Arthur Scherr. John Adams, Slavery, and Race

Arthur Scherr’s John Adams, Slavery, and Race: Ideas, Politics, and Diplomacy in an Age of Crisis begins as one would hope all scholarly works would begin, clearly setting the scene by showing what has been wrong in its field of study. Scherr’s introduction clarifies how a number of Adams’s biographers, diplomatic historians, and distinguished founding-era experts have been unable to see the second president’s absolute failure to make any genuine commitment to racial equality. Contrary to Richard D. Brown, John P. Diggins, David McCullough, and several others, who either ignore Adams’s conventional racial views (what we today would call racist) or portray him as an abolitionist, Scherr provides a convincing book-length argument that this latter portrayal is not so. Moreover, his argument provides a lesson that cannot be too often reiterated: that our scholarly community also forgets. As Scherr points out, John Howe Jr. published in 1964 an article on Adams’s failure to actively oppose slavery, which has been ignored or simply forgotten by later historians (xiii–xiv). It is yet another question whether one still needs to prove that most, even (if not particularly) the best educated, white people in the eighteenth century believed in racial inequality as natural among humankind. This is easy to establish by referring to any good historical account of contemporary treatises of natural history, as the field was called at the time. Inferring from Scherr’s extensive criticism of Adams’s recent treatment in history books, one begins to wonder whether there is a need for a general reform in American history departments’ curricula regarding such a basic skill as historical contextualization. Stylistically, the author could have situated most of his criticism of other scholars in the endnotes after the introduction, where a summary review of earlier scholarship belongs.

Argument (complex analysis) · Criticism · Diplomacy · Epistemology · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Wonder · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Classics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy