Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T09:16:10.372Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

OLMSTED, DE BOW, AND THE WEIGHT OF EVIDENCE ON THE AMERICAN SLAVE SOUTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Harro Maas
Harro Maas*
Affiliation:
Centre Walras-Pareto d'études interdisciplinaires de la pensée économique et politique - IEPI Bâtiment Geopolis - Université de Lausanne. Harro.maas@unil.ch.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Scholarship on the American Slave South generally agrees that John Eliot Cairnes’s The Slave Power provided a highly biased interpretation of the functioning and long-term viability of the southern slave economy. Published shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, its partisanship is partly attributed to its clearly stated goal to shift British support from the secession states to the states of the Union. Thus, it is generally agreed, Cairnes sifted his sources to obtain the desired outcome. A more balanced use of the sources at his possession would have provided a very different outcome. This paper will challenge this general assessment of Cairnes’s book by examining in some detail two of Cairnes’s most important sources: Frederic Law Olmsted’s travelogues on the American Slave South and James D. B. De Bow's compilation of statistical data and essays in his Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States (1852–53). By contrasting De Bow's use of statistical evidence with Olmsted's travelogues, my final purpose is to question the weight of evidence on the American Slave South. Cairnes aimed, I will argue, much more to balance the evidence than is generally acknowledged, but it is misleading to think that balancing a wide range of evidence washes out bias if this evidence itself is politically skewed, as is the rule rather than the exception.

Type
Symposium: American Political Economy From the Age of Jackson to the Civil War
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 171 - 185
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Archival sources: Cairnes Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 8982; Cairnes Collection. James Hardiman Library, Galway.Google Scholar
Anderson, Margo J. 1988. The American Census: A Social History. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Margo J. 2003. “The Missouri Debates, Slavery and Statistics of Race: Demography in Service of Politics.” Annales de Démographie Historique 1: 23–38.Google Scholar
Anderson, Margo J, and Fienberg, Stephen E.. 2000. “Race and Ethnicity and the Controversy Over the US Census.” Current Sociology 48 (3): 87–110.Google Scholar
Cairnes, John Elliot. 1862. The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs: Being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues Involved in the American Contest. London: Parker, Son, and Bourn.Google Scholar
Cairnes, John Elliot. 2003. John Elliot Cairnes: Collected Works. Volume 6. London: Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Cohen, Patricia Cline. 1999. A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Bow, James Dunwoody Brownson. 1850. Commercial Review. Volume 7.Google Scholar
De Bow, James Dunwoody Brownson. 1852. The Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States: Embracing a View of their Commerce, Agriculture, Manufactures, Internal Improvemen. Three volumes. New Orleans, The office of De Bow's review.Google Scholar
Den Hollander, Arie Nicolaas Jan. 1967. “Countries Far Away-Cognition at a Distance.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 9 (4): 362–376.Google Scholar
Desrosières, Alain. 2002. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Desrosières, Alain. 2008. L'Argument Statistique: Tome 1, Pour Une Sociologie Historique De La Quantification. Paris: Presses des MINES.Google Scholar
D’Onofrio, Federico. 2015. Making Variety Simple: Statistics and Agricultural Modernization in Early 20th Century Italy. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Dunn, Susan. 2007. Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Durden, Robert F. 1951. “JDB De Bow: Convolutions of a Slavery expansionist.” The Journal of Southern History 17 (4): 441–461.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fogel, Robert W., and Engerman, Stanley L.. 1974. Time on the Cross. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.Google Scholar
Genovese, Eugene D. 1989. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Hummel, Jeffrey Rogers. 2014. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, A History of the American Civil War. Chicago: Open Court e-book.Google Scholar
Jennings, Thelma. 1990. “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Though a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women.’” Journal of Women's History 1 (3): 45–74.Google Scholar
Kvach, John Franklin. 2008. “The First New South: J. D. B. De Bow’s Promotion of a Modern Economy in the Old South.” PhD diss., University of Tennessee.Google Scholar
Maas, Harro. 2011. “Sorting Things Out: The Economist as an Armchair Observer.” In Daston, Lorraine and Lunbeck, Elizabeth, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 206–219.Google Scholar
Maas, Harro, and Morgan, Mary S., eds. Observing the Economy: Historical Perspectives, History of Political Economy 44, annual supplement (2012).Google Scholar
Majewski, John. 2009. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Herman Clarence. 1931. “DeBow's Review.” The Sewanee Review 39 (1): 54–61.Google Scholar
Öhman, Martin. 2013. “The Statistical Turn in Early American Political Economy: Mathew Carey and the Authority of Numbers.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11 (3): 486–515.Google Scholar
Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1856. Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on their Economy. New York: Mason.Google Scholar
Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1860. A Journey in the Back Country. Mason.Google Scholar
Olmsted, Frederick Law, McLaughlin, Charles Capen, Beveridge, Charles E., Censer, Jane Turner, Ranney, Victoria Post, and Schuyler, David, eds.. 1977. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. 1969. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Le Capital au XXIe siècle. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. 1994. “Making Things Quantitative.” Science in Context 7 (3): 389–408.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore M. 2011. “Reforming Vision: The Engineer Le Play Learns to Observe Society Sagely.” In Daston, Lorraine and Lunbeck, Elizabeth, eds., Histories of Scientific Observation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 281–302.Google Scholar
Russel, Robert R. 1925. “The Pacific Railway Issue in Politics Prior to the Civil War.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1925): 187–201.Google Scholar
Schor, Paul. 2003. “Statistiques De La Population Et Politique Des Catégories Aux États-Unis Au XIXe Siècle. Théories Raciales Et Questions De Population Dans Le Recensement Américain.” Annales de Démographie Historique 1: 5–21.Google Scholar
Schor, Paul. 2009. Compter et Classer. Paris: EHESS.Google Scholar
Shade, William G. 1996. Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System 1824–1861. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Skipper, Ottis Clark. 1958. JDB De Bow: Magazinist of the Old South. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Sutch, Richard C. 1975. “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860.” In Engerman, Stanley and Genovese, Eugene, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 173–210.Google Scholar
Sutton, Robert P. 1968. “Nostalgia, Pessimism, and Malaise: The Doomed Aristocrat in Late-Jeffersonian Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1): 41–55.Google Scholar
Wender, Herbert. 1930. Southern Commercial Conventions, 1837–1859. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Whately, Richard. 1819. Proof of the Existence of Napoleon Buonaparte.Google Scholar