Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.

Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. By Adam Rothman. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xvi, 296. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-01674-2.)

The title of Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South, an examination of American expansion into the Deep South states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana over the forty years following the American Revolution, has a double meaning. This was a crucial period when slavery, fueled by the rise of the cotton kingdom and the labor-hungry sugar empire of Louisiana, escaped the eastern seaboard and spread across the Old Southwest in newly revitalized forms. Territorial acquisitions, decisions about the international and internal slave trade, Indian policy, land sales, war and diplomacy, and tariff laws facilitated settlement of the Old Southwest and transformed the Deep South into a slave country. At the same time those policies and the actions of countless individuals, both bound and flee, entangled the nation as a whole in the institution of slavery, turning the United States itself into a slave country. This was not an inevitable process, Rothman argues, but rather the result of specific decisions and policies that shaped the contours of antebellum slavery.

Tracing a path from the Jeffersonian vision of a West where slavery could be diffused to the point of extinction to the failure of that dream in the Missouri crisis of 1819-1820, Rothman organizes his book around chapters devoted to the settlement of both the cotton lands of the Black Belt and the sugarcane plantations of Louisiana. A wide cast of characters populate Rothman's Deep South: Indian agents intent on so-called civilization and the Red Stick Creek warriors who resisted; African slaves who led revolts and the polyglot citizens of Louisiana, including New Orleans's free blacks, who suppressed those rebellions; surveyors who carved up the wilderness with geometric precision and the wave after wave of settlers who purchased those plots of land to farm with or without slave labor. Rothman enlivens his account with stories of these individuals, but he repeatedly returns to the role of the government in the settlement of the Deep South. War and diplomacy extended the territory of the United States, secured control of the Mississippi River, and removed the threat of foreign intervention in the Southwest. The federal "civilization" policy and the conquest of the Creek Nation in 1813-1814 opened land for white settlement, and the government's surveying and sale process facilitated that transfer of property. Federal tariffs on foreign sugar bolstered Louisiana's economy, while each of the Deep South states passed laws regulating the internal slave trade, juggling their desire for labor with their need for security. Out of the accretion of those individual actions and specific policies emerged a slave country.

Most of the topics covered in Slave Country will be familiar to readers, but Rothman offers a fresh perspective by placing them within the interpretive framework of slavery's expansion. One contribution of Rothman's comprehensive approach is the integration of Louisiana history--too often treated as an insular and exotic anomaly--into the broader regional history of the Southwest. Sugar and cotton fueled the expansion of slavery, and Rothman is careful to delineate both the parallels and the differences between those economies. But the real merit of the book lies in its sharp focus on an important transitional period and the countless ways in which westward expansion gave birth to an antebellum South and a nation deeply entangled in the institution of slavery.

DANIEL S. DUPRE

University of North Carolina at Charlotte