Manisha Sinha: How slavery and race are treated in Daniel Walker Howe's magnum opus

Daniel Walker Howe's magnum opus is more than a sum of its parts. This review, focused only on how the author deals with the issues of slavery and race, might not quite do justice to his achievements. However, most historians recognize the centrality of slavery to nineteenth-century American history and one of the main themes of this book, a critique of Jacksonian Democracy, is based on its proslavery and white supremacist politics. Even though Howe's book in this respect acts as a counter argument to Sean Wilentz's equally mammoth work, _The Rise of American Democracy_ (2005), it is somewhat old- fashioned in its laudatory emphasis on the technological and economic progress, political and geographic growth, and religious and cultural transformation of the early American republic. Like the men and women he writes about, Howe seems to believe that American history from 1815 to 1848 unfolded according to providential design. The overall Whiggish tone of the book stands in stark contrast with the nation's unsavory history of enslavement, exclusion and genocide, a term that Howe uses to describe the fate of Native Americans during this time. To a certain extent, this tension exists within the book. Dedicated to the memory of John Quincy Adams, the author's sympathies clearly lie with those who were critical of their country's dismal record on race and slavery.

Descriptions of slavery and the lived experience of African Americans figure briefly in the first part of the book and tend to get lost mid- way. In keeping with his narrative style, Howe recounts the life stories of prominent blacks such as abolitionist Sojourner Truth, slave rebel Denmark Vesey and church leader, Richard Allen to frame his arguments. He still uses the outdated interpretation of paternalism when writing about plantation slavery as a social institution but views planters as hard-headed capitalists, men on the make, rather than in terms of the"romantic mythology surrounding them" (p. 60). Howe's critical comments on paternalism, which pepper his discussion of slavery, do a much better job when it comes to the planters than the slaves. As he concludes, paternalism described planters' self-perception better rather than the lived reality of the master-slave relationship. Howe's discussions of slave life and culture on the other hand, especially given the exponential growth of the field, are on the thin side. In a chapter devoted to the expansion of slavery and the emergence of the cotton kingdom, he does incorporate the new literature on the vast extent and importance of the domestic slave trade and concludes appropriately,"Much of the Atlantic civilization in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand" (p. 132). At another point, when Howe argues that slavery is the one instance where economic rationality does not jibe with morality, he makes a discordant comparison between the unsavory reputation of slave traders with that of used car dealers today. Given his acknowledgement of the saliency of slavery in early American political and economic life, one wishes that Howe had devoted more space to this subject, a tall order for a book which is over eight hundred pages long and which is framed by a progressive, optimistic view of United States history.

Antislavery, rather than slavery, fits the interpretive arc of this book better. In fact, it is the perfect test case for Howe's argument that a combination of religious millennialism and technological prowess, represented by the communications revolution, marked the history of the early American Republic. Howe does not see anything radical in the emergence of an interracial abolitionism but subsumes it under a larger discussion of the Second Great Awakening and reform activity, from Bible societies to prisons. Similarly, abolitionist print culture and tactics took full advantage of the revolution in communications to move slavery to the center stage in national politics. Rejecting the social control model, he argues that religious institutions were relatively open to African Americans, women and immigrants before political ones and that evangelical Protestant Christianity actually helped promote the goals of American democracy. However, some abolitionists, especially Garrisonians and the" come outers," as he notes, were highly critical of established religion and the church. Even Howe's discussion of the emergence of the black church, while admirable in many respects, misses out on the distinct nature of African American Christianity, with its Old Testament emphasis on Exodus, its identification with Israel as the chosen people of God, and its belief that divine vengeance would prove to be the instrument of racial liberation. Acknowledging that the black church was a bastion of communal autonomy and antislavery activity, Howe still views such organizations as merely"analogous" to white ones (p.183). And he even argues that as militant an African American abolitionist like David Walker fought only for the mainstream values of the black middle class such as education. One could also quibble with Howe that Nat Turner was moved more by a prophetic rather than a millennial vision of Christianity. Ironically, even though black abolitionists are present in this book, more in fact than in most general histories of this period, their distinct position on subjects ranging from slavery to black rights is missing. Unlike white Americans, African Americans for the better part of the nineteenth century viewed the United States as the land of slavery rather than a city on the hill.

At the same time, black and white abolitionists rejected colonization plans to deport the black population to Africa. Despite early interest in emigration back to Africa, which as Howe points out revived in the 1850s, most African Americans opposed the program of the American Colonization Society as a racist plot to shore up slavery and deny free blacks full citizenship rights. Howe seems to have difficulty admitting that some plans of the middle class economic modernizers and evangelical clergymen he admires like colonization may have been both wrong headed and unfeasible. He even suggests that with greater funding from the federal government, the ACS colony of Liberia might have been more successful. But not all plans for economic and religious"improvement" were necessarily progressive. In the Upper South, where it enjoyed greatest support, colonization remained a program to get rid of free African Americans rather than a step toward emancipation, despite the relatively small numbers of slaves freed and sent to Liberia. Lower south slaveholders may have viewed colonization as a stalking horse for abolition but most abolitionists and African Americans correctly understood it as shoring up the racial status quo, maintaining black enslavement and racial hierarchy in the United States and peddling impossible and deadly, given what we know of the high mortality rates of black emigrants, dreams of black independence in Africa.

