In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Positive Goods and Necessary Evils Commerce, Security, and Slavery in the Lower South, 1787–1837 Brian Schoen Situating the region most committed to slavery, the Lower South, within the politics and history of the early United States remains a difficult task. Much of the literature makes the region the exception to most rules. As the rest of America transformed the Revolutionary spirit into a liberal-capitalist nation, Georgians, and particularly South Carolinians, supposedly took another path, drifting and eventually sprinting into a counterrevolutionary, even pre-modern, mindset. In short, the rest of the world passed the Lower South by, leaving it as a marginalized region on the fringes of the allegedly greater story of American political and economic development.∞ Not all historians have accepted this view. Indeed, several recent scholars provide a starkly different trajectory that places racism, slavery, and the Lower South at the center of the national story. In this narrative, far from shrinking to the fringes of mainstream American political development, Lower South planterpoliticians and their Virginia allies emerge as leaders of a ‘‘slave power’’ that hijacked or perverted the principles of freedom to make the United States a ‘‘slave nation.’’ The precise timing of this transformation remains unclear, though increasingly the Constitutional Convention—that vexing ‘‘compact with the Devil’’ —appears to mark the moment that supposedly determined the outcome. This newer narrative turns the more traditional one on its head, making the Lower South’s devotion to slavery the national rule rather than the regional exception.≤ While both accounts are compelling, neither does justice to the complicated political story of the Lower South during the first half-century of the ‘‘politics of slavery.’’ Both narratives jump teleologically from one slave-related debate to the 162 Brian Schoen next, often seeking to explain the origins of secession, rather than explaining particular developments on their own terms. As the present volume illustrates, however, the issue of slavery seldom entered early national politics predictably or in an isolated manner—even for those hypersensitized Lower South politicians who were willing to use almost any political tactic to prevent interference with their institution. More frequently, the debates over slavery were ill-defined, the unintended byproducts of other policy discussions, including the nature of national political economy, the entrance of new states into the Union, or debates over the contours of federalism. Understanding the politics of slavery thus requires not just appreciating how its institutional presence affected American society and politics; it also requires accepting that the politics of slavery was reshaped by seemingly unrelated developments. Lower South politicians’ commitments to bettering their economic and geopolitical positions in an everchanging Atlantic world indelibly shaped how they understood and approached their defense of slavery. This essay looks forward from the Revolution, rather than backwards from nullification or the Civil War, to trace the Lower South’s deeply pragmatic—and thus often turbulent—relationship with the federal government. It examines how Southerners linked their essential commitment to slavery with other political issues—some of them only partly related to the issue of slavery—such as regional security, or the region’s transition from a languishing, eighteenth-century, Caribbean-focused economy, to a vibrant, nineteenth-century one based around the coastal and trans-Atlantic trade in cotton. In this ‘‘big picture’’ approach, no clear trajectory emerges. For one thing, Lower South politicians did not have to work their way toward a marginal political position within the Union. They began the national period hyperconscious of their peripheral economic position, and believed that the federal Constitution would be essential to remedying it. After successfully deflecting antislavery proposals in the First Congress, Southern politicians relied heavily on federal power to secure and extend their region’s borders, enhance trade, and protect slavery from external threats. The strides they, and other Americans, made in creating a relatively secure and commercially integrated polity by the 1820s, however, unintentionally created the very circumstances that made the region less reliant on—and, with the bursting forth of protectionism and Northern anti-slavery measures, more suspicious of—the federal government, particularly with regard to its handling of trade policy and the situation of free blacks. If we situate the Lower South, then, within a broader and more fluid economic and political context, its leaders appear less as ideologydriven reactionaries and more as shrewd calculators. They willingly deployed federal power when it protected their broad array of interests, but sought to [3.146.34.191] Project MUSE (2024-04-18...

Share