Slavery and Freedom

March 1, 1990
In a rich, challenging set of interpretive essays, Oakes ( The Ruling Race ) views slavery in the Old South as a product of liberal capitalism, yet an institution wholly at odds with liberal concepts of freedom and society. He demonstrates how slavery hindered the growth of a class of independent small farmers; how the master-slave relationship affected the fabric of every other relationship in the South; how violence, sexual abuse, personal degradation and the breakup of families were basic components of the slave system. A historian at Northwestern University, Oakes shows that slave resistance during the Civil War fostered the Confederacy's internal collapse--a phenomenon slighted by most historians. The concluding chapter traces the postwar emergence of a new landlord-merchant class that wielded political power against landless Southerners, black and white. Oakes's rewarding synthesis strips away myths and misconceptions surrounding slavery and its aftermath.

March 1, 1990
Slavery and freedom must always be understood in context, and the appropriate context in the Old South was liberal capitalism, historian Oakes argues in five telescopic essays. Weaving an interpretive synthesis, he fixes on slavery's problematic relationships in a dynamic economy and polity moving with revolutionary power to define freedom with an ever-increasing universalism that the Old South selectively embraced and eschewed. Oakes's powerful little book surges with fresh rejoinders to much of the most important work on the nature of slavery, the South, and the American nation.--Highly recommended.-- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.

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