David Brion Davis. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery .Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery by David Brion DavisReview by: By Philip D. MorganThe American Historical Review, Vol. 110, No. 3 (June 2005), pp. 795-796Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.3.795 .

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its goals” (p. 200). They also clearly identified theirinterests as distinct from the laboring classes. “Ironi-cally,” the author argues, “it was the issue of slaverythat most helped to draw greater distinctions betweenthe middle class” and the working class (p. 179).

Slavery is not the central focus of this study of theantebellum South, but it is a profoundly important partof the story told here. When middle-class southernersdetermined that slave labor could accelerate economicprogress, they alienated planters who preferred amonopoly over slave labor and working-class peoplewho feared competition with slave labor. Thus, Wellsargues, in the 1850s the white South did not enjoy theracial solidarity often assigned it. Although the middleclass had successfully cultivated closer ties with theNorth, by the 1850s slavery undermined those ties aswell. Wells does not offer a major new interpretationof the causes of the Civil War. He does, however,persuasively argue that understanding the needs andaspirations of the emerging southern middle classoffers “an additional piece of the puzzle of Civil Warcausation” (p. 208). A variety of northerners had aidedand supported the modernization and industrializationof the South, but when middle-class southerners de-termined to use slave labor to hasten the changes theywanted, northern support was replaced with hostility.Middle-class southerners, Wells claims, helped pushthe nation to war both “by destabilizing the southernsocial structure” and “by drawing the ire of northern-ers suspicious of a modernizing slave South” (p. 209).Bridges carefully built to unite northerners and south-erners with common middle class interests “becamethe vehicle for the transference of mutual distrust” (p.215).

Wells’s focus forces some exaggeration of classdistinctions in the antebellum South. Certainly someplanters supported much of the middle-class agenda.Yet some distortion was necessary to delineate a grouplargely ignored in the massive historical accounting ofthe antebellum South. This important book should berequired reading for students of the Old South andshould be considered in any future synthesis. I hopethat the author’s thesis will soon find its way intotextbooks. Graduate students will find Wells’s bookparticularly valuable for the wealth of new researchpossibilities it suggests.

BESS BEATTY

Oregon State University

DAVID BRION DAVIS. Challenging the Boundaries ofSlavery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003.Pp. 115. $18.95.

Delivered in 2002 as the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures atHarvard University, the three chapters of this shortbook offer smart apercus, insightful nuggets from themaster historian of comparative slavery. As the titlesuggests, David Brion Davis aims to make his readerrethink context, particularly of space and time. Thus,the first chapter takes a bird’s-eye, panoramic view of

the origins of New World slavery, ranging over centu-ries and most of the globe; the second is a worm’s-eye,microcosmic look at a single year, 1819, which Davissees as a critical “foretaste of what American slave-holders and abolitionists would be up against” (p. 2);and the final chapter, reverting to a wider lens, probesAfrican-American abolitionism and the overreactionof southern leaders, which Davis believes stemmedfrom their “fixation on the Caribbean” (p. 3). Thechapters move forward in time and extend the limits ofthe North American continent. Using cinemascope,microscope, and telescope, Davis reveals North Amer-ican slavery in a new light.

The first chapter is a tour de force. In just thirtybreathtaking pages, Davis points to some key anteced-ents of New World slavery. Enslavement, he notes, wasalways “an important byproduct of intercontinentalempires” (p. 7), and therefore ancient examples arerelevant. Arabs and their Muslim converts were thefirst to develop a long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa, which rivaled or even exceeded itstransatlantic counterpart in numbers of captives. Eventhough the Koran and Islamic law were essentiallycolor blind, Islamic literature developed racial stereo-types about blacks that seem to have been transmittedfrom Muslims to Christians, from the eastern Medi-terranean to Iberia. At the same time, within Europe,the northwest saw the rise of free labor nations whilethe Mediterranean witnessed a revival of slavery andthe development of the prototypes—most notablysugar plantations—of New World colonization. Ini-tially, Mediterranean slavery was dominated by“white” slaves from the Black Sea, but Turkish expan-sion cut off the supply, making sub-Saharan Africa theprimary source. These were some of the critical pre-conditions for New World slavery, although Davisemphasizes that its development was not predeter-mined but was rather “haphazard, irrational, andepisodic” (p. 23). Indian slavery might well haveworked but for enormously destructive pandemics thatnobody at the time could have predicted. Europeanslavery would have been cheaper than its Africancounterpart, but a sense of unity among Christians ofWestern Europe blocked any revival of white slavery inthe New World. Instead racial enslavement of peopleof African descent became an inextricable part of NewWorld settlement, “the dark underside of the Ameri-can Dream” (p. 32).

