Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery by Calvin Schermerhorn (review)

In Unrequited Toil, Calvin Schermerhorn emphasizes slavery’s central role in United States history before the twentieth century. Scores of familiar and less familiar vignettes drive its unflinching account of human, lived, and bonded experiences. By rooting a narrative history in biographies, Schermerhorn reminds readers that slavery took many different forms and influenced people’s lives in many different ways. As he concludes, “Slavery was never one thing, and enslaved people were never homogenous. There was no stagnation or sleepy plantation” (3).

Schermerhorn creates a sweeping narrative of bonded people in the United States. In twelve highly readable chapters, Unrequited Toil explores topics as diverse as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Triangular Trade, and the Trail of Tears. While teachers and students will already be familiar with many of these pivotal developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of Unrequited Toil’s subjects might be less well known. Chapter 4, “Black Insurgency,” for example, traces escapes from the Virginian Corotoman plantation during the War of 1812 era, and Chapter 8, “Industrial Discipline,” includes a discussion of Anchor brand Cavendish tobacco sold in Australian markets during the 1850s. Schermerhorn contributes to conversations about this range of familiar and less familiar events when he highlights African American experiences within the events. Stories such as Denmark Vesey’s planned insurgency; Jacob D. Green’s courtship of his sweetheart, Mary; Corinna Hinton Omohundro’s public persona as a white woman; and John Washington’s flight to Union soldiers during the American Civil War all add empathetic dimensions to struggles against proslavery individuals and slaveholders, the “human barbed wire” of Schermerhorn’s work (41).

The depth of this volume’s research is one of its main strengths. Unrequited Toil seamlessly weaves together an impressive array of existent literature on slavery in the United States. Both students new to slavery studies and seasoned readers will find much to consider in Schermerhorn’s extensive footnotes. The plethora of secondary works cited in Unrequited Toil, be it the groundbreaking work of the late Ira Berlin, the classics of James McPherson, Drew Faust, Eric Foner, Edmund S. Morgan, and Michael Holt, or more recent historiographic staples such as Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014) and Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013), constitutes a virtual treasure trove of United States slavery historiography. The bibliography and the highly accessible prose of this work make it an especially strong candidate for use in a variety of undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

In addition to engaging scholarly and primary source works in far-flung topics of conversation, Unrequited Toil contributes its own theoretical considerations to slavery studies. Multiple works have placed discussions of United States slavery within comparative, transnational, and global contexts. Andrés Reséndez’s The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016) and David Brion Davis’s Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006), both of which Schermerhorn cites, as well as Dylan C. Penningroth’s The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (2003) are just some examples of this methodological practice. Schermerhorn notes a tendency within this literature (noninclusive of the sources listed here) to compare systems of slavery in terms of better or worse. In response he argues, “Comparing circumstances of personal violence versus contexts misses the point. Differing global slaveries were not qualitatively better or worse; rather they had different defining characteristics and value structures” (6). His observation is worth remembering in future classrooms, research, and projects.

Unrequited Toil studies antebellum westward expansion in the United States through the framing concept of “war capitalism.” As in studies of the diverse contexts involving United States slavery, a vast body of scholarship, such as Andrew J. Torget’s Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the...