dshanebeck – Readings in 19th Century American History

Source Debates/Questions

October 28, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

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The central goal of my historiography is to trace the ways in which slave owners, traders, or governments established capitalistic modes of efficiency in the slave system. The central question should rest on how historians have viewed the claim that the slave system was a backwards, feudalistic structure that kept the plantation system technologically and economically behind the rest of industrialized societies. There are three clear debates between my various sources dealing with how slaves are viewed or used by traders and planters. The first major debate centers around methodical decisions made by those involved in the slave trade. Historians such as Beckert and Rockman, Stephanie Camp, and Rees, Komlos, Long, and Woitek make clear arguments for the intentional ways in which slave plantation owners maximized output of their slave populations through food allotments, quota systems, and detailed record keeping. All of these historians agree that the slave system was not random or feudalistic, but intentionally attempting to maximize efficiency of production and output much like industrial factory. The second major debate follows technological advancements and incentives in order to reach peak production. Walter Johnson, John Majewski, and Chad Morgan all argued that there were very specific advancements in technology or economic structure that pushed slavery forward in its efficient modes of production. These could be as simple as steamboats to expand southern cotton empires and production capabilities or active pursuit of a southern modernization of factories. Some southern governments even pushed for tax incentives and incorporations in order to modernize the southern structures. The last area of discussion centers around the slave trade and its efficient structures of transport and space usage. Robert Harms, Marcus Rediker, Greg O’Malley, and Stephanie Smallwood all clearly argue that the slave trade created a commodified product of human beings that were treated like other goods for sale (whether on the slave ship itself or in port). The commodification that occurred allows these historians to argue for an intentional capitalistic system that dehumanized the commodity of transport and increased the efficiency of the system.

I will also provide one voice from an early history that challenges the above assertions by various historians. Douglas Egerton’s work was much earlier than the above historians and really might be the voice that they were attempting to silence. His assertions center on the idea that slavery cannot inherently be capitalistic due to its hierarchical society that was established. Edgerton believed that the paternalistic natures of the system and lack of wage for laborers could not create a capitalistic or advancing southern economy.

Blog Post Beyond the Founders – Dave Shanebeck

October 9, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Beyond the Founders attempts to speak into the historiography of the early Republic a story of the growth of democracy that is not limited in scope to the increase of white male suffrage. The editors of this massive collection of essays attempted to weave an argument that expounds the ideas of American political history beyond that of powerful white men who shaped the early institutions of American political structures and theory. Instead of a limited group controlling and shaping the whole, American politics was the story of a variety of players and factors vying for a voice and clamoring to be heard or affect change. Political parties were not just constructs of simplistic political theory, but rather a cultural reaction to a myriad of people and communities that leaders were forced to listen to. Agency and voice are given to cheese makers, women and mothers, racial groups and abolitionists, back-country farmers, educated men, masculine men, political writers, rowdy mobs, native Americans, and many other diverse participants in shaping the American political identity (public and private). One of the central arguments of these essays is that Americans, no matter their station or political leaning, reacted to an ever changing political scene and actively sought to participate and shape the direction politics flowed.

While these essays are powerful in their argument for a varied approach to American political structures and theories, some lack a strong explanation of what views they are exactly attempting to challenge. A specific example rests in chapter nine as Saul Cornell attempted to challenge recent historical views of the second amendment. While he provided a very compelling case of the contextual areas the second amendment traveled, he continued to mention “modern scholarship” without explaining who or what that scholarship was. This might be a nitpicky, but in order to fully understand how his argument challenges “modern scholars,” I think it is important to explain their specific positions and names (which I did not see detailed) other than just in a footnote.

The most compelling and interesting chapter was ironically the chapter devoted to political philosophic theory by John Brooke. At first glance, I dreaded reading it. However, Brooke’s descriptions of legitimacy, civil society, and consent I found incredibly fascinating and grounding of the entire collection. Once again Gould finds his way into our discussion as Americans navigated legitimacy within the the republic as without. Steven brought this out in his discussion of Gould as Americans fought to be legitimized on the world stage. In Beyond the Founders, Brooke puts American political theory squarely in the conversations of legitimacy and consent that dominated the Enlightenment era. Brooke calls it a “cross-fertilization of civil society and consent” and the “inherent contradictions” of the American political system. (219-220) It is precisely the breaks and parallels to European structures or philosophy that both make the American civil society unique in structure and legitimate.

