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Books > History > American history > 1800 to 1900
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Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause - Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (Paperback, New edition)
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Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause - Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (Paperback, New edition)
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Thomas Jefferson advocated a republic of small farmers--free and
independent yeomen. And yet as president he presided over a massive
expansion of the slaveholding plantation system, particularly with
the Louisiana Purchase, squeezing the yeomanry to the fringes and
to less desirable farmland. Now Roger G. Kennedy conducts an
eye-opening examination of the gap between Jefferson's stated
aspirations and what actually happened.
Kennedy reveals how the Louisiana Purchase had a major impact on
land use and the growth of slavery. He examines the great financial
interests (such as the powerful land companies that speculated in
new territories and the British textile interests) that beat down
slavery's many opponents in the South itself (Native Americans,
African Americans, Appalachian farmers, and conscientious opponents
of slavery). He describes how slaveholders' cash crops--first
tobacco, then cotton--sickened the soil and how the planters moved
from one desolated tract to the next. Soon the dominant culture of
the entire region--from Maryland to Florida, from Carolina to
Texas--was that of owners and slaves producing staple crops for
international markets. The earth itself was impoverished, in many
places beyond redemption.
None of this, Kennedy argues, was inevitable. He focuses on the
character, ideas, and ambitions of Thomas Jefferson to show how he
and other Southerners struggled with the moral dilemmas presented
by the presence of Indian farmers on land they coveted, by the
enslavement of their workforce, by the betrayal of their stated
hopes, and by the manifest damage being done to the earth itself.
Jefferson emerges as a tragic figure in a tragic period.
Mr. Jefferson'sLost Cause was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
for 2003.
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