M A R K S I S M

In Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement, Gelien Matthews argues for the reverse of the Edwards thesis outlined in Rugemer.  While she acknowledges the argument by contemporaries and historians alike, that abolitionist agitation in British Parliament influenced slaves to seize opportunities for revolt, she asserts that the opposite is no less true.  Specifically, she notes how, especially after the 1816 Demerara rebellion, abolitionists used the periodic slave uprisings to support the shift in their positions from ones of slave code reforms and gradual emancipation to one of the immediate abolition of the slave regime.

Matthews outlines how the relationship between abolitionist activity in England and slave rebellions in the Caribbean were subject to competing interpretations from pro- and anti-slavery advocates, obviously with the pro-slavery folks arguing that agitation led to rebellion, and the anti-slavery folks arguing that rebellion indicated slaves were fit for freedom and that immediate abolition was necessary.

For Rugemer’s purpose – outlining how the seeds of sectional conflict and secession were sown in the Caribbean – I don’t think it truly matters who is right or wrong here.  Regardless of if abolitionist agitation inspired revolt, or revolt gave ammunition to abolitionists, Southern planters would seen and read about how slave insurrections in the Caribbean led to significant losses to life and property, and that abolition came not long after, both events southern slave holders wanted to avoid at all costs.  So on the one hand, given the Caribbean pro-slavery interpretation most easily visible in Rugemer’s treatment of the Edwards thesis, southerners would have had the desire to secede to avoid further slave revolts stemming from Congressional discussion about the future of slavery in the United States – regardless of whether this was the actual sequence of events.  But on the other hand, even if southern planters understood and accepted the argument Matthews and abolitionists put forward –that insurrection proved slaves’ fitness for freedom and was instrumental in achieving abolition –I think slave holders would have felt the same animosity towards the north and the same impetus to secede so that if another insurrection did occur it wouldn’t lend credence to the abolitionist position.

Nonetheless, the pro-slavery/Edwards position has received far more treatment as the “true” sequence of events than the mirror image proposed by Matthews.  While both seem equally plausible, and Matthews agrees with thiat interpretation, The Problem of Emancipation seems to be more in conversation with those treating the Edwards thesis more seriously (Michael Craton, Hilary Beckles, and others I will be dealing with in the coming weeks).

Ultimately though, and maybe this is negating everything I just typed out, I don’t really think any of this matters all that much for Rugemer’s argument.  Despite some level of historiographical disagreement about what caused what, the Rugemer all that matters is that the pro-slavery faction thought abolitionist agitation was reaching slaves in some manner, and that this led to insurrection.  This is the interpretation planters in the South latched onto, and in that way, the Civil War genuinely had roots in Caribbean slave society.

One of the major elements of Edward Rugemer’s The Problem of Emancipation is his analysis of slave insurrections and insurrection conspiracy.  The Edwards thesis which he relies on so heavily to ground his analysis of the influence of British abolition and events in the Caribbean on the Civil War basically asserts that discussion of abolition, or sometimes slavery more generally, in the press gets filtered through literate slaves and free blacks, spread throughout slave communication and information networks, and ultimately leads to slave insurrections.

Thus, for the next few blog posts I am going to address the historiography of slave insurrections, and see how they fit into Rugemer’s narrative, especially in regards to the Edwards thesis.  I want to look at what white planters perceived as the causes of the insurrections, what historians say the “actual” causes may have been, and the repercussions these insurrections (or plans for insurrection) had on laws, race relations, and political developments.