Fugitive Landscapes – Dave Shanebeck

October 2, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Samuel Truett beautifully weaves a borderland narrative across multiple centuries of southwest American history. By using a mosaic of social, political, and economic history, Truett attempted to place the borderlands of the southwest into a broader historical context that took into account the diversity of people that populated, migrated, and shifted through the area throughout the three centuries. Truett’s central argument is that the borderlands are not divided as neatly and cleanly as modern Americans or historians would like. Often, historians want a clean story that changes as people shift and identities solidify. However, Truett offers nothing of the sort in Fugitive Landscapes. The borderlands of the southwest were defined by not just “cross-border networks of corporate power” but something in which “ordinary people emerged from the shadows of state and corporate control to reshape the borderlands on their own terms.” (9) Truett argues that it was not the corporations, governments, or institutions that controlled borderland identity, but rather everyday people who were attempting to live in a truly frontier society that never closed but persisted. Their dreams of the future and hopes for a new life never died, but were constantly challenged, reshaped, and forged again.

Even though the first half of Truett’s work is somewhat dull and stale, Truett set the stage for the power of his work in chapters five through seven. It is not that the first part or even the first few chapters were not necessary as Truett was clearly setting the stage for how the frontier mentality of the colonial and nineteenth century borderlands established a connection to borderlands of the twentieth century. This is only a slight critique due to the fact that I personally found chapter 4, “The Mexican Cornucopia,” rather slow. It holds a significant part in explaining the corporate power plays that shifted towards Mexico’s northern border.

While Diana, queenlove35 and I struggled with Pekka Hamalainen descriptions of the southwest borderlands in Comanche Empire, I did not have that same feeling throughout Samuel Truett’s borderland history. Much of this is due to the fact that Truett was only attempting to argue that the agency of borderland history lies with the everyday people who transported themselves in and through the various centuries and locations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He did not attempt to provide a more significant agency to one group or another; instead, Truett focused upon the cornucopia or people and agents–Apache, Mexican miners, white settlers, or even major corporations–that made up a truly diverse and constantly shifting area. While we were left questioning the definition of empire and power of the Comanche people in Comanche Empire, I felt satisfied by Truett’s concluding chapters and epilogue that nicely painted a picture of the region that felt as wild and undefinable today as it was two hundred years ago. No matter how hard outside forces attempted to exert power or authority over the borderland area, it kept its frontier identity and continued to be a place of dreams–albeit rarely fully realized–and people who continue to persist.

Paper Proposal – Dave Shanebeck

September 29, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

In my paper “Industrial Slavery: The efficiency of the slave system,” I want to look at the structure of slavery as an efficient, industrial system. Often, slavery is thought of or taught as a backwards, agricultural, feudal society that does not relate to the great industrial might of “advanced economies.” The very nature of the slave system and slave owners is portrayed as almost bumbling through land acquisition, slave trading, and simplistic systems of punishment in order to produce profit. Often slave owners are seen as sacrificing technological advancement or machine efficiency because they have grown lazy by a dependence upon slaves. My paper will focus in on how historians have shifted this narrative to the argument that slave owners and traders methodically created systems that were not only advanced, but mirrored the industrial centers of the world in the efficiency of production and maximization of product. This was not lucky or born out of massive land holdings, but rather the deliberate structuring of a slave society that focused upon efficiency of labor and production in order to maximize profit in concert with their industrialized neighbors (in the north or around the world).

In order to trace how historians have approached this issue, I will need to focus on a few key questions. First, in what ways have historians tracked the slave trade itself as a “factory” of efficient production of labor? How did slave traders create efficient methods or systems in order to obtain and control slaves in transit to sale? Second, did plantation owners create methods of control in order to exact maximum efficiency from a labor force that had no incentive to work hard? In what ways was punishment used as a means of efficient production? And finally, how did the slave system use technological advancements or structures in order to get mass amounts of product to market?

There are many primary sources that could be addressed for this study. First is always the eyewitness slave accounts that detail the treatment and methods of slavery (Northup, Equiano, Douglas, etc.). These sources are valuable for a slave perspective and also provide interesting issues of validity as many have been questioned for their authenticity as abolitionist tracts. There are also documented records and census data of cotton production and exports from southern ports. Slave trade databases can also be a good place to achieve numbers and figures that explain the vast amount of people that crossed the Atlantic. This could be valuable when assessing the efficiency of the trade in human labor. I am interested to look into slave owner documentation as a way to trace how much they thought about efficiency of the slave system. I would specifically want to see if there is language that points to methodical methods that may be industrial in nature.

