Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (review)

known essay "The Irony of Southern History," reprinted here, is simply a more sophisticated version of the same theme: the southern heritage (seen, in this case, as the tragic heritage of defeat) represents a fund of experience distinct from the history of the rest of the country, and it is the responsibility of the southern historian to cherish and preserve it Woodward would doubtless balk at the suggestion that the southern historian must not only preserve the southern tradition but defend it—"explain or justify" it, in Simkins' words. But the point is that this obsession with southern uniqueness continues to obscure the important question of whether or not the "southern tradition" had any basis in social reality in the first place. It continues to assume what needs to be subjected to analysis. It assumes that the South was feudal rather than capitalistic, aristocratic rather than bourgeois, when the validity of these assumptions is precisely what needs to be tested before the history of the South can begin to be written. Elkins and McKitrick have argued that slavery can only be understood by considering "the dynamics of unopposed capitalism," and not only slavery but all the questions of southern—and national—history depend, for their interpretation, on whether one considers the ante bellum South as a precapitalist or capitalistic society. To assume that the "southern tradition" describes actual conditions is to prejudice the whole investigation from the outset. Of Southern History in the Making, it need be said only that it reveals the same doting absorption in the South and things southern that characterizes southern scholarship in general. Christopher Lasch University of Iowa Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. By Robert McColley. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Pp. viii, 227. $5.00.) In the era leading to the Civil War, antislavery writers frequently quoted the opinions of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary era—Jefferson, Washington, Mason, et al,—to prove that at one time even the South itself had condemned slavery. After the war apologists of the South seized upon the same quotations to support an argument that the South had originally opposed slavery and would have gotten rid of it if the ferocity of the abolition attack had not frightened slaveholders into defending the institution . Despite the deep differences in their points of view, both groups of writers pictured post-Revolutionary Virginia as opposed to slavery, and both accepted this version of history partly because it enabled them to believe what they wanted to believe. It has been a long time now since William E. Dodd made the incredible statement that Jefferson and his followers "had favored above all else the overthrow of slavery" (1911), but the legend of a powerful antislavery impulse in the post-Revolutionary South has survived in a somewhat more 285 286CIVIL WAB HISTOBT cautious and watered-down form. Along with it, the belief has persisted that antislavery continued to flourish in the South until the profits of cotton, the invective of Garrison, and the violence of Nat Turner caused a proslavery reaction. Robert McColley gives these long-standing if somewhat diminished concepts an effective coup de grace in his Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia. Through a careful reexamination of the record, McColley is able to show that while some of the Virginia liberals of the Age of Reason condemned slavery in the abstract, they resisted all steps which actually encroached upon the slave system. With extensive evidence to back his statement McColley asserts that "not one Virginia statesman of the Jeffersonian era, with the single exception of St George Tucker, ever advanced a practical proposal for the elimination of slavery or for the systematic amelioration of the Negro's condition." In fact he says, the Jeffersonians took readily to the idea of congenital Negro inferiority; by a statute of 1806, they decreed that any slave who should be emancipated after that time must leave the state within a year or revert to slavery; they imposed severe restrictions upon free Negroes; they never publicly opposed the domestic slave trade; and they were consistently hostile to the assertion of any kind of federal authority which might impinge upon slavery. On the other side of the ledger, McColley...