Journal Article Kevin Waite. West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. Get access Kevin Waite. West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 372. Paper $29.95. Robert E. May Robert E. May Purdue University, US Email: mayr@purdue.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 4, December 2023, Pages 1894–1895, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad376 Published: 05 December 2023

"Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the meaning of the American Civil War in Britain." The Historian, 84(2), pp. 309–310

Reviewed by: The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America by Jason T. Sharples Robert E. May (bio) The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America jason t. sharples University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 328 pp. The title of this masterful contribution to Anglophone Caribbean Basin / North American colonial slavery studies, a play on Eugene D. Genovese's subtitle in Roll, Jordan, Roll (Vintage P, 1972), suggests a work equally concerned with slave revolts and rumored slave uprisings. But although slave risings like the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina (1739) and Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica (1760) draw author Jason Sharples's attention, the main focus here is phantom insurrection scares between 1655 and 1786. Indicating only twelve known genuine revolts between 1700 and 1750 in all Anglophone colonial America, Sharples emphasizes "at least ninetysix documented occasions before 1790" when "colonial officials in eastern North America and the British Caribbean believed that they discovered evidence of a 'slave conspiracy'" (12). Not only does Sharples show that rumored conspiracies overshadowed real ones numerically; he also downplays the carnage of the latter. Rather, Sharples contends that Black rebels [End Page 602] almost invariably sought refuge from bondage in safe spaces (e.g., Maroon communities) rather than avenging their oppression by murdering enslavers or overthrowing colonial governance. Arranged topically but building chronologically toward two chapters and an epilogue covering, respectively, the Seven Years' War, the era of the American Revolution, and the Black uprising in French Saint-Domingue culminating in the founding of the republic of Haiti in 1804 ("an inflection point for white and black fear in the arc of the history of slavery" [245]), Sharples's study assesses the intellectual, socioeconomic, and geopolitical causes of and preconditions for insurrection panics and factors dictating their scope, including the instrumentality of toxic print media as publishers "sold white readers a [stereotypical] narrative arc that they craved" (shades of Fox News!) (99). New York newspaper publisher John Peter Zenger, that early paladin for freedom of the press, makes his fleeting appearance here as a purveyor of unfounded bloody insurrectionist intentions during an Antigua panic in 1736. As concerned with effect as well as cause, Sharples shows the considerable price enslavers incurred from conspiracy panics in terms of extra military expenditures, disrupted trade networks and court systems, and financial burdens from the execution of accused slave conspiracy collaborators—though some colonial governors converted panics into policy "opportunities" (181), exacerbating scares so white subjects would better cooperate in improving militia systems and reconstructing fortifications. Insurrection panics almost invariably revolved around allegations insurrectionists intended to set towns afire, murder all white males, and rape white women. Such fears erupted in the wake of coerced, fabricated testimony by suspects who, after being tortured, held hopes (not always realized) of being spared from death by cooperating with officials' demands they prove their accountability by incriminating others; and Sharples unpacks factors playing into whom authorities most suspected and suspects fingered as accomplices. (Authorities, for instance, interpreted alcohol toasts and oath-taking among enslaved peoples, based on West African traditions, as indicators of ongoing plots.) He also reveals how language barriers impeded authorities' investigative capacities; officials were limited in responding appropriately to rumored uprisings by their own "conceptual vocabularies" (23)—including tropes of antipopery, readings about slavery in ancient times, alleged uprisings by Irish indentured servants, [End Page 603] and fears that Europe's Catholic powers would use Carib and North American Natives as agents in inciting slave terror. Unable to accurately comprehend Black behaviors, authorities inaccurately projected their own military structures, like "regiments of horse" (40), onto imagined rebellions. Demography, too, fostered preconditions for revolt scares, as in Barbados, where just 175 planters held 61 percent of all slaves and where enslaved people mostly belonged to workforces ranging from one hundred to three hundred laborers. Not only were large concentrations of Black people worrisome to white officials and slaveholders, but sudden population declines among whites cast additional demographic shadows. Demography, however, never becomes solely determinative. Insurrection panics owed less to overall percentages of Black people in a colony than to relative percentages of captive African and creole enslaved persons within...

