Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619-1860 (review)

92civil war history sometimes to go awry. For example, he regards the destruction of property by slaves, the working class rebeling against the master class, as the main reason why Southern whites of the antebellum period failed to develop an industrial economy. Industrial machinery was too expensive to permit slaves to operate and perhaps destroy it. Ashworth regards the use of slave labor at the Tredegar works as an exception. Perhaps concern about industrial property influenced a few, but I believe the generally accepted historical explanation about the Southern mindset was a more determining factor: whites in the South denigrated an industrial society as inferior to an agricultural one from both an economic and social standpoint. Again, Ashworth explains Van Buren's failure to achieve the presidential nomination in 1844 as a result of Calhoun's letter defending slavery to Richard Pakenham, British minister. No mention is made of Van Buren's letter to the Niles Weekly Register opposing the annexation ofTexas. In addition, the organization of the book is confusing and flows against the chronology of events. Digressing from his discussion of abolitionism and Calhoun's political theory in the 1830s, Ashworth launches into an extended critique of George Fitzhugh's writings and Southern demands to reopen the African slave trade, both of which belong more properly to a discussion of events in the 1850s. He then returns to Jacksonian democracy and the attitudes of Whigs and Democrats toward slavery before finally ending with expansion and the Compromise of 1850. While Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic offers much to think about, its breadth gives the impression of an organization that lacks focus. Perhaps the second volume will finally pull the entire study together. Eugene H. Berwanger Colorado State University Southern Slavery andthe Law: 1619-1860. By Thomas D. Morris. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. 575. $49.95.) Antebellum Southern proslavery literature contains frequent assurances that what William Henry Trescot after the war called the South's "pure and wellordered society" owed its internal harmony and stability to its "peculiar institution ," itselfessentially in tune with the forces ofnature and history and perfectly obedient to the behests of God. One of the things that makes this first-rate account by Thomas Morris so compelling is its conclusive demonstration ofthe extraordinary amount and degree of internal disharmony and disorder that slavery produced, both as theoretical construction and practical, daily experience . In blunt contrast to the often coherent worlds implied in Southern defenses of slavery, Morris presents "the messy and often complex attempts of Southern judges to deal with the problems created by" slavery (13), and the result is a book reviews93 portrait of nothing less than sheer, endemic incoherence which, Morris argues, by the 1850s revealed a society in crisis. Many things caused it, but prominent among them was the dual aspect of slaves as persons and property and the nature of the owner-slave nexus together with the legitimate interests of the community and state in that relation. As property (sometimes defined as realty, usually as chattels), slaves were at their owners' disposal. But this was not absolute, even in the colonial period when owners might murder their slaves perhaps without provocation and probably with impunity, yet slaves be entailed and exempted from sale to satisfy debts, and it became increasingly less absolute with the growing recognition of humanity in slaves and changing conceptions ofproperty that accompanied the development of the market, liberalism, and capitalism. When, from the close of the eighteenth century well into the antebellum years, Southern states extended legal protection to slaves, provided procedural rights that sometimes equaled those of the free, and in the 1 850s recognized civil rights of slaves by requiring owners to care for their physical well-being, they reduced the authority of owners; and when, at the same time, owners acquired greater authority in their ability to dispose of their slaves in the market as they pleased, they encountered increasing legal involvement by the state. There was nothing like precise symmetry in this: older values and legal forms persisted as new ones emerged, and bewildering "local variations" (226) make generalizations precarious at best. Where some Southern...