Blog Post #3 – A Union Forever, David Shanebeck

September 25, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

David Sim’s desire is to speak into American foreign policy and politics the ideals of Irish nationalism. Essentially, Irish Americans have gotten plenty of historical focus by American scholars in social and political arenas within America. Scholars cover the Irish impact upon cities, political machines, urban living, and the railroad extensively. Sim wants to discuss the less understood argument of Irish nationalism and its effect upon American foreign policy decisions and structures. Throughout the nineteenth century the Irish struggles and frustrations at home against British control spread with the diaspora of Irish immigrants coming to America. Sim argues that these feeling of nationalism were always strong to the Irish and as they established their communities in America, these feelings of pride and hope for a free Ireland continued. Many Irish hoped that America would provided the necessary political power and leverage to force the British into recognition of an Irish nation. Sim argues that through their outspoken rhetoric in America and even physical action of the Fenians or other expatriates traveling to Ireland under questionable motives, the Americans were forced to deal with problems of citizenship and protections granted overseas. In the end, the Irish failed in their bid for change, but Sim argues that it was their powerful push and the presence of American citizens in jails overseas that forced the United States to take strong foreign policy stances.

This work connects well with Gould’s arguments about early American desires for recognition as a nation. Queenlove35 summarized Gould well when she stated that Americans wanted to be respected and allowed a “place at the globalizing nations grown-ups table.” Ireland is seeking the same recognition after receiving independence from the British dominion and believe that it is the liberty and republican loving Americans who can help them get there. There are overtones that even as the Americans struggle with the “Irish question” and issues of expatriates in prison that they are still not being fully respected by the former parent country. American diplomats navigate difficult legal understandings between protections of foreign citizens as the British attempt to silence continued Irish protest. Much of the failure of the Irish nationalistic overtures might be the ever shifting relationship between Britain and her former colonial child. As Americans and British grow closer at turn of the century and into World War I, the Irish nationalistic pressure subsides from American foreign policy.

Supplementary Reading – Barbara Bush “African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children”

September 20, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Bush, Barbara. “African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children: Traumas of Dislocation and Enslavement Across the Atlantic World.” Caribbean Quarterly (March-June, 2010), Vol. 56, No. ½, 69-94.

Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom details what she claims is the missing historical focus upon gender as a key element of slave resistance in the antebellum south. Camp places slave women into unique positions of both “agents and subjects, persons and property, and people who resisted and who accommodated.” (Camp, 1) Camp’s argument centers around the ideas of geographic space and the slave’s body. According to Camp, everyday rebellious actions drove slave resistance to southern institutions and elements of control. Slaves did not just run away, but had secret night parties, made and wore specially made clothing, harbored fugitives, and supported or displayed abolitionist propaganda. Slaves used whatever geographic or spatial space available to resist their position–even if that meant only running away for a short period of time to just come back later.

While Camp deals primarily with the slave women of southern society, Barbara Bush discussed a broader Atlantic world perspective on slavery’s gender issues. Specifically, Bush focused on the story of slavery’s mothers and their ability or desire to forge new cultural identities. Bush traced her argument about the importance of birth within African cultural “fulfilment of female adulthood and fertility.” (Bush, 72) By going back to the African continent Bush allows for slave resistence to take on an element of cultural retention. Bush argued that even though the slaves were transported across the Atlantic, there was not a complete accommodation into new structures or societies. Slaves, according to Bush, continued their “African-derived conceptions of motherhood” and resisted attempts to change their core identities. (Bush, 70) Bush contends that even though the slave trade disrupted African life, slaves used similar cultural structures to protect and preserve the lives of children born on slave ships and on plantations. Bush uses a specific focus on African culture to defend the ideas that motherhood was one of the central core elements of African culture and strength. Because of the strength that mothers held in African communities, this translated to the plantations as women took an even more central role to slave life and survival. Elder slave women were charged on the plantation to take care of infants and younger children. Even Camp supported this claim that on the plantation women were less likely to be truant because of the fact that they were tied to family roles. Bush gave slave women significant agency by placing the argument together with the idea that slaves transplanted African cultural norms of childrearing in a village setting. Slavery disrupted African society and transplanted African women into the new society of the slave plantations. These women did not just accommodate or allow cultural norms to disappear. Instead, they developed systems and structures that allowed for mothering and parenthood that Bush argued “crossed the Middle Passage with the enslaved captives.” (Bush, 75-77) Bush even argued that enslaved women would enter into “concubinage relationships with European men” so that they either would be treated more favorably or perhaps have a better opportunity to win their freedom. (Bush, 83) In both cases the role of the mother became a central part of slave resistance to women’s positions on the slave plantation.

Bush claimed that there was also evidence that enslaved women in Barbados actually transplanted their child carrying techniques (they used their hips instead of arms) onto the islands as white women were known to carry their children in the same ways as the slaves. Bush commented that the survival of the older customs is “remarkable, given the pressures on women and the forces constantly undermining family life.” (Bush, 83-84) Because of the lack of father figures for many slave families on plantations, mothers were forced to take on roles that provided the necessary “psychic and material support for one another.” (Bush 84) This would actually constitute an adaptation as Bush claimed there was no precedent for female dominated societies in Africa–or at least not societies that centered around networks of “quasi-’kin’” as Bush claimed. (Bush, 84) Women in the Caribbean plantations worked together in networks of elder and younger women in order to adapt to the lack of men or father figures that may have been present in Africa. Bush claimed that these adaptations to the slave system created unique, yet still non-European, communities that lasted long after slavery ended.

Slave resistance was more than just running away, having secret parties, making clothing or harboring fugitives. Slaves responded to their position by creating new lives and starting families. Slave women resisted by supporting one another from the moment they arrived on slave ships to the plantations throughout the Caribbean and Antebellum South. Slave women used their positions within a maternal structure to resist the damaging elements of slavery upon the community. Regardless of sale or transfer of male members of the family, mothers and “grandmother” figures came together in the Caribbean south and women played a central role in the resistance to slavery’s challenges.

Paper Topics

September 15, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

How do historians view the expansion of slavery in connection to the American Empire narrative? Essentially, this topic would look at the slave trade and subsequent growth of the cotton industry as a major catalyst to the recognition of the United States as a legitimate player on the world stage.
The Anti-Native American Empire. This topic would deal with how the early growth of the republic and then subsequent explosion of southern cotton necessitated a refocusing of Native American policy in the eyes of the American government. Was it a shift in policy or something ingrained in the American psyche?
Most likely my topic: Slavery as a complex, efficient Southern industrial system. This topic expounds on our reading from Beckert and Rockman to dive into how historians have portrayed the efficiency of the slave trade and system.

Blog Post #3 – Slavery’s Capitalism

September 11, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Beckert and Rockman have provided a fantastic collection of essays with the intent and argument to situate the historical discussion of slavery in the economic institutions of capitalism in America. In order to accomplish this feat, both editors bring together a variety of essays and methodologies that incorporate everything from technological innovations like the McCormick Reaper to the finances of ledger building upon the plantation, connections between maritime traders and merchants from New England, and the early century push by Whig politicians for a true “American System”. Beckert and Rockman present a powerful case to situate the discussion of slavery not just as a social bondage institution that was limited to a southern planter aristocracy; it was in fact a powerful institution that encompassed northerners, southerners, and outside powers in an ever increasing push for expansion and profit. The sheer power of the slave’s investment capital not only determined the perspective of a southern planter, but the eyes of northern and southern bankers and creditors. I especially appreciated chapter one’s methodological discussion by Edward Baptist on how to deal with source material about slavery that can potentially come with heavy bias of the enslaved (who may have been influenced by abolitionists). Pages 48-49 give a detailed account of how historians can work around these fears and actually provide power back into sources that some may have questioned as abolitionist propaganda. At the same time, those pages provide a powerful defense of the quota argument for increases in the cotton output during the early 19th century.

Last week Robert discussed Gould’s argument for Americans pushing, in the years following both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, to be recognized as an equal nation on the world stage. At multiple points Beckert and Rockman have provided historical work that continues the narrative of America’s dependence on the mercantile world. Perhaps there is an argument to be made that the South’s expansion into the southwest and subsequent cotton explosion in the years following the War of 1812 provided the material necessary for Britain and other nations to finally start to take the United States seriously. While the essays that Beckert and Rockman do not definitively deal with this subject, it is clear that England, Spain, France, and even Russia had a lot to gain by the American’s increased trading patterns throughout the Atlantic and Caribbean that centered around slavery.

