A Defense of Virginia and the South [Hardcover]

R. L. Dabney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0873779290 | ISBN-13: 978-0873779296

The author explodes abolitionist myths and confronts northern prejudices more completely than in any of his other works. He grounds his arguments in Scripture and history and cares not a whit about the modernists' two greatest evils--insensitivity and dogmatism.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Hess Pubns (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873779290
• ISBN-13: 978-0873779296
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a defense of Southern slavery, May 10, 2005

By 

R. M. Williams "just an avid reader" (tucson, arizona USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Defense of Virginia and the South (Hardcover)

This is perhaps one of the 10 most important books i've ever read.

I first read this probably 25 years ago, and i haven't ceased to be challenged by it ever since. I am in the middle of writing 3 essays on the Civil War and American slavery. This was a reread where i took my time and paused and gazed off into space continually. such a book. a day painfully and thoughtfully spent. I am presbyterian, Dabney is one of my heroes, perhaps after Calvin my favorite theologian, his writing is persuasive, passionate, thoughtful, painful, challenging, etc etc. Leave a whole day for this small book, you will need the time to ruminate under the nearest tree and image yourself in the antebellum South, first as a white man, then as a black slave, then again as a Christian of each race. How do you reconcile the contradictions between "love your neighbor as yourself" and the black backs broken by years of whips and forced labor, where the whips were in the hands oftentimes of people in the pews of the same churches we sit in today? How can a Christian let alone a competent and serious theologian defend slavery after the Civil War?

The possibilities are pretty well defined:
1)he was so effected by his culture, economic needs and socio-political environment that his religion was simply trumped.
2)the Scriptures support something called slavery which is not the same thing as the South called slavery. a confusion of terms.
3)he was sincerely wrong, confusing the packaging of the ideas in the Bible with the inspired ideas themselves. dwelling on the text and missing the real principles.
4)the Bible really does support slavery and for that reason alone is to be discarded as a barbaric relic of long gone days, we have progressed past that.
5)all of the above (in different amounts, with different accents) plus Christianity over time frees slaves as a matter of being consistent with higher level principles. amelioration.

1 is the basic Marxist analysis... 2 is the common way Scripture is defended today, online, OT and Roman slavery was not heritarily nor was it race based... 3 is the classic liberal explanation that was the North's stock answer... 4 is the Garrison emancipator answer... 5 is mine.

what follows are a few of the most significant quotations from the book and my short analysis. Amazon reviews is too short to write a good essay, but this gives a good idea of Dabney's writings and his arguments.


Our best hope is in the fact that the cause of our defence is the cause of Gods' Word, and of its supreme authority over the human conscience. For, as we shall evince, that Word is on our side, and the teachings of Abolitionism are clearly of rationalistic origin, of infidel tendency, and only sustained by reckless and licentious perversions of the meaning of the Sacred text. It will in the end become apparent to the world, not only that the conviction of the wickedness of slaveholding was drawn wholly from sources foreign to the Bible, but that it is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the Untited States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism. Because we believe that God intends to vindicate His Divine Word, and to make all nations honour it; because we confidently rely on the force of truth to explode all dangerous error; therefore we confidently expect that the world will yet do justice to Southern slaveholders. The anti-scriptural, infidel, and radical grounds upon which our assailants have placed themselves, make out cause practically the cause of truth and order. pg 21-22
---In addition to defending the institution of Southern slavery, Dabney's second big point is just this, abolitionism is Jacobin, in fact he uses the term consistently for the anti-slavery northern parties. As such Dabney is an excellent place to start a study of the various pieces of the Enlightenment: Scottish, English, French and how they crossed the Atlantic and took root here very differently than in their homelands. Scottish common sense appears to be a philosophic rebuttal to the Humean skepticism and French radical anti-revealed religion ideals. But for Dabney this quote sums up much of how he preceives and deals with his Northern opponents-they are radical Red Republicans bent on bringing the French terror on his beloved South. Remember the book is written several years after the defeat of the South, Dabney knows painfully how the story ends, at least so far.

