Quotes from Adam Rothman

slaveowners and their allies in the United States tried to protect their country from the most democratic, egalitarian, and terrifying prospect of the Age of Revolution: a generalized slave rebellion.

Like ashes from a volcanic eruption, the legacy of the St. Domingue slave revolt was carried throughout the Atlantic world by what the poet William Wordsworth called "the common wind.

far as slaveowners in the Deep South were concerned, these arrangements inaugurated a golden age, which lasted twenty-five years. The white and black population steadily increased, cotton and sugar production expanded, and the remaining southern Indians were either expelled or brought under the jurisdiction of state laws.

The Tohopeka massacre, known afterward as the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, was the bloodiest battle in the long history of conflict between American Indians and the United States.

The whole enterprise involved terror and violence.

they believed Africans were more industrious and less dangerous than enslaved people born into the revolutionary world of the Americas.

The violence that accompanied American expansion in the Deep South tragically followed from Jefferson's utopian vision of an empire of liberty moving peacefully across the continent.

That forced labor gradually became discredited at the same time as it expanded is surely one of the great paradoxes of world history in the nineteenth century.

Nationalism, racism, and other toxic prejudices likewise corrode our own global society. We live in a world in which slavery has not been eradicated and, if we are not vigilant, may again flourish under a new dispensation of global inequality.16

John Randolph of Virginia, a fierce opponent of the war, cautioned the House of Representatives in 1811 that twenty years of French radicalism had left their mark on the country's slave population. "God forbid, sir, that the Southern States should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van!

Migrants identified cotton growing with slave labor as if the relationship were natural.

But why did such an imaginative group of people declare independence from one of the greatest empires on earth and establish a truly novel polity but not get rid of an institution that most of them thought was immoral and dangerous?

Nothing is ingrained more deeply in American ideology than that ours is a free country. Yet freedom and slavery were densely entangled in the early United States.

Thirty-four of the thirty-five Creek leaders who signed the treaty of surrender had supported the United States during the war, and they were understandably astonished and embittered to find themselves stripped of much of their land.

At a time when the annual production of sugar did not exceed thirty million pounds, the geographer William Darby predicted that Louisiana's annual sugar production would eventually reach two hundred million pounds (which it did in the 1840s).

Morgan argued that the attitude of the free people of color toward the United States depended on the policy of the government toward them: "They may be made good citizens or formidable abettors of the black people.

The Mutiny Act of 1807 finally settled the legal status of Afro-British soldiers by effectively emancipating all slaves in British military service.

White Louisianians must have been relieved when the mayor banned free men of color from teaching the martial arts to their brethren. In New Orleans, it seems, good fencers did not make good neighbors—especially when they were colored.

The diversity of the slave population was an obstacle to collective resistance, though obviously not an insurmountable one.

a society dependent on plantation slavery could not defend itself. "This Country is strong by Nature," the committee asserted, "but extremely weak from the nature of its population

known in the North as the "slave power." Slaveowners in the Deep South believed in the need for slavery and in their own benevolence as masters.

Nonslaveholding free white men and women managed to grow corn and cotton on their farms in Alabama and Mississippi, as they did elsewhere in the South, generally for household consumption and local markets.181 (And after emancipation, cotton production in the southern United States would far surpass antebellum levels.)

Antislavery, rather than slavery, was the world-historical innovation of the era.

One assiduous historian has recently estimated that approximately 170,000 slaves were introduced into North America between 1783 and 1810, with more than 100,000 of these arriving in the first decade of the nineteenth century.