An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918

6. Institutional Studies of Slavery

6 Institutional Studies of Slavery The Johns Hopkins University Studies not only set a scholarly standard for institutional monographs on slavery, but served to establish slavery as one of the most popular subjects of inquiry for graduate students and other investigators. But after the turn of the century, Johns Hopkins began to lose its dominance in the field of Southern history in general and slave studies in particular. Courses in Southern history soon were offered at the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. In 1902, for example, Frederick Jackson Turner hired young Ulrich B. Phillips to teach Southern history at Wisconsin. Turner noted that the Madison campus possessed excellent research facilities for studying the history and culture of the South. "We desire to understand the South," wrote Turner, "and to have its history treated here impartially and fully." Even before Phillips arrived, such student theses as "Economic Characteristics of Slavery in 1850" and "The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky prior to 1849" had begun to emanate from Wisconsin's seminars. I At Columbia, students flocked to work with John William Burgess and William A. Dunning, whose Ph.D.'s in turn offered similar fare to another generation. In 1906, for example, Walter Lynwood Fleming began offering a course "Slavery in America" at West Virginia University in Morgantown. In this seminar Fleming stressed the evolution of slavery worldwide-in the Orient, Europe, and England. His students juxtaposed slavery in different places and at varying times with com- 164 The Formative Period of American Slave Historiography parative free labor systems. They evaluated American slavery as a broad sectional, economic, and social force with long-range effects on blacks and whites alike. Fleming's course syllabus, "History of Slavery," suggests the professor's view of slavery as a fluid and diversified labor system. Elsewhere, others such as Professors J. Franklin Jameson and William E. Dodd also taught specialized courses in the history of slavery.2 This flurry of interest in slavery resulted in the publication of hundreds of obscure theses, monographs, and articles on the topic. To be sure, some of these added next to nothing to the slavery debate even in those years. Today they stand as curiosities of an earlier day. At the very most they illustrate the varieties of proslavery or neoabolitionist thought still current as late as 1918. But many of the lesser-known scholarly and popular writings on slavery made important contributions. They transcended the narrow confines of the Johns Hopkins dissertations and began to provide the necessary detail for broader interpretive studies. Influenced strongly by the work already completed at Johns Hopkins, these writings tended to mirror in method and sources much of the research begun in Baltimore. They adoped the institutional framework first introduced by Herbert Baxter Adams-examining the evolution of different elements of an institution over time. Several of the authors discussed in this chapter broke fresh ground and established new avenues in the study of the peculiar institution. They began to occupy, but far from filled, glaring gaps in the literature. All in all, these institutional writings attest to the persistent interest in slavery throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And they suggest the breadth of the literature on slavery even in its seminal years. I Because of the widespread availability of published slave codes, legal digests, statutes, and court proceedings, slave law remained the most popular subject for students of the peculiar institution. A virtual flood of writings, often thin in substance and hackneyed, dominated writings on slavery in these years. So common were studies of slave law that at least two scholars called for fresh approaches to the topic. In 1911 Professor William T. Laprade of Trinity College complained that previous writings simply listed slave statutes at random. They ignored the interplay of custom and racial etiquette in the enforcement of these laws.3 According to Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago, so Institutional Studies of Slavery 165 much attention was paid to slave jurisprudence that "the more intimate and human side ... the relations between the races ... has been neglected ." Students of slavery, insisted Park in 1915, were misled by relying too heavily on law codes as sources.4 But the topic of slave law continued to hold great appeal. For many white students it reinforced the distant, impersonal, formal, and legalistic way most white Americans viewed blacks in general during...