Reviewed by: South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War by Alice L. Baumgartner Robert E. May (bio) South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. By Alice L. Baumgartner. (New York: Basic Books, 2020. Pp. 384. Cloth, $32.00.) Alice L. Baumgartner's remarkable book provides new perspectives on African American agency in Civil War causation. It also underscores Mexico's antislavery record in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In detail South to Freedom explores the transnational consequences of [End Page 565] enslaved escapes southward, initially to Spanish Florida and New Spain and later to Mexico, from or through the Mexican state of Coahuila y Téjas and the Republic of Texas (later the state of Texas), though some arrived by sea. In the decades before the Civil War, three to five thousand enslaved persons in the Texas Republic and American states, especially Texas and Louisiana, sought liberty in Mexico. Although borderlands specialists have often addressed these escapes, mainstream scholarship points the figurative fugitive compass northward to the free states or Canada. This distortion Baumgartner remedies, showing how it obscures the complex interplay between southwestern borderlands history and Civil War causation. Enslaved persons' cross-border flights concerned southern slaveholders to an extent far disproportionate to the relatively small number of persons involved; they were a crucial factor in igniting the Texas Revolution and the U.S. war with Mexico, which, in turn, following the Mexican Cession, underlay the 1850s disputes over slavery's expansion westward and into the Caribbean, precipitating the U.S. Civil War. Baumgartner is hardly the first historian to grasp that ambitions for cotton and slavery in Texas spurred on Texan revolutionaries, but she dramatically upstages prior scholarship in foregrounding enslaved escapes southward within that story. Mexico's supportive social and economic climate for African Americans, including protective institutions, invited the influx. Baumgartner weaves the complex history of Mexican race gradations and tolerance, including Spain's Las Siete Partidas, into her narrative, before exploring the more than three-decade Mexican emancipation process. In 1824, Mexico's Congress banned importations of new slaves, freeing them from the moment they reached "national territory"—a radical step compared to those that other New World governments, Haiti excepted, took against the African slave trade. Between 1824 and 1827, over one-half of Mexico's state governments passed free womb laws, and in 1829 and 1837, respectively, a presidential decree (soon lifted to appease Anglo Texans) and Mexico's Congress outlawed slavery. Ultimately, abolition was embedded in Mexico's 1857 constitution: all persons born in Mexico were free, and fugitives gained immediate free status and immunity from extradition, becoming eligible for full citizenship. Baumgartner devotes an intriguing chapter to African Americans' applications for cartas de naturalización and associated legal procedures. Given Mexico's welcoming environment for escaped slaves, U.S. negotiators, responding to pressure from Deep South slaveholders, consistently pressed Mexico to sign an extradition arrangement so that fugitives could be retrieved by their Anglo claimants. Efforts by the administrations of [End Page 566] John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, however, came up short. Still, because Mexico's national government sought to mitigate military tensions with norteamericanos, it generally left enforcement of black fugitives' freedoms to the discretion of local officials, a laxity that made some escaped slaves vulnerable to recovery by Anglo petitioners. All this changed with U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, after which Mexican officials "saw no reason to continue to respect the 'property' rights of United States citizens as it had in the past" (141). In addition to dealing with many legal, diplomatic, and political questions, Baumgartner illuminates escaped slaves' livelihoods and experiences within Mexico, mostly within northern military colonies, such as at the Seminole leader Wild Cat's tract in Coahuila. They toiled as poorly paid and sometimes abused agricultural labor and fended off frequent Comanche and Lipan Apache raids. Baumgartner also shows how local Mexican officials and common citizens determinedly protected African Americans, especially those living in vulnerable military colonies, from Texan cross-border raids to recapture them. At times, Mexico turned the tables. In...