Gould – Building a European Power in America

September 5, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Eliga Gould presented a powerful argument for the establishment of not just the American nation’s independence, but essentially the structuring of a fledgling European Empire. Gould’s argument begins from the moment the British government attempted to “make Americans more accountable to the Crown’s treaties in Europe.” (pp. 6) He continued through the young republic’s defense of slavery as America–unable to defend the morality of the slave trade–are able to establish a foundation of property ownership that was understood as “legal” in both European and American courts. Gould finishes with a thorough accounting of the issues of nationhood surrounding the War of 1812 and subsequent treaties with Britain, Spain, and France. Throughout the entire work, Gould seamlessly weaves his central argument that in order to be seen as a legitimate nation, the United States had to work within the frameworks of European treaties and gain acceptance from European nations as to the Union’s legitimacy. It was the European frameworks and legal standings of treaty working that allowed the United States to become an independent nation and, eventually, their own empire.

While last week Diana and I struggled to completely accept Hamalainen’s argument for a Comanche empire in the Southwest, Gould does not leave me with the same feelings of a stretched argument. There are potential holes as to how far European treaties truly could stretch or bind Americans (especially when considering the distance between European and American land masses). Overall, I felt as if Gould provided a very strong argument for a people having powerful political agency in establishing their own corner of the world order. Whereas Diana and I struggled with the idea that the Comanche drove or were actors in their rise to prominence, I did not feel as if Gould had the same struggles. He especially worked well with the idea that the Union grew in strength throughout the time period following the revolution and highlighted by the War of 1812. Perhaps the strongest argument came with the actions of Andrew Jackson in Florida in his execution of two British officers. Jackson may have taken a risk, but it was a calculated power play by a fledgling nation that was determined to be recognized as any other European power and it worked. (180-183) It might perhaps be unfair to Hamalainen as he was dealing with an “empire” that quickly rose and fell while Gould had the benefit of hundreds of years of American “imperial” growth (quotes only because we still are struggling with the definition of “empire”). Clearly the Americans have been able to sustain, grow, and become one of the more dominant world forces (not just localized to one area). Gould gives us a great foundation for discussion of European understandings of treaties and political legitimacy in the growing of that power. Read more →

Post #1 – Comanche Empire

August 30, 2016December 16, 2020dshanebeck

Pekka Hamalainen made a strong case for a changed perspective of the American Southwest during Spanish and French colonization. Especially having read Brooks’ Captives and Cousins, I found myself very skeptical of the argument that the Comanche were the driving force of imperial control in such a vast, diverse, and changing landscape such as the Southwest. The idea that the Comanche empire did not just stall Spanish and French expansion but built their own empire “that subdued, exploited, marginalized, co-opted” and otherwise dominated a region with the kind of power that Hamalainen argued definitely peaked my interest (pg. 3). After finishing the introduction I was not entirely sure that I was willing to support the claim that the Comanche Empire could possibly stand out above the variety of native groups vying for influence among the clash of European encroachment. It was a strong thesis to start from and would require substantial evidence in order to prove.
As a whole, Hamalainen delivered a powerful narrative of a Comanche people that were adaptive to the environments in which they were surrounded or entered. I have to say that the argument for military might was not in question as Hamalainen clearly laid out the power the Comanche were able to gain over the use of horses and European weaponry. However, what caught my eye was the discussion about economic power that surrounded the trade and commerce networks that the Comanche set up or exploited throughout their empire. It was a very compelling case that Hamalainen made about how the Comanche were able to leverage their domination of horses on their lands to use it as a piece of capital. Comanche tribes did not have manufacturing but they were able to use the horse as a powerful chip in entering dominating positions of trade throughout the Southwest (pg. 72-73).
I felt as if there were some gaps or at least omissions from the argument that could have either supported Hamalainen or perhaps decreased the strength of his thesis. In multiple cases of Comanche expansion or growth–1750s-60s and then again in the 1770s-80s–there were major factors leading to pressure upon other groups on the fringes of the empire. There could be a case made that the Comanche were able to either leverage the turmoil due to their geographically centralized location and powerful networks of diplomacy and trade; or it could be argued that they were just quicker to adapt. Were Comanches able to use the destruction of the French empire and Spanish empires respectively because of their superior political, economic, and military jockeying? Or were Comanche just able to adapt and good at taking advantage of other’s misfortune? While Hamalainen comments on these issues, he does not spend a significant amount of time discussing the effects of both the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War and connecting it to Comanche growth or decline.

Readings in 19th Century American History – Fall 2016

Author: dshanebeck