The Southern Debate Over Slavery: Volume 1, Petitions to Southern Legislatures 1778-1864 (review)

It is not particularly difficult to evaluate the significance of a documentary editing project. Does the project add appreciably to our understanding of the topic? Is the editorial and transcription method fully explained? Has the document selection been done with intelligence and discrimination? Is the annotation pertinent and enhancing? Is the provenance of the documents clearly established? In the case of Loren Schweninger's first volume of The Southern Debate Over Slavery all of the answers are affirmative.

It is no exaggeration to say that the interpretation of slavery was revolutionized by the use of neglected documents; in the present case, I suspect, interpretation will once again be altered significantly. The volume under review offers a sampling of the thousands of petitions concerning issues of race and slavery that Southerners submitted to their state legislatures from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Arranged chronologically and reproduced with original spellings and idiosyncratic phraseology, the petitions offer an especially rich portrait of Southerners grappling with the issues that dominated their day, and with their understanding, or misunderstanding, of the legal restrictions and parameters that bound them inextricably together. The collection includes petitions filed by slaveholders and nonslaveholders; abolitionists and defenders of slavery; slaves and free blacks; and women and men offering a unique perspective characterized by intimate detail, accuracy, and documentation. Indeed, unlike the many contemporary reminiscences and autobiographies that ushered in the previous historiographical revolution about slavery, these petitions were written with the full knowledge that they would be subjected to public scrutiny and verification at the legal bar. Thus, the petitions afford an intimate glimpse, with minute detail and candor, into the world both the slave and slaveholder made.

The documents, like so many published before them, graphically reveal the dark side of slavery from the grim fears of the white people who lived among large numbers of the enslaved to the yearnings of the slaves themselves to be free. Yet, also included are documents that speak to the attitudes of freed blacks forced to leave their homeland or seeking to overcome the harsh legal system that refused to recognize their unique and terribly unusual status. The strange symbiotic relationship of black and white people in the Old South is also examined through documents that speak to the situation of free women of color in this society as well as to the reliance of manumitted African Americans on their former owners for protection, passes to travel, guardianship papers, and reference letters. "Perhaps the most striking feature about the legislative petitions," writes Schweninger in his introduction, "is the picture they paint of slave resistance. . . . Legislative petitions . . . provide substantial documentation to show that the South was a place of fear, anger, hostility and violence" (xxxi). In fact, these petitions leave the reader with the clear understanding that interracial violence was quite common in the land of moonlight and magnolias.

The petitions in this first volume, then, do more than merely augment knowledge in many areas concerning slavery and race relations in the Old South. They also do more than provide the opportunity to revise old interpretations. The documents offer immediate observations by those most affected by the slave system in as succinct and truthful a context as possible. "As a result," writes Schweninger, "legislative petitions provide a remarkably clear view of the institution of slavery, one not diluted by conventional mores or the passage of time" (xxxii).

This collection will be used time and again by those seeking a fuller understanding of the institution that tore the union asunder. One could not, or should not, expect more from a project such as this.