Slavery and the Southern Economy: Sources and Readings (review)

270CIVIL WAR HISTORY philosophers of that age of a perfectly articulated world in which each person and institution occupied a place in the great chain of being and bore a necessary relation to the whole. They conceived of an orderly universe operating in accord with natural law. Therein lay much of thenhorror of slavery, for as an offense against natural law, slavery in theneyes destroyed the moral order of the universe." Seen from this new perspective Lundy's shifting attack on slavery, his refusal to appeal exclusively to guilt, his willingness to experiment, and, above all, his immovable faith in colonization became comprehensible for the first time. By 1830, however, Lundy's limited success in attracting national attention and winning converts had brought into the movement younger and more vigorous men untroubled by methodological doubts and concerned primarily with the moral dimensions of their task. After 1830 these newcomers usurped Lundy's place in the antislavery vanguard and came to regard his continuing interest in colonization as a withdrawal from the moral confrontation with the forces of slavery which they eagerly sought. Garrison was not the most charitable of critics, yet surely he was right in chastising Lundy for his obsession with founding a profit-making free labor colony in Texas. It is here that we sense fuUy die enormous distance, which the author has measured so weU, between an eighteenth-century mind and the perfectionist temperament of the 1830's. As Lundy becomes embroiled in the interminable frustrations of his Texas scheme his almost complete isolation from the main scene of antislavery activity is clear, and the pathos in the description of the lonely zealot, now tired and Ul, chasing his iUusion across Mexico is not enough to sustain our flagging interest or the author's claim that Lundy "could properly claim a large share of the credit for arousing popular hostility against annexing Texas." With Lundy's death we feel relief at the belated removal of a courageous but now misdirected reformer who has clearly lived beyond his time. If Mr. Dillon's portrait of Lundy is not altogether successful as biography, it is nevertheless a significant revisionist account of the early period of American antislavery and of a pivotal figure in it—a treatment closely adapted to its subject whose life was useful, important, and unexciting. John L. Thomas Brown University Síflüen/ and the Southern Economy: Sources and Readings. Edited by Harold D. Woodman. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Pp. x, 261. $3.95.) The debate over the profitability of slavery and the impact of the peculiar institution on the economy and society of the antebellum South has been going on now for weU over a hundred years. The argument, which began as a polemic between supporters and opponents of the slave system, has moved from the pulpit and soap box to the groves of academe, but it continues with a ferocity reminiscent of the earlier confrontation, as this BOOK REVIEWS271 exceUent coUection of readings amply demonstrates. Professor Woodman also shows that many of the hypotheses of present-day historians and economists , although frequently buttressed by complex mathematical formulas and formidable statistical tables, are essentiaUy variations on some very old themes. This is certainly the case with the continuing dispute over the influence of slavery on the economic development of the Old South, a subject to which Woodman devotes one of the book's five parts. Contemporary critics of the slave system, such as Hinton Rowan Helper and J. E. Cairnes, who claimed that slavery inhibited the growth of manufacturing, commerce, urban centers, and diversified agriculture south of the Potomac, have been seconded by scholars such as Fabian Linden and Eugene D. Genovese, who cite the low level of demand for manufactured goods as the primary reason the plantation South failed to industrialize. On the other side of the argument, Robert R. Rüssel basicaUy agrees with David Cristy, a prominent member of the proslavery school, that slavery did not retard southern economic growth and that in concentrating on the production of great staple crops, the South was doing what it was economicaUy best suited to do. By skillfuUy combining old and new views in...