Slavery and Emancipation (review)
Paul E. Lovejoy
University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 74, Number 1, Winter 2004/2005,
pp. 532-533 (Review)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/utq.2005.0141
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/180617
Accessed 19 Jun 2017 03:30 GMT
532 letters in canada 2003
Rick Halpern and Enrico Dal Lago, editors. Slavery and Emancipation
Blackwell 2002. xv, 416. US $29.95
This contribution to the series Blackwell Readers in American Social and
Cultural History explores the history of slavery in the anglophone North
America that eventually became the United States. It does not explore the
topic for all of North America and therefore does not consider the role of
the Spanish, French, and Dutch spheres, and indeed neglects Canada. The
book is intended as supplementary readings, including primary sources
and excerpts from selected scholarly contributions, to a general overview
of the subjects of slavery and emancipation, and hence concentrates on
legal, economic, and political factors that shaped the course of American
history.
The book is divided into fourteen sections that highlight the colonial
origins of race and slavery in the anglophone North American context, the
adaptation of enslaved Africans to their coerced environment, the
formation of the ‘master class,’ the impact on the American Revolution on
slavery, the growth of the cotton economy, the ideological and material
world of the planter class, slave resistance in the nineteenth century, the
Civil War, and emancipation. Each section has excerpts from three
documents and one scholarly contribution intended to provide an
overview.
There are many excellent excerpts in this collection, and indeed it is a
useful addition to the literature on North American slavery. The editors
point out that the debate within American historiography on slavery has
centred on the debate over the extent to which plantation slavery was
capitalist or paternalist, and largely focuses on the debate within white
American society over the efficacy of the peculiar institution. As this
collection reflects, slavery was strongly shaped by the development of
plantations in the tidewater region of Virginia and coastal South Carolina.
Moreover, the impact of the American Revolution, the cotton boom, and
the crisis leading to the Civil War are given ample attention.
The collection can be compared with similar anthologies, such as that
edited by Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America
(1999), which consists only of documents with short introductions, and
hence represents well the voices of African-Americans. Taken together,
these two collections contain a considerable body of text for use in teaching
and indeed for reference.
Unfortunately, Slavery and Emancipation suffers from several defects that
detract from its overall contribution. Despite its inclusion in a series
devoted to social and cultural history, the focus largely overlooks the
crucial role of Africans themselves in the shaping of North American
society and culture. The selection from Equiano, for example, ignores the
fact that he may well have been born in South Carolina, not Africa, and
university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5
humanities 533
hence the value of the text is in remembered tradition, not personal
experience. Moreover, Ira Berlin’s interpretation of the African experience,
which is the principal text dealing with African history, is questionable at
best and often simply wrong. A collection such as this would have
benefited from the inclusion of one or more scholarly excerpts from
specialists in African history and diaspora.
The social and cultural history of slavery in North America has to
address issues of cultural origin and specificity that draw on comparative
study of the African diaspora in the context of African and Atlantic history.
A major gap in the volume is the lack of such a perspective, so that topics
focusing on slavery and emancipation in Spanish and French possessions
of mainland North America that eventually became part of the United
States are excluded. There is much more on the study of resistance to
slavery, especially its cultural, religious, and ethnic dimensions, than is
covered in this collection. On balance, the collection tends to reinforce older
interpretations that fail to situate slavery in the United States in the broader
context of the ‘black Atlantic.’ Slavery and Emancipation is a welcome
addition when used in conjunction with other collections of documents and
with scholarly interpretations that are not included in the volume. (PAUL
E. LOVEJOY)
Andrew Mark Eason. Women in God’s Army:
Gender and Equality in the Early Salvation Army
Wilfrid Laurier University Press. xiv, 242. $34.95
From its early days in the 1870s as a Christian mission in London’s East
End, the Salvation Army drew on unconventional measures to attract those
beyond the reach of organized religion. Especially controversial was its use
of female preachers on streets and platforms, a practice inaugurated by its
co-founders, William and Catherine Booth. Notably at variance with the
middle-class gender norms of the day, this principle of sexual equality was
laid down in the Army’s founding documents, elaborated by the leadership, and reiterated by historians.
Drawing on feminist theology with its ‘hermeneutic of suspicion,’
Andrew Mark Eason has re-examined early Salvationist rhetoric about
gender equality and tested it against actual practice during the Army’s first
half-century in England. After a rather tendentious introduction discussing
the methodology (the one instance where the reader is reminded that this
work originated as a master’s thesis), successive chapters examine attitudes
to gender and female preaching within the culture of Victorian evangelicalism, as well as in the writings of Charles Booth and other early male
leaders, most notably Booth’s associate George Scott Railton. Having
established that the leaders, despite their unusual openness to female
university of toronto quarterly, volume 74, number 1, winter 2004/5