Books in Brief: The Antelope

The Antelope, by John T. Noonan Jr. (University of California, 198 pp., $10). The plot (I use the world deliberately, for the whole thing comes off as an historical whodunit) of this beautifully written study is complex. In 1820, after the U.S. had outlawed the slave trade, a slave ship arrived off St. Augustine (in then-still-Spanish Florida) and was captured by an American revenue cutter from Georgia. It had some 280 Negroes aboard, most pirated from Spanish and Portuguese ships off Africa’s west coast, though some may have been the “property” of New Englanders. (At that time, our slaving was continuing under foreign flags.) The incident touched off a saga of cupidity, larded over with sanctimonious solicitude for the blacks, which lasted eight years and ultimately involved local, state, federal, and foreign officials—two Presidents (Monroe and John Quincy Adams), assorted Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, several senators and congressmen, the Supreme Court (which ended up using the case to reaffirm the legality of slavery), and the Congress assembled. While it lasted, the Negroes were not left idle: more than half were worked to death, or died in the Georgia “fever seasons,” but not before producing windfall profits for almost everybody who could possibly exploit them. Finally, in 1828, the remnant got to Liberia. Noonan painstakingly details this moral disaster with a studied understatement no doubt designed to produce in the reader a sense of outrage he never indulges himself. Except for Francis Scott Key and his friends (and even they did far less than they might have) there are no heroes here, although many years later (when he was back in Washington as a congressman) the anti-slavery Adams was conscience-stricken enough to say, about himself and Monroe: “Is it possible that the President of the United States should be ignorant that the right of personal liberty is individual?” What Noonan makes clear is that the people involved with slavery, North or South, knew from the very beginning what they were doing, but they either would not or could not break the chains that bound them to America’s “peculiar institution,” mainly and ultimately because it was just too profitable. Someday, somebody (it will be John Noonan, I hope) is going to do a book like this on abortion.

JM

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J. P. McFadden

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The Antelope, by John T. Noonan Jr. (University of California, 198 pp., $10). The plot (I use the world deliberately, for the whole thing comes off as an historical whodunit) of this beautifully written study is complex. In 1820, after the U.S. had outlawed the slave trade, a slave ship arrived off St. Augustine (in then-still-Spanish Florida) and was captured by an American revenue cutter from Georgia. It had some 280 Negroes aboard, most pirated from Spanish and Portuguese ships off Africa’s west coast, though some may have been the “property” of New Englanders. (At that time, our slaving was continuing under foreign flags.) The incident touched off a saga of cupidity, larded over with sanctimonious solicitude for the blacks, which lasted eight years and ultimately involved local, state, federal, and foreign officials—two Presidents (Monroe and John Quincy Adams), assorted Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, several senators and congressmen, the Supreme Court (which ended up using the case to reaffirm the legality of slavery), and the Congress assembled. While it lasted, the Negroes were not left idle: more than half were worked to death, or died in the Georgia “fever seasons,” but not before producing windfall profits for almost everybody who could possibly exploit them. Finally, in 1828, the remnant got to Liberia. Noonan painstakingly details this moral disaster with a studied understatement no doubt designed to produce in the reader a sense of outrage he never indulges himself. Except for Francis Scott Key and his friends (and even they did far less than they might have) there are no heroes here, although many years later (when he was back in Washington as a congressman) the anti-slavery Adams was conscience-stricken enough to say, about himself and Monroe: “Is it possible that the President of the United States should be ignorant that the right of personal liberty is individual?” What Noonan makes clear is that the people involved with slavery, North or South, knew from the very beginning what they were doing, but they either would not or could not break the chains that bound them to America’s “peculiar institution,” mainly and ultimately because it was just too profitable. Someday, somebody (it will be John Noonan, I hope) is going to do a book like this on abortion.