“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.”
—Edmund Burke

The better part of a century ago, the great scholar A.E. Housman observed that most of the new books that came across his desk served no purpose whatever “except to interrupt our studies.” This is certainly the case today with the vast literature in American history. And, generally speaking, the more prestigious the publisher and the institution of higher education after the author’s name, the more useless the book is.

That is not true, however, in regard to the work in review, which exhibits truly what many dust jackets proclaim falsely: original research and insight and real “relevance” in pursuit of the historian’s duty to make the past comprehensible and usable. That is, Proslavery cuts through existing conventions and old propaganda and uncovers fresh and truthful aspects of that great middle era of American history which preceded the Civil War. What Tise has discovered will disappoint and demoralize many, I suspect, but a society which engages in convenient forgetfulness and comforting distortion about critical aspects of its past is at least as deluded and in need of therapy as an individual who does so.

It is not too much to say that what Tise brings to light suggests the need for major revisions in American intellectual and religious history, as they have been commonly recounted. And, though unintended, the book also creates a new and interesting perspective on the genealogy of the American right and left, whatever they may be. Nor does it detract from the credit of the author that the evidence he adduces has always been obvious in the historical record for anyone who has eyes to see that it really should not be surprising. Because American historians, in general, are incapable of thinking except along the lines of conventions that have been prefabricated for them, and often look without seeing, it is always an achievement to break through their orthodoxies. For the evidence presented here has not been so much unknown as it has been deliberately thrust from conscious recognition.

To place this book among the many books on slavery, we need to look closely at its time period, its intellectual terrain, and its geographical focus. The time period is what Tise calls the “neglected period” of proslavery thinking, before the political intensification of the issue in the mid-decades of the 19th century (though he overlaps both ways when useful). It is an era covered from the other, antislavery, side by David Brion Davis in his superb Slavery in the Age of Revolution. This leads us to what many will find an unexpected intellectual terrain and geographical focus. To put an elaborately developed description succinctly, Tise finds every phase of the intellectual defense of black slavery fully developed in the North among the most respectable thinkers at a period before the South had even been prodded into any militant consciousness on the issue.

He finds this among conservative Northerners, if we define conservatives as persons who were alarmed by the French Revolution into developing a defense for traditional society. (And we must remember, unpalatable as the truth may be, that the subordination of the black people into a laboring caste was a long-established and pervasive tradition in the United States, and indeed throughout the New World, by the end of the 17th century.)

But the most shocking part of the findings for moderns will be the prominent role played by the Northern clergy in the full development of the articulated defense of Negro slavery in the United States as a part of the accepted order of things. For moderns, the unchristian nature of slavery seems self-evident. But, alas, this is not much more than provincialism in time. Antislavery is not biblical; it is a quite recent notion, which draws its impetus from “modernization.”

It is true that the abolition movement rested in considerable part upon religious impulses as they developed from the intellectual and social ferment of the Northern form of evangelicalism during the 19th century, when a new and very American synthesis was made between democracy and Christianity. But it is also true that the greater part of the orthodox clergy in the North, at least at the beginning, opposed abolitionism strenuously. (Sympathetic historians of antislavery have always known that the abolitionists’ hardest battles were their early ones, in the North.) The opponents of abolition among the Northern clergy were not simply the musty standpatters—they were often among the ablest, most articulate, and most creative leaders of their denominations. And they were found in all of the major Protestant denominations, as well as among Catholics and Jews (to the extent that they were present in those days).

By influence and by migration to the South these clergymen provided the South with a ready-made defense when the time came. As Tise sees it—if I read him rightly—the South emerged from the Revolution basically JefFersonian in its political ideals, despite its social structure. It accepted slavery as a kind of disagreeable necessity that had grown up, but did not undertake a philosophical defense, in part because it would have been in obvious conflict with its Jeffersonianism, in part because it had not been until the 1830’s prodded into the need for any articulate defense.

In other words, for Tise the history of early 19th-century America is marked by a reactionary anti-egalitarianism which rises in the North and spreads to the South. There cannot be any legitimate quarrel with the evidence that he has accumulated, though, of course, historians can and doubtless will quarrel about the import and the perspective. Indeed, I must part company with the perspective. For Tise, the development of an articulated conservatism at this period constitutes a repudiation of the egalitarianism of the American Revolution, and is therefore reactionary. But he greatly overestimates the egalitarian and especially the antislavery implications of both the Revolution and Jeffersonianism. That is, he makes assumptions about the egalitarianism of the Revolution that may not be defensible and may never have been accepted by the persons he thinks repudiated them. One can repudiate the tendencies of the French Revolution without in any way betraying the American.

By overestimating the antislavery element in the American Revolution, he portrays abolitionism as less of an innovation than it was, and the defense of slavery (which by his own and much other evidence was traditional) as more innovative than it was. Nor was there any real incompatibility between Jeffersonianism and the defense of slavery. The defense of slavery appeared in the South earliest and strongest precisely among the strictest Jeffersonians, and was not unknown among Northern Jeffersonians. If there had never been any French Revolution, the defense of slavery in America would have still taken the same course of reasoning from biblical and traditional authorities, bolstered by states rights, since these were the native intellectual matter of Americans.

For Tise, then, the Northern thinkers who defended slavery constituted a kind of counterrevolutionary conspiracy which defended the existing system of black bondage because it deplored all egalitarian and revolutionary tendencies. But this is to set up the situation the wrong way and to shift the burden of innovation from the abolitionists to the preservers of the status quo, which tends to interfere with a proper understanding of both groups.

He sees proslavery sentiment in the North as closely linked to the sternest forms of conservative New England federalism, which, alarmed by the French Revolution, repudiated the American Revolution and moved toward the consolidation and defense of hierarchical, traditional, religious society. There is a good deal of truth there, but I think I could very easily, by looking at other evidence, find a genealogy within New England federalism for abolitionism as well. Certainly the Southern defenders of slavery usually saw this as the case.

To put it another way, while correctly identifying the existence of vigorous proslavery sentiment in the North, he mislocates its center and considerably underestimates its overall weight. By using some of his own evidence and other sources, I could create a convincing argument that while certain Northern federalists did indeed defend slavery on conservative grounds, the defense of slavery was even stronger among the Jeffersonians of the North than it was among the federalists.

The Jeffersonians, after all, were dedicated to states rights and strict construction of the Constitution as it stood and to an economic philosophy that coincided with the South’s. John C. Calhoun at the height of his career of sectional defense of the South had a considerable number of admirers in the North. These were not among the “conservatives” (in Northern terms) but among the most zealous “liberals”—for instance, the young radical, Orestes Brownson, and Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, historian of the New York “Locofocos.” (Of course we must realize that a “liberal” in those days was not the same thing as a “progressive” in Whiggish and modern terminology.)

Thus Tise tends to suggest that Northerners who sympathized with the South before and during the Civil War were conspiratorial federalist millionaires who believed in the Bavarian Illuminati. There were some people of that type who favored the Confederacy, but in fact, by my reading of history, people of that type were far, far more likely to be abolitionists and Republicans. Southern sympathizers like Franklin Pierce, Clement Vallandigham, and others came overwhelmingly out of a Jeffersonian background. This is clear even in much of Tise’s own evidence. Such slavery defenders as Charles J. Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, James K. Paulding of New York, and John Mitchel, the Irish revolutionary, were Democrats and do not fit the stereotype of reactionary New England clerics. A considerable portion of both the “liberals” and the “conservatives” of the North defended the South’s regime, right up to and, in some cases, even after the rumble of guns in Charleston harbor.

To take this analysis a bit further, we have to accept the truth that a 19th-century “liberal” was not a progressive in the modern sense. The liberal elements in American society, those most strongly in favor of democracy and equality for white men, were also, generally speaking, the strongest supporters of white supremacy, of limited government, and of traditional (antiegalitarian) social arrangements, and looked to the South as their political mainstay. On the other hand, the “conservative” elements—those in favor of social hierarchy and economic privilege—in the North were also the “progressives” who wanted forward movement in society, by government action if necessary, and found the South a political and social impediment.

It would be tremendously comforting for the modern liberal if majority rule, racial egalitarianism, and social progressivism always went together, and indeed much of accepted American history is written as if they did. But, in fact, such has seldom been the case in the reality of living, breathing America—whether in the pre-Civil War era, in the Progressive era, or, dare we say, in the present. Historically it is quite clear that enthusiasm for the common man has often gone hand-in-glove with white supremacy, and racial egalitarianism has often been accompanied by indifference or contempt for the common man.

I am sure that most will find this even more discouraging than Tise’s perspective and that many will not and cannot accept it. It does not particularly discourage me, because I do not expect history to be convenient and pleasing. The lessons it teaches are usually a good deal sterner than the inevitable triumph of democracy and progress. As I sometimes tell students who really want to know: History is like life—it is a good deal tougher, more complicated, and more ambivalent than television.

It was really not part of the author’s purpose to provide a theory of the origins of the American right and left, except insofar as he adopts certain assumptions about the nature of the American Revolution. It would thus be unfair of me to quarrel with him in this regard. Indeed, he has given us, even if unintentionally, much food for thought in regard to the historical development of the right and left in America, a highly problematic intellectual puzzle which happens to interest me, and for which I believe no adequate theory has ever been provided.

Of course, a great deal depends on how you define such terms as liberal and conservative, and when dealing with them historically one is always shooting at a moving target. Such questions cannot be easily settled, and it may even be that it is impossible. But it does seem to me that the evidence of Proslavery has to be taken into account by anyone who takes an honest interest in constructing a genealogy of American conservatism.

How should American conservatives relate to the Civil War, for instance? I do not believe this question has ever been answered to any honest man’s satisfaction. Was it conservative to defend the South and its inherited ways, its counterrevolution against modernization? Or was it conservative to preserve the Union, as did Mr. Lincoln, even at the expense of the most revolutionary acts and program in American history and with the enthusiastic approval of Karl Marx?

Personally, I have never been able to comprehend how any conservative who had any intelligent appreciation of the real texture (rather than just the theory) of American experience could fail to feel a surge of sympathy with the boys in gray. I can well understand how one could admire William Lloyd Garrison, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner. But I cannot understand how or why one could admire them and still call himself a conservative. It takes nothing less than the sophistry of the Straussian political scientists to answer this paradox adequately. I know, however, that decent folks disagree with me, and I remain open to argument. As I said, history is not easy, and it may not be possible ever to settle such questions.

Perhaps the most significant thing about this book is that it is part of an as-yet-unrecognized and unlabeled shift of focus in American history writing from the South to the North. Most of the historical literature, and of the common understanding in regard to our Civil War (still the largest and most critical episode in American history) has proceeded on the working assumption that the South constituted a peculiar minority, standing athwart the preordained mainstream of American development. Thus, when one had explained satisfactorily the origin and nature of the peculiarity, one had explained how the immense and bloody civil conflict at the center of our history came about.

Though such an approach has long been axiomatic and unexamined, there are several things wrong with it. To begin with, it makes little sense to treat the South, at any time prior to the Civil War, as a minority. In territory, population, and political and cultural influence the South was an equal and often a preponderant part of American development during all this period.

But the main flaw with the approach is that it undertook to explain the peculiar while leaving the standard of normalcy undefined and undescribed. It was simply assumed that the North was a kind of universal and unquestionable norm against which all else was to be measured. (This is the same attitude with which Americans approach relations with foreign nations.) But the norm itself was never postulated, which gave a strange context to examinations of the South, which was deemed to be un-American but was always measured with an elastic ruler. Proslavery, along with another fine recent book, Anne Norton’s Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture, at last shifts the attention to where it should have been all along—to describing the nature and development of the North. While they do not provide all answers, these books ask the right questions, and open new ground for more realistic ways of looking at a vitally important period in American history.

This historical revisionism is important not because it revises old sectional controversy, and not because it makes it no longer possible to comfortably assign all evil to the region below the Potomac, segregated from a shining and uncontaminated America—though that is pleasing enough. Rather, it is important because the study of the antebellum North will eventually allow us to know for the first time the true lineaments of development of what became the American mainstream. If there is any young historian out there who wants to know where the cutting edge is in American historical understanding, it is there—the new and coming field of Northern history.

[Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, by Larry E. Tise (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press) $40.00]