5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book on an important topic, July 31, 2005
This review is from: Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Hardcover)
I read Steven Deyle's book, Carry Me Back, on the recommendation of a review by Benjamin Schwarz in the June 2005 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Schwarz praised Carry Me Back as "a fine book - by far the best work to date on the subject." Schwarz also pointed out that Deyle "takes a broad view" of the domestic slave trade and "he approaches the subject with nuance." I found the book persuasively argued and a pleasure to read. Although my doctorate is in political science, I am a history teacher and I strongly recommend Carry Me Back to any student of US history.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History at its BEST, May 24, 2009
Informed by 198 collections at 39 archives across the country, 99 newspapers from 18 states, and hundreds of published primary and secondary sources, Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade In American Life (2005) is an excellent account and the first account of "what the domestic slave trade meant for American Society, North and South" (14). Also, rather than having a singular, thesis driven account, Deyle explores the positive and negative aspects of the trade according to how individuals (women, men, children; slave, free; in both the North and South) in the nineteenth century viewed them. Historiographically, historians have typically neglected to study the domestic slave trade, a system that bought and sold 2 million individuals, half of the total slave population, as commodities from 1820-60.
Deyle presents many exciting and carefully crafted arguments in Carry Me Back. First and foremost, the slave trade was a significant part of many individuals' lives for over sixty years. This trade, significantly, had its birth in the American Revolution. Furthermore, slavery was responsible for the early division between the North and the South. With the cotton gin and resulting Cotton Kingdom, the South was entrenched in race-based plantation labor more than ever before. This also caused the price of enslaved individuals to rise. Deyle defines a slave trader as anyone who ever engaged in buying and selling slaves. "At one time or another, virtually every slave owner in the South participated in this trade" (7). Sometimes slaves were sold as cash or for quick cash. Although most did not make a living on this, a few did and a few became extremely rich. This money still lingers in society today. It provided funds that began colleges, including Georgetown College in Washington, D.C. Also, rather than perpetuating stereotypes of the slave trader, Deyle explores them, without neglecting to examine their cruelties, as businesspersons participating in the larger Market Revolution. Besides divisions between the North and South, there were divisions between the Upper South ("the breeders") and Lower South ("the buyers"). These divisions were directly over the domestic slave trade. Beginning around the 1830s, the North and South increasingly grew in opposition. For one thing, most Northerners had not directly experienced slavery since its abolition in the late 1790s and early 1800s. The younger generation was particularly dissatisfied with the South having slavery (even though they were "wage slaves" according to proslavery ideologies). Deyle also argues that the buying and selling of slaves troubled Southerners more than any other component of slavery, as it directly involved money and directly contradicted their proslavery rhetoric and images. African-American slaves resisted their sale when they could. They, for example, warned children at a young age, created fictive kin networks, and, at times, elected violence. The slave trade hurt the African-American family more than anyone or anything else. Overall, Deyle focuses more on economics than politics. In 1860, the South had an estimated $3 billion dollars in slave property. "`CASH FOR NEGROES': Slave Traders and the Market Revolution in the South" is the best chapter.
And are there weaknesses in Carry Me Back? A few. First, in a few places, due to the thematic nature of the book, some of the information is redundant, but this repetition only reinforces important points and allows each chapter to stand alone. Second, when discussing slave auctions conducted by individual states, a specific section on the sale of the (an estimated fifty thousand) illegally imported Africans would have made a nice addition. Finally, the book does not specifically acknowledge that 75% of families in the South did not own enslaved individuals. The absence of such a discussion does not harm or bias the argument. Its addition would, however, show that the entire South was not singularly completely committed to slavery.
Carry Me Back is truly an excellent work of scholarship. Deyle uses the trajectory of slavery, along with a backdrop of cultural, economic, political, and social events, such as the market and transportation revolutions, in the nineteenth century so well that Carry Me Back would be an appropriate selection for first semester survey courses in United States history. In addition to newer students, anyone reading this book will benefit and appreciate Deyle's smooth prose and organized arguments. Deyle provides readers with pure history, free of jargon and theory. He also provides solid data. Furthermore, he explores the true, yet often neglected horrors of the slave trade and race-based slavery. Deyle's research forces individuals in the United States to enter a new discourse on the horrors of the recent past, horrors forgotten by popular memory. Carry Me Back is certain to inspire students of slavery. It concludes with a call to them to help expand the historiography.
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