“Forword” in “T. Butler King of Georgia”
Foreword to the Reissue
There are no statues of Thomas Butler King. No one carved his features into stone so that future generations might remember him and learn from his life. His face never appeared beside those of Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis in catalogs of mail-order statuary, cast either from true bronze or more affordable white bronze. He will never have red paint thrown on him, nor will he be defaced with slogans decrying his enslavement of human beings. He will not be the subject of contentious town hall meetings. He will not leave any awkward absences in town squares or city parks. His name will not be scrubbed from any university buildings. His absence from the public landscape is largely mirrored in the writing of history; he is mostly ignored in narratives of either the United States or the Confederacy, even as a footnote.
Yet, as Edward M. Steel Jr. (1918–2011) demonstrates in this volume, T. Butler King is a person worth remembering as a “figure of more than local importance” (7). Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Steel graduated from Harvard University in 1940. After a stint as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Force, he started as a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His dissertation there became this volume, which was published shortly into his long tenure on the faculty of West Virginia University. There, Steel became best known as a scholar of Mother Jones. He edited two volumes of Jones’s papers as well as The Court-Martial of Mother Jones, documents that he uncovered after they were presumed to have been destroyed.1 Although Jones, the early twentieth-century labor organizer and radical agitator, is diametrically opposite in social significance from King, the antebellum slavocrat and politician, readers of Steel’s work will notice similarities in how Steel treats his subjects. Steel was a political biographer above all. More important to him than the details of their personal lives is the impact his subjects had on the public sphere. The essence of biography is sifting through someone’s life and deciding which parts are relevant to the narrative you wish to tell. This inevitably leads to some gaps and omissions. Some of these decisions may stand out to current readers, particularly around King’s involvement with slavery. Historians subsequent to Steel have found different angles from which to examine T. Butler King, particularly his role in the family and as a patriarch.2
King is not the image that comes to mind when one pictures the typical antebellum slaveholder. He was born in Massachusetts and raised in Pennsylvania, both states with a long antislavery tradition. Yet after moving to Georgia to practice law, he married Anna Matilda Page in 1824 and thereafter inherited her father’s substantial holdings of land and enslaved Black people—around 150 souls at any given time. He thereby ascended into the South’s planter aristocracy, “one of that extremely small group of slaveowners who counted their dependents in the hundreds” (164). King’s advantageous marriage catapulted him to levels of wealth, power, and influence that few others could dream of attaining, and this is what Steel makes the focus of his biography.
As with many of his new peers, King turned his attention to politics, serving first in the Georgia legislature before winning election to the federal House of Representatives. There, he distinguished himself from his peers in a few important ways. Steel deems him “one of the most nationalistic of all the Southern Whigs” (167). In a region that steadfastly resisted the imposition of tariffs, King readily adopted the Whig Party’s pro-tariff stance. He was a staunch supporter of expanding the U.S. Navy so as to better project American power abroad. Most notably, King devoted his political career to building internal infrastructure, especially railroads, even as his peers remained skeptical of such endeavors. After leaving political office, he became a dedicated booster of railroads. Indeed, Steel writes, “His promotion, finance, and lobbying for the Southern Pacific Railroad gave a preview of the gilded age that was to follow” (115). During the election of 1860, he “stress[ed] the economic interdependence of the sections” even as he denounced the Republicans’ plans of “consolidated government” (141). Despite his nationalism, he quickly joined in the rising tide of succession. Following Georgia’s secession, he traveled to Europe on behalf of the state to build direct commercial ties with European states, a mission that shortly transformed into propagandizing the Confederate cause.
In many ways, King embodied what scholars have come to term the second slavery, when many slaveholders around the Atlantic world embraced technology and scientific management to improve the efficiency of their operations, as well as further enmeshing themselves in national and global networks of economic and political influence. Slavery was not, as many previous historians argued, only an atavistic obstacle to modernization. Rather, according to its proponents, slavery could fit comfortably within modern frameworks—comfortably, that is, for the enslavers and other elites. From appearances, King was not at the forefront of this development, but nevertheless this is clearly the current in which he swam. King was a wealthy planter who sought to retain and increase his wealth, and this “kept him at the forefront of these economic developments” of industrialization, cotton cultivation, and railroad construction (164). King’s was a slavery on the move, adapting to and growing with the times and ensuring the continued brutalization of and extraction from enslaved Black people.
For a biography of a planter magnate, Steel offers remarkably little consideration of King as a slaveholder, much less the lives of the people he enslaved. Steel remarks mildly that “to his slaves he is reputed to have been a kind master” (32). He adds that the King family “maintained an attitude compounded of several elements, two ingredients being a sense of responsibility and a feeling of affection” toward “the slaves who performed the basic labor” (165). He does not interrogate the deeper meaning of these sentiments. It is an odd sort of affection that requires holding other human beings in bondage. While the King’s slaveholder ideology remains unexplored, Steel leaves it clear that slavery laid the economic foundation beneath King’s political and entrepreneurial endeavors. The agricultural operation on St. Simons Island was “the basic resource on which the family relied for their existence” (116). Without it, there would be no King the politician or King the entrepreneur. If, as Steel claims, King’s life foreshadowed the growth of big business and U.S. industry during the late nineteenth century, his economic basis in slavery takes on a larger significance. Steel’s work predates the long-running debates over the relationship between American capitalism and American slavery, and he obviously offers no intervention in that historiography. However, Steel’s portrayal of King as “a foretaste of the era of big business that was to follow after King passed from the scene” (166) can be read as evidence for the existence of that relationship.
In a way, King is all the more remarkable for his unremarkableness. While he held vastly more power and influence than most Americans (not to mention the nation’s enslaved underclass), he was not a man of great feats or a man who remade the nation. He was not the type to be immortalized in story and song—or in statues. While he was far from the typical American (if such a person can even be said to exist), his life nevertheless reveals much about the United States in the nineteenth century. His life shows how slavery was woven into the tapestry of the nation and not only the South. He was a living embodiment of the dynamism of slavery as it adapted and modernized throughout the antebellum period. And his business activities presaged the rise of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Even all these years later, Steel’s biography of King remains relevant.
MATTHEW GORDON
Notes
1. Mary Harris Jones and Edward M. Steel, eds., The Correspondence of Mother Jones (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Mary Harris Jones and Edward M. Steel, eds., The Speeches and Writings of Mother Jones (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988); and Edward M. Steel, ed., The Court-Martial of Mother Jones (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996).
2. Steven Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and Stephen Berry, “More Alluring at a Distance: Absentee Patriarchy and the Thomas Butler King Family,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 863–89.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.