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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.
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| 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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The book is divided into four parts. First, we get Jefferson—his manner, outlook, and personal failings—along with most of the environmental issues of relevance (for instance, soil exhaustion, climate, and the relationship between economy and environmental health). Kennedy draws in readers by forcing them to see the contrast of a slave-run plantation system versus an independent yeomanry as one of environmental degradation versus ecological sustainability. Then, after a short section (Part II) on the integration of southern cotton producers into a network of "international textile colonial-imperialism" (p. 115), he presents and evaluates (Part III) those who resisted the slave-labor plantation system, such as Indians, yeoman, Tories, freed and escaped slaves, and Irish émigrés. In Part IV he discusses those "commercial assisters ... and armed men" (p. 171) who promoted such a system. The independent yeoman cause was Jefferson's to lose, Kennedy contends, because he allowed the "commercial assisters" to gain influence during the planning of the Louisianan lands. |
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It is to Kennedy's credit, and the most notable contribution of this book for readers of this journal, that he considers environmental history of central importance to standard-fare political history—both the use of environmental factors to explain historical change and consideration of changesinthe environment due to social causes. However, the book stumbles on several fronts. For one, Kennedy's attention to environmental issues in the early chapters is quickly abandoned. And for his environmental points, a near-exclusive reliance on New Deal-era secondary sources, like Lewis Gray's History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), ends up limiting the full exploration of how environment, politics, social order, and economy worked together. This limits the book's appeal to environmental historians, who, to be fair, are not the primary audience. Yet as a popular book, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause also has limitations. Kennedy's writing is in places smooth and fluid, especially when he weaves together local details with world-historical figures like Napoleon, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. Just as often, though, his penchant for excessive and minute details—names, dates, alliances, loyalties made and broken—makes for difficult, if not soporific, reading. |
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Kennedy's basic point is that smaller, more sustainable agricultural lands were pushed out by the new dominance of higher-productivity, larger-scale plantations. This battle of large-yield and proto-industrial management versus small-yield and local management, outlined in the contexts of the early American republic, provides a striking precedent to the current issues of globalization. It would seem that the very model of ecological degradation in our modern world has an interesting relationship to the early American system of agriculture. Although Kennedy does not bring these contemporary points of relevance to the fore, Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause may provide a useful stepping off point for readers who want to address them. |
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Benjamin R. Cohen is completing his dissertation in Virginia Tech's Department of Science and Technology in Society. Focusing on antebellum-era agricultural chemistry and state scientific surveys, he studies the ways in which the practice of science changed how Americans interacted with and conceptualized their environment. |
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