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North Carolina Office of Archives and History Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 by John Ashworth Review by: Thaddeus Smith The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 73, No. 4 (OCTOBER 1996), p. 499 Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and History Stable 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 of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of 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 extend access 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 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic. Vol. 1: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850by John Ashworth

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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

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