Upload
review-by-thaddeus-smith
View
214
Download
2
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
North Carolina Office of Archives and History
Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1: Commerce andCompromise, 1820-1850 by John AshworthReview by: Thaddeus SmithThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1996), p. 499Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521479 .
Accessed: 17/06/2014 23:31
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
North Carolina Office of Archives and History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The North Carolina Historical Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 188.72.127.119 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:31:28 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Book Reviews 499
not profess to be historians but servants of them. Clio's servants have many tasks, and
Historical Consciousness celebrates one group of them.
Alexander Moore
South Carolina Historical Society
Alexander Moore
Slaver/, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850. By John Ashworth. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Preface, acknowl
edgments, introduction, conclusion, appendix, index. Pp. xii, 520. $19.95, paper; $64.95, cloth.)
John Ashworth's work is the first of a two-volume monograph on slavery and capitalism as they relate to the development of the Second Party System and the origins of the
Civil War in nineteenth-century America. Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 is
best classified as a revisionist study: its uniqueness lies in Ashworth's redefinition or expan sion of such familiar Marxist terms as class, class consciousness, and class conflict. For
example, Ashworth defines enslaved African Americans as a class. The constant
threat of individual as well as collective black resistance in the South forced southern
planters/statesmen to defend the existence and the extension of the institution westward.
In essence, slavery became a positive alternative to northern wage labor. Though often
at odds with the common definitions of such general terms, Ashworth's redefinitions are
necessary to understand the impact of the political tension created in such issues as
the 1820 Missouri debate, the Nullification crisis, and the Free-Soil movement. The Civil
War, Ashworth concludes, was an inevitable conflict between the agrarian South and
the capitalist North.
Ashworth maintains that the Civil War was a bourgeois revolution driven by class con
flict between those who supported wage labor and those who defended slave labor. As a
consequence, much of the sectional conflict in the nineteenth century is the difference
between capitalist and slave mode of production. While the book does not necessarily
challenge the traditional Marxist interpretation of this period, it does provide a different
and exciting insight into the crucial role of enslaved African Americans as active parti
cipants in historical change. This study is highly recommended reading for Old South
and African American scholars seeking to understand the relationship between Ameri
can slave resistance, northern wage labor ideology, and the development of nineteenth
century capitalism.
Thaddeus Smith
Middle Tennessee State University
Thaddeus Smith
In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern
Literature. By Susan J. Tracy. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Acknowledg
ments, introduction, conclusion, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. ix, 307. $42.50.)
Arguing that literature represents one of many ways in which "people in power institu
tionalize their ideas," Susan J. Tracy examines antebellum southern literature to demon
strate that "the proslavery argument concerns gender and class relations as well as race
relations." Tracy explores both the characteristics and roles of female, black, and lower
class white characters in "historical romance" novels written by George Tucker, James
Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverly
VOLUME LXXIII • NUMBER 4 • OCTOBER 1996
This content downloaded from 188.72.127.119 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 23:31:28 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions