| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase. By Roger G. Kennedy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xv + 350 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index. $30.00.

In Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause, Roger Kennedy argues that the failure of "a Southland republic of free and independent yeoman" (p. 73) to take hold after the Louisiana Purchase can be held partially responsible for several hefty problems in American history. These problems include the entrenchment of a fractured social system between the states in the early Republic, the perpetuation of a soil-exhausting agricultural system, and the legacy of favoritism to land speculators and the international trade system. This is a work of general political and social history, aimed at the broad Barnes-and-Noble set. Appealing to such an audience, Kennedy, a former director of the National Park Service, enrolls a few old arguments from the field of environmental history—most prominently, that Indians and small farmers treated land responsibly, while slave-owning planters did not, and that climate plays a role in the course of human history—while setting up his larger claims that, first, we would have been better off ecologically and politically had the economy of the early Republic stuck with small, independent farms and, second, that this also might have staved off that other Lost Cause of 1861.

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