Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840

Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840
ISBN-10
0820323969
ISBN-13
9780820323961
Category
History
Pages
501
Language
English
Published
1990-10-01
Publisher
University of Georgia Press
Author
Larry E. Tise

Description

Probing at the very core of the American political consciousness from the colonial period through the early republic, this thorough and unprecedented study by Larry E. Tise suggests that American proslavery thought, far from being an invention of the slave-holding South, had its origins in the crucible of conservative New England. Proslavery rhetoric, Tise shows, came late to the South, where the heritage of Jefferson's ideals was strongest and where, as late as the 1830s, most slaveowners would have agreed that slavery was an evil to be removed as soon as possible. When the rhetoric did come, it was often in the portmanteau of ministers who moved south from New England, and it arrived as part of a full-blown ideology. When the South finally did embrace proslavery, the region was placed not at the periphery of American thought but in its mainstream.

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