Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860

by Watson W. Jennison

Overview

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813134468
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	02/10/2012
Series:	New Directions in Southern History
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	440
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Watson W. Jennison, assistant professor of African American history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has written for the Journal of Southern History and the North Carolina Historical Review. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Editorial Reviews

Makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of antebellum Georgia.

Timothy J. Lockley

This readable and engaging history provides a fresh perspective on familiar chronologies. That the work at times seems to be counterintuitive or counterfactual is a testament to the ways in which Jennison challenges assumptions about the meanings of race and the histories we tell ourselves.

American Historian Review

This book is a welcomed addition to the literature on race and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Journal of American History

Colonial Georgia has long been known as 'the debatable land' contested by the British and Spanish crowns. That imperial conflict, as Watson Jennison shows, was the tip of the iceberg. In a sweeping account, Jennison describes the struggle between Low Country planters, Revolutionary republicans, black maroons, free people of color, and Native Americans to control the region. Georgia's violent and tumultuous first century culminated in the creation of a white man's republic. Readers of this excellent book will know that the outcome was neither uncontested nor inevitable.

Claudio Saunt

[...] Jennison draws upon a wide variety of source material to present a fluent, thorough account of the spread of black slavery and the attendent white supremacy in Georgia from 1750 to 1860. [...] he challenges those who would read the hardened racial attitudes of the late antebellum era as inevitable, unchanging, and uncontested. [...] Jennison [...] weave[s] a more complicated tapestry based on relationships and negotiaons. Jennison successfully challenges this narrative, making clear that racial unity was not always a given Ultimately, Jennison's monograph helps to flesh out the diversity and complexity of early Georgia's social, political, and cultural life Cultivating Race will appeal to scholars of early American race relations, but its readable and engaging style suggests that undergraduate students also would find the book a useful addition to their reading lists

South Carolina Historical magazine - Rose Stremlau

[...] Jennison draws readers into the complex world of early Georgia.

Southern Spaces - Thomas Chase Hagood

Jennison's thoughtful synthesis of social, intellectual, and political history will stand for some time to come as the best one-volume account we have of slavery and racism in Georgia. This is a book that students and scholars of slavery, the South, and race in American history need to read and contend with.

Anthony E. Kaye

"Cultivating Race" is highly readable and recommended for graduate courses on colonial and antebellum U.S. history.

The Journal of African American History - Kellie Carter Jackson

This book provides interesting insight into the history of Georgia and demands a place on any early Americna reading list.

Southern Historian

Finesses Georgia's racial history to show that divides were not inevitable and that the call for the democratazation of white society helped create a bifurcated society by the antebellum era.... Jennison improves our understanding of how these divides came to be.

Choice

"Makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of antebellum Georgia." — Timothy J. Lockley, author of Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record

From the Publisher