Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 | Andrew Torget

Resenhista

Amie Campos – University of California. San Diego.


Referências desta Resenha

TORGET, Andrew J. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Resenha de: CAMPOS, Amie. Historia Agraria De América Latina, v.2, n.1, p. 201-204, abr.2021. Acesso apenas pelo link original [DR]

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South – MAULDIN (THT)

MAULDIN, Erin Stewart. Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 256p. Resenha de: SCHIEFFLER, G. David. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.720-722, ago., 2019.

Erin Stewart Mauldin’s Unredeemed Land is the latest addition to the vast body of literature that explains how the Civil War and emancipation transformed the rural South. Whereas previous scholars have highlighted the war’s physical destruction, economic consequences, and sociocultural effects, Mauldin, an environmental historian, examines the profound ecological transformation of the Old South to the New. Using an interdisciplinary methodological approach, she argues that the Civil War exacerbated southern agriculture’s environmental constraints and forced farmers—“sooner rather than later”—to abandon their generally effective extensive farming practices in favor of intensive cotton monoculture, which devastated the South both economically and ecologically (p. 10).

Mauldin contends that most antebellum southerners practiced an extensive form of agriculture characterized by “shifting cultivation, free-range animal husbandry, slavery, and continuous territorial expansion” (p. 6). Although the South’s soils and climates were not suitable for long-term crop production, most farmers circumvented their environmental disadvantages by adhering to these “four cornerstones” (p. 6). Ironically, however, these very practices made the South especially vulnerable to war. When the Civil War came, Union and Confederate soldiers demolished the fences that protected southern crops, slaughtered and impressed roaming livestock, razed the forests on which shifting cultivation and free-range husbandry hinged, and, most significantly, destroyed the institution of slavery on which southern agriculture was built. Mauldin’s description of the Civil War’s environmental consequences echoes those of Lisa M. Brady’s War Upon the Land (2012) and Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation (2012), but with an important caveat: in Mauldin’s view, the war did not destroy southern agriculture so much as it accelerated and exacerbated the “preexisting vulnerabilities of southern land use” (p. 69).

After the war, southern reformers and northern officials urged southern farmers, white and black, to rebuild the South by adopting the intensive agricultural practices of northerners—namely, livestock fencing, continuous cultivation, and the use of commercial fertilizers as a substitute for crop and field rotation. Most complied, not because they admired “Yankee” agriculture, but because the “environmental consequences of the war—including soldiers’ removal of woodland, farmers’ abandonment of fields because of occupation or labor shortages, and armies’ impressment or foraging of livestock—encouraged intensification” (p. 73). Interestingly, many southerners initially benefited from this change. Mauldin contends that the cotton harvests of 1866-1868 were probably more successful than they should have been, thanks to the Confederacy’s wartime campaign to grow food and to the fact that so much of the South’s farmland had lain fallow during the conflict. In the long run, however, this temporary boon created false hopes, as intensive monoculture “tightened ecological constraints and actively undermined farmers’ chances of economic recovery” (p. 73). Mauldin argues that most of the southern land put into cotton after the war could not sustain continuous cash-crop cultivation without the use of expensive commercial fertilizers, which became a major source of debt for farmers. At the same time, livestock fencing exacerbated the spread of diseases like hog cholera, which killed off animals that debt-ridden farmers could not afford to replace. Finally, basic land maintenance—a pillar of extensive agriculture in the Old South—declined after the war, as former slaves understandably refused to work in gangs to clear landowners’ fields and dig the ditches essential to sustainable farming. Tragically, many of those same freedpeople suffered from planters’ restrictions of common lands for free-range husbandry and from the division of plantations into tenant and sharecropper plots, which made shifting cultivation more difficult. And, as other scholars have shown, many black tenants and sharecroppers got caught up in the crippling cycle of debt that plagued white cotton farmers in the late nineteenth century, too.

Mauldin’s story of the post-war cotton crisis is a familiar one, but unlike previous scholars, she shows that the crisis was about more than market forces, greedy creditors, and racial and class conflict. It was also about the land. Despite diminishing returns, southerners continued to grow cotton in the 1870s, not only because it was the crop that “paid,” but also because ecological constraints, which had been intensified by the war, encouraged it. Instructors interested in teaching students how the natural environment has shaped human history would be wise to consider this argument. They should also consider adding “ecological disruptions” to the long list of problems that afflicted the New South, as Mauldin persuasively argues that the era’s racial conflict, sharecropping arrangements, and capital shortages cannot be understood apart from the environmental challenges that compounded them (p. 9).

In the 2005 Environmental History article, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?”, Linda Nash urged historians to “strive not merely to put nature into history, but to put the human mind back in the world.” With Unredeemed Land, Erin Stewart Mauldin has done just that and, in the process, has offered one way in which history teachers might put the Civil War era back in its natural habitat in their classrooms.

David Schieffler – Crowder College.

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Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands 1800-1850 | Andrew Torget

Three enslaved people – Richard, Tivi, and Marian – fled enslavement in Louisiana in 1819, seeking relief from the brutality of slavery in the United States in the northern borderlands of New Spain. At this time, the Mexican province of Tejas was home to a small population of ethnic Mexicans, known as Tejanos, along with a larger indigenous population, including the powerful Comanche. Less than thirty years later, this area would be the state of Texas within the United States and home to the fastest-growing enslaved population in the slaveholding republic. In his meticulously-researched book, Andrew Torget follows the emergence of an Anglo-Texan society, nation, and, eventually, state. The book takes a firmly political and economic approach to history, which makes for a propulsive and clear narrative, but Richard, Tivi, and Marian aside, keeps that narrative largely the preserve of economically and politically powerful individuals and groups – legislators, empresarios, generals, and merchants. Torget masterfully integrates an intricate explanation of the politics of New Spain and Mexico with a more familiar narrative of the expansion of the United States cotton frontier into Texas. The advancing cotton frontier, however, appears mostly in the form of increasing numbers of cotton bales leaving Texas and the growth of migration of enslavers to the region, bringing with them enslaved people. Seeds of Empire thus occupies an interesting place, both linked to recent scholarship on the connections between slavery and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States and circum-Caribbean world, like Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, but also employing different methods and narrative strategies than much of that scholarship.

