Customer Reviews

Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840

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I read Larry Tise's Proslavery not long after it was published, because I was asked to review it. I found it well written, but somewhat dense, yet very rewarding. Some antebellum wit said of the region, "alas for the South, her books have grown fewer, she never was much for literature."

While some can think of exceptions to that statement, it was generally true. White Southerners were not a bookish people, and did not produce, or read, volumes by the carload. If you subtract titles in law, political philosophy, and theology, the list is even shorter. What Tise does is trace the origins of the pro-slavery defense or "positive good" argument back to its origins among New England clergy and other northern thinkers and writers. His volume, at just over five hundred pages, is not easy reading, but he deals with an important subject, has an original thesis, and proves many of his points.

Michael B. Chesson
Founding Professor and Dean
The American College of History & Legal Studies

I was excited to get my hands on this book by Larry E. Tise. I was hoping that it would be a reliable discription of the arguments that were used by those who argued for slavery. Not only was I diappointed, I found myself becoming rather irritated at the author's general thesis, which, I think he failed to "prove". He is trying to show that the southern pro-slavery argument was not "southern", but that it originated in, what he calls "conservative rebublicanism" of New England. At least that is what I understood him to be aruging.

Certainly there were northerners who were anti-abolition and were proslave, so what? Certainly there were ministers from New England who were pro-slavery, so what? There were also scores of New England clergy other people who were opposed to slavery. Tise seems to think that by showing there were a bunch of northerns who were proslavery that proves that the southerns got the ideas to defend slavery from them. Or, as he says "that it was spurred by impluses from outside the South, and that nonsoutherners as well as nonsouthern ideas were chiefly responsible for the transformation" Please.

Honestly, I think Tise misses the truth here.