Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution.

Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution. By Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen. Introduction by Eleanor Holmes Norton. (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, Inc., c. 2005. Pp. xvi, 336. $24.95, ISBN 1-4022-0400-0.)

In a series of recent studies, political historians have been exploring the myriad ways in which concerns for the protection of slavery shaped American political institutions, from the Constitution itself to the political parties, the origin of local police forces, and the shape of tax regimes. Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution makes a more ambitious claim that concern for the protection of slavery actually caused the American Revolution. The argument hinges on the southern, and especially Virginian, response to the combination of the Declaratory Act (1766), the "repugnancy clauses" of colonial charters, and the Somerset case (1772). In the Declaratory Act, Parliament held that it could legislate for the colonies in "all cases whatsoever" (p. 21). In the repugnancy clauses, colonies were prohibited from passing laws that were inconsistent with British law. In the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield freed a fugitive on the grounds that slavery was "so odious" that it could exist only under positive law--and therefore could not exist in England until Parliament passed an explicit proslavery measure (which it never did) (p. 14).

Emphasizing that the founding fathers were lawyers skilled in the parsing of legal texts, the Blumrosens argue that this combination of precedents led the southern founders to champion independence in order to secure "the sole right to direct their internal polity" (p. 102). Northerners cared about Britain's power to tax; southerners cared about its power to abolish slavery. With independence, southerners came to see the North as they had seen Britain: as an outside power that might interfere with slavery unless restrained by guarantees of autonomous state control over internal policy making. Hence the founders included Article 2 in the Articles of Confederation ("Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States"), along with other clauses of that document and the U.S. Constitution.

The last third of Slave Nation examines the relationship between the slavery ban of the Northwest Ordinance and the adoption of the Constitution. It defends Staughton Lynd's thesis of a sectional bargain in which Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory in return for the convention adopting the three-fifths clause, noting also that banning slavery in the Northwest implied protecting it in the Southwest (Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays [Indianapolis, 1967]). It then adds a new argument that the southerners who supported the slavery ban intended the free Northwest as "a safety valve or dumping ground for antislavery sentiment" (p. 219). "The channeling of New England antislavery people north of the Ohio protected the institution of slavery in the rest of the country," though it ultimately caused the Civil War by linking the Northwest to the Northeast rather than the South (p. 220).

The book has obvious problems: factual errors that could have been caught (slaves as 80 percent of South Carolina's population, p. 34), simplistic summaries of complex issues (Bacon's Rebellion causing Virginia's shift from indentured servitude to slavery, p. 26), and questionable evidentiary claims--including a sharp criticism of historians who doubt that an 1821 letter by John Adams "explains his actions supporting the South on slavery issues at the First Continental Congress in 1774" (p. 92). The thesis also raises unanswered questions: if the problem with the British Empire was the insecurity of slavery, why did the West Indies not join the revolt?

Nevertheless, Slave Nation is a passionate and interesting work. As longtime civil rights lawyers, the Blumrosens write with a deep commitment to overcoming the legacies of slavery in the United States. Their agenda is exemplified in the book's illustrations, from portraits of Lord Mansfield and the Founding Fathers to Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

ROBIN EINHORN

University of California, Berkeley