Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

The Meaning of Slavery in the North by David Roediger; Martin H. BlattReview by: Joanne Pope MelishJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 762-763Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124805 .

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JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

The Meaning of Slavery in the North. Edited by David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt. Labor in America. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998. Pp. 224. $40.00.)

The Meaning of Slavery in the North presents substantially revised papers delivered at the twelfth Lowell Conference on Industrial History by the same name held at the Lowell National Historical Park in June of 1993. The conference seems to have had a modest and carefully circumscribed goal. According to co-editor Martin H. Blatt, its organizer as chief of cultural resources and historian at the park in 1993, "The central point of the conference was to demonstrate the interconnections between the slave South and the industrial North" (xiv). On the other hand, Dan Georgakas, editor of the Garland series, Labor in America, of which The Meaning of Slavery in the North is the fourth volume, concludes his forward to this volume by stating that the major contribution of the published collection lies in "demonstrating that the institution of slavery and the psychology it generated were always national in character" (iv). These visions are not quite the same, and while the collection faithfully carries out the former task in most respects, its engagement with the latter is somewhat problem- atic.

The eight conference papers published here engage several important debates very effectively. Five of them address different aspects of the complementary economic dependency of northern industry and southern slavery. Ronald Bailey shows how participation in the slave trade and allied commerce fueled New England's textile industry, which became the linchpin of an American economy whose growth thus "directly depended on the fruits of the labor of slaves" (19). Although slavery and industrial development were widely thought to be incompatible, Larry K. Menna shows how southern Whigs could see economic diversification and a self- sufficient South as crucial to the survival of slavery. Myron O. Stachiw and Thomas H. O'Connor discuss aspects of the complicity of northern cotton manufacturers in the slave system of cotton production; Stachiw describes the northern manufacture of "negro cloth" worn by southern slaves, while O'Connor examines the complex attitudes of northern industrialists, "men on a tightrope" balancing proslavery and antislavery forces (47).

Three papers concern aspects of antislavery activism. John R. McKivigan shows how northern churches, far from being in the antislavery vanguard, rejected the abolitionist position and, after the Civil War, maintained their own discriminatory practices. Carolyn Williams, on the other hand, demonstrates the positive connections between religious liberalism and feminist abolitionism in the lives of four well-known female

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abolitionists. Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven discusses women's literary approaches to antislavery activism.

Alone among the contributors to the volume, Alexander Saxton engages the question of the production of racial meaning. Here he provides a synthesis of his argument in The Rise and Fall of the White Race (1990) on the role of blackface minstrelsy in disseminating "compelling images of democracy as necessarily white," and in infusing "the Free Soil insurgency and even the antislavery cause itself with white racism" (169).

The eight essays (and the conference/volume title) assume that "slavery" is southern, ignoring the existence of slavery in the North itself before 1820; in his excellent introduction, Robert L. Hall corrects this omission by offering a short history of chattel slavery in the northern states before introducing the articles that follow. He also notes gracefully that the struggle of emancipated blacks in the North "is not a story confronted directly by the essays in this volume" (xvii). But the absence of both northern slavery and free African Americans in the essays seems to undercut Georgakas's claim that the volume addresses the "national character" of slavery. The historical relationship between northern whites and northern slaves and former slaves surely must have had some influence on how antebellum whites made meaning of southern slavery-and contemplated prospective southern black freedom. The absence of northern free blacks in these pages also implies that the only significant antebellum black presence was in southern slave quarters, or that southern slavery had no meaning for northern blacks, or that any meaning they made of it is unimportant. In his "Afterword: Why Douglass Knew," co-editor David Roediger offers an important corrective by invoking Frederick Douglass, a southern slave transplanted to the world of northern commerce, as "ideally situated to penetrate the subtleties and contradictions of slavery's simultaneous national presence and differing sectional meanings" (179). Of course, as much as he "made himself a spokesperson and a symbol of free blacks"(180), southern ex-slave Douglass effaces as well as embodies northern free black experience. This is a useful collection that succeeds admirably in dismantling the facile opposition between antebellum North and South. In dispelling one set of assumptions, however, it may foster others that could profitably be interrogated.

Joanne Pope Melish is visiting scholar in American Civilization at Brown University and the author of Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860.

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