Seeds of Empire tells the history of the Texas borderlands in three sections, beginning with an introductory chapter on the region “on the eve of Mexican independence,” continuing to a second part on the tension between the extension of the United States’ cotton frontier into Mexico and increasing Mexican antipathy toward slavery in Mexico, and concluding with a section on independent Texas’ attempts to create a successful proslavery cotton republic. It is in discussing the debates surrounding slavery in northern Mexico that Seeds of Empire makes its greatest contribution. Torget lays out an important and, in the historiography of Texas, largely untold narrative of the debates between proslavery Americans and Tejanos and antislavery political forces in Mexico. This section of the book transports readers to debates in Saltillo and shows how important Mexican resistance to slavery would be for Anglo-Texans and enslaved people in Texas.

For Torget, there are three main factors that shape the period of the 1830s and 1840s when Texas seceded from Mexico and pushed to join the United States. He often glosses these three factors as “cotton, slavery and empire,” but his fuller description of each factor is more revealing of the approach of the study. (6) Cotton is really the “rise of the global cotton economy,” slavery is the “battles over slavery that followed,” and empire is “the struggles of competing governments to control the territory” of Texas. (5-6) The brief terms suggest a clear connection to ideas scholars have recently termed “The New History of Capitalism” and “The Second Slavery,” both of which emphasize economic shifts in plantation commodity production under slavery, an increasingly industrial approach to enslavement, and the expansion of plantation complexes to new territory. This scholarship, at its best, connects large shifts in economics, politics, and society to the lived experience of enslaved people. For example, in his River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson connects his discussion of the cotton economy to the daily lives of enslaved cotton pickers in Mississippi by tracing the journey of cotton from seed to boll to lint to bale on a Liverpool wharf. (Johnson, 246-279) While both Johnson and Torget use cotton as a way into the world of the Second Slavery, Torget chooses different individual human actors to focus on – largely politicians, empresarios, and powerful cotton planters. While this allows Seeds of Empire an admirably comprehensible and tight narrative of complex and oft-ignored political developments in northern Mexico and, later, Texas, it also means that enslaved people appear largely as subjects of debate, rather than agents of historical change. This is reflected in Torget’s insistence that the aspect of slavery most shaping Texas is national and international debates in Mexico, the United States, and Europe over the future of slavery. This is a result of the political approach the book takes to explaining this period of the history of Texas, but it is still a missed opportunity. Adam Rothman, in writing a history of the advancing cotton frontier that Torget foregrounds, writes a narrative with a central role for politics and warfare, but also foregrounds the active role enslaved people played in shaping the cotton frontier with, for example, the German Coast Uprising.

Torget’s key intervention – that the history of the Texas borderlands can only be understood in terms of the advancing United States cotton frontier – fits naturally into recent scholarship emphasizing capitalism and the Second Slavery, yet Seeds of Empire stands, in terms of its narrative approach, historical actors, and political and economic focus, in stark contrast to much of this work. Historians of the Second Slavery and the New History of Capitalism have largely sought to integrate the testimony of enslaved people, understand historical change as deeply influenced by the actions of enslaved people, and play down the influence of British abolitionism on the daily actions of enslavers in the United States. Torget convincingly argues that Mexican and British abolitionism was central to the history of the Texas borderlands, but is unable to reckon with the ways enslaved peoples actions shaped these borderlands. The book could have offered a fuller explanation of the failure of the Texan proslavery republic by integrating an approach similar to that of Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning, which combined an analysis of high politics with an emphasis on political history operating at all levels – showing that, in her case, the Confederacy was crumbling from within outside of its diplomatic and military defeats.

Torget’s book presents an admirably clear and engaging narrative of the competing influences on the borderlands of northern Mexico and the southern United States. Seeds of Empire makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship on the southern United States and northern Mexico by showing how important the antislavery politics of New Spain and Mexico were to the expansion of cotton slavery in the Texan borderlands. While retaining the common emphasis on the importance of the United States cotton and slavery complex, empresarios, and the Comanche in shaping American immigration, the growth of slavery in the borderlands, and the eventual secession of Texas from Mexico, Torget forcefully demonstrates that it is nearly impossible to fully understand this process without a fuller understanding of the politics of Mexico that conditioned the actions of empresarios and free migrants from the United States. In many ways, the narrative shows that it was primarily determined Mexican resistance to slavery in the province of Tejas that prevented enslavers from the United States from migrating in large numbers before the secession of Texas, then the abolitionist politics of Great Britain and threat of Mexican military force that slowed this same migration before the United States annexed the Texan republic. Seeds of Empire is key reading for scholars interested in the history of Texas, the Second Slavery, and the history of the expansion of the United States. Historians of cotton slavery in the United States have recently emphasize the centrality of expansion into Texas to late-stage slavery in South and Torget provides an important step toward exploring and explaining that expansion.

Ian Beamish – Assistant Professor of History of 19th Century US and History of Slavery in the University of Louisiana. E-mail: [email protected]


TORGET, Andrew. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Resenha de: BEAMISH, Ian. Capitalism and Second Slavery in Texas. Almanack, Guarulhos, n.17, p. 460-464, set./dez., 2017. Acessar publicação original [DR]