And with these things, bury the purple dream Of the America we have not been, The tropic empire, seeking the warm sea, The last foray of aristocracy The South's secession from the Union in the winter of 1860-1861 deserves remembrance, according to most current scholarship, primarily as a defensive reaction to Abraham Lincoln's election as U.S. president and the growing political strength of his antislavery Republican Party. Fearful that America's corridors of power were dominated by hostile politicos, appalled at northern fury against and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, aware that the free states had an unshakable grip on the western territories and would never concede to slavery's extension, outraged by John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry and the specter of northern-inspired slave revolts, and dishonored by abolitionist diatribes against their labor system, white southerners fled such alarming trends by founding their own country. Secessionists, by this rendering, had an inchoate vision at first for their new government, devoting infinitely more thought to what was wrong with the one being forsaken than to the one being initiated. Though disunionists generally believed that the North and the South were, in the words of U.S. senator James H. Hammond of South Carolina, "distinctly separate and hostile," they sought separation mainly to preserve slavery. Confederate nationalism, thus, was more the product than the cause of the South's war for independence, gradually and consciously constructed. (1) Still, Confederate founders shared visions beyond regional security and insulating their slave labor system. An early imagining of disunion, Virginian Nathaniel Beverley Tucker's 1836 futuristic novel, The Partisan Leader, envisioned a free-trade southern nation booming in the wake of separation. Along similar lines, fellow Virginia radical Edmund Ruffin's 1860 political novel. Anticipations of the Future, imagined the South winning a war for independence and accomplishing prosperity through direct trade and treaties with European countries. Taking such aspirations into account, the historian John Majewski has dubbed the founding of the Confederacy the South's bid "to create a more modern economy." Many southern nationalists sought freedom from northern dominance of their commerce, religious institutions, education systems, and literature. Some even envisioned dramatic transformations of political institutions once secession occurred, the initiation, in George C. Rable's words, of a "commonwealth resting on social harmony, political consensus, and unquestionable legitimacy" and devoid of patronage and political parties. Recently, Michael T. Bemath has portrayed the immediate post-secession Confederacy as a "moment of possibility," when agendas of enhancing women's education, reforming and moderating slave management, and rolling back popular democracy might gain traction. (2) Secessionists' tentative aspirations included spreading Dixie's peculiar institution into Latin America, where it was banned with the exceptions of Brazil and Spain's colony in Cuba (and a few other locales), places with which many southern slaveholders sensed a natural affinity. As a Nashville, Tennessee, newspaper put it shortly after the Civil War began, southerners believed that their solution to the problem of relations between capitalists and working classes put them in a special relationship to Brazil and Cuba, both of which had "settled" on the same answer. Matthew Pratt Guterl observes along these lines that the Old South's "master class ... was connected--by ship, by overland travel, by print culture, by a sense of singular space, and by the prospect of future conquest--to the habitus and communitas of New World slaveholders." To no small degree, this confidence in post-secession expansion, which looked toward absorbing Cuba in addition to taking over and spreading slavery into free-labor parts of Latin America, drew sustenance from the confidence that southern slaveholders had in their labor system's health and future once they divorced themselves from antislavery politicians in Washington, D. …

Bulletin of Latin American ResearchVolume 36, Issue 4 p. 547-549 Book Review Independent Mexico: The Pronunciamiento in the Age of Santa Anna, 1821–1858 - by Fowler, Will Robert E. May, Robert E. May Emeritus, Purdue UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Robert E. May, Robert E. May Emeritus, Purdue UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 05 September 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12678Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume36, Issue4October 2017Pages 547-549 RelatedInformation

Positing that prior historians have miscast the post–Civil War southern migration to Mexico, Todd W. Wahlstrom argues in this revisionist work for an entrepreneurial take on southern colonists in Mexico and for positioning them within borderlands and transnational contexts. Rather than serving up die-hard rebels escaping Yankee rule and possible punishment for disloyalty who fantasize about recreating a labor system approximating slavery in a substitute Dixie, Wahlstrom presents exiles who are mostly “small to middling” (xxii) former slaveholders, professionals, and skilled laborers driven by self-improvement impulses and visions of modernizing Mexico’s economy. Further, he argues the emigrants held significant sway beyond their numbers—only about five thousand arrived between 1865 and the early 1870s according to lists published in the emigrant newspaper Mexican Times and Wahlstrom’s parsing of other evidence. They “pushed transnational social and economic relations in new directions” (xxi) by fostering “cross-border trade” and helping to forge “a hemispheric economy” (111).

