The Southern response to British abolitionism: The maturation of proslavery apologetics

Journal of Southern History

Volumn 70, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 221-248

  Rugemer, Edward B ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67649556452     PISSN: 00224642     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/27648398     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. On the Coercion Bill see Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867 (London, 1959), 269
2. and A. D. Kriegel, "The Irish Policy of Lord Grey's Government," English Historical Review, 86 (January 1971), 40-42
3. On abolitionist influence in the reformed Parliament see Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (London, 1972), 16-17
4. For more on Hammond see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982)
5. Wilfred Carsel, "The Slaveholders' Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery," Journal of Southern History, 6 (November 1940), 508-9
6. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 58-63
7. Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens, Ga., 1979)
8. and Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 79-82
9. On the proslavery argument generally, in addition to the above, see David Donald, "The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History, 37 (February 1971), 3-18
10. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore, 1977), esp. chap. 6
11. Faust, "Introduction: The Proslavery Argument in History," in Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1981), 1-20
12. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 27-19
13. and Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), chap. 5
14. Tise, Proslavery, 77-79
15. William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1965), 76-82, 108-11
16. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought, 65-89
17. William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, chap. 9; Faust, "Introduction," 4-7
18. On George Fitzhugh see George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters, edited by C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), vii-xxxix
19. and Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), 118-244. The interpretation of proslavery thought advanced in this essay departs from these earlier works, both of which saw Fitzhugh, who did not publish until the 1850s, as sui generis
20. [Thomas R. Dew], "Abolition of Negro Slavery," American Quarterly Review, 12 (September 1832), 193 (quotation)
21. Faust, "Introduction," 8-9, 21-77
22. Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1988), chap. 3
23. Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000), chap. 2
24. Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832 (Baton Rouge, 1982)
25. For an engaging discussion of the importance of the early 1830s see also Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York, 2001)
26. A major exception to this is Joe Bassette Wilkins Jr., "Window on Freedom: The South's Response to the Emancipation of the Slaves in the British West Indies, 1833-1861" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1977)
27. On the influence of British abolition upon American abolitionists see Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-slavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (New York, 1933), chap. 3
28. James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976; rev. ed., New York, 1996), 46
29. William E. Channing to Lucy Aikin, May 30, 1833, in Anna Letitia Le Breton, ed., Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D. and Lucy Aikin, From 1826 to 1842 (London, 1874), 171
30. and Second Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Presented January 15, 1834 (Boston, 1834), 13
31. See also James G. Birney, Letter on Colonization, Addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills, Corresponding Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society (New York, 1834), 14
32. David Root, The Abolition Cause Eventually Triumphant. A Sermon, Delivered Before the Anti-Slavery Society of Haverhill, Mass[achusetts], Aug. 1836 (Andover, 1836), 20
33. and David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chap. 3
34. Greensboro (N.C.) Patriot, May 8, 22, 1833
35. On abolitionist connections between Britain and the United States see Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, 1972)
36. and R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1983)
37. See Seymour Drescher, "Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain," Journal of Social History, 15 (Fall 1981), 3-24
38. On the importance of classical training for southern authors see Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York, 1994)
39. Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002), 13, 21-22, 74-76
40. and Richard Lounsbury, "Ludibria Rerum Mortalium: Charlestonian Intellectuals and Their Classics," in Michael O'Brien
41. and David Moltke-Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, 1986), 325-69
42. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 46-83, 111-16
43. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 3-36
44. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), 193-223
45. David Ramsay, Ramsay's History of South Carolina, From Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (1809; rpt., 2 vols, in 1, Newberry, S.C., 1858) I, 2; II, 113, 118-19, 122, 130
46. William Gilmore Simms, The History of South Carolina. . . (New York, 1860), 49
47. See also John Drayton, A View of South-Carolina, As Respects Her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston, 1802), 169-71, 218-19
48. Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States To 1860 (2 vols.; Washington, DC, 1933), II, 609
49. Alfred Glaze Smith Jr., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State: South Carolina, 1820-1860 (Columbia, S.C., 1958), 71-73
50. See McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1993)
51. and Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana, 1992)
52. B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 77
53. Julian J. Petty, The Growth and Distribution of Population in South Carolina (Columbia, 1943), 75
54. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 123
55. See also Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), chaps. 1-4
56. and Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 10-14
57. Brutus [Robert J. Turnbull], The Crisis: or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government (Charleston, 1827)
58. Lowell Joseph Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (New York, 1928), chaps. 11-12
59. Temperley, British Antislavery, 1-12
60. Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, 1982), chaps. 20-21
61. H. McD. Beckles, "Emancipation by Law or War? Wilberforce and the 1816 Barbados Slave Rebellion," in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916 (London, 1985), 84
62. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York and Oxford, 1994), 251-92
63. [Turnbull], Crisis, 128-29, 64
64. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 22-26
