A Book I Love + book.google=An Antebellum Math Problem

Ok--so I'm sitting here reading John McCardell's fantastic Idea of a Southern Nation. He references an algebra book published in the 1840s by a Davidson prof, D.H. Hill, (also later a Confederate general) that makes fun of yankees.

So I surf over to book.google--what a fabulous research tool this is. And though a librarian was just yesterday criticizing me for my research method (and for also not spending enough time in the archives), I have to say: it sure is convenient to be able to pull up the text on my desktop. So check out this problem from Professor Hill's book:

A Yankee mixes a certain number of wooden nutmegs, which cost him 1/4 cent apiece, with a quantity of real nutmegs, worth 4 cents apiece, and sells the whole assortment for $44; and gains $3.75 by the fraud. How many wooden nutmegs were there?

Fun in math class, eh? (Am I right in thinking that 4x-1/4x=375?)

In honor of Sally's terrific work on State v. Mann, how about this problem involving the hiring of a slave:

A planter hired a negro-man at the rate of $100 per annum, and his clothing. At the end of 8 months the master of the slave took him home, and received $75 in cash, and no clothing. What was the clothing valued at?

Also, on the issue of emancipation and the generosity of North and South, this:

A gentleman in Richmond expressed a willingness to liberate his slave, valued at $1000, upon the receipt of that sum from charitable persons. He received contributions from 24 persons; and of these there were 14/19ths fewer from the North than from the South, and the average donation of the former was 4/5ths smaller than that of the latter. What was the entire amount given by the latter?

Mighty interesting stuff to see what's on the minds of antebellum textbook authors, eh?

(By the way, just so this is clear--the book I love is McCardell's Idea of a Southern Nation.)

Two things I love

Well, it's a Friday afternoon in July and so it's time for a little break from University, Court, and Slave. Time to talk about two things I love.

First, University Microform's Digital Dissertations. I'm able to sit here in my office in Chapel Hill and read Colin Bradley Burke's fantastic quantitative study of colleges in the antebellum period. Second, quantitative studies of history. Reading Burke's study I'm reminded that it wasn't so long ago that scholars wrote their own programs to do data analysis. (He talks about a FORTRAN program he wrote to compute coefficients.) Heck, even I did my own programming for my first quantitative study back in the mid-1980s. (That's because I didn't have an account on my school's IBM 370, so I used a desktop.) Ah, the good old days....

Traces of the Trade, on P.O.V. This Tuesday

I've been buried in work on University, Court, and Slave (though you couldn't tell it from how little progress I made last week), so I'm a little behind the curve on this most exciting news. The much-discussed documentary Traces of the Trade will be broadcast on television for the first time this Tuesday, June 24, on the PBS show P.O.V. (In Chapel Hill, POV's broadcast of the film will be on Friday the 27th.) Traces of the Trade is about James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island (one of our country's wealthiest men and a leading figure in the slave trade in the eighteenth century) and a journey that DeWolf's descendants made recently as they retraced the paths of his trade routes and property holdings. They began in Bristol, then went to Ghana and the Caribbean.

I saw a director's cut of this back in 2005 at a conference at Brown University. It was fantastic--absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see the final version. You need to see this. Trust me on this one.

This evening's Bill Moyer's Journal has a short preview, which you can watch here. Also, Sally tells me that the director, Katrina Browne, will be speaking in Chapel Hill on September 6. You may also be interested in c-span's broadcast with Thomas DeWolf, who's the author of a book on this subject, Inheriting the Trade.

Resurfacing in Chapel Hill

Well, it was a long trip from Tuscaloosa to Chapel Hill.

I'm sitting here in my pet friendly hotel in Chapel Hill listening to the Democratic Rules Committee debate; riveting stuff, for sure. And because Chapel Hill is a new beginning for me, I thought that I'd post Thomas Cole's Falls of the Kaaterskill, which is about nature and the new. It's also a connection to my past, however, because it's home is the fabulous Westervelt Warner Museum in Tuscaloosa.

I have new found respect for folks like movers. I also have new found respect for the antebellum southerners I study. The amount of energy it took to settle the south and the physical difficulties were extraordinary. But what the move--packing my books and files, even with the help of movers--as well as the drive impressed upon me how difficult is was to sustain and propagate intellectual culture. The library at the antebellum University of Alabama had something like 5000 volumes; it was one of the largest libraries in the country at the time. Yet it must have been extraordinarily expensive and difficult to assemble those book. Moreover, it's testimony to the extraordinary commitment to the community of ideas that people in the old south, in places that were so difficult to get to, read and wrote about ideas of religion, politics, and moral philosophy. They sustained a culture in the face of adversity. Now, that may also tell us something about why that culture was so thoroughly conservative. (Although in the eighteenth century the hurdles were even greater and that was not so nearly conservative an intellectual culture.)

