An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841-1846 by Derwood Dunn (review)

Encouraged by her mother, her 'Paw,' an occasional school teacher, and such notables as author Jesse Stuart and singer Johnny Cash, Alethea learns to express her thoughts through poetry and painting; hence, though the author is economical with "flowering words," Someone's Child is fiUed with descriptive phrases, flavored with the mountain dialect of Eastern Kentucky. For example, instead of a "scraggly headed child," Alethea writes, "Her hair looks like a bunch of baby kittens had had a good sucking on it!" or, avoiding the tired cUché, "hungry as a bear," she declares, "I ate Uke an old hound that had been chasing a 'coon aU night!" Making no claims as an academic treatise, Someone's Child has touched me in a way that no other autobiography has, and for those who want to understand "Indian issues," this book is unequaled in its illuminating analysis of those issues. —Ginny Carney Derwood Dunn. An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841-1846. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1997. 271 pages. $36.00. This is an intriguing book! Professor Dunn of Tennessee Wesleyan CoUege author of the very important historical study, Cades Cove, has done us another significant service by introducing us to Ezekiel Birdseye. Birdseye was a Connecticut Yankee who represented Gerrit Smith, Lewis Tappan, and other wealthy Northern abolitionists in their various Southern investments. He was a fascinating aboUtionist who more than held his own in debates with proslavery advocates in several parts of the South. In his day, Birdseye was quite weU known throughout abolitionist circles, and his revealing letters were often published in Gerrit Smith's Friend of Man, in the Christian Freeman, and in die American AntiSlavery Society's Emancipator. That this important cog in the antislavery network has remained largely hidden from modern scholarship is unfortunate , and we are deep in Professor Dunn's debt for having resurrected Ezekiel Birdseye. Birdseye was born in 1796 in Cornwall, Connecticut, of a prominent entrepreneurial family. He went South in quest of fortune in 1818, first to the South Carolina upper Piedmont, then in 1824 to Northern Alabama, then to Georgia and Middle Tennessee, and other places until, in 1838, he settled in Newport, Cocke County, East Tennessee. Clearly he spent much time each year in Connecticut, where his wife and daughter 62 remained. East Tennessee was thenceforward the center of his Southern operations until his mysterious death in Knoxville in 1861 during the first months of the Civil War. During the 1840s he sent a series ofinsightful letters to Gerrit Smith dealing mostly with his experiences with slavery, debates with slaveholders , various antislavery contacts mostly through Maryville College, as well as investment possibilities and the economic conditions in the South. The book is organized into two parts. Part I is Professor Dunn's excellent four-chapter, eightyeight page essay on Birdseye and his place in the abolitionist movement. One chapter evaluates Birdseye's entrepreneurial role. Scholars interested in the industrial and mining development of Appalachia will be most interested in this chapter, for Birdseye was deeply involved with his friends, Judge Jacob Peck and John Caldwell, in various speculative ventures, including the opening of the copper mines and smelting in Polk County, Tennessee, in 1852. Part II of Dunn's book includes thirty well-edited letters from Birdseye to Gerrit Smith from February 23, 1837, to March 25, 1846, as well as a letter to Andrew Johnson written only months before Birdseye's death in June of 1861. The letters tell a story that Professor Dunn does not need to enhance. The early letters show an optimistic and gentle believer in the rights of man, and a man who made sincere business alliances wherever he went. His optimistic and uncompromising faith in the advantages to the South, ifonly slavery was destroyed, was strong and clear in the 1830s and early 1840s. But the later letters betray a fear that slavery was too strong, and that proslavery entrepreneurs were only waiting for a chance to ruin him. The last letter to Andrew Johnson in February, 1861, is a pale, whimpering affair begging for a post office appointment for a young...