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Reviewed by:
  • Cotton and Conquest: How the Plantation System Acquired Texas by Roger G. Kennedy
  • Peter A. Coclanis
Cotton and Conquest: How the Plantation System Acquired Texas. By Roger G. Kennedy (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) 352 pp. $34.95

Cotton and Conquest is not the type of book that the Journal of Interdisciplinary History usually reviews. It best can be described as rambling and discursive narrative history, bordering at times on antiquarianism. Kennedy, its author, was trained in the law but spent his career in a variety of fields ranging from journalism to university administration, politics, and government service. For thirteen years, he held the directorship of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History and, under President Clinton, the directorship of the National Park Service between 1993 and 1997. By the time this book appeared, he had been dead for some time. But the argument that he advanced and defended in Cotton and Conquest—with a certain old-fashioned élan, not to mention solid research—warrants serious attention.

The overarching thesis of Cotton and Conquest is straightforward, even if the book’s research design and narrative path are decidedly not. Kennedy is concerned, first and foremost, with challenging Turner’s view that westward expansion was an inevitable national story of manifest destiny and that slavery was not central to the westward expansion of the southern states.1 Following the leads of many historians in recent years, Kennedy argues instead that westward expansion was based on choices, not inevitability, and that it was perforce international through and through, involving the Spanish, the French, Native Americans, and Mexicans. In Kennedy’s view, expansion to the southwest was about imperialism, cotton, and slavery more than anything else.

In the case of imperial expansion into Texas specifically, Kennedy makes a strong case, albeit in an amazingly roundabout way, that “[t]he acquisition of Texas as a slave society occurred after forty years of preparation and rehearsal, and thirty of strenuous and successful colonization by the planters” (275). Most of Cotton and Conquest is concerned with tracing this acquisition, but not without sideways and, to put it bluntly, superficial glances at the history of cotton, the evolution of slavery in North America, the Industrial Revolution, etc., none of which much enhances the argument’s clarity. Nonetheless, Kennedy demonstrates how a broad array of characters—avaricious planters, shippers, manufacturers of cotton, land speculators, financiers, and politicians in both the [End Page 91] United States and Europe—joined forces in a manner that eventually succeeded in making Texas part of the slavocracy and bringing it into the union as a committed slave state. Although few professional historians today will be surprised by Kennedy’s conclusions, they will, if sufficiently patient, glean much useful detail, as well some unusual insights, from a gifted polymath’s swan song.

Peter A. Coclanis
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Footnotes

1. See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1921).

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