First Take on Three

A quick critique of the first three books I've finished:

Masters of Small Worlds, McCurry

Seeking to explain why yeoman farmers in South Carolina would align with the planter class. A strong case that the planters promoted a social hierarchy based on engendered and racialized household mastery which incorporated an equally engendered evangelical world view. The view was that the yeoman farmer was the master of his poor little household as much as the planter was master of his rich large one and together they shared a status of "freeman". The yeoman farmer mastered his wife, children and whatever slaves he might own, the planter did the same and this was analogous to God's mastery over all. Threats to slavery were threats to any master's dominion no matter how large or small, rich or poor it was. Threats to slavery were threats to God's mastery. The message was distributed through the pulpit and through the local militia organizations.

Based on an amazing amount of research into church and civic records. I wondered though, how the Nullification Crisis still ended up in a loss for the nullifers and why the planters still felt it necessary to suppress the anti-secession vote as much as they did. I would have liked to learn where, when and why the "we're all freemen together" message didn't result in the political success the planters hoped for.

Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson

I read this book first about a year ago. It was one of the initiators of this path I'm on. Through examination of the antebellum New Orleans civil court cases of slave sales gone bad, Johnson puts the focus on the three people involved in a sale: seller (in this case, a trader), slave and buyer. The seller creates an imaginary slave to fit the buyer's fantasy of a slave. The slave, caught in the middle, is forced to embody that imaginary slave - healthy, fertile, compliant - struggles to determine what buyer poses the least risk and manipulate his/her self-presentation to match that buyer's fantasy. The slave suffers with the inevitable failure to either make the right determination before the sale, successful manipulate the sale or successfully fulfill the buyer's fantasy afterwards. And this after having already suffered being torn away from family and community when initially purchased by the trader.

What initially struck me was an explanation of how the fantasy of owning slaves dangled hope in front of the nonslaveholder of the opportunity to move up to the slaveholding class and become rich. Just as young northern men dreamed of moving west, buying cheap or free land and building a successful farm, young southern men dreamed of buying slaves, building a farm with them out west, seeing their enslaved numbers grow naturally and becoming rich.  

Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman

I hope we don't have to read too much of this one. It's a collection of essays examining the structure of the Constitution and slavery-relevant laws such as the Northwest Ordinance and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793  plus a couple on Thomas Jefferson. He looks at the differing versions and the arguments or nonarguments over each. I've been through the first five chapters and so far there's been no research into any other documentation other than the legislative ones. There's no investigation of the changes in attitudes towards slavery, race, white supremacy, citizenship and so on. In other words, it's flat, dull and repetitve and I've quit reading.