Last semester in Dr. Boles’s US South seminar, we read Winthrop Jordan’s Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy.  In it, Jordan argues that a number of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, in the Spring of 1861, conspired to revolt against their masters.  In doing so, Jordan relies primarily on the slave testimony recorded by Lemuel P. Conner during the secret and extralegal investigation of the conspiracy by the Second Creek Examination Committee; he also utilizes the diaries and personal correspondences of some members of the white community in Adams County.  While Jordan seems wholly convinced of the existence of a slave conspiracy – evidenced most demonstrably by his continued, capitalized use of the term “Plan” – he largely ignores the effect of the political fervor the oncoming Civil War would have had for both the members of the elite, white planter class, as well as for the individuals that class held in bondage.  More egregiously though, his rather uncritical use of Conner’s testimony results in a level of bias towards the accuracy of the sources surprising for an historian of Jordan’s stature and pedigree.  A more cautious reading of Conner’s account of the testimony reveals the extent to which rumor and coercion from white elites led to the creation of the impression of a conspiracy.  When these elements are taken under full consideration, the existence of any kind of real plan for insurrection becomes a far more tenuous possibility.

After the hastily convened courts, and after the majority of the slaves believed to be involved were executed, what is somewhat interesting about this case is that it was not publicized, and was kept under-wraps for a very long time.  During the seminar we had a lot of difficulty understanding why this was kept silent for so long.  I kept thinking that if the planters wanted to give slaves disincentive to slaves to revolt, they would advertise how quickly and brutally the whites in Adams County responded.  After reading the Problem of Emancipation, however, it seems to make more sense.  If you accept that a discussion of cracks in the slave establishment are seized upon by the slave community as an opportunity to revolt, the whites in Adams County may have wanted to keep the conspiracy at Second Creek a secret for fear that other slaves would gain information about it, and consider it an opportune time for them to revolt as well.

Did Bryan Edwards have the single greatest influence on the South’s decision to secede, and the eruption of the American Civil War?  That’s kinda the feeling I was left with after finishing The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War.  Rugemer’s argument in every chapter seems to hinge on the widespread acceptance and influence of the “Edwards Thesis.”  Responses to, and perceptions of the causes of slave insurrections, and the impact of discussing and enacting abolition all seem to come back to an acceptance or rejection of the Edwards thesis.

That said, even despite the centrality of the Edwards thesis, Rugemer’s argument certainly seems to hold water.  He gauges public opinion on slavery, insurrection, and abolition primarily through his analysis of newspaper articles.  In addressing popular responses to events, Rugemer is engaging with what Edward Ayers has dubbed “deep contingency.”  Rugemer quotes Ayers’s explication of deep contingency at length, and I think it would be fruitful, for the sake of emphasis, to reproduce that again here.  He states that deep contingency focuses on the “’connection between structure and event, on the relationships between the long-existing problem of slavery and the immediate world of politics.’  One of the central structures in democratic societies is public opinion, particularly as it influences political life, and for the antebellum United States, public opinions about black emancipation were important” (8).

Rugemer tracks these public opinions through periodicals published in the United States, including articles from Caribbean papers, and finds that they demonstrate considerable concern with developments in the Caribbean when assessing the slavery question in the US.  For southern planters, Caribbean developments demonstrated that discussing emancipation in the legislature led to slave insurrections, while for northern abolitionists, agitating for emancipation ultimately led to official abolition.  Opinions were formed based on these interpretations of the developments in the Caribbean, and battle lines were drawn accordingly.

I’m not quite sure, however, how far this line of reasoning can be extended.  Did developments in the Caribbean around emancipation debates stoke sectional tensions? Did it ultimately lead to the South to secede? Did the conflicting views in regards to the Edwards thesis cause the Civil War?  Rugemer seems to bring the reader along this path, but kind of left me hanging in terms of how far he thought this could go.  He’s clearly engaging the conversations on what started the Civil War, but given his argument, the answer has to be something more complex than “slavery.”

Rugemer’s discussion of the influence of newspaper articles discussing abolition and the slavery question on slave insurrection, and to an extent the Edwards thesis itself, seems to parallel the arguments made by Johnson and Sidbury in their contributions to the Vesey Conspiracy forum.  In light of the fact that Rugemer presents rather matter-of-factly to what Johnson and Sidbury draw significant attention, it seems that the idea that literate slaves and free blacks transferred information through slave communication and information networks has been solidified in the historiography.  Also, considering the way Rugemer discusses the perceived causes of, and responses to slave insurrections, it’s interesting to juxtapose his argument with those in the Making of a Slave Conspiracy forum, and also Furstenberg’s take on how planters explained the existence of slave uprisings.

