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Posts Tagged ‘Historiography’

Allen Mendenhall, American History, Confederacy, Gary W. Gallagher, Harvard University Press, Historiography, History, Roswell Mill, Slavery, The Civil War, The South, The Union, The Union War, The University Bookman

Additional Thoughts on Gary W. Gallagher’s The Union War

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Slavery, Southern History, The South, Western Civilization on December 23, 2011 at 10:50 am

Recently I reviewed Gary W. Gallagher’s The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011) for The University Bookman. The review (“Why the Union Soldiers Fought”) is available here. I have not said all I mean to say about Gallagher’s book, so this post records some additional thoughts.

I began my review with the tale of the “Lost Women and Children of Roswell.” It was difficult as a child, knowing this story and others like it, to view the Union Army as completely righteous and pure, or to justify the eradication of certain evils like slavery with other widespread and destructive evils like war. Despite being a Southerner with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, I’m ambivalent about the War because of the various and totalizing perspectives that were thrust upon me when I was young, and because of my general opposition to war and nationalism, to say nothing of the complex figuring of race that played a defining role in bringing about the conflict.

As I went from middle school to high school, and then college to graduate school, the less likely I was to reduce the causes of the War to one or two factors, and the more likely I was to believe that anyone’s view of the War is already tainted by biases and assumptions. Over time, I learned never to rule out alternate ways of viewing the War or the Confederacy. I decided that no one would ever discover the intellectual trump card that would prevail over other viewpoints about the War that killed more men than all other wars in American history, combined.

There’s always more than one way of looking at a conflict, be it this War or some other one. And our imperfect understanding of conflicts—of anything, really—always consists of generalizations based on the confines of personal experience. We can read about the events encompassing the War, and we can guess at the logic and beliefs that explain those events. But we can never relive the War or experience it in real time; and if we are honest, we must say that we can never read all there is to read about the period, never fully know the way a nineteenth-century mind thought, never entirely understand the quotidian realities of the men and women of all races at those times and in those places. Being human, moreover, we make mistakes and assumptions. Most of us revise our errors when we notice them. But some don’t. Some try to rationalize the logic of the unrealities to which they cling. Read the rest of this entry »

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Catharine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, David Brion Davis, Edmund S. Morgan, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eugene Genovese, Fogel and Engerman, Historiography, Interracial Sex, Ira Berlin, James Hugo Johnston, Laws of Slavery, Loving v. Virginia, Miscegenation Laws, Orlando Patterson, Paul Finkelman, Peter Kolchin, Slavery, Stanley Elkins, Virginia, Winthrop Jordan

The Place of Miscegenation Laws within Historical Scholarship about Slavery

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Economics, History, Law, Laws of Slavery, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Thomas Jefferson, Western Civilization on May 17, 2011 at 8:28 am

The following post appeared at The Literary Table.

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Miscegenation laws, also known as anti-miscegenation laws, increasingly have attracted the attention of scholars of slavery over the last half-century. Scholarship on slavery first achieved eminence with the publication of such texts as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), and Leon F. Litwack’s North of Slavery (1961). When Winthrop D. Jordan published his landmark study White Over Black in 1968, miscegenation statutes during the era of American slavery were just beginning to fall within historians’ critical purview. The Loving v. Virginia case, initiated in 1959 and resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, no doubt played an important role in activating scholarship on this issue, especially in light of the Civil Rights movement that called attention to various areas of understudied black history.

In Loving, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia’s miscegenation statutes forbidding marriage between whites and non-whites and ruled that the racial classifications of the statutes restricted the freedom to marry and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the wake of Loving, scholarship on miscegenation laws gained traction, although miscegenation laws during the era of American slavery have yet to receive extensive critical treatment. Several articles and essays have considered miscegenation laws and interracial sex during the era of American slavery, but only a few book-length analyses are devoted to these issues, and of these analyses, most deal with interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the nineteenth-century antebellum period, or from the period of Reconstruction up through the twentieth-century. This historiographical essay explores interracial sex and miscegenation laws in the corpus of historical writing about slavery. It does so by contextualizing interracial sex and miscegenation laws within broader trends in the study of slavery. Placing various historical texts in conversation with one another, this essay speculates about how and why, over time, historians treated interracial sex and miscegenation laws differently and with varying degrees of detail. By no means exhaustive, this essay merely seeks to point out one area of slavery studies that stands for notice, interrogation, and reconsideration. The colonies did not always have miscegenation laws; indeed, miscegenation laws did not spring up in America until the late seventeenth-century, and they remained in effect in various times and regions until just forty-four years ago. The longevity and severity of these laws make them worthy our continued attention, for to understand miscegenation laws is to understand more fully the logic and formal expression of racism. Read the rest of this entry »

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American History, Ariela Gross, bibliographical essay, David Brion Davis, Historiography, History, Kenneth Stamp, law, Law professors, Legal Education, Legal Scholarship, Paul Finkelman, Slavery, Stanley Elkins, Winthrop Jordan

Law Professors and Laws of Slavery

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Slavery, The Literary Table, Western Civilization on April 4, 2011 at 3:44 pm

This post was first published over at The Literary Table. I have reposted here because the content of the post relates to many recent posts on this site.

Kenneth Stamp published his landmark study The Peculiar Institution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) in 1956, thus inaugurating the institutionalized and concerted efforts of scholars to examine the history of slavery in America with greater detail. Research and study of the history of slavery then gained momentum in the 1960s. One of the seminal texts from this period was David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Cornell University Press, 1966), winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. An ambitious undertaking, this book seeks to demonstrate the continuity of slavery through various times and places in Western Civilization. A legitimizing narrative or logic always accompanies the institution of slavery, Davis suggests, but such narrative or logic—or narrative logic—is fraught with paradoxes threatening to undermine the institution altogether. How, for instance, does one reconcile the ideals of freedom and equality, so celebrated by American Revolutionaries, with the pervasive reality of human bondage? How does one make sense of a Christianity that both condemns and justifies slavery? How can slaves be humans—rational agents with free will—and chattel property at once? How does ending the slave trade worsen conditions for the enslaved? If enslaving infidels, and only infidels, is valid by law and church teaching, then how do European colonists validate the enslavement of converted Africans? How can colonists rely heavily upon an institution that they fear? How can one of the earliest American colonies to oppose slavery (Georgia) become a hotbed for slavery? If, according to law and church teaching, only pagans can be enslaved, why are not Natives enslaved as frequently or as much as Africans? For that matter, why do early objections to slavery focus on Natives, who are less likely to become slaves than blacks? Why do colonists insist on Christianizing slaves yet fear converted slaves? How does the antislavery movement develop out of the very ideology sustaining slavery? How do notions of sin both justify and subvert the institution of slavery? Why does the Age of Enlightenment, with its celebration of reason, humanism, and liberation, intensify rather than disparage slavery? And how can the New World, a putatively progressive landscape, rely on and perpetuate an ancient institution? These and other questions permeate Davis’s provocative text. Davis does not try to resolve these apparent contradictions so much as he explores them through various persons, places, and patterns; in so doing, he describes how human bondage gets revised and extended from one age to the next, and how justifications for slavery in one era inaugurate justifications for slavery in later eras. Read the rest of this entry »