Presidential Studies QuarterlyVolume 44, Issue 4 p. 782-783 BOOK REVIEW Lincoln's Forgotten Friend: Leonard Swett. By Robert S. Eckley. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 306 pp. Robert E. May, Robert E. May Purdue UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Robert E. May, Robert E. May Purdue UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 27 October 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12161Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue4December 2014Pages 782-783 RelatedInformation

Ambitious congressmen needed little prodding to join the army when war erupted with Mexico in the spring of 1846. Since the earliest days of the Republic, Americans had promoted war heroes to their highest office. Generals George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison all won election as the nation's chief executive primarily because of their military luster, and many other presidential contenders positioned themselves for presidential bids with martial exploits. No wonder, then, that a mere three days after Congress voted for war with Mexico on May 13 an observer in Washington reported some fifty congressmen had applied to the U.S. president, James K. Polk, for army commissions, in some instances on behalf of relatives, but many of them for themselves.

In the spring of 1864, just before General Ulysses S. Grant began the campaign that crushed southern hopes for independence, a Union embarrassment off Haiti's southwestern coast gave Confederates a rare late Civil War propaganda bonanza. A year earlier, as part of President Abraham Lincoln's colonization program, four hundred and fifty-three African Americans had boarded the brig Ocean Ranger at Union-held Fortress Monroe on Virginia's coast, bound for Haiti's Île-à-Vache, or Cow Island. Nothing had gone right for the emigrants on ship or on the island. Now, a press report of their fate played into Confederate hands (Figure 6.1).

Reviewed by: Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered Jill May (bio) and Robert E. May (bio) Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered. Edited by Heather Campbell Coyle. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 2011. Released as a catalog by the Delaware Art Museum for the recent commemorative exhibit of Pyle's work one hundred years after his death, this is an oversized, sumptuously illustrated collection of eleven documented essays (with biographical chronology) about Pyle's career as an artist and painter. As editor Heather Coyle aptly puts it, the work provides "a variety of recent perspectives on Pyle, situating his images, writing, and instruction within the story of American art" (11–12). Although Pyle's imagery receives more attention in this volume than does his prose, the essays nonetheless supplement and expand upon discussions in the special Pyle section of the summer 1983 Children's Literature Association Quarterly, further [End Page 355] illuminating the tremendous impact of its subject's work on children's literature, illustration, and bookmaking in the US. Taken together, the two compilations give contemporary scholars in children's literature and American studies an understanding of Pyle's importance as: (1) an early adapter of folklore and legend; (2) an illustrator who trained many of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century US magazine and book illustrators within children's literature; (3) a committed Swedenborgian who applied his faith's perspectives to his creative work; and (4) a staunch supporter of an American ideal of patriotism. Published one hundred years after Pyle's first great classical adaptation The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood appeared in book format, the ChLA Quarterly section addressed Pyle's most important contributions to American children's literature. Former presidents of the ChLA, then young scholars, provided seminal pieces about unique perspectives of Swedenborgianism found in The Garden Behind the Moon (Perry Nodelman, "Pyle's Sweet, Thin, Clear Tune"); the ideal of an American hero embedded in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (John Cech, "Pyle's Robin Hood"); and the stinging critique of war in Pyle's medieval novel, Otto of the Silver Hand (Jon Stott, "The Purposiveness of Evil" and Malcolm Usrey, "A Milestone of Historical Fiction for Children"). Also found in the same issue are discussions of Pyle's work as a poet, illustrator, and literary folklorist, a description of the Delaware Art Museum's manuscript collection by then-curator Rowland Elzea, and an evaluation of his work as a visionary of American patriotism by American historian Robert Vitz. Still, pirates are missing, as is a serious discussion of Pyle's multivolume rendition of the Arthurian legend. There is much to be gained by turning to what Howard Pyle: American Master Rediscovered reveals on these topics, as well as several other facets of Pyle's career. All of the essays in this new work highlight Pyle's career as an important American artist and teacher, but several are particularly useful to scholars in children's and young adult culture. Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack have written extensively on the Arthurian legend and Pyle's work, but in "Howard Pyle and the Arthurian Legends" they adroitly pinpoint his expansions on the legends and show that he used the traditional tales in a "democratization" of the characters, asserting that "it is not the armor that makes the knight but rather his virtuous and dutiful action" (50). They have chosen some of the most dramatic and highly retold scenes in both text and illustration for their analysis, concluding that Pyle used the stories to suggest an earthly "paradisal garden" where men could live in peace (53). In addition, they point to Pyle students who continued the tradition of romanticized Arthurian illustrations for other American retellings. Anne M. Loechle discusses Pyle's imagery of pirates in "Gunpowder Smoke and Buried Dubloons," while David M. Lubin expands on Pyle as the "inventor" of the pirate clothing and stances we find in American movies, from Douglas Fairbanks in the 1926 The Black Pirate to Johnny Depp [End Page 356] in the twenty-first-century Pirates of the Caribbean. Loechle traces Pyle's pirates back to earlier publications, including Charles Johnson's illustrated A General History of the Robberies and Murders...

