The books at hand are Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution by Lawrence Goldstone (Walker) and American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin L. Einhorn (University of Chicago Press), but Wood uses th
e review to take aim at a broader literature that places slavery front and center at the nation’s founding. Other works on his list are Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power (2000); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic (2001); Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders (2001); Garry Wills, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003); Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen, Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (2005); and Gary Nash, Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006). These books, Wood suggests, "help satisfy the seemingly insatiable desire of many historians today to place slavery at the heart of America's origins."This treatment of slavery, he argues, is an improper form of presentism. He agrees with Bernard Bailyn, who "is keenly aware of the present's need to relate to the past and the power of that need in stimulating historical inquiry and writing. ‘There is always,’ [Bailyn] writes, ‘a need to extract from the past some kind of bearing on contemporary problems, some message, commentary, or instruction to the writer's age, and to see reflected in the past familiar aspects of the present.’ But without ‘critical control,’ this need, says Bailyn, ‘generates an obvious kind of presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical example.’"
Wood sees historians as taking to studies of the founding their present-day concerns. Early in the 20th century, when class struggle was a topic of concern, historians like Charles Beard studied the role class at the founding. In the latter half of the 20th century, Wood argues, race has been at the forefront, and so historians have put race at the center of their work on the founding. Wood finds value in this work, but he asks whether "the historians who have written these works exercised Bailyn's 'critical control' and avoided distorting the past with their present-minded concerns?"
Wood acknowledges that "no one can deny the importance of slavery to the develop
ment of early America." He emphasizes that "the fact that slavery had been taken for granted for thousands of years prior to the mid-eighteenth century must be the starting point in any assessment of its influence on early American politics and nationhood. With the exception of some isolated people with strong principles, especially Quakers, few Americans prior to the Revolutionary era seriously questioned the institution of slavery. It was the Revolution and its emphasis on liberty that made slavery a problem for Americans."From this starting point, Wood turns to detailed and rather sharp critiques of Goldstone and Einhorn, which don’t lend themselves to quick summaries. Those with an on-line subscription to the NYRB can find the rest here, or you can purchase one-time access for $3.00. Others can find it in your mailbox, on your newsstand, or in your library. And for Mark Graber's very positive take on Einhorn's book on the Legal History Blog, click here.
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Thanks to Al Brophy for the tip on this.
Note: I am traveling this week and next, so any glitches that need my attention may take a little longer than usual in fixing.
