Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. By

Larry E. Tise. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1987. xix + 510p.;

illustrations, tables, notes, index. $40.00.)

It is evident that we must at some point have a meeting of minds regarding

the old anti-slavery war, not at all so that we can agree on details or even

issues, but in order to rephrase them for a new era. It is a long time since

specialists argued over the roles of New England abolitionists as compared

with westerners-that is, of the Old Northwest. It is a still longer time since

scholars assumed the Civil War to have been a war between Free Soil as

opposed to proslavery sections. Meanwhile, the non-scholar has known

without research who Garrison and John Brown were, and has not puzzled

over the fact that one was against war on principle and the other was a

committed partisan of terror.

Our own "Second Revolution" signalled by the Brown and other civil rights

Supreme Court decisions has created a substantial parity in the legal status of

the several geographic and ethnic groups, so that new questions are raised

about the role of history in our concerns. Not surprisingly, our psychological

stakes in history vary, yet we must move toward some consensus regarding the

roles played in such of our national crises as the anti- and proslavery drives

which culminated in drastic war. Consensus will not come easily, so we must

be grateful when serious efforts are made to contribute to it. Such a work is the

present one. It covers formidable ground, with considerable thoroughness. It

cannot be definitive; the subject is too large and involves too much. But it is the

most ambitious of recent writings in the field, with a thesis which can be

grasped and responded to.

It is not always recognized how fortunate we are in not having a secessionist

tradition in the Old South, nurtured by memories of heroes and many dead.

This is not true elsewhere. In Flanders, for example, there are still groups

which hate the Belgium government and endure jail in behalf of their cause.

This lack of a dissident nationalism seems partly the result of empathetic

feelings North and South. Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, referred to

the "mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot

grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land." Business,

travel, family, and other factors created everything from tolerance of different

attitudes to sympathy with different conditions. Lincoln's regard for Alexander

Stephens, who became the Confederate Vice-President, was not untypical.

But as important was it that both North and South harbored similar views in

some respects toward the blacks in the population. Although the North was

averse to slavery, it had been built on the enslavement of indentured servants,

often treated more harshly than blacks because they required more discipline

and had service limited by the terms of indentureship. Naive students used to

say they were in service "only" from seven to ten years, as though northern

farmers had "only" played at dominating their white chattel. Modern studies

have spelled out actual working and living conditions. The public, however,

makes all basic decisions on what it chooses to be interested in, and it has