Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 24, 1989 by M.E. Bradford

Prosla very. A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-184, by Larry E. Tise (University of Georgia, 568 pp., $40)

FOR REASONS that have more to do with contemporary politics and the intellectual fashions of our time than with an interest in history per se, we have experienced in the past two decades a veritable explosion of commentary on the phenomenon of American Negro slavery. Indeed, it is now clear that there have been too many of these books-that they are so numerous and so predictable that they actually get in the way of serious consideration of their subject. This literature exists primarily to give to those who write it an opportunity to demonstrate their own moral refinement-as "ethical proof" of their right to instruct those benighted conservatives of this latter day such as do not, in retrospect, hate slavery to the point of distraction, as if it were an infamy still among us and a key to contemporary policy disputes. It is easy to lose patience with such a superfluity of painless rectitude. We can gather from its noisy display no sense of the "peculiar institution" as part of the overall pattern of American life at earlier moments in our national history, nor any explanation of why our forefathers were unable to agree about how to regard slavery, once it was established in their midst.

Larry Tise's Proslavery.- A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 is an exception to the foregoing generalization. In refusing to simplify the history of black bondage, this book discourages focus upon the practice of slaveholding by the variety of self-righteous ideologue who values his knowledge of the past only as a means by which he can impinge upon the present; and also discourages the kind of bigoted simplicity that finds in the South (or Southern habits of mind) the source of every national problem.

For in Tise's estimation, "the adoption of a proslavery ideology in the South in the 1830s marks not a departure from the rest of the nation, either ideologically or psychically, but rather a full adoption of what may have been at the time America's strongest sociopolitical and cultural philosophy and tradition." By this reference to an anti-egalitarian heritage he invokes a Federalist/Whig version of hierarchical European or Burkean conservatism, which grew to prominence among us in reaction to the demagogy of Patriot rhetoric. Tise maintains that proslavery thought in its mature flowering was not just a Southern reaction to abolitionist pressure but "the creation of Americans, not Southerners alone, [one that] expressed . . . what were at the time the attitudes, values, and beliefs of a vast number of Americans-North and South." Indeed, Tise regards this social philosophy as one facet of a larger American conservatism that emerged after a brief interlude of hyperbole about aboriginal equality among men. In examining several hundred American social thinkers, his question is, "At what point and by what process did Americans reject the theory of natural rights?"

Tise argues that sucb a rejection occurred, that it spread early in New England, that its dissemination throughout the country owed much to the influence of literate Yankee clergymen, and that its antecedents and connections reached far back into earlier European thought. Southerners were not "unique" in their apology for slavery as a "positive good" or in ing that, once among us, it was a "necessary evil." Yet in demythologizing a corner of our collective past, Tise depends upon other political myths in which he still has faith. He posits a "golden age" in which most Americans believed in the metaphysi"human rights," as we now understand that term, during which they were committed to more than the equality of citizens before a law with limited scope: a kind of incidental political equality among freemen which they had already enjoyed before the ministers of George III began to plot against them.

However, all sorts of Americans who were not convinced of generic human equality nevertheless found fault in the outright possession of one man by another: John Jay, Rufus King, Oliver Ellsworth, Gouverneur Morris, to mention but a few; while others who defended some version of the rights of man also held that it was "dreadful," "foolish," and "Cowardly" to generalize about the possibility of future emancipation: Thomas Sumter, Patrick Henry, Charles Pinckney, Christopher Gadsden, George Mason, and John Taylor of Caroline. As for the Fathers and Framers who had their doubts about the natural rights of man, the truth is that their number was legion. No perfectly egalitarian interval, in either practice or belieg can be discovered in the pattern of our collective past-certainly not between 1773 and 1800.

Leaving aside what the signers intended by the second sentence of the Declaration and the troublesome question of that document's relation to the Constitution, there is a plethora of evidence that, like James Duane of New York, many influential Americans of their generation thought a broad theory of equality "a feeble support" of their country's cause and concurred with Caleb Strong of Massachusetts that "inequality . . . arises from the nature of things." They were, with Samuel Chase of Maryland, persuaded that "the rights of man can be derived only from the conventions of society," and of the view of Theodore Sedgwick of the Bay State that "there are grades in society [that] are necessary to [its] existence. This is a selfevident proposition [i.e., as opposed to what appears in the Declaration]." Moreover, it is probably true that (as the Marquis of Chastellux maintained after visiting among us in 1780-1782) the "halfphilosophers" of the new American regime had in mind, when they spoke of "the people," only freeholding citizens: landholders who participated in government and "had a few Negroes."