From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas (review)

BOOK REVIEWS83 From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas. Edited by Loren Schweninger. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984. Pp. xi, 225. $26.00.) This is an impressive book about a remarkable man. James Thomas was born a slave in Nashville in 1827. His father was a prominent Tennessee jurist and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice, "but he had no time to give me a thought. He gave me twenty five cents once. . . . that was all he ever did for me." Paternal neglect notwithstanding, the life and travels of Thomas would have been incredible for any nineteenth-century American. But for a slave, who later gained his freedom, to have embarked on such an odyssey is truly astonishing. At the age of fourteen he journeyed alone to New Orleans and back. Soon thereafter he became a prosperous and respected Nashville barber. Still a slave, he traveled twice to the North as a personal servant visiting, among other communities, Buffalo, New York City, Saratoga, and Newport. After his emancipation in 1851 he joined William Walker on a filibustering expedition to Nicaragua. By 1861, he had speculated on land in Kansas, Iowa, and Missouri. The autobiography ends abruptly on his return from an extensive 1873 tour of Europe. Thomas recorded these events in the early twentieth century, and most of his views and impressions seem to have mellowed over the years. There is little bitterness or rancor in this account. He demonstrates no small admiration for wealthy, genteel white Southerners, but does not conceal his contempt for poor, ill-bred whites. Though a careful and wry observer of antebellum America, he was no deep thinker and he rarely reflected at length on a subject. Instead he offers a myriad of insights and anecdotes on subjects ranging from dentistry, cock fighting, and Jenny Lind to Jacksonian politics, Mississippi riverboats, and Abraham Lincoln. He was—except for his color—preeminently a nineteenth-century American, passionately inquisitive and boldly acquisitive. He had a genuine affection for people and moved with surprising ease among both blacks and whites. When provoked, especially on matters of race, he revealed a biting and sardonic wit. "The Indian, removed from his savage state, becomes a very decent American. He feels proud of being part Indian. He is sought after. He is of noble blood. Who ever heard of a noble Negro?" By the 1880s, Thomas was a wealthy man who had acquired several blocks of prime real estate in downtown St. Louis, only to lose it to the ravages of a tornado and the Panic of 1893. He died in poverty in 1913. Therein, however, is the chief shortcoming of this book. It is incomplete and the title is misleading. This is essentially an antebellum memoir. There is nary a word on Thomas's rise and fall as an entrepreneur or on any of the other events that transpired during the latter four decades of his life. 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY Loren Schweninger deserves special mention. He was much more than merely the editor of this book. If there is such a literary figure as a coautobiographer , then he deserves the appellation. He has done a meticulous and masterful job of historical reconstruction, transforming a fragmentary and incomplete manuscript into a significant and comprehensible work of history. By way of extensive footnotes, he has identified every important and nearly every obscure individual mentioned by Thomas. Moreover he has included a fine biographical essay of Thomas's whole life. It is safe to assume that Thomas himself spent less time compiling his account than Schweninger did restoring and enhancing it. William C. Hine South Carolina State College Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System. Edited by Alan M. Kraut. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Pp. xii, 286. $35.00.) This collection promises the reader "nine fresh essays on the relationship between abolitionism and politics" and a "conservative perspective on abolitionism that seeks to separate the reformers from the coming of the [Civil] war." It is not entirely successful. Despite brave attempts to cut loose from the baleful influence of the "Civil War synthesis," half the essays...