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  • Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation ed. by John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason
  • Justin Roberts
Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation. Ed. John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8139-3105-0, 336 pp., cloth, $49.50.

Contesting Slavery is an anthology of thirteen essays along with an introduction and a final commentary. The essays explore the relationship between politics and slavery in the early U.S. republic on its own terms and the political debate over the westward expansion of the institution. By reading forward from the revolution rather than backward from the Civil War, the authors move beyond tired debates about the origins of the Civil War and thus transcend the teleology that has too often plagued works in southern history. The essays share a set of common themes. They counter the idea that the slavery debates and, particularly, antislavery sentiments were suppressed between the creation of the Constitution and the 1820s or 1830s. They look beyond major political events such as congressional debates and founding fathers to politics on the ground. They stress contingency, partisan politics, and local and regional politics. They avoid the oversimplification of a North/South divide in political ideals. Many of them claim to situate the early republic more fully within the Atlantic World, striving to avoid the too often parochial view that has constrained nineteenth-century U.S. history. Many of the essays also complicate the binaries of positive good and necessary evil as interpretive lenses in the slavery debates. Finally, they question whether ideology alone was sufficient to drive action.

Although the editors claim that the anthology situates the slavery debates of the early republic within broader Atlantic contexts, not many of the essays are successful at doing this. Because they lend interpretive cachet, “Atlantic” and “Atlantic World” have certainly become popular buzzwords, but it is much easier to call a work “Atlantic” than to make that work deeply comparative and transnational both contextually and historiographically. The Atlantic history paradigm has been venturing forward from the colonial era deep into the nineteenth-century United States. Most of the essays in this volume are very sensitive to local politics and regional variations in the early United States, but they fail to fully engage with Atlantic contexts. Edward B. Rugemer’s “Caribbean Slave Revolts and the Origins of the Gag Rule,” and John Craig Hammond’s “Uncontrollable Necessity,” which explore the plantation revolution that was transforming Mississippi and the Louisiana territory as politicians debated slavery’s westward expansion, are the essays that best situate the United States within a broader Atlantic.

Most of the essays that try to position their subject in an Atlantic context mention just a few key events, such as slave rebellions in the Caribbean. Brian Schoen, for [End Page 104] example, touches on the impact of slave rebellions in the French Caribbean on the development of slavery in the Lower South. The essays do not, however, adequately engage with a burgeoning literature on slavery in the French and British West Indies. In several cases the omission is glaring. Eva Sheppard Wolf, for example, explores the rise of free-labor thinking in the United States, tracing it from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. This is an important essay because, as she explains, our thinking is still influenced by this powerful idea that free labor is cheaper or more efficient than slave labor. Although Wolf ’s essay is thoughtful, she fails to even cite Seymour Drescher’s critically important work The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (2002), which explores the rise of an ideology that privileged free labor in the British Empire. The anthology would have also benefited from an essay with a broad Atlantic perspective on the rapid natural growth of the slave population in the United States (which was almost unique in the history of Atlantic slavery). How did this shape political perspectives on slavery in the early republic, and how did Americans interpret or respond to it?

Collectively, these essays suggest we are moving into a...

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