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 6
... less than a century earlier but was now, after heavy cultivation, showing signs of erosion and exhaustion. Dolley Madison and Anna Maria Thornton had eyes trained to detect those signs. Though city ladies, they had married into the ...
... less than a century earlier but was now, after heavy cultivation, showing signs of erosion and exhaustion. Dolley Madison and Anna Maria Thornton had eyes trained to detect those signs. Though city ladies, they had married into the ...
Strana 9
... less damage to the poultice of leaves and roots and exposing the soil beneath less perilously to erosion. Like Indians, many yeomen planted in little hillocks, amid the trees, rather than in rows stretching across denuded fields ...
... less damage to the poultice of leaves and roots and exposing the soil beneath less perilously to erosion. Like Indians, many yeomen planted in little hillocks, amid the trees, rather than in rows stretching across denuded fields ...
Strana 10
... less desirable land. There agriculture was conducted by people without much capital and (generally speaking) with their own labor, adapting to the demonstrable advantages of the practices of Indians similarly situated. In an ...
... less desirable land. There agriculture was conducted by people without much capital and (generally speaking) with their own labor, adapting to the demonstrable advantages of the practices of Indians similarly situated. In an ...
Strana 11
... less frequently than did slave-worked plantations, because Indian agriculture was less intrusive and destructive. So was that of white yeomen. One reason why human responses to soil depletion and sickness accelerated in the plantation ...
... less frequently than did slave-worked plantations, because Indian agriculture was less intrusive and destructive. So was that of white yeomen. One reason why human responses to soil depletion and sickness accelerated in the plantation ...
Strana 16
... less than forty years later, as was its contemporary, Betty Washington Lewis's Kenmore. The other Lewis mansion, Woodlawn, was completed in 1802, but “by 1845,” we are told by the Garden Club of Virginia, it “was neglected—no white man ...
... less than forty years later, as was its contemporary, Betty Washington Lewis's Kenmore. The other Lewis mansion, Woodlawn, was completed in 1802, but “by 1845,” we are told by the Garden Club of Virginia, it “was neglected—no white man ...
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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