Ebook: Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740-1829: An Anthology

In Proslavery and Sectional Thought in the Early South, 1740-1829, Jeffrey Robert Young has assembled thirteen texts that reveal thedevelopment of proslavery perspectives across the colonial and earlynational South, from Maryland to Georgia. The tracts, lectures, sermons, and petitions in this volume demonstrate that defenses ofhuman bondage had a history in southern thought that long predatedthe later antebellum era traditionally associated with the genesis ofsuch positive defenses of slavery. Previous anthologies, notably DrewGilpin Faust's The Ideology of Slavery, have made the antebellumperspectives of slavery's defenders widely available to scholars andstudents, but earlier proslavery thinkers have remained largelyinaccessible to modern readers. Young's anthology offers a corrective.

In his introduction to the volume, Young explores the relationship between proslavery thought, Christianity, racism, and sectionalism. He emphasizes the ways in which justifications for slavery were introduced into the American South by reformers who hoped to integrate the region into a transatlantic religious community. These early proponents of slavery tended to minimize racial distinctions between master and slave, and they hoped to minimize the cultural distance between southern plantations and English society.Only in the early nineteenth century-with the rise of an increasingly influential abolition movement-did proslavery thinkers begin to justify their beliefs with approaches that underscored differences between North and South. Even then the theorists included in this anthology emphasized the extent to which southern slaveholders' claims to mastery were rooted in a Western moral tradition that reached back to antiquity.