Clearly, the heroes of Howe's book are the Whig advocates of economic modernization and religious and social reform. And he repeatedly evokes Lincoln, a former Whig, as the great heir to this political and cultural tradition. For the most part, Howe is correct in tracing antislavery antecedents back to Whig statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Joshua Giddings. Lincoln shared their moral abhorrence of slavery and unfortunately he also believed in Henry Clay's advocacy of colonization for the better part of his political career. But the Whig party was also home to political and economic conservatism, the textile magnates, whom Charles Sumner famously dubbed"lords of the loom" in alliance with the"lords of the lash." Moreover, some Southern Whigs, especially large slaveholding planters, could be as rabidly proslavery as southern Democrats. In fact, Howe's chapter on Texas and John Tyler is moot. If some Whigs became Republicans, others joined the Know Nothing Party, the American and Constitutional Union parties, and, in the south, the Democratic Party. We hear less about them in this book. The Republican party, as Eric Foner demonstrated a long time ago, was much more than an updated version of the Whig, an interpretation that had enjoyed much favor among Progressive and revisionist historians of the Civil War. And nativism, Foner argued, was a competing rather than a complementary force to antislavery in northern politics. The author, unlike this reviewer is more convinced by the opposing interpretation of the so-called ethno-cultural school of political historians.[1] Howe also overreaches when he claims that perhaps a couple of successful Whig presidencies, especially if Clay had been elected in 1844, might have prevented the sectional explosion over the expansion of slavery and prevented the Civil War. But the key to solving the problem of slavery, as black and white abolitionists understood, lay in full and immediate emancipation (most antebellum southern slaveholders were also not shy about proclaiming their political and ideological commitment to slavery) and not half-baked solutions like colonization or gradualism.

On the whole, however, Howe ought to be commended for his judicious analysis of the racialist and proslavery nature of some Democratic policies and its expansionist agenda, which ultimately resulted in sectional conflict and war. Whether this was an aspect of Jacksonian democracy or a description of its essential nature, I will let Howe and his critics debate. It is easy to agree with him that the Democrats were the villains of the piece when it comes to Indian removal, suppression of abolitionist literature and petitions, African American rights, and their response to the shipboard slave rebellions on the _Amistad_ and _Creole_. Howe also repeats Whig criticism of Jackson for his arbitrary, excessive, and unconstitutional use of executive power, but Jackson's strong unionist stance against nullification and John C. Calhoun's rabidly proslavery and antidemocratic political agenda formed an important constitutional precedent for Lincoln. Apparently, Lincoln consulted Jackson's Nullification Proclamation when composing the Emancipation Proclamation.[2] Ultimately, the increasingly proslavery bent of the Democracy would drive even northern party stalwarts like Martin Van Buren in the 1840s and Stephen Douglas in the 1850s into opposition. Howe's discussion of Texas annexation, which he correctly describes as a proslavery and pro-southern project championed by southern Democrats and Whigs like Jackson, Tyler, Calhoun, Abel P. Upshur, and James Polk, makes good use of Frederick Merk's old but still useful books on the topic.[3]

However, his chapter on the Mexican War, while rich in detail when it comes to political maneuvering and intrigue, military strategy and battles, little known facts about Irish Catholic deserters and the response of Mexican and native populations, is somewhat superficial on the politics of slavery. It is surprising that Howe does not deal more extensively with northern Whig and abolitionist opposition to the war as a land grab for slavery or the sectional conflict in Congress over it that would lead to the demise of the Whig party. And Calhoun's initial and compromised opposition to the war had much more to do with his fears for the safety of slavery and the racial hierarchy on which it rested, than his alleged fears for the future of the Union.[4] Howe's criticism of the spread-eagle expansionism of the Democrats and President Polk is vitiated by his anachronistic observation that the acquisition of western territories allowed the United States to fight off Japanese aggression during the Second World War. But in keeping with his curiously nineteenth-century view of history as divine providence, he notes,"God moves in mysterious ways, and He is certainly capable of bringing good out of evil" (p. 811).

Howe concludes his book with a meditation on the pivotal year of 1848, the year of democratic revolutions in Europe and the rise of the Women's Rights movement, and one might add Free Soilism or political antislavery, in the United States. Instead of exploring the transnational connections between these movements, as he does earlier all too briefly with abolition, Howe returns to an old and discredited concept, American Exceptionalism. But as far as slavery and race are concerned, the United States was very much part of a hemisphere-wide racial, anti-democratic system, and viewed in that international context, its early history appears less exceptional or providential. The tension between a progressive narrative of the country's political, economic and cultural growth, which Howe renders astutely and lyrically, and its dependence and long adherence to a brutalizing system of labor that put it behind most European and Latin American nations remains until the end. While this reviewer wishes that the sensibility and story of that failure had informed this book more, the author succeeds eminently in what he set out to do in it.

Notes

[1]. Eric Foner, _Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: the Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

[2]. Manisha Sinha, _The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 50.

[3]. Frederick Merk, _Slavery and the Annexation of Texas_ (New York: Knopf, 1972); Frederick Merk, with Lois Bannister Merk, _Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

[4]. In the interests of full disclosure, I should reveal that my remarks here are based on my work in this area, _The Counterrevolution of Slavery_ (2000).