An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841-1846

Durwood Dunn's incisive portrait of Ezekiel Birdseye not only enlightens in rich and startling ways our understanding of race relations, politics, and economic development for a substantial portion of the mountain South, it is equally as significant a contribution to the growing scholarship on American abolitionism. One finishes this book baffled by the fact that so vital a voice in the antislavery movement has been overlooked by so many for so long. -- John C. Inscoe, University of GeorgiaThis book reveals a record of lively southern reform activity and business enterprise that has too long gone unrecognized. This is a rewarding piece of detective work. -- Merton L. Dillon, author of The AbolitionistsThis volume, a collection of letters written by an abolitionist businessman who lived in East Tennessee prior to the Civil War, provides one of the clearest firsthand views yet published of a region whose political, social, and economic distinctions have intrigued historians for more than a century.Durwood Dunn's extensive introduction describes abolitionism in Appalachia and Ezekiel Birdseye's relation to it. A native of Connecticut, Birdseye came to East Tennessee in 1838 after having lived for at least twenty years in other parts of the South, including South Carolina and Alabama. His familiarity with slavery in the lower southern states gave him a unique perspective on the peculiar institution as it existed in East Tennessee. Between 1841 and 1846, Birdseye expressed his views and observations in letters to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York reformer who arranged to have many of them published in antislavery newspapers such as the Emancipator and Friend of Man.Thoseletters, reproduced in this book, drew on Birdseye's extensive conversations with slaveholders, nonslaveholders, and the slaves themselves. He found that East Tennesseans, on the whole, were antislavery in sentiment, susceptible to rational abolitionist appeal, and generally far more lenient toward individual slaves than were other southerners. Opposed to slavery on economic as well as moral grounds, Birdseye sought to establish a free labor colony in East Tennessee in the early 1840s and actively supported the region's abortive effort in 1842 to separate itself from the rest of the state.Birdseye's detailed descriptions of people, places, and attitudes in East Tennessee -- expertly annotated and contextualized by Dunn -- make a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex ideological tensions that marked the antebellum era.