Papers by Calvin Schermerhorn
Slavery & abolition, Feb 27, 2024
Jacob D. Green’s speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, se... more Jacob D. Green’s speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, self-financed Black speaker became a networked abolitionist building on the achievements of other expatriate African American activists like Moses Roper and James Watkins. Born enslaved in Maryland, Green made serial escapes from enslavement in Kentucky and elsewhere in the United States, sojourning in Toronto before arriving in Lancashire at about age forty-eight with evidently few funds. Green appealed to cotton and woollen mill town residents to oppose enslavement and the Confederate States of America from where most of North-West England’s cotton originated. He initially lectured under the sponsorship of nonconformist ministers in Yorkshire and built a network that included ministers in the United Methodist Free Church, Congregational Union, capitalists, and tradespeople. Nonconformist sponsorship led to an 1864 move to Heckmondwike in the centre of his lecture circuit. He connected with those who sponsored other Black abolitionists, burgeoning his network by speaking in West Yorkshire towns and cities that had hosted African American orators before. As a networked abolitionist, he earned income from speaking and publishing an autobiography and may have died in England in 1866.
Journal of the Early Republic, 2013
Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. By Robert Gudemstad. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State... more Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom. By Robert Gudemstad. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 280. Cloth, $42.50.)Reviewed by Calvin SchermerhornThis concise and engaging book tells the story of technological and market development, social transformation, and ecological change through the history of steamboats in the interior South. It synthesizes previous scholarship and also adds much that is new. The book begins with the hopeful and pioneering passage of the New Orleans from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 1811 and ends with Mark Twain's embroidering steamers into a tapestry of memory, one that helped to obscure the history Robert Gudmestad invigorates with incisive analysis and often harrowing detail. "By the 1830s," he contends, "steamboats had become the workhorses of the economy in the southern interior, as they enhanced the value of slaves, raised plantation productivity, and provided new sources of revenue for planters" (158).The architects of steamboat commerce were engaged in a promethean process of capitalist economic development, and steamboats were "floating engines of capitalism" (155). Steamboat entrepreneurs understood that "steamboats stood at the intersection of risk, opportunity, and power in the burgeoning Southwest" (8). Americans quickly awoke to their power and promise, and soon steamers were hauling cotton and other commodities to entrepot cities and ferrying finished goods back into the interior, creating economic linkages, information networks, and political ties. Operators sought to maximize their cargo capacities, and "ambitious captains bragged that their steamboats were 'loaded to the guards'" with bales of cotton by the thousands (142). Most steamboats were owned by southerners who operated them with Yankee shrewdness. As cotton production grew, so did boats, which became faster, longer, wider, and more capacious.Steamboats were social spaces, and Gudmestad explores steamboat culture from captains, clerks, and pilots down to the waiters, chambermaids, and roustabouts, unskilled laborers - often enslaved - who carried the heavy cords of wood, rolled barrels of goods, and stacked bales of cotton. An interior view of steamboats reveals how social differences were created and reinforced. For instance, middle-class white female passengers confined in parlors and cabin rooms were ostensibly being protected from the aggressively masculine culture of the deck. Boats' saloons were filled with games and bluster, tobacco and whiskey. First-class passengers allured by ever-loftier claims of luxury and speed were often frustrated at the realities of mediocre fare; noisy, filthy, and cramped accommodations; and delays on account of weather, mechanical failure, or operators' intrigues. Deck passengers, including many immigrants, struggled for space, and workers struggled for sleep amid their unremitting toil. "Although there were instances of racial comity," Gudmestad contends, "the bulk of the surviving evidence points to a pattern of racial intolerance and harassment" (48). A greater human tragedy also unfolded on steamers.Steamboat operators became agents of two forced migrations taking place simultaneously. "Even though Indian Removal is usually associated with a land journey," Gudmestad argues, "the majority of Native Americans traveled all or part of the way to Oklahoma in steamers" (79). Gudmestad contends that steamers' technological advancements that made them essential to the commercial transformation of the country also seemed to make them attractive to agents removing Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, and even enslaved people whom some Indians claimed as property. …
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Sep 1, 2012
<jats:p>Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery</jats:p>
Journal of American Ethnic History, 2022
Slavery & Abolition, 2015
Credit facilitated the intra-US slave trade's growth between 1815 and the financial crisis of... more Credit facilitated the intra-US slave trade's growth between 1815 and the financial crisis of the late 1830s. Movement of money across geographic space was the enslavers’ chief challenge, and this article details the process of slaving firms’ building credit and remitting funds with which they constructed supply chains in bondspersons. Slave market development was dependent on US and North Atlantic financial integration and comprised three stages. These included use of the Second Bank of the USA, supplemented by domestic bills of exchange, and culminating in the use of southern state banks with northern correspondent ties, which the financial crisis severed.
