Friday, February 13, 2009

Grigg mentioned Jeffrey Hummel's book

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. I don't have that one and haven't read it (excellent review here and Ross has a long article about it here), but the title comes from something Lincoln said about conscription, I believe, but I'm not finding it on the web, so I'll have to get ahold of Hummel's book. He mentions it in passing in this speech, Slavery in America, at FEE. (He gives a couple other speeches at their History and Liberty seminar, too: The Radicalism of the American Founding and One Nation Under Bigger Government: The Civil War

Ross, btw, contests Hummel's notion that slavery would have died quickly in the Confederacy if they had been allowed to secede. That idea predates Hummel's book, my Grampa, a history teacher in Oklahoma, used to say that too. It seems to me, though, that Hummel's speech (the first one) gives credence to Ross' argument in that he tells us that the theory of racism/slavery was given a strong boost by the Haitian uprising and subsequent events there.

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