The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (review)

The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery. By Don E. Fehrenbacher. Completed and edited by Ward M. McAfee. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001. Pp. xiii, 512 . $35.00 .)

The late Don E. Fehrenbacher was one of the most esteemed historians of the middle period. His numerous important contributions, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978 ), influenced the interpretations of a range of critical topics from Lincoln as a politician to Roger Taney as a jurist. Now, one of Fehrenbacher's former graduate students, Ward M. McAfee, professor of history at California State University, San Bernardino, has completed and edited the book Fehrenbacher had been working on at the time of his death, The Slaveholding Republic. Thus, McAfee has done for his mentor what two-and-a-half decades ago Fehrenbacher did for his colleague David M. Potter, when he completed Potter's magisterial The Impending Crisis.

In the introduction McAfee informs readers that Fehrenbacher left a largely completed manuscript. He had written eight of ten chapters and had begun the final two, which McAfee finished, holding to what he calls Fehrenbacher's "direction finders" and "overall theme" (xi, xii). Beginning with the Revolutionary era and ending with Reconstruction, the book is generally chronological, though it is a series of interrelated essays rather than a sustained chronological narrative. Throughout Fehrenbacher is concerned with the relationship of slavery to the nation or the republic. At the outset he notes a vexing contradiction: the Revolution began with the Declaration's clarion call to basic rights of all people but ended with a peace treaty stipulating that Great Britain must return slaves under its control to their American owners. Along the way Fehrenbacher considers slavery in the federal district, slavery and American foreign policy, the international slave trade, and fugitive slaves. The final two chapters deal with the territorial issue and the triumph of the Republican party.

The book, learned and thoroughly researched as one expects from Fehrenbacher, chronicles what he views as a fundamental shift in the definition of the American republic. Entering a historiographical thicket, Fehrenbacher presents the Constitution as originally neutral on slavery. Although he certainly does not put on a proslavery uniform, insisting that the document did not protect slaves as property, neither does he wear antislavery stripes, admitting that the Constitution recognized the importance of the institution. Yet, to him slavery embarrassed the Founders, and they expected it eventually to disappear. Of course, that disappearance never occurred. As Fehrenbacher interprets the decades between 1790 and 1860 , the United States government did become proslave, and over time official America generally agreed that the Constitution protected slavery as property. That view dominated the executive branch and was emphatically affirmed by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case. As he persuasively argues, however, not all Northerners accepted that outlook, nor did Congress formally enunciate it. On the contrary, using two illustrations from 1828 and 1848 when Congress specifically refused to pay claims for losses of slave property, Fehrenbacher maintains the Congress rejected the doctrine that the Constitution mandated the national government to acknowledge property rights in slaves.

Still, Fehrenbacher concludes, rightly in this reviewer's opinion, that to 1860 the United States was definitely a slaveholding republic in which slaveowners could feel secure. In his reading of American history, Fehrenbacher closely resembles Abraham Lincoln; Fehrenbacher's phrase "The Republican Revolution" (the title of chapter 10 ) captures their perspective. With that term, Fehrenbacher posits that the Republicans wanted to return to what he and Lincoln shared, and called the outlook of the Founders: that slavery must be placed on the road to extinction, though the process could be gradual, because of the impossibility of reconciling slavery and essential American ideals. Thus, for Fehrenbacher and McAfee, as for Eric...