The next two chapters are less sweeping in scale. ForDavis, the year 1819 marks “a kind of national rite ofpassage,” a watershed, when many trends converged,leading to “a broad national consensus that the na-tion’s contradictions involving slavery should be re-pressed or on occasion resolved by compromise” (p.44). He couples two “models of flexible interpretation”(p. 54)—John Marshall’s vision of a powerful federalgovernment and William Ellery Channing’s espousalof moral improvement—as harbingers of later chal-lenges to proslavery readings of the Constitution andthe Bible. The last chapter explores the connections

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between abolitionism, led in key ways by AfricanAmericans, and the paranoid fears of southern slave-holders, who were increasingly obsessed with antisla-very agitation. At the heart of those fears lay thespecter of Haiti, the possibility of a “nuclear retribu-tion” (p. 81) on the part of slaves. “Ironically,” Davisconcludes, “by continually overreacting to a somewhatneutral, complacent, and racist North, Southern mili-tants created an antislavery North in the sense thatmany Northerners felt personally and justifiablythreatened by an undemocratic Slave Power” (p. 90).The slaveholders’ increasingly militant stance ulti-mately led to their own destruction.

Davis proves here that his mind is as subtle andvigorous as ever. This reader eagerly awaits moreworks from the greatest living historian of comparativeslavery.

PHILIP D. MORGAN

Johns Hopkins University

HAROLD HOLZER. Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speechthat Made Abraham Lincoln President. New York:Simon and Schuster. 2004. Pp. 338. $25.00.

Harold Holzer has done more than produce a bookabout a neglected Abraham Lincoln speech; he hasshown Lincoln delivering it, close up, impressing anaudience of staunch antislavery men, most of whomopposed making citizens of those they wished toemancipate. Had Lincoln failed to gain their support,his party might not have nominated him for thepresidency.

The story has one complication. Shortly after Lin-coln arrived in New York, he learned that the locationof his speech had been changed from abolitionistHenry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklynto New York’s Cooper Union building. The informa-tion unsettled Lincoln. What he had prepared “for Mr.Beecher’s church folks” would never work for a gen-eral Republican audience. To one of his hosts hecomplained, “I must re-write my address in the main”(p. 73). Throughout the weekend, Lincoln revised.

On Monday night, February 28, 1860, Lincolnbrought his new draft to a partially filled but excitedauditorium. Straightaway he assaulted Stephen Doug-las, who believed the Constitution’s framers favoredslavery’s extension into the territories; Lincoln, bycounting their votes on earlier and later slavery ques-tions, showed the framers’ overwhelming opposition toslavery’s extension. In the second segment of hisspeech, Lincoln discussed the issues dividing Northand South. Since neither side could recognize themerit of the other’s position, the status quo was theonly alternative to conflict. Lincoln concluded bycalling on his party to reaffirm its policy of containingslavery, to resist compromise, and to fight to reserveAmerica’s new territories for free men.

The evening’s event concluded, Holzer follows Lin-coln on a midnight visit to the New York Tribune toensure the accurate typesetting of his speech. He

accompanies him on his unanticipated eleven-dayspeechmaking tour throughout New England; then hefollows him home, where Lincoln imagines himselfpresident while meticulously editing the pamphletversion of his Cooper Union Address.

Holzer’s book is powerful because it raises manyissues about Cooper Union’s role in Lincoln’s presi-dential campaign. Lincoln’s New York speech may ormay not have made him president, but his words wereimportant, and we do not know why his audience wasso receptive to them. If, in fact, he went East “to createa sensation in the national media” (p. 86), did thedelivery or content of his words make him sensational?What if Lincoln had caught the flu and depended on aless dynamic speaker to read his speech, whose wideprint distribution was planned before he delivered it?How much weaker would have been its impact?

Many readers will wonder whether Lincoln’s audi-ence estimated him to be a radical or moderateRepublican. Holzer declares that Lincoln’s addresswas “conservative in tone, but liberal in message” (p.139), “an ingenious attempt to make Republican prin-ciples appear nonthreatening” (p. 233). But to whichprinciples does Holzer refer? Containment, not aboli-tion, of slavery was the keystone of Republican policy.What made Lincoln’s vision more progressive, morethreatening, than his party’s?

On the content of Lincoln’s original speech, one canonly speculate. He went to New York to campaign forthe presidency, as Holzer tells us, but since he neverspoke at Beecher’s church, his revisions become im-portant. If Lincoln had expected the New York audi-ence to be more moderate than Beecher’s, he mightwell have softened his prose, then hardened it when hetoured the more liberal New England states. Had hespoken successfully to Brooklyn’s more liberal audi-ence, then his original speech, if more strident than hisrevision, might have disappointed his moderate party.

Questions about the Cooper Union Address cannotapply to Lincoln’s more famous but less significantspeeches: the Gettysburg Address and the SecondInaugural Address. Had Lincoln made different cere-monial speeches at Gettysburg and at his SecondInauguration, the course of history would have re-mained unchanged. Had he made a different politicalspeech in New York—one too radical or too tame—the presidency could have gone to another man. Thislast point may or may not bear scrutiny, but no one canever again write about Lincoln’s rise to the presidencywithout coming to grips with it. Holzer’s superb assess-ment of the Cooper Union Address’s context, purpose,and consequence will therefore be a touchstone forfuture scholarship on the election of 1860.

BARRY SCHWARTZ

University of Georgia

THOMAS J. GOSS. The War within the Union HighCommand: Politics and Generalship during the CivilWar. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: UniversityPress of Kansas. 2003. Pp. xx, 300. $34.95.

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