The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (review)

174CIVIL WAR HISTORY sequence of lost luggage—including notes and manuscript—when Green was returning from a year as Harmsworth professor at Oxford. With typical tenacity, readily recognized by his many students and friends, he kept his commitments by starting again. The Role of the Yankee in the Old South is a study of northerners who moved south or immigrants who resided in the North before moving southward. Thus, the only community tie linking the many randomly selected Yankees is their former homeland north of the Mason and Dixon line. Green found, according to the 1860 census, that upwards of 360,000 Yankees had made homes in the southern states, and he estimated that more than half a million had made a similar move from the time of the American Revolution to the Civil War. He groups his case studies under such career headings as government, education, religion, theater, journalism, agriculture, and industry. In the group portraits which emerge from the series of vignettes, Green can give only impressionistic findings because he had no adequate controls for the multitude of variables in his raw material. His conclusions, however, are not mere serendipity. He holds that the Yankees exerted "an influence on Southern life far greater than is generally recognized and out of proportion to their numbers." They held political office at every level, edited many of the leading newspapers, forcefully filled southern pulpits, and were recruited as school administrators and faculty with the same vigor that basketball recruiters now scour the country for lanky lads tall enough to stuff a basket. Dr. Green effectively destroys the old myth that northerners and southerners were two irreconcilable societies, that Yankees possessed only antagonistic qualities intensified by their drive for gain, and that the South was hostile to all Yankees. The use of multiple biographical presentation with the necessary concentration on details would create pitfalls for the average researcher. Green's experienced hand has avoided most of these although "Cyrus King" should be Cyrus Kingsbury and Gideon Blackburn should not be associated with the Brainerd Mission to the Cherokees. James W. Livingood University of Tennessee at Chattanooga The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. By Philip D. Curtin. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Pp. 338. $7.50.) Philip Curtin's Atlantic Slave Trade commands immediate attention with its arresting thesis that earlier estimates—cited by eminent historians from W. E. B. DuBois to David Brion Davis—placing the total number of Africans transported to slavery in Europe and the New World at 15 or 20 million, were nothing more than pure guesses made without benefit of serious research, and that careful analysis of the empirical data at our disposal suggests that the total was actually about 9 or 10 million. BOOK REVIEWS175 This conclusion in itself would be sufficient to accord the book wide attention, but it scarcely begins to suggest the importance of the volume . For one thing Curtin's Atlantic Slave Trade is an impressive and pioneer study in historical demography, whose methodology merits the attention of historians. Moreover the book reaches significant new conclusions about the rate of increase and decrease in the slave trade, the distribution of slaves in the New World, and the geographical sources of the slaves in Africa. Finally, as Curtin says, "The principal value of this quantitative survey is not mere quantitative accuracy—not simply the substitution of 'right' numbers for wrong ones. . . . Their value is not in being correct, but in being correct enough to point out contradictions in present hypotheses and to raise new questions for comparative demography and social history." And Curtin proceeds to raise just such questions. Capitalizing on specialized research done by others, which hitherto had not been drawn together, Curtin employs both direct and indirect evidence to make his estimates: records of slaves imported through a particular port or to a given colony, and shipping records of European ports, where such records exist over a period of years; statistics regarding population and economic productivity in specific colonies, and the value of European exports to Africa, since all of these were related to the size of the slave trade. Extraordinary care must be used in employing these indirect forms of...