Volume 21, Number 16 · October 17, 1974
What We Didn't Know About Slavery
By Willie Lee Rose
Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States
by Carl Degler
Macmillan, 302 pp., $3.25 (paper)
Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713
by Richard S. Dunn
Norton, 379 pp., $2.45 (paper)
White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginians
by Wesley Frank Craven
University of Virginia, 114 pp., $5.75
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
by Peter H. Wood
Knopf, 326 pp., $10.00
Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia
by Gerald W. Mullin
Oxford University Press, 219 pp., $2.50 (paper)
For six or eight generations writers have been pegging slavery up and down on a moral scale that buckles alarmingly with the temperature of the social issue that slavery entailed. So long as the peculiar institution was a contemporary reality the question was absolute. Was slavery a moral institution, or was it not? Abolitionists saw in it 'the sum of all villainies' because it encouraged every other sin. But defenders of slavery pointed to Holy Writ, where they found ample precedent but no condemnation, and widely advertised their conclusion that God had His purposes: slavery was a positive good.
Review, 5120 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |