Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South

American historians have long studied the settlement of the Old Northwest. Jefferson's draft legislation restricting slavery and the spread of democratic institutions provide a compelling picture of how founding visions played out in western lands. Adam Rothman's Slave County joins recent examinations of the Old Southwest by James Miller, Daniel Usner, Thomas Ingersoll, Edward Baptist, Walter Johnson, and others to provide an equally revealing, if less uplifting, window into the early decades of the American experiment.

Rothman begins with Jefferson's utopian commercial-agrarianism and his earnest hope that diffusion might ameliorate and eventually end slavery in North America. Drawing upon the best that social, intellectual, economic, and political history has to offer, he then describes how international developments (British industrialization, the spread of cotton, heightened demand for sugar after St. Domingue's slave rebellion) and calculated decisions (largely guided by white America's "civilizing" impulse) inaugurated the displacement of Native Americans and the spread of African slavery. Adeptly moving between the local, national, and international stages, Rothman describes well-known events such as the Louisiana Purchase and Missouri Controversy, while bringing to light less studied local people and events, including the efforts of Quaker surveyor Isaac Briggs and a fascinating account of the 1811 German Coast insurrection ("the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States," 74). In climactic fashion, Jackson's exploits against the Creeks and victory at New Orleans unexpectedly transformed a tenuously-controlled region into an "arena for the United States' greatest wartime triumphs." The war thus "reinforced the American's providential view" and the "rhetoric of freedom obliterated the reality of slavery" (160-161). By 1820 commerce and collaboration as well as "terror and violence" between ethnically-diverse peoples had transformed the Deep South, not into Jefferson's idyllic image, but into a generally-stable slave society and bulwark for proslavery national politics.

Rothman's broadly and deeply researched portrait challenges deeply held assumptions that population pressures inevitably drove expansion while a complacent federal government struggled to define it. At every point in his story, Rothman argues, "U.S. sovereignty shaped the Deep South." The federal government "absorbed the region through diplomacy and conquest, administered its territorial governments . . . encouraged economic development. . . . through nation-building measures that included the survey and sale of public lands, the improvement of the transportation infrastructure, . . . the imposition of a tariff on foreign sugar . . . [and] allow[ing] the transfer of slaves into the region" (218-219). In this sense, the book's title reflects both Rothman's desire to show how contingent choices and broad processes shaped Deep South society and his conviction that the extension of slavery there reveals much about the nation as a whole.

Many of the events and developments in this book are covered more exhaustively in other monographs. Yet, Rothman's gift lies in his ability to succinctly and cleverly contextualize and synthesize complicated events and processes. Slave Country is well-suited for upper-level undergraduates and graduate classes and promises to become the standard account of the settlement of the Old Southwest.