I've been enjoying Neely Young's new book Ripe for Emancipation (and here on books.google), which I picked up recently in the Washington and Lee bookstore. It's a study of the antislavery movement in Rockbridge County, Virginia (of which Lexington is the county seat). And what I particularly like about it is that it links intellectual history -- like the Enlightenment-based ideas of freedom that prevailed in the early nineteenth century -- to the practices of emancipation via will and inter vivos that took place over the first sixty years of the century. Of course, those ideas declined in popularity in Rockbridge County as they did everywhere in the south over the pre-war years, though there was more persistence of the ideas there than in many other places.
A couple of things are particularly interesting to me -- Young studies the Rockbridge County probate and deed records to get a pretty comprehensive sense of the emancipations that took place; it looks like something on the order of 5% of the enslaved people in the county were freed over this time, though it may have been somewhat more than that. Not a lot, by any means.
One of the many insights that I gained from Young was the understanding -- however laughable it was to many people at the time and to us now -- that the anti-slavery southerners sincerely clung to the idea of colonization a part of emancipation. This, perhaps, helps us understand just how effectively Thomas R. Dew ended the movement for emancipation in Virginia when he showed that colonization wasn't economically feasible. Thus, anti-slavery in the south had little future, if it had to be linked to expelling newly freed people from their homes and even transporting them to Liberia. The viable options in the minds of Virginians made termination of slavery impossible.
Couple of other points. First, by focusing on anti-slavery (and its decline), we miss the rise of the proslavery movement in Rockbridge. I'm going to be talking a lot more about this in the next month, but I think it's important to view both of these movements together, to see the power of the proslavery argument. While you have some forward-thinking and brave people -- often faculty at Washington College, like Henry Ruffner and George Dabney -- they are relatively unimportant when balanced against the proslavery thinkers and actors, even in Rockbridge County who are saying things like the virtues of slavery are beyond dispute and the only thing worthy of discussion is how to secure slavery as an institution. I love intellectual history -- and the history of Enlightenment thinkers in particular -- so I very much enjoyed reading Young. I don't mean to be implying that he makes the anti-slavery ideas out to be more powerful than they were; I just think it's important to see the ideas in context to understand how limited they were.
Second, Young discovered that something like 19 testators in 1860 provided for emancipation of their slaves, which is substantially more than any other year before then (the next largest in a single year was 12 in 1828). That leads me to a question...why? Wills, of course, are often written years before the testator dies and thus may reflect the sentiments of people a decade or more before. But clearly something unusal was going on in 1860 ... besides the election of Lincoln and the movement for secession.
Anyway, if you're looking for a very fine study that links ideas and social history, I would urge you to look at Young's important book. And here's a discussion of the cover by the artist who drew it.
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