This abolition is purely the result of a supposed military necessity, because the North believed that otherwise she could not overthrow the South in an unjust. war. But for this single fact, the Africans would still be in bondage, so far as the Yankee was concerned. The proof is, that the Chicago platform of the Black Republican party in 1860, expressly repudiated the purpose ever to meddle with slavery in the States. Mr. Lincoln, the chosen man of the North, solemnly asserted the same thing in his letter to A. IH. Stephens of Georgia, in his publick inaugural, and in his messages. The Congress, after.the beginning of the war, solemnly declared to the world by a joint resolution, that the purpose of the war was only to restore the Union, and not to restrict or change State institutions. Mr. Lincoln constantly declared to the Abolitionists, that if the perpetuation of slavery tended to restore the Union, it should be perpetuated. His standing invitation to the States in arms against him was: "If you wish to keep your slaves, come back into the Union." Can the North be believed in her own declarations? Then, the charge made is true-that abolition in the South was prompted by ambition and hatred, not by philanthropy. Nor has this act been less wicked in its effects than in its motive. To the white race it was the most violent, convulsive, reckless and mischievous act ever perpetrated by a civilized government.
pg 88
---The issue is that no one really cared about black people, certainly in the light of subsequent history true on the whole, racism was firmly established North and South. but the minor issue is that the South treated black people better than the North treated their white laborers, this is an open issue for me.

It does in the first place, what all secular history and speculations fail to do: it gives us the origin of domestic slavery. And we find that it was appointed by God as the punishment of, and remedy for (nearly all God's providential chastisements are also remedial) the peculiar moral degradation of a part of the race. God here ordains that this depravity shall find its necessary restraints, and the welfare of the more virtuous its safeguard against the depraved, by the bondage of the latter. He introduces that feature of political society, for the justice of which we shall have occasion to contend; that although men have all this trait of natural equality that they are children of a common father, and sharers of a common humanity, and subjects of the same law of love; yet, in practice, they shall be subject to social inequalities determined by their own characters, and their fitness or unfitness to use privileges for their own and their neighbours' good. But second: this narrative gives us more than a pre diction. The words of Noah are not a mere prophecy; they are a verdict, a moral sentence pronounced upon conduct, by competent authority; that verdict sanc tioned by God. Now if the verdict is righteous, and the execution blessed by God, it can hardly be, that the executioners of it are guilty for putting it in effect
pg 103,
---this is both the Hametic verses defense and a defense that slavery is the result of moral or economic failure. this argument also appears in Rushdoony and much of the Christian reconstructionist defense of slavery. The problem: unlike prisoners on a southern prison farm, black slaves where not there because of something they did. The defense that this kind of punishment and retribution slavery is Biblical misses the point that no black slave was made a slave because of his/her economic or moral failure, but most were there because they were born black. This is the big question of if OT slavery=Southern slavery and the answer is a firm no. OT and Roman slavery was not genetic, was not racist and was not for life, let alone the children of slaves.

They were to be bought and sold. They were heritable property: (Mr. Sumner would prove hence, "mere chattels.") iHere is involuntary slavery for life, expressly authorized to God's own peculiar and holy people, in the strongest and most careful terms. The relation, then, must be innocent in itself. With what show of candour can men say, in the face of a sanction so full, so emphatic, so hearty, that Moses, finding the hoary institution of domestic slavery so deeply rooted that it would be impossible then to abolish it, tolerated it, and limited it by all the restrictions which he could apply, calculated to cut off its worst horrors? We ask, was Moses the author of these laws, or God? Does the Almighty, the Unchangeable, the Holy, connive at moral abuses, like a puny human magistrate, and content himself, where he dare not denounce a sin, with pruning its growth a little? We ask again: Is this gloss borne out by the facts? Was Moses, in fact, timid in assailing old and deeply-rooted vices, and in demanding that they-should be eradicated wholly? Let his uncompromising legislation against Idolatry and Adultery answer.. The truth is, such writers as use the above language know nothing about the true nature of domestic slavery, and draw their inferences only from their prejudices. God and Moses knew it well. They knew that it was an institution which, when not abused, was suitable to the... Read more ›

29 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars To any Christian, June 8, 2000

By 

statesrights1860 - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Defense of Virginia and the South (Hardcover)

This is a book that is a must read, it will benifit any Christian, it offers a truth that many are afraid to give. It is about the Institution of Slavery, and the Constitution and the Bible. Dr. Dabney was a great writer, all of his books are very intresting. This is perhas the best twenty dollars you will ever spend. Deo Vindice.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Defense of the Southern Confederacy, November 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Defense of Virginia and the South (Hardcover)

A refreshingly different veiw of the War Between the States. Dabney bases his defense of the South on the Bible and the Constitution quite eloquently. This book will definatly open your eyes.