Reviewed by T. Stephen Whitman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by T. Stephen Whitman | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

T. Stephen Whitman, Mount St. Mary's University

Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. By Adam Rothman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 312 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Slave Country asks why the institution of slavery expanded in the early national United States and examines the region that became the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, from 1790 to 1820. Adam Rothman offers a complex explanation for the rapid creation of the cotton South, touching on diverse factors such as shifts in Spanish trade policy, federal government land surveying practices, and the evolving nature of pro- and antislavery debates. Two themes receive the greatest emphasis in this penetrating analysis: slaveholders persistently used state power to secure slavery in the Deep South and they successfully civilized and domesticated slavery within this new empire. The resulting first-rate book will inform readers at all levels of sophistication and specialists will appreciate Rothman's many insights into the events and processes that drove slavery's expansion.	1
In the America of 1790, owning slaves was an obvious sign of wealth, yet overlarge proportions of slaves represented a deep threat to public safety. Rothman sketches how slaveholders responded to this paradox by supporting the maintenance of slavery but opposing the Atlantic slave trade, and employing fear of enslavement as a political metaphor to defend their liberty to own slaves. One way to soften the resulting contradictions was advocating the diffusion of slaves, that is, their transportation westward from black majority counties in Virginia, Maryland, or South Carolina to the new territories of the lower Mississippi Valley. This argument calmed the sleep of seaboard slaveholders by bidding to diminish fears of insurrections. Diffusion also appealed to some northerners as a remedy for supposed southern stagnation, apparent, for example, in a comparatively free Pennsylvania prospering more than slave-ridden Virginia. The author shows how the geographic dispersal of slaves helped slaveholders to carry the day in congressional debates on the organization of the Mississippi Territory in 1798 and to legitimize slavery in the Louisiana Purchase lands two decades before the Missouri crisis of 1819.	2
Rothman then turns to the theme of civilizing America's southwestern frontier. Indian groups, notably the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, were pressured by agents such as Benjamin Hawkins to adopt commercial agriculture with a view to reducing their need for land, so that land-hungry Americans could exercise what they took to be their natural right to occupy uncultivated lands or, more precisely, lands cultivated at less than maximal profit potential. Rothman is perhaps a bit too ready to accept contemporary American portrayals of Creek and other tribal groups as migratory hunters. Yet he incisively shows how accommodationists among the Civilized Tribes, by seeking to grow cotton with slave labor, whetted rather than blunted white desires to make their lands into slave country.	3
American acquisition of the west bank of the Mississippi with the Louisiana Purchase added a new dimension to the creation of slave country. The Spanish had tried to make Louisiana a more profitable colony by encouraging sugar growing and the importation of slaves. These trends accelerated after the slaves' revolution in Saint Domingue all but extinguished sugar planting there. Wealthy Americans such as New York's Edward Livingston migrated to Louisiana and employed classic strategies of aspiring colonists: strategic marriage increased wealth, public office secured position, and insider information facilitated acquisition of the best lands. As in other colonial settings, illicit trade, in this case slave smuggling, also generated wealth. Once Louisiana planters had grown rich from the efforts of men including Jean Lafitte, the timing was right to criminalize such activities and lock in one's superior position.	. . .

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