Slave Country

in the early United States. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in an honest look at America's troubled past.

Adam Rothman

Rarely is an author's first book so mature in its balance and authority. Rothman sets out to explain 'why slavery expanded' under the leadership of members of the revolutionary generation and their successors, and why it expanded especially into the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, lands that were part of the Louisiana Purchase...The realities of slavery appear in all their vividness, as does the distinctiveness of the white cultures of the region, especially Louisiana's. One comes away from this readable, energetic work by Rothman appreciating how much the nation's vaunted past--its military successes, its democratic growth, its economic might--owes to the enslavement of people out of Africa. Publishers Weekly 20050110 Adam Rothman's Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South is the fullest account we have of how slaveholding in the southern states became not only acceptable but also a source of pride and celebration. -- George M. Fredrickson New York Review of Books 20050714 Adam Rothman's ambitious first book, Slave Country, provides an analytical narrative of how the three states associated with the Deep South--Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi--developed into plantation societies. Rothman weaves together political, economic, social, and military history to construct a much-needed study of this often-overooked region's beginnings...Rothman has a first-rate writing style, a sure command of the sources, especially primary source materials, and this book fills a real need in the historical literature for a modern analysis of the growth of slavery in the Deep South. -- James C. Foley H-Net Adam Rothman explains persuasively and succinctly how slavery expanded into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama from the 1780s to the 1820s--how a slave country, the United States, nurtured a slave country, the territory of the Deep South. The dual meaning in the title evidences Rothman's breadth of vision; his compelling narrative interweaves great causes and small stories...His interpretative structure sets a new standard of elegance and sophistication. It is difficult to do justice to the nuances and pleasures of Slave Country in a short review. You need to read it for yourself, and buy copies for friends. -- Anthony Gene Carey Alabama Review Adam Rothman's Slave Country is destined to be included on the must-read list of any serious student of antebellum slavery in the United States. The work is both significant and formative in that it recognizes the establishment of the new states of Louisiana (1812), Mississippi (1817), and Alabama (1819) as portending the formation of a Deep South ethos that defended slavery at all costs...Slave Country documents how the worst fears of those who imagined a slave power conspiracy came to be understood. -- Junius P. Rodriguez Journal of American History 20060301 An important book that sets a new agenda for studying the histories of the early U.S. republic, of the South, and of enslavement in nineteenth-century North America. -- Edward E. Baptist American Historical Review 20060201 The story that moves and grows through [Rothman's] text is one vitally important to any understanding of the nineteenth century, but one that historians are all too eager to move past in their effort to get to the "real" "Old" South. Rothman's subject is the expansion of both American national power and the enslavement of Africans in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana from 1790 to 1820...Rothman's impressively detailed and documented account shows that federal surveying and land selling, as well as other forms of executive and legislative policy making, ensured that slavery and the domestic slave trade would sustain cotton and sugar dreams in the lower Mississippi Valley. -- Edward E. Baptist American Historical Review Adam Rothman's Slave Country is destined to be included on the must-read list of any serious student of antebellum slavery in the United States. The work is both significant and formative in that it recognizes the establishment of the new states of Louisiana (1812), Mississippi (1817), and Alabama (1819) as portending the formation of a Deep South ethos that defended slavery at all costs...In a sweeping narrative that finds prescient links between territorial expansion, war, free-market capitalism, and Indian removal, the work traces how the special needs of the Deep South brought about an entrenchment of slavery in a nation that was morally ambivalent to the institution. -- Junius P. Rodriguez Journal of American History [A] studiously hard-hitting book. -- Jack Markowitz Pittsburgh Tribune-Review 20061008