Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas by Christa Dierksheide (review)

Just as World War II is often dubbed a “good” war, the clash between abolitionists and defenders of slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is often imagined as a rare conflict with clear forces of good and evil. In Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas, Christa Dierksheide problematizes that simple duality, asserting that British and American pro- and antislavery advocates actually shared much in their visions of slavery and empire. Both factions, Dierksheide maintains, promoted “amelioration” for slaves—defined as “gradual improvement”—as part of envisioning empire as a positive, civilizing force for humanity (p. 1). One side just anticipated amelioration within slavery, the other through abolition.

The book focuses primarily on slaveholder ideologies. Part 1 highlights Virginia, with a chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson’s argument that ameliorating slavery would supposedly prepare enslaved peoples for abolition in some distant future. Chapter 2 turns to antebellum Virginia and the debates between slaveholders Thomas Dew and John Hartwell Cocke, stressing that while Dew defended slavery and Cocke pushed abolition and colonization, both advocated amelioration; Dew just believed that reform made slavery acceptable. Part 2 traces a similar trajectory among slaveholders in South Carolina. In the early national period, Henry Laurens was inspired by his emerging national identity to seek amelioration for slaves with an eye toward future emancipation. By contrast, William Harper and other slaveholders argued that slavery should be improved but not abolished. In both Virginia and South Carolina, Dierksheide argues, the antislavery amelioration of the Revolutionary era unwittingly paved the way for antebellum arguments that reforming slavery made abolition unnecessary.

Clear and concise, these sections on U.S. slaveholders offer nuanced readings of their principal characters, demonstrating that pro- and antislavery activists were not “binary opposites” (p. 2). Both sides were condescendingly paternalistic toward enslaved people, and both advocated reforms. It is less clear whether Dierksheide is correct in asserting “that historians have so long supposed” pro- and antislavery thinkers to inhabit entirely opposite poles (p. 2). Surely most historians recognize that figures like Jefferson and Laurens possessed complex and conflicting ideas about slavery.

More important, in casting slaveholders and abolitionists as all interested in “amelioration,” the book sometimes suffers from taking slaveholders’ written ideas too seriously. The written word is crucial to historians, but sometimes actions speak louder than words. At times, Dierksheide seems to conflate the two. For example, when discussing Laurens’s turn to expressing antislavery sentiments after the Revolutionary War, Dierksheide asserts, “He sought to put this new antislavery sentiment into practice in the post-revolutionary period. As such, he envisioned plantations without slaves” (p. 115, emphasis added). Unfortunately, “envisioning” antislavery is not quite putting it “into practice.” Laurens went right on exploiting the hundreds of enslaved people he held in bondage. That he rationalized this exploitation differently is interesting, but downplaying action in favor of written ideas makes the transition seem more profound than it was. Similarly, because Laurens—arguably the most prolific slave trader in colonial North America—asserted after the Revolution that the slave trade had been foisted on colonists by Britain, it raises profound questions about how seriously we should take his expressed ideas (or those of other slaveholders). In blaming Britain, he was lying to himself and to us. As such, more attention to the disparity and interplay between words and actions would strengthen this study.

The most compelling arguments in Amelioration and Empire emerge in Part 3, which examines how Bryan Edwards and John Gladstone defended slavery in the British Caribbean from abolitionist critiques. These slaveholders asserted a positive role for slavery, claiming it helped the British empire spread modernity, enlightenment, and Christianity to the world. Here Dierksheide gives more attention to abolitionist ideologies than in Parts 1 and 2, highlighting antislavery critiques that argued the British empire in South Asia showed there was a free...