In the spring of 1801, Thomas Jefferson described the implications of the republican “revolution of 1800.” He declared that “our revolution and its consequences,” which had “excited” the “mass of mankind,” would “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” After being “hood-winked from their principles” by the pseudo-monarchical Federalists, the “people,” Jefferson believed, had finally “learned to see for themselves” by electing the Democratic-Republicans to political office. A Federalist-dominated regime, one that operated on the principle that “man cannot be governed except by the rod,” would retard advancement in the union. The “tyranny” of consolidated...

At age eighty-one, Thomas Jefferson was convinced that progress was spreading westward. “I have observed this march of civilization advancing from the sea-coast, passing over us like a cloud of light, increasing our knowledge and improving our condition,” he wrote to William Ludlow in 1824. In the meantime, he assured, “barbarism has … been receding before the steady step of amelioration” and will soon “disappear from the earth.” The Rockies he imagined as the least refined; the eastern coast, with its access to Atlantic markets, the most advanced. In surveying what he considered to be an ever-expanding and improving American...

There are no reminders of the scores of slaves who once worked there, or of the endless acres of rice planted in alluvial fields. There is no evidence of a great house that once stood in Georgian splendor at the end of an avenue of oaks. And other than a terraced graveyard, there is little to suggest that a prominent South Carolina family once lived in this spot. Instead, there is a monastery and extensive formal gardens. Mepkin plantation has all but disappeared—Mepkin Abbey now stands in its place.¹

Over two hundred years ago, this 3,143-acre tract of Cooper...

In 1835, the jurist and politician William Harper spoke eloquently before a crowded hall at the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning in Columbia. His oration, however, was as much about the citizenry’s “duty” to effect “moral and intellectual cultivation” within their society as it was about slavery. Harper urged his audience to educate themselves about the system, to “understand its character.” Since slavery was destined to continue, he advised, then “we should derive from it all the good of which it is capable.” Harper called upon South Carolinians to “improve it [slavery] so far as it can...

Venus arrived in Jamaica by way of Angola. The “sable” goddess rode in a scallop-shell throne of “burnish’d gold” atop the “curling seas,” holding the “azure rein” of the “winged fish.” Encircled by plume-bearing cupids, her “scepter” commanded the attention of the “tropicks” of “either Ind.” Yet locked around the neck and raised wrist of the “sable Venus” were iron bands. For this “gay goddess” was also a slave.¹

This was how Thomas Stothard imagined the African slave trade when he drew the lithograph “Voyage of the Sable Venus” in London in 1794. This was how the Jamaican clergyman Isaac...

By 1828, John Gladstone owned over a thousand slaves as well as several sugar plantations in the British Caribbean colony of Demerara, on the northern coast of South America, and in the eastern portion of Jamaica. Yet Gladstone had never set foot on any of his profitable estates at Vreeden Hoop, Success, Hordley, Oxford, or Fair Prospect; indeed, he had crossed the Atlantic only once, in 1790, for a brief tour through the eastern states of America, and did not intend ever to leave the British Isles again. For it was in Britain that Gladstone could become exactly what would...