In The Problem of Emancipation Edward Rugemer heeds the frequent call in recent years to expand the scope of American history by exploring how the American Civil War was influenced by international causes in the wider Atlantic world.  Rugemer highlights how northerners and southerners alike lived in a transatlantic world, so it makes sense to view the causes of the Civil War through a framework that takes into consideration the political developments of the wider Anglo-American world.

Rugemer discusses how in the historiography of the American Civil War, there have long been two major competing interpretations: the “fundamentalist” interpretation, which holds that slavery was the sole factor leading to disunion, and the “revisionist” approach that highlights the larger political factors, slavery among them, that ultimately forced the United States into Civil War.  Rugemer states that his book will engage with Ed Ayers’s idea of “deep contingency” which attempts to reconcile this historiographical debate.  His focus, however, on competing ideas about Caribbean emancipation and abolition, drawn largely upon North/South lines, seems to lean heavily towards the “fundamentalist” interpretation.  Yes, he discusses the politics and public opinion surrounding these issues, but they always seem to be highlighting the differences between northern and southern attitudes.  If British abolitionism and emancipation in the Caribbean had such significant impacts on political debates in the United States, and the differences in opinion largely fell along North/South lines, it seems to me that The Problem of Emancipation, rather than engaging with the concept of “deep contingency,” seems to be a trans-Atlanticized elaboration of the fundamentalist approach.

Rugemer doesn’t seem to be just telling the history of the United States as it approached the Civil War within a larger narrative of the history of the Atlantic world, though.  Rather, he argues that “Britain’s abolition of slavery should be understood as a seminal event in the history of the United States” (6).  In this way, Rugemer’s focus on British abolition and its effects in the West Indies seems slightly over-determined; he seems to assert that all of Americans’ views about the future of slavery and the possibilities of emancipation were based on how abolition and emancipation developed in the British empire.  While Rugemer is undoubtedly correct in his assertion that “American society had much in common with the societies of the Atlantic world,” politics and developments unique to the United States probably had a larger impact on American ideas about slavery, race, and emancipation than Rugemer lends credence to.

Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

In contrasting Jack Greene’s call for historians of the early United States to pay greater attention to state and local governments as the primary political arena for most Americans during the early national period with Don E. Fehrenbacher’s The Slaveholding Republic, I was immediately struck by the fact that his book is subtitled An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery – not that of “the United States’ Governments.”  I view Fehrenbacher’s formulation, despite Greene’s assertions about the lack of import afforded to the federal government during this period, as a more accurate account of the federal government’s power concerning slavery.

Fehrenbacher argues that, despite the Garrisonian abolitionist interpretation, one accepted by a significant proportion of modern historiography, that the US Constitution is fundamentally a slaveholding document, the framers intended the document to be neutral on the question of slavery – insomuch as they could be.  Rather than the letter of the constitution, it was the policies enacted and decisions made after ratification that solidified the federal government’s support and protection of slavery and transformed the United States into a slaveholding republic.  Echoing Winthrop Jordan’s argument about the appearance of slavery in North America to begin with, Fehrenbacher frequently cites a series of “unthinking decisions” with the solidification of federal government support for slavery.  These actions taken by the federal government, in regards to the slave importation, slavery in the nation’s capitol, fugitive slave laws, foreign affairs, the extension of slavery into federal territories, among other areas, established that despite the neutrality of the government’s principle organizing document, that the federal government would protect the rights of slaveholders and the institution itself.

