Virginia y la reforma de la esclavitud, 1800–1865: Los límites del progreso en una sociedad esclavista by Gerardo Gurza Lavalle (review)

Mexican historian Gerardo Gurza Lavalle takes up the challenge of analyzing how the religious, political, and economic elite of Virginia attempted to modify and reform the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century. The author structures his analysis by arguing that, with the North industrializing and the Deep South expanding cotton production, Virginia slave masters took concrete steps to reform and diminish the state's economic reliance on slavery, even while they took steps to prolong slavery's existence. At the heart of Gurza Lavalle's analysis is to probe the contradictions embedded in attempts to simultaneously reform and protect slavery in nineteenth-century Virginia.

The strength of the work is to revisit the split-personality upper South elite, who looked toward an industrial future in the early nineteenth century, but who remained reliant on an agricultural past. Over time, their inability to disavow their slaveholding past and their enthusiastic defense of slavery as a distinct cultural characteristic of the region became crystallized by responding to abolitionists' critiques with the evangelical furor supplied by the Second Great Awakening. The author analyzes the American Colonization Society as part of Virginia elites' efforts to reform slavery, even though he recognizes its overall ineffectiveness. For Gurza Lavalle, the overall failure of reform illustrates the inability of the Virginia elite to conceive of how to create a society free of slavery where former slaves could live. In the remaining chapters, the author focuses on the role of the church in promoting two distinct reform movements: first, those that attempted to eradicate or greatly diminish the importance of slavery to the Virginia economy; and second, those that accepted the inability to abolish the institution but attempted to make it less violent and more in accord with the Christian principles animating the Second Great Awakening.

As his subject is the slaveholding elite and those closely aligned to their objectives, the author writes from the slave masters' perspective. He draws heavily from ecclesiastical sources, such as those produced by the Baptists, and in particular the minutes of local Baptist associations throughout Virginia. Gurza Lavalle recognizes that reforms were designed to maintain slave masters' dominance over society, but he asserts that some of their policies "reflected an authentic preoccupation for the living conditions of their slaves, and the desire to create a progressive and 'civilized' society" (p. 19). At certain places throughout the text, the argument that any reform of slavery essentially weakened the institution stands in contrast to recent studies that have shown that the nineteenth-century South was a dynamic malleable society. In recognition of arguments by Edward E. Baptist and Walter Johnson on the capitalist and modern features of nineteenth-century slavery, Gurza Lavalle argues that his study complements their insights by showing how reformers hoped to develop an economy that moved beyond slavery. The promise of reform on the part of slaveholders to eliminate, modernize, and ameliorate slavery was far more than just a defensive strategy aimed at addressing abolitionists' discourses, according to Gurza Lavalle. Throughout the work, a critical examination of self-serving discourses that promised benevolent reforms on the part of the slaveholding elite and the actual social practices and experiences of the enslaved remains underdeveloped, an issue many readers will be quick to point out. However, it should be stressed that this is precisely the author's point; as social legitimacy was questioned on economic, religious, and political fronts, self-justification by the master class became all the more necessary and ever more defensive. In the end, the proliferation of attempts to modify slavery and its changing discursive legitimacy serves itself as an index of a society unraveling and the limits of reform.

In closing, Gurza Lavalle provides an insightful analysis of the changes made...