Metropole and Periphery Robert E. May (bio) Steven E. Woodworth . Manifest Destinies: America's Westward Expansion and the Road to the Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. xiv + 412 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $30.00. One of the most consistent strains in Civil War historiography has been the argument that sectional crises over slavery's westward expansion had more to do with bringing on the conflict than protective tariffs, Northern resistance to returning fugitive slaves, and other issues dividing Northerners and Southerners in the antebellum decades. If Southerners wanted out of the Union in 1860-61 after Lincoln's election as president, it was primarily because of the determination of Lincoln and his Republican Party to prevent slavery from expanding. Neither Lincoln in his speeches, nor his party in its platforms, advocated, prior to the war, that the U.S. government abolish slavery in states where it already existed. Countless scholars, in making their case for the primacy of slavery expansion, make the obligatory allusion to Thomas Jefferson's foreboding, in the midst of the Missouri struggle of 1820, that the question of slavery's expansion would ultimately spell the "knell of the Union." The matter disturbed Jefferson "like a fire bell in the night" because he sensed that acquisitions of territory in the future would render that year's settlement, which divided remaining territory in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery and freedom at the 36º30' parallel, was impermanent. Sooner or later the disposition of other territory would kill the Union.1 Straddling the boundary between popular history and original scholarship, Steven E. Woodworth's Manifest Destinies argues convincingly that prior to the Texas annexation crisis of the mid-1840s, the problem of slavery within a democratic republic, though disruptive, was contained by America's political party system, which superseded the nation's geographical divisions. That is, the country's most important political disagreements were partisan rather than regional and focused on economic issues like banking rather than the morality of slavery. In 1840, the abolitionist Liberty Party's presidential candidate, James G. Birney, mustered a pitiful 7,069 votes—about one quarter of a percent of the electorate. However, once the nationalist president John Tyler's Southern sectionalist secretaries of state—the Virginian Abel P. Upshur and South [End Page 248] Carolina's John C. Calhoun—converted Texan annexation into an initiative to strengthen slavery, the bottle released the disunion genie. No longer feeling comity with fellow Southern congressmen, Northern representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1845 repealed the infamous "Gag Rule," which had been a damper on debate about slavery. From that point, things only got worse, since expansion westward lay at the center of the American national psyche, dwarfing other issues: "The very surge of expansion that led to the realization of the long-held American dream of a continent-wide empire of liberty also served to intensify and focus the national disagreement over slavery to the point that none of the old political methods sufficed to contain it anymore" (p. 356). Woodworth ends his book with a sustained analysis of the struggle over slavery expansion during and immediately after the Mexican War, observing that disputes over the Wilmot Proviso, California, and related territorial issues ensured, despite the Compromise of 1850, that the Union survived on borrowed time. There is nothing original in this thesis, and Woodworth never claims there is. David Potter, in The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 (1976), observed that federal "jurisdiction over western lands" brought disputes over slavery into the national arena (p. 53). Michael A. Morrison contended in Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (1997) that once "slavery was taken up by American politics in the territorial question, the tragedy [disunion] was foretold" (pp. 277-78). Bruce Collins foreshadowed Manifest Destinies in The Origins of America's Civil War (1981), asserting that the "annexation of Texas opened the series of political crises which culminated in civil war" by shifting political disputes over economic policy "to a single problem, the extension of slavery" (p. 68). Countless quotations could be culled from other seminal works, including...

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.