Journal of Social History, 2014
The maritime interstate trade in bondspersons illustrates the contours of United States capitalis... more The maritime interstate trade in bondspersons illustrates the contours of United States capitalism of the early nineteenth century as it developed between 1807 and midcentury. The saltwater trade between the Chesapeake and New Orleans comprised four stages corresponding to larger economic developments. An incidental slave trade rose in the context of the US ban on imported slaves, embargoes, and the growth of domestic commerce. An essential trade followed, growing in the post-War of 1812 transatlantic market for agricultural staples. It was carried on aboard vessels plying the so-called cotton triangle and also ships carrying regionally-specific goods and commodities between domestic ports. The 1830s witnessed a vertical trade exemplified by one slaving firm that responded to the swift expansion of credit and surging demand. Following the panic of 1837, market fragmentation led to a mechanical trade, which was also dependent on robust exports of slave-produced crops. Financial technologies propelled that development, and the maritime slave trade was nearly seamlessly integrated into the broader coastal trade.
Race for Profit is a landmark study of how structural racism transforms and reproduces disadvanta... more Race for Profit is a landmark study of how structural racism transforms and reproduces disadvantages. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor tells a convincing story of race and capitalism in late twentieth-century urban American housing markets in transition. The book develops the theme of "predatory inclusion" of African-descended Americans in home ownership sponsored by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and financed by private lenders after the urban riots of the mid-1960s (p. 5, passim). One was Wilhelmina Gause of Philadelphia. A twenty-seven-year-old Black mother of three, she could not afford a house, yet a real estate agent said there were none for rent in the neighborhood. She saved the $500 down payment, signed the mortgage, and moved in to discover that a broken pipe leaked sewage into her basement, a wall leaked rain into her house, and a backyard drain was stopped up, flooding the yard. And Gause now owned the property. Her family's experience typifies the transition from redlining to predatory inclusion. Taylor wonders, "How could a house that appeared to be falling apart also be appraised by the FHA as having any value and then approved for a mortgage subsidy?" (p. 142). Race for Profit intervenes in a historiography of race, capitalism, and urban housing that includes Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money:
... shun that title, while other immigrants have denied native black Americans' claim to the... more ... shun that title, while other immigrants have denied native black Americans' claim to the title African American since they had never been in Africa.16 Black immigrants have joined groups such as the Organization for the Advancement of Nigerians, the Egbe Omo Yoruba ...
American Nineteenth Century History, 2013
Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina mo... more Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms-to save their families despite that new economy. Moving focus away from the traditional...
Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina mo... more Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block. Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms-to save their families despite that new economy. Moving focus away from the traditional...
Faulkner and History
This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative li... more This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative literature, surveying the historiography to which Faulkner and later writers contributed. Drawing on categories formulated by historian David W. Blight, it races a dialectical movement from an “abolitionist script” (grounded in antebellum ex-slave narratives) that “contrasted the humanity of enslaved people with the instrumentality of paper used to mediate slave transactions,” through a proslavery rhetoric that ignored economic context and ascribed paternalistic qualities to slaveholders, to an uneasy synthesis in antislavery novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decried “slavery's immoral accounting” while generally “affirm[ing] plantation paternalism.” The postbellum years saw a similar cycle, as emancipationist and white supremacist scripts collided before New South writers combined elements of both into a sentimental “reconciliationist script” that won popular support and influ...
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Papers by Calvin Schermerhorn
A freedom narrative as well as a slave narrative, this compact yet detailed book illustrates many important developments in antebellum America, such as the large-scale forced migration of enslaved people from long-established slave societies in the eastern United States to new settlements on the cotton frontier, the political-economic processes that framed that migration, and the accompanying human anguish. Goings’s life and reflections serve as important primary documents of African American life and of American national expansion, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This edition features an informative and insightful introduction by Calvin Schermerhorn.
Calvin Schermerhorn argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, slaveholders needed to employ or hire out a healthy supply of strong slaves, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms—to save their families despite that new economy.