Fehrenbacher extends this line of reasoning in describing how the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 led to the secession of the southern states.  Southerners feared that Lincoln would reverse the aforementioned policies that had been established since ratification, and seceded to preserve and protect the institution of slavery.  Fehrenbacher’s argument allows for a wholesale jettisoning of any euphemistic “states-rights” arguments concerning the causes of the Civil War, and places the concern about the continuation of protections of slavery by the central government at the forefront.

Given Fehrenbacher’s description of how influential the federal government was in how and to what extent slavery functioned and spread to individual territories and states, Adam Rothman’s objection to Greene’s argument about the centrality of state and local government’s gains significant support.  Rothman’s assertion that “the fate of slavery in the early Republic was never wholly determined on the state level by local elites…the federal government delineated local elites’ room for maneuver” (274).  Rothman’s objection to Greene parallel’s Fehrenbacher’s argument about the importance of federal policy relating to slavery: “Greene’s argument that most political activity took place at the state and local levels cannot explain why American citizens argued so bitterly over the problem of slavery at the level of the nation-state” (274).  As Fehrenbacher expertly demonstrates, the federal government had a huge impact on the way state and local governments could regulate (or not) the character of slavery at levels below that of the nation.

William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

In Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, William Dusinberre describes the horrific experiences of slaves working on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia low-country by focusing exclusively on three of the biggest plantations in the antebellum South, Charles Manigault’s Gowrie, Pierce Butler’s Butler Island, and Robert Allston’s Chicora Wood.  Dusinberre utilizes the extremely detailed plantation records and diaries of these massive plantations, and to a far lesser extent Francis Kemble’s impressions of Butler Island based on her interactions with slaves there in 1838 and the WPA interviews conducted a century later.

Dusinberre seems to be writing in order to remind general readers and scholars alike how truly brutal, violent, and horrifying slavery was – though I’m not sure who exactly forgot this – in response to more recent historiographical trends that highlight the establishment of slave communities and cultures, and the maintenance of slave agency.  In doing so, however, Dusinberre seems to refute the last fifty years of historiography, arguing that the violent and deadly nature of work in the rice swamps and planters’ brutally capitalistic nature prevented slaves from developing the institutions this historiography has highlighted; his assertion that slaves “adapted their conduct to their masters’ whims” is disturbingly Stanley Elkins-esque (433-4).

Further, Dusinberre’s argument that low-country rice plantations are capitalistic rather than paternalistic seems off-base; he seems to conflate paternalism with benevolence.  His assertion that the legacy of Eugene Genovese’s scholarship is that it allows southern whites to “take pride…in their ancestors’ paternalism” seems to distort the term’s meaning (431).

But to return to Dusinberre’s denial of the development of meaningful slave communities and cultures in low-country Georgia and South Carolina: while his expert analysis of the plantation records, diaries, and letters, combining qualitative and quantitative methods, absolutely supports his assertions about the extraordinarily high mortality rates, the difficulty in maintaining a traditional, nuclear family, and the generally violent, dangerous nature of work on rice plantations, I do not think his evidentiary base allows him to really make claims about slave communities and cultures.  The only black sources he uses are the writings of the white wife of an absentee planter, and interviews conducted by a white woman with elderly former slaves – hardly the best sources to assess the existence of slave culture and community.

Michael P. Johnson’s article “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” and the subsequent responses has important implications for how historians interpret the events of the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy, in regard to who led a conspiracy against whom.  Johnson argues that the insurrection was more of a creation of the white members of the court than a reality designed by Vesey.  One of the members of this court, as Johnson points out in his response article “On Reading Evidence,” was Nathaniel Heyward, one of the many “wealthy, powerful slaveowners,” on the court, who “owned upwards of 1,000 slaves” (194).  Heyward was also friends and related through marriage to the Manigault family, owners of the Gowrie plantation examined by Dusinberre.  Given the brutality and violence outlined by Dusinberre on a rice plantation similar to the one owned by Heyward, it is not hard to imagine how the “determined and vengeful white slaveholders who knew what they were looking for… whipped, threatened, and colluded with cooperative black witnesses until they found it” (194).