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 the development of proslavery perspectives across the colonial and early national South, from Maryland to Georgia. The tracts, lectures, sermons, and petitions in this volume demonstrate that defenses of human bondage had a history in southern thought that long predated the later antebellum era traditionally associated with the genesis of such positive defenses of slavery. 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.