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BOOK REVIEWS77 volumes of this valuable edition of Polk correspondence as the president faced deepening domestic and foreign crises. Frederick J. Blue Youngstown State University An Abolitionist in theAppalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism , and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841-1846. By Durwood Dunn. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Pp. xii, 306. $36.00.) A single theme runs throughout the twenty-eight letters from East Tennessee entrepreneur Ezekiel Birdseye to New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith that appear in Durwood Dunn's new volume. It is Birdseye's conviction, expressed in one of his first notes to Smith, that "improved communications between North and South would contribute greatly to the overthrow of slavery" (138). In a series of dispatches clustered in the depression years of 1841-42 and during the expansionist uproar of 1 845-46, the Connecticut transplant conveys both his distaste for the brutal practices of his slaveholding neighbors and a remarkable confidence that the discredited institution might soon disappear from the Southern mountains, to be followed by its demise throughout the United States. The Birdseye-Smith correspondence is the centerpiece, rather than the entire substance, of this book. Nearly half of the volume consists of Dunn's own writing , which includes an overview of East Tennessee antislavery and the region's failed initiatives to form a separate state, a meticulous recreation of Birdseye's career and his friendships with local southern leaders, and a helpful survey of recent debates over the relationship between abolitionism, capitalism, and the actual experience of Southern slaves. In this introductory section, as notable in some respects as the subsequent primary documents, Dunn asserts that the "greatest value" of the Birdseye letters is their depiction of "the hidden world of private opinions about slavery expressed to him by prominent southerners in confidential conversations." Such incidents provide, in Dunn's opinion, "the nearest approach documentary evidence offers to the real mind of the community " and constitute a sort of "interior road map of the moral landscape of this public sentiment" (42-43). While the rich material may not be wide-ranging enough to support any such comprehensive claims, it certainly does provide compelling testimony about antislavery tendencies among East Tennessee clergymen , entrepreneurs, politicians, and even two judges on the state bench. Readers lacking a special interest in Southern Appalachia might find other significance in the documents Dunn presents, since the Birdseye reports tell as much about one important branch of the abolitionist movement at a critical juncture as they do about the particulars ofslaveholding in EastTennessee. At least five (and probably many more) of the letters to Smith were reprinted verbatim 78CIVIL WAR HISTORY in Northern antislavery newspapers, as were two other Birdseye letters that Dunn selects. As accounts clearly intended for publication and circulation, then, these dispatches sought as much to make history as to record it. Like Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is ( 1 839), they presented the daily horrors of chattel slavery to citizens of the free states unsure of the true nature of the institution. Birdseye clearly realized this, repeatedly declaring his hopes that his observations might help in some way to "further the cause" by discrediting slavery and rallying opposition to it at a moment it seemed economically unproductive. Viewed from this perspective, the letters are a compelling case study of the intricate, dialectical interaction between an antislavery North and a slave South that Stanley Harrold has recently documented. Birdseye consistently affirmed that Northern resolve, inspired by accurate knowledge ofconditions in the slave states, would as effectively turn slaveholders from sin as the recent "Temperance Reformation" in the North had spread light to a once-drunken South. He assured Gerrit Smith and his Northern associates that their efforts against slavery were already accomplishing good, even though many improvements were still needed. Birdseye also looked to Smith, one of the nation's wealthiest men, to sponsor free labor colonies in the slave states and to purchase the freedom ofan especially promising slave, William, who clearly had "talents to expose the system and a scarrified body which would show how true his statements must be" (262). Mindful of the sophisticated antislavery campaign to shape public opinion...

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