Canada and the United States
tempted to advance Anglo-Saxon culture and the
boundaries of freedom. Not surprisingly, a patina of
racism covered many of the expeditions. The jerrybuilt ventures struggled with inadequate financing,
transportation, supplies, and manpower. Sometimes
the spirit of the men and their leaders catapulted the
ragged bands into brief initial success, before the
almost inevitable collapse forced the half-naked, halfstarved liberators stumbling back to American shores.
Although the flood tide of failed filibusterism ebbed
with the Civil War, May explores the negative legacy:
a severe distrust of the United States in Central
America promoted conservative regimes, anti-American nationalism, and closer bonds with Europe. Commercial relationships suffered, and official U.S. efforts
to acquire additional territory from Mexico and Spain
(Cuba) faltered amid ill will and suspicion. In domestic
polities, advocates of free soil and abolitionism increasingly linked filibustering and the extension of
slavery. May argues that most filibusters hoped their
activities would secure rather than destroy the United
States, yet inadvertently the failure to acquire additional slave lands helped convince the South of the
futility of remaining in the Union.
May has provided a major contribution toward our
understanding of the "underworld" of filibustering.
Extensively grounded in primary sources with broad
recognition of relevant secondary accounts, this wellwritten and well-organized volume offers only bits
about which to quibble (including the press's decision
to omit a bibliography). While agreeing that this was
"an ugly chapter in the nation's past" (p. 296), some
historians may take exception to May's legalistic definition of these sometimes idealistic and often pathetic
figures as "criminals." Others may question the notion
that "had Americans never filibustered, the Union
might have weathered the storm [of sectional strife]"
(p. 279). Scholars will welcome May's decision to write
a different kind of book about filibustering. By combining social and cultural with political and diplomatie
history, he moves the discourse in new directions. The
filibusters may have been "rascals" and "pirates," but
in an ongoing age of American empire, they should not
be forgotten.
JOHN M. RELOHLAVEK
University of South Florida
EDWARD E. BAPTIST. Creating an Old South: Middle
Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002.
Pp. xiv, 392. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
Edward E. Baptist has rendered a provocative analysis
that is likely to force a rethinking of the way the
antebellum slave plantation system operated on the
southern frontier. He argues that the planters from the
Chesapeake and the Carolinas who settled middle
Florida did not merely replicate the system they were
familiar with. The new environment, with all its daunting challenges, shaped and molded the plantation
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1149
system that emerged there. In making this argument,
Baptist analyzes the challenges facing three distinct
groups: planters, white yeomen, and African-American
slaves. The planters, determined to acquire riches and
dominate the political economy that emerged, rode
roughshod over their slaves and used the mechanisme
of power to overwhelm the yeomen. They ripped their
slaves from community and kin without regard to the
psychological toll that such a separation would involve
and moved them to a harsher physical environment
than they were accustomed to, an environment that
itself challenged the slaves' ability to adjust. Planters
were to discover, however, the limits to their ability to
"rule imperiously" (p. 102), and both yeomen and
slaves came to influence the shape and form of the
society that emerged.
In the book's opening chapters, Baptist demonstrates the early advantage that planters had over
yeomen. By gaining influence over certain important
offices, planters were able to control access to land
ownership, and thus yeomen found themselves at a
distinct disadvantage, sometimes losing land they had
homesteaded to speculators who got to the land office
before them—speculators often associated with those
in control. Disdainful of the countrymen who came to
the Florida frontier, planters assumed a superiority
over them, and this attitude was all pervasive. Planters
brooked no affront to their honor, but they had a
carefully scripted procedure to follow should it be
necessary to resort to violente: the duel. However
much they might challenge each other, planters eschewed such a manner of settling disputes with countrymen. Countrymen were to be whipped and beaten,
ridden like horses, but never accorded the honor of a
duel. Countrymen were no less violent, but their
violente took different forms. They engaged in rough
and tumble fights, and pity the poor planter who came
upon a countryman skilled in such techniques.
Even as the planter strutted about the early middle
Florida frontier, dominating the political scene and
assuming the aire of superiority, countrymen challenged them in a variety of ways. For example, Baptist
details the way in which they used folk tales to
undermine the supposed authority of planters. In the
long run, however, planters' own greed undermined
their economie superiority and forced an alliance with
yeomen that united white men politically. Faced with
the collapse of the Union bank and the reality of a
changed political landscape upon achieving statehood,
Florida planters began to link up with the emerging
Whig and Democratie parties and dropped the factionalism that had dominated early Florida.
