Reviewed by Philip D. Morgan and Vincent Carretta | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by Philip D. Morgan and Vincent Carretta | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University

Editor's Note: The following two reviews reflect a joint effort by (and joint publication with) Early American Literature.

Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810. Edited by James G. Basker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 784 pages. $50.00(cloth), $27.00 (paper).

In a heroic undertaking of nearly 800 pages, James G. Basker has assembled approximately 400 poems, or poetic fragments, about slavery that were published in English by more than 250 writers. He likens the project to a "vast archaeological dig" (xxxiii); his excavations have uncovered everything from beautiful masterpieces to humdrum shards, from operas and musical comedies, through dramatic pageants and epics, to doggerel and gravestone inscriptions. He confines the temporal boundaries of his anthology to the "long" eighteenth century. Before about 1660, he notes, slavery was not of major cultural or economic importance in the English Atlantic, and after about 1810, "slavery in British and American cultural life became two different stories" (xxxviii). Within this period, then, he sees an essentially unified Anglophone world, and his aim is to be as inclusive as possible. The volume incorporates poems, or parts of poems, that bring "slavery into view, whether as its main subject, in a single passage or character, or, more glancingly, in bits of allusion or metaphor" (xxxiii). Basker knows he has not identified every poem that mentions slavery (perhaps a supplement will be forthcoming); in some cases, particular poems about slavery are known to have existed but are no longer recoverable. Nevertheless, this collection is remarkably comprehensive, reprinting a substantial amount of verse for the first time.

If slavery was important in the Anglo-American collective imagination, it became increasingly so over the period of this anthology. This study documents the emergence of a widespread awareness of the subject. The century 1660–1760 saw the publication of less than a fifth of the poems included in this anthology, whereas the half century from 1760 to 1810 witnessed a mounting surge of publications, with the last two decades accounting for 45 percent of the total. In the late seventeenth century, the mention of slavery was often incidental; by the end of the period, whole epics were devoted to the subject. Apparently, a lag existed between the sentiments of most poets and the reality of an expansive and vibrant institution. The cultural and economic significance of slavery was evident by the turn of the eighteenth century. By then most British colonial trade was dependent on the labor of enslaved people. Yet the upsurge in poetic interest in slavery took largely an antislavery position. More than nine of every ten poems challenged and denounced slavery; only an insignificant minority (beginning with John Saffin in 1701 and encompassing most notably James Boswell in 1791) defended the institution. As Basker notes the "poems at the very close of the book mark an almost uniform crescendo of jubilation. The slave trade had been abolished on both sides of the Atlantic and slavery itself seemed destined to end soon after" (xlvii). But why was so little proslavery verse written?¹ This question needs answering.

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