A Memorial of Samuel Townsend

In honor of memorial day, I thought that I'd post on a most interesting will--that of Samuel Townsend of Madison County, Alabama. (Thanks to the fabulous Merrily Harris of the University of Alabama's Hoole Library for bringing this to my attention.) Mr. Townsend's 1856 will freed a number of people (Joel Williamson speculates that at least some of them were family members). The will is important evidence of the ways that testators, lawyers, and executors negotiated around the system of slavery--and on this I will be talking more later this summer.

However, you know what the very first substantive request was? To be buried on his plantation and for a memorial to be erected over his remains! ("I wish my body to be interred in the grave yard on the plantation where I now reside, a marble monument worth from five to seven hundred dollars erected upon my grave, and enclosed by a durable stone wall.") Pretty cool to look to wills to see how people thought about memorials, isn't it?

University, Court, and Slave

I thought that I'd talk a little about my current project. I'm pretty excited about it, in part because it's something I've been working on (in one way or another) since beginning graduate school. I've had a bunch of detours, through colonial American history (particularly Quaker legal thought), through violence in the early twentieth century and contemporary discussion of reparations. But I'm now back and working on intellectual thought in the old South.

Alas, I'm one of those people who study dead, white men--and Christians and slaveholders at that. Every now and then a white woman wanders across my pages, too. And sometimes enslaved people speak--though as I'll talk about next month, I more often study ways that the slaveholders try to prevent them from speaking.

My current project is a monograph, tentatively called "University, Court, and Slave." It's about jurisprudence in the south in the years leading into Civil War. And the way I try to get at that complex set of ideas is by looking to the writings of academics, who were often more expressive about the matrix of ideas about economy (utility), history, and precedent than were judges faced with deciding cases in front of them.

In the years leading into Civil War, orators at Harvard and Yale spoke in support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. William and Mary’s President Thomas Roderick Dew and University of Virginia Professor Albert Taylor Bledsoe were among the leading American proslavery writers. Randolph Macon College President William Smith wrote a proslavery college textbook, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery. Smith's book, like many other southern texts, are available on the UNC website. I 'm glad such books are available, so they can be studied.

These days I’m studying the intellectual defense of slavery in American colleges in the years leading into Civil War. The same language of moral philosophy that’s employed in colleges also appears in public debate (like the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Congress) and in judicial opinions. The concern for considerations of utility rather than individual humanity to slaves and their references to historical “knowledge” about the ubiquity and need for slavery appear in college classrooms, in public oratory, and in judicial opinions. Sometimes people write about the role of moral philosophy in judicial opinions. What interests me is how there is a common language. I don’t suggest that lessons Justice Thomas Ruffin learned while a student at Princeton in the first decade of the nineteenth century controlled him when he was a judge on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1829 through the 1850s. Rather, the language of utility and history that was common to college classrooms and to judicial opinions suggests some of the connections. The professors and jurists (and politicians, too) are drawing upon a common understanding of how to address moral problems.

Those sometimes hidden connections can help us answer some important questions about the reasoning process of antebellum jurists–-and so are important to legal historians. Once we focus on the ubiquitious considerations of utility, I think we understand why people as different in outlook as Morton Horwitz and Richard Posner both see economic considerations as central to jurisprudence in the 19th century.

Even more important than what they say about 19th century jurisprudence, these connections illustrate how powerful the proslavery forces were. They demonstrate that when we think about investigating universities’ connections to slavery, we should pay close attention to the ways that they loaned their intellectual capital to the project of continuing nearly four million people–-indeed our whole country–-in bondage. Those proslavery college professors were engaged scholars; they used their talents and their positions of influence to teach the next generation.

There are also stories about a few places where college professors opposed slavery. Judge William Gaston of the North Carolina Supreme Court spoke against slavery in an address at the University of North Carolina in 1835. After the mid-1830s, Southern schools–like the South more generally–were consistently and forcefully in favor of slavery.

