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Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860. By Watson W. Jennison. New Directions in Southern History. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2012. Pp. [xii], 428. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-3426-0.)
Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860 explains how Georgia evolved from a multiracial society to one based on white supremacy. The middle ground of racial accommodation, Watson W. Jennison argues, persisted in Georgia until the dawn of the antebellum era, when a rigid racial hierarchy solidified.
Jennison's account unfolds chronologically, starting with the settlement of Georgia as a "common man's utopia" in 1732 (p. 11). The decision by the struggling colony's trustees to lift the ban on slavery in 1750, however, "fundamentally undermined" Georgia's trajectory (p. 18). Despite fits and starts, Georgia quickly evolved into a slave society, albeit one in which free people of color retained a significant degree of autonomy.
Thereafter, Jennison examines the changes wrought by revolutions in America and Haiti. Georgia lost two-thirds of its slave...