Rare Book Monthly
Slavery in the United States [1836]: It's a Long Road to the Mountaintop<br>By James K. Paulding
This book starkly portrays American racial attitudes in the 1830s.
This book is extremely interesting for the rare and unvarnished perspective on slavery and race that Mr. Paulding unabashedly advances. These are positions that appear to be less about facts and more about the emotions that southerners felt at the prospect of an entirely free Black population. Mr. Paulding is well aware of the numbers involved and the possibility that Blacks could actually take control of some areas. For Mr. Paulding, and presumably for southern whites, this is simply a terribly threatening and intolerable idea. It is one that would lead, with the Hayes-Tilden presidential vote trade in 1876, to the ending of northern occupation of the south and to the imposition of a second set of southern chains to quell the concerns and hysteria that this book accurately anticipates forty years earlier.
So why dredge all of this up now? What you are about to read is ugly. For our Black readers in particular, it may be hurtful. Wouldn’t it be best to cover the reality with revision; attribute it all to “states rights,” economic issues, and various less offensive explanations? Why not focus on what’s good in our heritage and ignore those parts hardly worth remembering?
These are fair questions, but I believe that knowing the truth about the more sordid parts of our past is the better way to prevent them in the future. What makes Paulding’s book a particularly valuable read in this light is his stark portrayal of the assumptions behind prejudice. He makes no attempt to varnish them over so as to make them more acceptable, as later generations would do. Almost no one would speak like Paulding today, but many still harbor beliefs based on the unspoken assumptions Paulding freely expressed. These beliefs don’t necessarily apply just to Blacks today. Some of us who would not hold these opinions of Black people may instead make these assumptions about other groups, immigrant Hispanics, Arabs, or gay people for example. Maybe if we look directly into the eyes of this beast, maybe if we look at the underlying assumptions behind our prejudices without first sanitizing them with excuses like “states rights,” we will want to free our own minds from the slavery of prejudice.
To those who wonder what the Civil War was really about, this book is highly recommended. For those interested to revisit the times, the emotions, and arguments we provide the entire text of this book divided into10 chapters. The book is 66,946 words and very well written. Read the entire book chapter by chapter or read selected chapters. This is an account you aren’t going to read in school. It is simply too painful but it’s also very important. Many of these arguments continue to populate political discussions in the United States. Seen, in the company they kept in 1836, we can better understand and reject them today.
Note: I have altered the text only where there are clear typographical errors such as "camly" where calmly was intended. I have not altered the capitalization of negro as this was the way Mr. Paulding used the term. He clearly did not think this term was intended to be capitalized. Today of course we use the term Black and we capitalize it.