President Francis Wayland of Brown University is one of those who opposed slavery; in 1845 he debated through a series of letters a proslavery minister from South Carolina, Richard Fuller. But those who opposed slavery were relatively few. More told their students and whoever else would listen that slavery was right; was ordained of God; was necessary for the continuation of American society; and that emancipation would cause greater harm (for slaves, as well as others) than would continuation of slavery. Such as some of the lessons we learn from rigorous investigations of our past, such as Brown University undertook. And for that knowledge, as for some many other things, we owe Brown's President Ruth Simmons and the Steering Committee’s leader, History Professor James Campbell, a huge debt.

Alfred Brophy

This is why they call it the moonlight and magnolia school

I've got my internet connection back up, so....

On Sunday I came home, on the late side from a colleague's house--they live next to the famous Tuscaloosa Country Club (famous because it's the subject of an important vignette in Carl Carmer's Stars Fell on Alabama).

The magnolia tree in the front smelled oh so sweet and the moon cast such beautiful shadows. No wonder there's a whole genre built around them. (The so-called "moonlight and magnolia school" that flourished from the wake of Civil War through the early twentieth century, which focused on the beauty of the old south.) Of course, focus on that can cause us to lose sight of a lot else, which we should be paying attention to.

By the way, trees are great stand-ins in southern thought for the critical southern values of inheritance and family. So when I was looking for a question for my remedies exam, I thought one based on a case from Jacksonville about some homeowners who sought an injunction to prevent the Alabama Power Company from cutting down their trees was the makin's of a great question.

Ruffin Field Trip: Part II

Here are two of Sally's other pictures from the Ruffin Field trip. At left is one of the slaves' houses from the historic Stagville, a plantation owned by the Beehan and Cameron families. About 900 enslaved people lived on the plantation around 1860. And below is the front of one of the houses. As I recall, there were four compartments--two on the entry floor and two on the second floor. Pretty sparse accommodations---no surprise there. And I think it's great that these structures have been preserved; they help convey a sense of what life was like. One of the things that surprised me (though it obviously shouldn't have) was how the houses are lined up in a row. It seemed very much like the industrial-era villages I've seen up north.

Looking forward to the Visit

Thanks Sally for that very, very kind introduction and for inviting me to walk into Greenespace and chat for a while. It makes me very happy and optimistic about the future to know that someone as thoughtful as Sally is an elected official. And I'm looking forward to being Sally's neighbor and colleague in a couple of weeks. It's a dream come true to be on a faculty as terrific as UNC's.

I share Sally's interest in things antebellum and in how we remember the past. And because I'm giving a talk on landscape art and property law on Thursday I thought that I'd talk some about that now, because I'm still rearranging my note cards and trying how best to present this material.

The talk, "Property and Progress" (cute play on Henry George, eh?) is on the relationship between landscape art and property law in the years leading into Civil War at one of my favorite--and one of our country's finest--art museums, the Westervelt Warner Museum. The talk centers around my favorite work of American art, Asher B. Durand's Progress (1853), which just so happens to be owned by the museum. This will be a huge treat for me, to have the chance to talk about that most magical of paintings at its home. And, in fact, this talk is part of welcoming it home from travels to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then out to San Diego for a major exhibit on Durand.

I join two themes here--first, the centrality of property and particularly the hand of humans on the land, in antebellum landscape art; second, the ways that antebellum property law reflected and amplified those values. The correlation between them is not perfect. A substantial part of landscape art reveals concern over increasing human intrusions on nature. For instance, Thomas Cole's landscapes frequently disclose an ambivalence about the market. What Cole and a lot of other people celebrate--including Frederick Church's Above the Clouds at Sunrise--is nature freed from humans.

The romantics of the antebellum era worried that someone tried to own the landscape. So when Natural Bridge in western Virginia was offered for sale, John Thompson protested it in the pages of the Southern Literary Messenger. Thomas Jefferson thought that the Natural Bridge, which he had once owned, should be treated as a public trust. (Frederick Church's image of the Natural Bridge, which is owned by the University of Virginia, is at right).


