- The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities
The Differences Slavery Made is a digital information source that demonstrates how scholars have begun to take advantage of the World Wide Web. The authors, University of Virginia history professors William G. Thomas and Edward L. Ayers, describe their Web site as a "single file of nearly 24,000 lines of text, not dozens of individual web pages with embedded links to each other" (Introduction: Presentation). It was composed at the Virginia Center for Digital History, and like any online article was published as a collection of hyperlinked documents with branching connections and layers of detail made possible by the use of electronic media. It is divided into seven major sections: introduction, summary, analysis, methods, evidence, historiography, and tools.
Thomas and Ayers examine the relationship between mid-nineteenth-century American slavery and emerging forms of modernity: the nation-state, economic development, participatory democracy, and individual autonomy. They question whether the negotiation of these sociopolitical influences produced new tensions that gave rise to the crisis of 1860–1861 and conclude that the Civil War did not simply result from the struggle over modernization. "The war was the result of two highly mobilized and highly confident regions, each modern in its own way, fighting over the future of slavery in a rapidly expanding United States" (Introduction: Overview).
The differences slavery made for white people were pervasive and structural, part of an ongoing process, not the outcome of the struggle between modernity and slavery. Slavery was "vitally connected" to modern progress. But as Thomas and Ayers point out, "the twentieth and [End Page 157] twenty-first centuries have shown all too clearly that forms of modern life can be adapted to forced labor and racial domination. The American South pioneered in this fusion" (Summary of Argument: Conclusion). Slavery and modernity coalesced as parts of the same process.
Thomas and Ayers reached these conclusions after comparing two counties close to the Mason-Dixon Line, one in which slavery was legal, the other in which it was not, which together offer a test of slavery's influence in the antebellum era. The South is represented by Augusta County, Virginia, and the North by Franklin County, Pennsylvania, "two places which shared virtually everything except slavery" (Summary of Argument: The Debates). The similarities between these communities provide the conditions needed for "something like a controlled experiment": if the culture, politics, and economy of Augusta County were affected by slavery, then its influence must have been even greater farther south; and if the culture, politics, and economy of Franklin County were largely unaffected by slavery, then its influence must have been even smaller farther north (Introduction: Overview). A test of this hypothesis revealed that these communities showed "significant differences in demography, agricultural strategies, and industrial development but broad commonalities in economic outlook, political structures, and cultural orientation" (Introduction: Overview). Thomas and Ayers conclude that
slavery drove all the conflict that brought on the Civil War but not in a simple way based on modernity, not in the way many imply when they speak of "economics" causing the war or of the "industrial" North against the "agricultural" South. . . . [S]lavery was more central to the Civil War than we have thought because it exerted a determining influence. . . . Slavery adopted the forms of modern life available in the mid-nineteenth-century United States—capitalist forms of investment and economic motivation, advanced transportation and communication, politics of broad participation by white men, and general white prosperity.
[William G. Thomas III, Edward L. Ayers, "An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities," American Historical Review, 108 (2003), 3–4]
Having reached this conclusion, the next step was to fuse the article's form with its argument and subject both to peer review.
The first peer reviewers questioned whether Thomas and Ayers' Web site could be called an "article" at all. Some argued that...