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

In this volume in the Cambridge Essential Histories series for undergraduate students, Calvin Schermerhorn examines the history of slavery in the United States, using words from William Wells Brown, a famous fugitive slave, as his title. Brown’s words provide an appropriate frame for what follows, including the slow death of slavery in the North, the expansion of the Cotton Empire during the antebellum era, and everyday slave life, in a chapter titled “Life in the Quotidian.” Schermerhorn also examines sexual violence, the slave narratives, geopolitics, the coming of the Civil War, the war itself, and Reconstruction. Perhaps the best component of his study of this large topic concerns his economic analysis, including the profits from the African slave trade, the importance of the cotton economy, “labor camps” during the westward expansion of the 1830s–50s, and the financing of the domestic slave trade (130).

The Bank of the United States was quasi-public, issuing its own notes alongside, in 1835, some seven hundred state-chartered banks throughout the country. These banknotes “point to the towering irony of the slave trade: its violence and destruction was built on confidence and trust” (74). It is difficult for most contemporary students to understand financial transactions that have nothing to do with a national currency, and it is important that students know how the buying and selling of slaves often occurred when buyer used banknotes to transact a purchase; thus, one of the book’s strong points is clear. Also impressive are the summaries of the “black insurgency” of revolt and conspiracies, including the Gabriel plot in Virginia in 1800; the German Coast rebellion in 1811 in Louisiana; the Denmark Vesey plot in South Carolina in 1822; and the famous Nat Turner revolt in 1831 in Virginia, which resulted in the deaths of more than fifty-six whites.

The author also presents a wealth of statistical information regarding the growth of the slave population, its expansion in the Lower South during the antebellum era, infant mortality comparing slaves and whites, and child mortality. “High infant mortality and childhood death,” he writes, “seemed to work against the value of property in people, but owners collectively implemented a grim calculus: it was less expensive to buy a bondsperson than to grow one” (94).

This work scrutinizes the Civil War and Reconstruction in greater detail than do other examinations of slavery, analyzing such topics as how and when secession occurred in the Southern states, how most white unionists in the North were fighting to preserve the Union, not abolish slavery. Frederick Douglass, the most famous black abolitionist, declared that for the Union to survive, slavery must end. As the war progressed, it became a battle against human bondage. However, the war did not make slaves into citizens: “Enslaved people’s self-freedom and federal emancipation did away with chattel slavery, or legal property in people. But rather than ending suddenly, slavery transformed in the midst of civil war, and while emancipation wiped slave wealth off the enslavers’ balance sheet, it did not end forced labor” (210).

While this volume has many strengths, especially concerning the economy of human bondage, it offers much less regarding African American culture. In fact some sections not only fail to examine the subject but argue that slavery tended to pull enslaved people apart: there was “precious little community” (3). This assertion seems somewhat dismissive of a previous generation of historians who discussed African American culture in some depth, exploring the emotional religion, folk songs and tales, dances, and superstitions, as well as language, customs, beliefs and ceremonies that separated them from their masters and provided community despite the harsh realities of the slave system.