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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... effects upon the land itself, ordaining its future and that of the people of the South. The Louisiana Purchase is the central eventin this story. Thomas Jefferson is its central character. This page intentionally left blank Choices and ...
... effects upon the land itself, ordaining its future and that of the people of the South. The Louisiana Purchase is the central eventin this story. Thomas Jefferson is its central character. This page intentionally left blank Choices and ...
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... effects of his action and inaction, by taking him home to Monticello. We know a great deal about the daily realities of his situation from his notebooks, and more from the accounts of a parade of visitors. Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton was ...
... effects of his action and inaction, by taking him home to Monticello. We know a great deal about the daily realities of his situation from his notebooks, and more from the accounts of a parade of visitors. Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton was ...
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... effects in the hands of the planters. When fire was used together with row crops, sod-busting plows, staple crops grown without siblings, and a refusal to rest the land by rotation, it did less good and more harm. Fire lays upon the ...
... effects in the hands of the planters. When fire was used together with row crops, sod-busting plows, staple crops grown without siblings, and a refusal to rest the land by rotation, it did less good and more harm. Fire lays upon the ...
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... effects upon the land of a plantation system. Observing Britain's first plantation system at work in Ireland, Bacon warned: Take it from me, that the bane of a plantation is when the undertakers or planters make such haste to a little ...
... effects upon the land of a plantation system. Observing Britain's first plantation system at work in Ireland, Bacon warned: Take it from me, that the bane of a plantation is when the undertakers or planters make such haste to a little ...
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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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