Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana PurchaseOxford University Press, 6. 3. 2003 - Počet stran: 376 Thomas Jefferson advocated a republic of small farmers--free and independent yeomen. And yet as president he presided over a massive expansion of the slaveholding plantation system, particularly with the Louisiana Purchase, squeezing the yeomanry to the fringes and to less desirable farmland. Now Roger G. Kennedy conducts an eye-opening examination of the gap between Jefferson's stated aspirations and what actually happened. Kennedy reveals how the Louisiana Purchase had a major impact on land use and the growth of slavery. He examines the great financial interests (such as the powerful land companies that speculated in new territories and the British textile interests) that beat down slavery's many opponents in the South itself (Native Americans, African Americans, Appalachian farmers, and conscientious opponents of slavery). He describes how slaveholders' cash crops--first tobacco, then cotton--sickened the soil and how the planters moved from one desolated tract to the next. Soon the dominant culture of the entire region--from Maryland to Florida, from Carolina to Texas--was that of owners and slaves producing staple crops for international markets. The earth itself was impoverished, in many places beyond redemption. None of this, Kennedy argues, was inevitable. He focuses on the character, ideas, and ambitions of Thomas Jefferson to show how he and other Southerners struggled with the moral dilemmas presented by the presence of Indian farmers on land they coveted, by the enslavement of their workforce, by the betrayal of their stated hopes, and by the manifest damage being done to the earth itself. Jefferson emerges as a tragic figure in a tragic period. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2003. |
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Strana xiv
... River after confrontation with the Spanish army. October 29 to November 4: Wilkinson negotiates Sabine Convention and turns on Aaron Burr. Jefferson's Embargo Act. Joseph Bonaparte set upon the Spanish throne. James Madison elected ...
... River after confrontation with the Spanish army. October 29 to November 4: Wilkinson negotiates Sabine Convention and turns on Aaron Burr. Jefferson's Embargo Act. Joseph Bonaparte set upon the Spanish throne. James Madison elected ...
Strana 7
... rivers” as the clouds parted before the sun. There on the mountaintop “we ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature.” Yet in that workhouse of nature, the rainwater was still coursing down plowed ruts ...
... rivers” as the clouds parted before the sun. There on the mountaintop “we ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature.” Yet in that workhouse of nature, the rainwater was still coursing down plowed ruts ...
Strana 8
... river valleys—a lay of the land that is particularly subjected to destructive washing even under moderate rainfall.” This was the “red and hilly” country Jefferson described to his French friends as “like much of the country of ...
... river valleys—a lay of the land that is particularly subjected to destructive washing even under moderate rainfall.” This was the “red and hilly” country Jefferson described to his French friends as “like much of the country of ...
Strana 15
... rivers. Many a Virginian can recite the names associated with these red-brick, beautifully proportioned mansions, yet their builders' names did not remain very long on the mailboxes—so to speak. They were a peripatetic lot, however much ...
... rivers. Many a Virginian can recite the names associated with these red-brick, beautifully proportioned mansions, yet their builders' names did not remain very long on the mailboxes—so to speak. They were a peripatetic lot, however much ...
Strana 22
... River lay “fields once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned and covered with . . . foxtail and broomsedge. . . . [A] country in its infancy, where, fifty years ago, scarce a forest tree had been felled by the 22 THE LAND AND M R. JEFFERSON.
... River lay “fields once fertile, now unfenced, abandoned and covered with . . . foxtail and broomsedge. . . . [A] country in its infancy, where, fifty years ago, scarce a forest tree had been felled by the 22 THE LAND AND M R. JEFFERSON.
Obsah
1 | |
The Invisible Empire and the Land | 85 |
Resistance to the Plantation System | 115 |
Acknowledgments | 169 |
EPILOGUE | 235 |
APPENDIX | 245 |
Notes | 262 |
Bibliographic Note | 307 |
Bibliography | 312 |
Index | 336 |
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