Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 141
the usefulness of this book for a methods course. Specialists in African American history
will want to address the issue of how representative Ely’s conclusions are for other
localities in Virginia and throughout the antebellum South. I suspect there will be a
number of journal articles and substantial works that take on this issue and that we will
therefore be discussing this book for some years to come.
Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American
Colonization Society. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp.
240. $59.95.
Reviewed by Ryan McIlhenny, University of California, Irvine
Eric Burin’s Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization
Society rounds out P.J. Staudenraus’s tenure (and Early Lee Fox’s before him) as the
leading authority on the American Colonization Society (ACS). Utilizing an array of
primary sources, including postmortem manumission contracts, and incorporating leading
secondary works, the author, an assistant professor of history at the University of North
Dakota, first provides a brief summary of the movement: the leaders, origins, and
financial hurdles related to African colonization during the “Era of Good Feelings”; the
role of one of the most influential regional agencies, the Philadelphia Colonization
Society; the way in which slave uprisings, most notably Nat Turner’s in 1831,
encouraged local governments to limit black manumissions; and the overwhelming
opposition from free blacks that gave birth to a radical and interracial antislavery cohort.
Contemporary historians have been too quick to castigate the ACS as a racist institutional
failure. For Burin, by contrast, the malleability (i.e., the disparate and competing
interpretations) and therefore longevity of this herrenvolk scheme did in fact “undercut
the ‘peculiar institution’” (3).
The author first considers the generational and regional factors that altered the
meaning of colonization. Beginning in 1817, many early slave-owning supporters eagerly
worked toward expatriation. The number of postmortem manumissions increased during
the initial days. Such plans not only assuaged the consciences of those who struggled
with the dilemma of owning human chattel in a country that prized liberty, but also
functioned to maximize the profits of involuntary servitude while at the same time
promising eventual freedom. Concern over the growth of the free black population in the
“City of Brotherly Love” and the growing hostility among the city’s black population,
especially in the wake of David Walker’s denunciation of the ACS as “a vicious,
nefarious and peace-disturbing combination” (84), led the Philadelphia Colonization
Society (PCS), one of the largest local organizations in the North, to focus its energy on
removing “black Pennsylvanians” (88). Many northern organizations followed the