Landscape painters also captured farms and parcels of land, such as Thomas Cole's Ox Bow in the Connecticut River (right). It shows the landscape around Mount Holyoke. Look from left to right and see the increasing civilization. On the left is wild nature, twisted trees; over towards the right are fields, orchards, roads. Ox Bow was completed in 1836, the same year that Emerson completed Nature. You may recall that Emerson said of landscape that:

The charming landscape which I saw this morning, is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

Thomas Cole painted a number of such scenes. Sometimes I've used Cole's 1847 "Home in the Woods," which is in the Reynolda House Museum.
The idea here is to show the ways that humans put their imprint on nature--and how artists celebrated that imprint. George Inness' Lackawanna Valley (below) is a classic example. Look at the machine going through the the fields of cut-stumps; the railroad roundhouse in the background; the smoke stack even further off; what a strange juxaposition (it seems at first) of humans and nature. While it seems strange at first, my point is that landscape art is part of the celebration of human's use of land. The boy sitting in the foreground reminds one of Thoreau who talks in Walden of setting his watch to the railroad whistle. Where the image of Walden is of a secluded place, that solitude was often disturbed by the train whistle and then the sounds of the engine.



There’re some neat connections here between property law’s reverence for private property (and its preference for use of land) and the kind of art that Americans produced. It's fun cultural history, I think. And every now and then there are some unexpected connections between judges and landscape art. For instance, in a lecture in 1844 at Dartmouth, United States Supreme Court Justice Levi Woodbury referred to Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire to illustrate how nations evolved–“starting first in the rudeness of nature; then maturing to high refinement and grandeur-till, amid the ravages of luxury, time and war, sinking into utter desolation.” The series of five paintings depict the same landscape (look for the mountain in the background), as the country goes from a state of nature, to civilization, consummation, destruction, and then desolation. Sort of sobering, but in keeping with many nineteenth-century Americans’ belief in the cycle of nations.
Others, including Justice Woodbury, saw an unbroken chain of upward progress, often facilitated by the increasing respect for private property. And so there's an odd contrast between Cole, who was ambivalent about humans' imposition on nature and Woodbury and a lot of other jurists, who were enamored of the market. And you know what Woodbury's talk is called? How could it be anything other than "Progress"?!
Yup, colleges in the antebellum era were deeply interested in progress-- technological, economic, and moral (though what that meant was unclear). And so it should not surprise anyone that Jasper Cropsey painted the University of Michigan in 1855 (right). It has everything--the school buildings and church (at right), the fields, the roads, a horse drawn wagon, domesticated animals. The college in the garden, to paraphrase Leo Marx' brilliant book The Machine in the Garden. And another important source for this talk is Angela Miller's fantastic book The Empire of the Eye.
What, then, of the centerpiece of the talk: Durand's Progress? It’s a great canvass for seeing all sorts of images of what "progress" meant-–the shift from the native Americans over on the left (the state of nature), then moving across the canvass to the right, the telegraph wires, the steam boats, the canal, the peddler, the boy bringing the cattle to market, the church, the railroad roundhouse....
The talk is particularly meaningful for me, too, because it's the last lecture I'm giving in Tuscaloosa. So it'll be fun, but sad, too, because I'll be saying goodbye to a painting I love and a lot of friends, too.
Alfred Brophy

Window into a colorful past in Wilmington

How fun to see that my friend Catherine Bishir has posted a message on H-Material-Culture, cross-posted at H-Slavery, about a wonderful celebration of the Johnkannaus this past December at Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington.

Earlier this winter, there was a reenactment of a traditional African American festival that prevailed in Wilmington, New Bern, and some other Carolina coastal towns during the 19th century at the Christmas season, at which slaves and later freed people paraded through the streets, went to homes of the wealthy for money, and performed certain dances and songs believed to trace from African and Caribbean traditions. (As you probably know, there was a slave holiday of about a week at Christmas, followed by slave hirings about January 1; Jonkonnu, or John Canoe, was the highlight in certain communities.)

A few years ago, Tryon Palace Historic Sites and Gardens began the revival of the event in New Bern, and it has become quite popular and powerful. This winter, the Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington was the site of the first such revival event in Wilmington, NC.

The scenes of people in costume descending the steps of the big house are probably pretty authentic to that of the antebellum period, as related by accounts of the time. These pictures are pretty exciting.

Slide show.

Harriet Jacobs observed the "Johnkannaus" in Edenton:

Every child rises early on Christmas morning to see the Johnkannaus. Without them, Christmas would be shorn of its greatest attraction. They consist of companies of slaves from the plantations, generally of the lower class. Two athletic men, in calico wrappers, have a net thrown over them, covered with all manner of bright-colored stripes. Cows' tails are fastened to their backs, and their heads are decorated with horns. A box, covered with sheepskin, is called the gumbo box. A dozen beat on this, while other strike triangles and jawbones, to which bands of dancers keep time. For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o'clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ch. 22.