elsewhere. But as "corruption" seemed to clip the wings of most British radicals on the other side of the Atlantic, the colonists came to feel that they were on their own; a realization which fed their increased willingness to consider separation as an option well before the outbreak of actual hostilities in 1775, let alone the summer of 1776.
In the end, Americans embraced republicanism as an alternative to the British constitutional order in which earlier resistance had been based once they concluded that that order had been corrupted beyond hope. They moved towards republicanism in a deliberate move to establish a new ideological basis for continued resistance and then rebellion and revolution.
The process by which once-loyal British subjects in the North American colonies became radicalized and turned against the government of a "mother country" in just a decade is the subject of Maier's now-classic study. By looking at published writings from the era as well as correspondence, she places the rise of the Patriot movement in the larger context of both British imperial history and the legal tradition colonists inherited.
The book is divided into three parts. Part One, "Traditions", recounts the heritage of acceptable resistance and public demonstrations against perceived governmental overreach which British law and custom had long tolerated and even protected. Understanding the forms in which colonial opposition to such British initiatives as the Stamp Act and so forth took is much easier when the reader is aware of this legacy.
Part Two, "Resistance", studies the early years of post-French and Indian War discontent and increasingly organized dissent in the context of British law and colonial conditions. The need to justify resistance in terms of social and cultural norms guided many of the actions taken. The Sons of Liberty and other early Patriots operated within colonial societies still wedded to traditional, corporate forms, so the importance of consensus (or at least the outward appearance of such) and propriety were stressed. "Mobs" were often restrained and even the most rabble-rousing leaders spoke out against the violations of norms.
Part Three, "From Resistance to Revolution", begins by putting the colonial resistance movement as it stood in the late 1760's in a broader context, stressing the connection between the colonists and their perceived allies in Parliament, the City of London, Ireland, and elsewhere. But as "corruption" seemed to clip the wings of most British radicals on the other side of the Atlantic, the colonists came to feel that they were on their own; a realization which fed their increased willingness to consider separation as an option well before the outbreak of actual hostilities in 1775, let alone the summer of 1776.
In the end, Americans embraced republicanism as an alternative to the British constitutional order in which earlier resistance had been based once they concluded that that order had been corrupted beyond hope. They moved towards republicanism in a deliberate move to establish a new ideological basis for continued resistance and then rebellion and revolution.
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs
Kathleen M. Brown. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996; published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.
The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.
Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.
The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.
The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.
The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.
Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.
The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.
The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.
Monday, January 16, 2017
Apostles of Disunion
Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001.
This brief study of the speeches and letters of several of the over fifty men who served as "Secession Commissioners"--essentially delegates sent as representatives of pro-secessionist state conventions to similar conventions in other states--identifies the language, rhetoric, and arguments of these men as an important indicator of the centrality of pro-slavery sentiment and a commitment to white supremacy to the secession crisis.
Dew's argument is concise and he includes the text of some of the more notable speeches in the Appendix so that the reader can read them in their entirety. Dew, who was raised in the South and was taught from an early age that the "War of Northern Aggression" was fought by his ancestors as a principled defense of Constitutional values and State's Rights--acknowledges that there were other "causes" of the war, including diverging economic systems, and a deeply-rooted (if, I would argue, possibly insecure) culture of honor in the South, but he argues that these documents provide a damning indictment of any effort to deny the degree to which the Confederacy was founded on, and fought for, a defense of slavery and the continued degradation and oppression of Black Americans.
This brief study of the speeches and letters of several of the over fifty men who served as "Secession Commissioners"--essentially delegates sent as representatives of pro-secessionist state conventions to similar conventions in other states--identifies the language, rhetoric, and arguments of these men as an important indicator of the centrality of pro-slavery sentiment and a commitment to white supremacy to the secession crisis.
Dew's argument is concise and he includes the text of some of the more notable speeches in the Appendix so that the reader can read them in their entirety. Dew, who was raised in the South and was taught from an early age that the "War of Northern Aggression" was fought by his ancestors as a principled defense of Constitutional values and State's Rights--acknowledges that there were other "causes" of the war, including diverging economic systems, and a deeply-rooted (if, I would argue, possibly insecure) culture of honor in the South, but he argues that these documents provide a damning indictment of any effort to deny the degree to which the Confederacy was founded on, and fought for, a defense of slavery and the continued degradation and oppression of Black Americans.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Awash in a Sea of Faith
Jon Butler. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.
The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.
And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.
Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.
This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.
The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.
And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.
Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
All the World's a Fair
Robert W. Rydell. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.
The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".
The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.
During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.
The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".
The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.
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