Volume 35, Number 10 · June 16, 1988
Negrophobia
By Edmund S. Morgan
The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia
by Mechal Sobel
Princeton University Press, 364 pp., $25.00
Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840
by Gary B. Nash
Harvard University Press, 354 pp., $28.95
Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia: 1860–1900
by Roger Lane
Harvard University Press, 213 pp., $25.00
When Landon Carter, a Virginia plantation owner, read the Declaration of Independence two days after it was issued, he wondered whether its ringing affirmation of equality meant that slaves must be freed. If so, he confided to his diary, 'you must send them out of the country or they must steal for their support.' The author of the Declaration held an even darker view. Jefferson thought that emancipation, unless accompanied by the exile of blacks, would 'produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.'
Review, 3594 words
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