Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture by David Brion DavisReview by: Kenneth H. WinnJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 312-313Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123797 .

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312 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

in the states at the founding. This penetrating essay will stand, among other expressions and testimonials, as a reminder of the excellent scholarship of which the profession has been deprived by Mr. Botein's untimely death.

University of Maryland, College Park Herman Belz

From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture. By David Brion Davis.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. x, 305. $29.95.)

Frequently, prolific writers at an advanced stage in their career pause to reflect on their intellectual past and to pull together their scattered writings into a single volume. In looking back on the trail of essays he has written during the last three decades, David Brion Davis sees an unplanned logic to the pattern of his work. Davis observes that according to classical account "slavery first appeared in human history . .. when warriors realized that it would be more advantageous to secure the services of captives than to kill them or eat them" (vii). In a somewhat parallel fashion, Davis has found that a personal preoccupation with violence and aggression led him, by various twists, from an early interest in homicide to his well-known and highly lauded work on slavery-hence the title of this collection.

All of the nineteen essays brought together in this volume have been previously published, and the most important of them will already be familiar to most of this journal's readers. Within the four general thematic sections- violence, the West, loyalty and identity, and slavery and antislavery-Davis has included such frequently cited and reprinted essays as "The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America," "Some Themes of Counter- subversion," "The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-

slavery Thought," and "Some Ideological Functions of Prejudice." Perhaps the harshest charge that can be leveled against this book is that a good bit of it was twenty to thirty years out of date on the day of its publication. Nine of these essays (by far the most substantial) first appeared between 1954 and 1966. In the meantime a lot of monographs have spilled over the

historiographical dam. Such once popular themes as the "paranoid" fear of conspiracy have now fallen out of fashion among historians. In a sense, many of these essays are like old friends from whom we have gradually grown apart. Still, some of these older pieces--"Some Ideological Functions of Prej- udice," for example-remain useful, and one can admire the skill with which Davis crafted them.

Davis' more recent essays, by contrast, tend to be meditations on the work of other historians. Five of them originally appeared as book reviews in the New York Review of Books. Others include a historiographic explication of works on slavery since World War II (containing an interesting account of the academic climate of the 1950s) and an imaginative and wide-ranging essay on the American family.

In sum, for historians not already familiar with Davis' early essays there is remedial work to be done, and they might begin here. The rest of us,

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BOOK REVIEWS 313

however, may safely pass on, to eagerly await his forthcoming volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation.

Washington University/ Kenneth H. Winn Missouri Historical Society

Andri and FranCois Andre Michaux. By Henry Savage, Jr., and Elizabeth

J. Savage. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Pp. ix, 435. Illustrations. $27.50.)

Andre Michaux and his son, Francois Andre Michaux, are familiar names to historians of the trans-Appalachian frontier. Until the publication of this excellent biography, however, they have remained rather undelineated figures known primarily for their published journals and, in the case of the elder Michaux, a brief interlude of political intrigue.

Born of humble parentage in France in 1746, Andre Michaux became a dedicated botanist and silviculturist who traveled in Europe and the Middle East before being sent to North America by the French government to col- lect and send back appropriate seeds, plants, and trees. France during this

period was particularly anxious to strengthen its national forests, which had been depleted by the intensive military and commercial shipbuilding of the

eighteenth century. Arriving in New York in 1785 with his young son, Francois Andre, he spent most of the next decade traveling from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River and from Hudson Bay to Florida in the furtherance of his assignment.

In 1793, after making arrangements for an expedition to the trans-

Mississippi West under the auspices of the American Philosophical Society, Michaux abruptly changed his plans. Acting as an agent of France's Citizen Edmund Charles Genet in the latter's efforts to raise a force of American frontiersmen to launch an attack on Spanish Louisiana, he traveled westward to meet with prominent leaders in the trans-Appalachian region, including George Rogers Clark, Benjamin Logan, and Isaac Shelby. With the collapse of this project, Michaux quietly returned to his botanical studies. Although willing to aid his native land in the political realm, his main interests clearly were in the study of the natural world. Some of the results of his efforts are contained in two published works he prepared shortly before his death in 1802.

After receiving valuable training and experience through accompanying and assisting his father, Francois Andre had gone back to France for an educa- tion in 1790 at the age of twenty. Returning to North America as a silviculturist and botanist twice during the early 1800s at the request of the French government, the younger Michaux traveled through New York, Penn- sylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. As readers of the Michauxs' published journals quickly discern, the son was the better recorder of the contemporary scene. A significant result of his forest studies was the publication of the landmark work, The North American Sylvas.

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