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Slavery and Silence. Paul D. Naish
Читать онлайн.Название Slavery and Silence
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812294309
Автор произведения Paul D. Naish
Издательство Ingram
The connections between early archeological studies, Indian removal, and racial pseudoscience were more often assumed than explicitly drawn. Analyzing the way these ideas intersected in support of one another reveals much about U.S. understandings of race at midcentury, ideas that would in turn inform views about slavery. But whereas many remarks about slavery were deliberately silenced in national conversation because they were too volatile, assumptions about the race of ancient Americans often went unmentioned because they were considered self-evident, hardly worth the trouble of defending.12 Beliefs that racial differences were essential and unchangeable, that land occupied by inferior races might be conquered and cleansed, that the race-based, slave-dependent economy of the Market Revolution signaled not the emergence of a new stage of capitalism, but the restoration of an order rooted in and justified by history, all supported the status quo.13
Like so many other issues of the antebellum period, the nation’s steady absorption of land in the southwest was intimately connected to the expansion of slavery, though the connection was not always explicit.14 “[T]he expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre-Civil War United States,” writes historian Edward Baptist. “Scholars and students talked about politics as a battle about states’ rights or republican principles, but viewed in a different light the fights can be seen as a struggle between regions about how the rewards of slavery’s expansion would be allocated and whether that expansion could continue.”15 Expelling the Indian inhabitants was justified by prevarications, fanciful arguments, and occasionally legitimate concern for their welfare, but much of the mania was driven by the lust for their land. Eager for more senators who would dependably promote the peculiar institution, the South particularly welcomed the addition of new states invested in the plantation economy (“this cotton argument, as it is called, is a strong inducement with me for desiring the acquisition of Texas,” said U.S. representative Thomas Bayly in 1845. “It will give us the entire control of that great staple”).16 New England opposed southern expansion for a related reason: it feared the waning of its political influence as its densely populated states lost migrants to the west.
The process of occupying southwestern territory—first through the enforced removal of native peoples, then through the annexation of Texas, and finally through the spoils of the war with Mexico—was riven with controversy. During the 1830s politicians, particularly in areas where Indians were long gone, railed against the injustice and its inhumanity of driving the tribes from their homes. Citizens organized petition drives to protest.17 A glance at the way the centers of opposition overlapped with centers of abolitionism—among New Englanders and Pennsylvania Quakers particularly—confirms the connection between expansionism and the diffusion of slavery. As the equally controversial possibility of annexing Texas and fighting a war with Mexico seized the attention of the American public in the 1830s and 1840s, opponents of slavery criticized Southern expansionism. Abolitionist Theodore Sedgwick understood the annexation of Texas, whatever the reasons given in its defense, as “but another name for the perpetuity of slavery.”18 One Isaac C. Kenyon wrote ruefully in the North Star in 1848 that the United States “is at this moment spending an enormous amount of treasure and blood for the purpose of establishing in Mexico that singular kind of freedom which is the lot of her colored people at home.”19
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