Slavery, Race, and American History: Historical Conflicts, Trends, and Method, 1866-1953.

Slavery, Race, and American History: Historical Conflicts, Trends, and Method, 1866-1953. By John David Smith. (Armonk, N.Y., and London: M. E. Sharpe, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 240. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-7656-0378-0; cloth, $64.95, ISBN 0-7656-0377-2.)

The fifteen essays that comprise this volume cover much the same ground as John David Smith's An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (Westport, Conn., 1985). In that earlier volume, the work of historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877-1934) was the culmination of a southern-born interpretation of slavery that rested on racist assumptions about the incapacity of blacks. That interpretation also justified racial inequality in the twentieth century. Phillips is the dominant figure in Smith's new collection, too, as well as the main subject of six of the essays. Phillips and his cohort of pioneer historians of slavery not only raised questions that we continue to debate but, as Smith shows, they also created the archives in which we continue to do our research.

Because he must introduce the historians and the historiography anew in each essay, repetition is unavoidable, as Smith acknowledges; but this does not leave much space for analysis. Phillips and his southern white peers are labeled racists, for example, but there is little here about just how that racism shaped the historians' interpretations. These historians' virtues are similarly declared but not fully demonstrated. Two of the most intriguing essays contrast Phillips's historical work with that of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frederic Bancroft. Smith's efficient summaries of the divergent views of these important scholars are admirable, but his achievement arouses a desire for more depth than short essays can deliver.

A main reason for the collection's lack of critical bite is that Smith is an advocate for scholars of long ago whose works, he believes, have received insufficient attention from today's scholars. The volume's first essay is about George H. Moore, an iconoclastic New Englander whose demonstration of his region's long sanctioning of racial slavery pleased white southerners during Reconstruction. It is exemplary in explaining the context of a now-obscure scholar's work and the reactions to it. Smith's essay on Howell M. Henry's 1914 study of police control of slaves in South Carolina, on the other hand, suffers a bit from his decision not to revise these essays. The essay on Henry first appeared before the publication of Norrece T. Jones Jr.'s Born A Child of Freedom, Yet A Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover, N.H., 1990). Smith's original conclusion that Henry's work still matters would be sounder here if he had appended a note on whether Jones's book had changed his assessment. He cites Jones' work, however, in the up-to-date bibliography that is another of this volume's virtues.

Smith's continuing interest in the documentary sources on slavery, and the ways in which historians have identified and used them, connects all of these essays. He shows how professional historians from the South, led by Woodrow Wilson, held up the principles of "scientific history" to condemn James Ford Rhodes for using the accounts of unfriendly travelers and other non-southern sources to interpret slavery in his history of the coming of the Civil War. These scholars suggested that plantation records, which they argued were less biased because they had been created during the course of daily business, along with diaries and other primary sources, provided better means to study slavery as it was. Other essays show how African American scholars simultaneously, but independently, collected a body of folklore and slave testimony to give the slaves' view of slavery.

Smith states that he intends this volume for "the student reader" (p. xii). The book will provide a solid introduction to the foundations of slavery historiography.

JOHN T. KNEEBONE Library of Virginia