65. Caroline Winterer writes that Americans' interests in the classics shifted from Rome to Greece beginning in the early 1830s, as the nation's cultural arbiters sought to nourish the new democratic society from democracy's source in Greece rather than the derivative culture of Rome
66. In choosing a Roman pseudonym, Pliny drew from the revolutionary tradition of resistance to authority, not contemporary classical trends. See Winterer, Culture of Classicism, chaps. 1-2
67. James E. Kibler Jr., Pseudonymous Publications of William Gilmore Simms (Athens, Ga., 1976), 4-5
68. John Edwin Sandys, "Pliny, the Elder" and "Pliny, the Younger," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed
69. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
70. Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s (Westport, Conn., 1989), 62-64
71. Donald M. Scott, "Print and the Public Lecture System, 1840-60," in William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 290
72. Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, chap. 1
73. Stewart, Holy Warriors, 164-65
74. Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, 1976), chap. 3
75. Robert Walsh Jr., An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America. Part First, Containing an Historical Outline of their Merits and Wrongs as Colonies; and Strictures upon the Calumnies of the British Writers (Philadelphia, 1819), 408-21 (quotations on pp. 408, 413-14, 421)
76. Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, 22
77. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6," Charleston Mercury, August 15, 1833
78. On the publication history of Dew's essay see Kenneth M. Stampp, "An Analysis of T. R. Dew's Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature," Journal of Negro History, 27 (October 1942), 380
79. On Gabriel's conspiracy see Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993) and
80. James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997)
81. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wis., 1999)
82. Edward A. Pearson, "Introduction: Culture and Conspiracy in Denmark Vesey's Charleston," in Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 1-164
83. and Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (October 2001), 915-76
84. The broadest survey of American slave revolts is still Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; rpt., Millwood, N.Y., 1977)
85. Alison Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 87-169
86. See [Dew,] "Abolition of Negro Slavery," 247-65
87. Faust, "Introduction," 8
88. See Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, 1990), 22
89. [Dew,] "Abolition of Negro Slavery," 190
90. Peel is quoted in Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York and Oxford, 2002), 129
91. On British abolitionism see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York and Oxford, 1987)
92. and David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (London, 1991)
93. Craton, Testing the Chains, chap. 22
94. William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican Party with Some Account of the Abolition Movements in the South before 1828 (New York, 1890), 104
95. Niles' Weekly Register, edited by Hezekiah Niles, was a newsmagazine with an economic focus
96. for its national significance see Norval Neil Luxon, Niles' Weekly Register: News Magazine of the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1947)
97. Reports on the Jamaica insurrection include Charleston Mercury, February 14, March 16, April 2, 7, 1832
98. Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, July 28, 1832, p. 388
99. Washington, D.C., United States Telegraph, July 3, 1833
100. William Freehling, Road to Disunion, 16-19 (quotation on p. 18)
101. Bryan Edwards used a similar technique in his defense of the slave trade. See Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (4 vols.; Philadelphia, 1806), II, 323
102. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1," Charleston Mercury, August 9, 1833
103. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 4," Charleston Mercury, August 13, 1833
104. Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959), chap. 3
105. James Brewer Stewart, "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790-1840," Journal of the Early Republic, 18 (Summer 1998), 181-217
106. Stewart, "Modernizing "Difference": The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840," Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999), 691-712
107. Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970)
108. See also Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998)
109. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2." For a biographical sketch of Edwards see Olwyn M. Blouet, "Bryan Edwards and the Haitian Revolution," in David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 44-57
110. Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, II, 309-25 (quotation on p. 317)
111. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2."
112. Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971)
113. See "Pauperism," Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, June 26, 1824
114. See Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965)
115. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 3."
116. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1." Pliny was digging for evidence to support his argument. The article he cited was titled "Report from the Select Committee on the Poor Laws . .." and was published in 1818. It discussed the "Causes and Cure of Pauperism." Edinburgh Review, 29 (February 1818), 261-302
117. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 4."
118. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2" (second quotation); "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 3" (first quotation)
119. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."
120. See also Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997), 103-42
121. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 5," Charleston Mercury, August 14, 1833
122. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."
123. For a survey of the uses of Malthus by southern proslavery writers see Joseph J. Spengler, "Population Theory in the Ante-Bellum South," Journal of Southern History, 2 (August 1936), 360-89
124. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 5."
125. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 48-19
126. Greensboro (N.C.) Patriot, May 8, 1833
127. Charleston Mercury, July 22, 1833
128. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 5."
129. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."
130. William L. Garrison reprinted the letter in the Boston Liberator, January 31, 1845
131. See James Henry Hammond, "Slavery at the South," Commercial Review, new ser., 1 (October 1849), 289-97
132. For more on this phase of Hammond's career see Faust, James Henry Hammond, 278-82
133. and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992), chap. 6
134. [Mill], "The Negro Question," Fraser's Magazine, 41 (January 1850), 25-31
135. R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2001)