The ironies (and absurdities) of slavery in the early American republic

I just finished with Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. The "internal enemy" is a term that whites often used to refer to the slaves in their midst since, as Taylor demonstrates, slave insurrections were a nearly constant fear among Virginia's slaveholders. I would highly recommend the book for those of you who are interested; here I just wanted to mention a few tidbits from the book that stuck out for me and, at the same time, highlight the sometimes highly paradoxical viewpoints that Virginia's slaveholders were forced, either intentionally or not, to maintain in order to preserve an economic system that was a large part of their cultural identity:

• The elimination of primogeniture and entail. These refer to the practices of, respectively, the inheritance by the firstborn child of the entirety of a family's estate and the restriction of inheritance to the family heirs only. When practiced, as they were in colonial America, these laws served to concentrate wealth among a small number of families and, within those families, a small number of powerful individuals. After the American Revolution, these laws were struck down in many of the former colonies, including Virginia. While American lawmakers (including most prominently Thomas Jefferson) felt that the elimination of such laws was more consistent with a republican form of government, it was actually devastating for slave families. In essence, primogeniture and entail prevented wealthy plantation owners from scattering their estates after their deaths. For slaves, this significantly reduced the likelihood that family members would be sold off. With the suppression of these laws after the revolution, wealth was more evenly distributed among whites but, at the same time, the breakup of slave families became easier and much more common.
• Blacks' lack of rights. In 1816, George Boxley hatched a plot to lead about 30 or so slaves (some of which were his own) to freedom in the North as revenge for being passed over for a militia promotion and a seat in the state legislature, both of which he blamed on the state's wealthy, slave holding elite. The plan never materialized, however, and Boxley was eventually arrested. Here's the catch, though: all the witnesses to the treasonous plot were black and therefore barred, by Virginia law, from testifying against a white man! I'll let Taylor (2013: 399) finish the story: "[u]ncertain what to do with Boxley, the authorities kept him in jail until...he escaped after breaking his irons and cutting a passage through the ceiling of his cell...[s]uspicions arose that some powerful local people wanted Boxley gone rather than risk an embarrassing trial that would acquit for lack of evidence." How's that for irony?

References:

Taylor, A (2013). The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. W.W. Norton, New York.

The end of slavery and the Old South

I just finished Bruce Levine's book, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South. Most of what I've read on the Civil War, while not ignoring the southern perspective, is typically written through northern eyes. I therefore found two things particularly interesting in Levine's book:

• Southern opinion was actually quite diverse on the question of succession and the war. The inevitability of succession was by no means shared by all southern whites, and there were several southern-based groups that actively fought against the Confederacy throughout the war. In fact, Robert E. Lee and other Confederate officers were forced to dispatch regiments from the regular army to help with home defense. 
• While most southern (and northern, for that matter) whites shared a common belief in white supremacy, only a select few at the top of the social hierarchy owned most of the slaves. This means that many of the soldiers fighting for the Confederacy were non-slave holders, and as the war dragged on many of these poorer folks developed a deep resentment for the planter elite. They began to wonder why they should fight such a destructive war to preserve an institution that they never had, nor likely ever would, benefit from.

Levine, in his BookTV lecture (you can also check out an NPR interview here), cites a recent national survey in which 50% of Americans polled "deny that slavery was the main cause of the U.S. Civil War." This view is even more prevalent among those below 30 years of age (nearly 3 out of 5). One of the key points of the book, and most of the contemporary sources appear quite clear on this, is that slavery was in fact a major, if not the major, impetus for the war. Other motivating factors, like the defense of state's rights or the maintenance of southern honor, while certainly important to some individuals, were largely concocted by elite slave owners to inspire the non-slave holding majority to participate, or drudged up years later to justify the war in a postbellum society hostile to slavery.

Although I didn't plan it this way, the North Carolina Museum of History is currently exhibiting an original copy of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln issued in September of 1862 and warned the Confederacy of the Union's intention to grant freedom to slaves within areas still in active rebellion. My wife and I stopped by the exhibit yesterday, and two pages of the proclamation (they never have all seven on display at once), written in the hand of one of  Lincoln's secretaries (I would guess either John Hay or John Nicolay, although I have not been able to confirm this), are on display. The museum will also be showing North Carolina's original copy of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery in the United States:

References:

Levine, B (2013). The fall of the house of Dixie: The Civil War and the social revolution the transformed the South. Random House, New York.