Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist: Selected Writings on Revolution, Recognition, and Race (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 300 Surprisingly, this otherwise persuasive account does not give adequate credit to Washington’s first autobiography. Like Harlan, Bieze discounts The Story of My Life and Work and assumes that Washington played a minor role, if any, in its publication. Story is “an unpolished work . . . a loose collection of photographs, photomontages, and drawings which lack conceptual or artistic clarity” (p. 65). Ironically, despite its many photographs and sketches, Story receives little attention in a work devoted to Washington and photography. What is more, Washington’s papers reveal a different story. Judging from his correspondence with his ghostwriter, Edgar Webber, he played an active role in its publication and the inclusion of illustrations. That notwithstanding, Bieze is to be commended for this book. In exploring the various contexts of the scores of photographs of Booker T. Washington, he has provided a compelling account of the charismatic leader and a major contribution to Washington scholarship. Furthermore, Bieze’s emphasis on visual representation points us to possible future studies. If indeed art is propaganda for Washington, a subject Bieze entertains near the end of his book, then the next horizon may lie in the Wizard’s interior and architectural designs for his beloved emerald city: Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. ANTONIO T. BLY Appalachian State University Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist: Selected Writings on Revolution, Recognition, and Race. By Lonnie A. Burnett. University of Alabama Press, 2008. ix, 251 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1620-4. Few people, historians included, have probably ever heard of Henry Hotze. But as Professor Lonnie Burnett convincingly argues in his introduction to this collection of Hotze’s writings, Hotze played a critical role in popularizing the “scientific” racism that became the central unifying element of southern nationalism. A Swiss immigrant, Hotze settled in Mobile in the 1850s and went to work for John Forsyth on the Mobile Register. As a believer in the idea that race determined moral and intellectual potential, Hotze soon found a place among the political and cultural elite of Mobile, who, influenced by Josiah Nott, shared his general understanding of the influence of race. While in Mobile, and with Nott’s encouragement, Hotze translated Arthur Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races. It was Hotze’s inter- O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 301 pretation of Gobineau, one not necessarily embraced by the French aristocrat himself, that made scientific racism more palatable to white southerners and Americans generally. Here Burnett makes his greatest contribution to the literature on scientific racism. Historians of the antebellum period, most prominently Eugene Genovese and the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have been dismissive of the argument that scienti fic racism had much appeal outside the narrow circle of intellectuals with whom Nott associated. Nott’s questioning of the Genesis version of creation was unacceptable to the vast majority of God-fearing southerners . Ministers and theologians published long treatises criticizing Nott and his theories as heresy. Gobineau sympathized with their view. He maintained that racial hierarchies emerged after the creation, thereby reconciling the creation story with his theory of racial hierarchy. Many defenders of slavery, although committed to a single creation on theological grounds, nonetheless found Gobineau’s interpretation unsatisfying as well because it conceded, apparently, the idea that all men were indeed created equal. In the introduction to his translation of Gobineau, Hotze dismissed the whole argument over creation as irrelevant. By removing the conflict between the theological and the “scientific,” Hotze produced a much more acceptable ideological defense of white supremacy. Shorn of its challenge to the Genesis account of creation, the idea that Africans could never achieve the same level of development as “Caucasians” reconciled the tension between southern whites’ celebration of equal rights and their defense of slavery. During the 1850s, this racial “science” legitimized the defense of slavery as the only way to preserve white supremacy. Ultimately, Hotze’s ideas became the basis for Confederate nationalism. During the Civil War, Hotze served briefly in the Confederate army. Finding army life less than inspiring, he...