Slave society on the Florida frontier, meanwhile,
evolved significantly during the same period. One of
the most intriguing aspects of Baptist's study is the way
in which he analyzes the nineteenth-century slave
narratives and the twentieth-century Works Progress
Administration (WPA) slave interviews. In both he
finds a subtext suggesting that slaves taken from the
Old South and brought to the wild Florida frontier
OCTOBER 2003
1150
Reviews of Books
viewed themselves as having been "stolen" from their
families and communities. In the early years, planters
brought a disproportionate number of young males—
who would have been better able to clear the wilderness and establish plantation agriculture—and this
created a less stable and more volatile slave community. But to endure the psychological trauma of relocation, slaves rebuilt families and communities as soon
as they were able and adopted the strategies for
survival that other historians have identified with the
Old South. Baptist asserts that, in the early years on
the Florida frontier, planters had little need for paternalistic justifications for slavery as they reigned with an
iron hand and with little significant opposition. Separated as they were from national politics by their
territorial status, they remained aloof from the debate
over slavery taking shape on the national stage. But as
they endured economic disaster and yellow fever epidemics, they feit their own vulnerability, and statehood
brought more than just a need to accommodate to the
countrymen. It required them to justify and rationalize
slavery. An insightful reading of an old slave's missives
to his mistress demonstrates that there was more
manipulation in them than the latter might have
imagined. James Page, a Baptist slave preacher, was
owned by the powerful Parkhill family and grasped
their perceptions of themselves as kindly masters and
mistresses. He would play the "Sambo" and demonstrate obsequious acquiescence in his enslavement,
but, as Baptist puts it, "Without repeated submission
to indignities, and the writing of carefully worded
letters to 'Miss Harriet,' James Page would have been
unable to preach freely to local black men and women.
The ties that Page carefully cultivated may have also
helped to make divisions of family and community like
those he had witnessed during migration and frontier
crises less likely to occur again" (p. 214).
This is a deeply researched and perceptively argued
study that establishes Baptist as a fine scholar and a
cogent writer. It has much to offer those interested in
both the Old South and in Florida, Texas, and Arkansas. It should spur scholars on to fresh examinations of
slavery on the frontier.
JEANNIE M. WHAYNE
said about race, but some southern apologists for
slavery simply took this story as the biblical rationale
for black enslavement, Africans being the supposed
descendants of Ham. Later verses mention Nimrod,
the grandson of Ham, and tie him to the kingdom of
Babel (Genesis 10: 9-10) and the later confusion of
languages there (Genesis 11: 1-9).
Stephen R. Haynes seeks to elucidate these passages
as they have been interpreted by Bible scholars over
the past two millennia, including early rabbinical commentary and the writing of the Church Fathers in the
first centuries of the common era. What he reveals in
the first quarter of the book is a rich feast of creative
commentary that ranged far afield from the kind of
textual literalism that often characterized later southern readings. Haynes then shifts to American interpretations of the Genesis material, focusing on the views
of southern ministers and proslavery writers. Thomas
Virgin Peterson's Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World
of Whites in the Antebellum South (1978) first laid out
the varied southern applications of the Genesis text to
their proslavery enterprise. Haynes extends Peterson's
analysis, in part by contextualizing southern readings
in the longer history of Genesis interpretation, and he
focuses his attention on the preeminent antebellum
southern Presbyterian minister, Benjamin M. Palmer,
whom, inexplicably, Peterson does not mention.
Haynes also enriches his study by showing how important the concept of honor was to southern interpreters
of Ham's embarrassment of Noah. Here Haynes borrows from and extends the well-known thesis of Bertram Wyatt - Brown's Southem Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).
In his discussion of the use of the story of Noah's
curse to justify slavery in the Old South, Haynes does
not attempt to determine how this biblical tale was
used in conjunction with other scriptural defenses. He
is not unaware that slavery apologists drew from a
variety of Biblical sources, but he does not place the
Ham myth in the larger repertoire of scriptural citations employed by southerners. Other scholars of
southern religion have shown that a wide range of
Biblical verses were used to defend slavery, and Eugene D. Genovese, for example, in A Consuming Fire:
University of Arkansas
The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White
Christian South (1998), argues that many prominent
STEPHEN R. HAYNES. Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slave'''. (Religion in America
southern Bible scholars dismissed the curse of Noah
because it was not literally tied to race. Haynes
mentions Genovese's view but does not explicitly
counter it. Two other books also have a broader
perspective, Mitchell Snay's Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (1993) and
John Patrick Daly's When Slavery Was Called Freedom:
Series.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp.
xiv, 322. $29.95.
Students of American slavery have long noted that
proponents of slavery were wont to use the Bible to
defend that institution, and one of the primary "proof
texts" was the so-called shame of Noah and the sin of
Ham as depicted in Genesis 9: 20-27. Ham saw his
drunken father, Noah, lying naked and told his two
brothers about it. Upon awaking, Noah cursed
Canaan, Ham's son, and said "a servant of servants
shall he [Canaan] be unto his brethren." Nothing was
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Evangelicalism, Proslavely, and the Causes of the Civil
War (2002), the latter too recent for Haynes to have
used. But these books suggest that a fuller understanding of the southern biblical justification of slavery
requires placing the use of Noah's curse in a larger
context of Bible reading and citation. More needs to
be said about who used the Genesis citations primarily,
OCTOBER 2003