Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 by MarcusCunliffeReview by: James Brown StewartJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp. 88-89Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3122784 .

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88 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

evidence confirming the evolution of sectional perceptions in the Northwest, and specialists will welcome access to this new mate- rial.

University of Montana Donald S. Spencer

Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860. By Marcus Cunliffe. (Athens, Ga.: Uni- versity of Georgia Press, 1979. Pp. xix, 128. Illustrations, notes, index. $9.00.)

These three addresses, delivered by Marcus Cunliffe for Mercer University's Lamar Lecture Series, must have been a delight to have heard. As expanded and published here, they are certainly delightful to read. A distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of Sussex, Cunliffe brings a sharp and unusually cosmopolitan Anglo-American perspective to the enormous sub- ject of slavery. With humor, graceful expression, and a stunning command of illuminating sources, he explores how various under- standings of our term "slavery" shaped the social attitudes of Englishmen and Americans in the pre-Civil War era. Cunliffe's concern is not only with racial slavery, but also with the economic "enslavement" that working class people felt increasingly subjected to in this era of intensifying labor regimentation. The complex Anglo-American debates over the morality and value of these two forms of slavery were intimately connected, Cunliffe argues, and influenced one another in countless ways. This idea provides the theme which unites the three essays.

In the first essay, "Slavery Black and White," Cunliffe explores how working people's protests against "wage slavery" became inex- tricably bound up in class conscious opposition to privileged aboli- tionists, and often reaffirmed the South's indictments of indus- trialization. Abolitionism, in turn, embodied a forceful refusal to confront the new realities of working class life, and projected in- stead an optimistic insistence on the progressive social harmony created by individual competition. Many of the propositions ad- vanced here will be familiar to those who have read the most recent works of David B. Davis, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Drew Faust, Ronald Walters, and Anthony F. C. Wallace, just to men- tion a few. Yet the range of scholarship suggested by this list also

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BOOK REVIEWS 89

conveys a sense of Cunliffe's impressive powers of creative syn- thesis. It is difficult to imagine a brief introduction to the related problems of labor, economy, and morality faced by Anglo-Ameri- can culture in the antebellum era more stimulating than this essay.

In the remaining essays, Cunliffe builds on this synthesis with original material which always reinforces a transatlantic perspec- tive. In his second section, he examines the impact of Anglo- American cultural animosities on chattel slavery - wage slavery debates between and within both nations. British censure of the United States for its continuing involvement with slave-owning, he argues, provoked the widespread American response that Eng- land's industrial poor were immeasurably worse off than the South's "contented" slaves. International rancor thus allowed Americans to divert their attention from growing problems of class oppression in their own society, stimulated an unwarranted smug- ness about the consequences of industrialization in the United States, and reinforced Northern support for slavery. British workers, for their part, grew increasingly suspicious of the upper classes' fixation with social evils in far-off America, and lack of concern for class oppression at home. Cunliffe's concluding essay gathers up many of these general themes in presenting the life of a single individual, Charles Edward Lester. Lester, first a Gar- risonian abolitionist, concluded in the 1840s that it was not the slave South, but industrializing England with its heartless factory owners, bloated aristocrats, and wretched "labourers" that truly threatened republican liberty in America. Cunliffe's concluding claim, that opinions like Lester's, not sectional animosity, were most typical of Americans after 1840, is intriguing and again re- veals how the over-arching questions of labor shaped racial feel- ings, moral judgments, and class consciousness. His claim also raises numerous questions, serious objections, and like the rest of this volume furnishes students of the antebellum era with a refreshing source of intellectual stimulation.

Macalester College James Brown Stewart

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