Southern Slavery: As It Was [Paperback]

Douglas Wilson (Author), Steve Wilkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1996

How is it that a pervasively Christian culture could have supported slavery? While opposing the South's abuses and racism, this essay seeks to correct some of the gross slanders of that culture. It explains Scripture's defense of a form of slavery against evangelicals who are embarrassed by it.

Product Details

• Paperback: 43 pages
• Publisher: Canon Press; 1 edition (June 1, 1996)
• ISBN-10: 188576717X
• ISBN-13: 978-1885767172
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,188,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Step right up, get your southern-fried pseudohistory here!, February 10, 2005

By 

chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Southern Slavery: As It Was (Paperback)

Suppose you are a son of the South, you consider yourself to be a good Christian, and (like most of us) would like to consider the deeds of your ancestors in the best light possible. In that case, you are probably at the mercy of conflicting impulses, since the sine qua non of the Confederate States of America was the preservation of slavery, and virtually all mainstream Christians today are in agreement that slavery as practiced in the United States was an evil institution. One cannot honor one's heritage without compromising one's heartfelt religious principals, and vice versa. What is one to do?

Well, the more prevelant route is that taken by most devotees of the Lost Cause mythos, which is that secession and the CSA was never about slavery, but rather "states' rights," whatever the hell that might mean. If one argues that rationale, all your opponent has to do is bring up either the Dred Scott decision or the Fugitive Slave Act, both of which utterly trample the notion of states' rights into the dust. In short, the states' rights argument raises as many paradoxical questions as it hopes to answer.

Another route is that taken by authors Wilson & Wilkins, who argue that 1) slavery was not contrary to godliness, and in fact it was the abolitionist movement which was contrary to the will of God; and 2) in any case, the slaves by and large were well-treated, well-fed and content with their existence. Oh yes, and it was the fault of the Northern slave trade that slavery continued in the South in any case, so if there is an original sin of slavery, it is to be found somewhere near Boston --- gosh, we haven't heard this argument before, have we?

The scholarship here, simply put, sucks. However, that puts these clowns in good company as the pseudohistorians that are Holocaust deniers or (ironically) Afro-Centrists like GGM James or JA Rogers. This work is heavily dependent on just a few sources, such as the writings of RL Dabney (not exactly a neutral source) or massively flawed statistical works like Engerman & Fogel's "Time on the Cross." The authors cherry-pick through the historical data, selecting only that data which fits into their pre-fabricated thesis. When they aren't cherry-picking, they are engaged in wholesale distortion, such as the argument that the leadership of the North had fallen under the pernicious and bible-hating influence of New England Unitarianism, which the authors rank only slightly above devil-worship, apparently.

Hmmmmmmmm. I didn't realize that Springfield, Illinois was a hotbed of Unitarianism --- my mistake. Also, I know my own family's history, and all of those ancestors from Ohio, Indiana & Illinois that joined the Republican party in the 1850's --- the last time I checked, almost all of them were Methodists, not Unitarians. Where do you think Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists got their start anyway, because of disagreements over the tarriff? Also, where do the Quakers, who really were the backbone of both the abolitionist and sufferage movements anyway, fit into the authors' simplistic scenario.

Of course, one has to accept the notion that the authors' narrow definition of "orthodox" evangelical Christianity is the One True Faith, otherwise their thesis tends to fall apart in a hurry. Regarding this, it might be in order to point out that these guys have ties to the Christian Reconstruction movement, a movement that frightens your more garden-variety right-wing Christians like Ralph Reed, for example. Their extemism is pretty much off the charts (among other things, this movement envisions the recreation of the South as a separate, lily-white Christian republic where public stonings might be acceptable), so if your Southern Pride tendencies are more conventional, you might want to keep this in mind.

All of this might seem pretty silly, but consider the relative success of the Holocaust Denial movement. For a generation now, the Holocaust deniers have been patiently peddling their wares, and now one sees a growing number of Americans (the numbers still vary considerably, depending on which poll you read) who now have doubts about the specifics of the Holocaust. Because Americans by and large tend to be pretty uncritical of that which they see in print, this pseudohistory can have a lasting effect. It remains to be seen if Wilson & Wilkins will succeed in their pushing their agenda.

35 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pseudo-historians at work, June 6, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Southern Slavery: As It Was (Paperback)

Among this books several theses are that, generally speaking, blacks were better off as slaves than they are today; that most blacks liked being slaves; that the ante bellum South was the most godly society in the world; and that slavery was "used" by northerners to provoke a "revolution." This book certainly isn't politically correct, and that's refreshing in its own way. Wjat is is, though, is a staggering exercise in drawing massive conclusions from minimal evidence. This book isn't history. It's neo-Confederate propaganda. Pity the "ministers" who wrote this didn't have much interest in getting things right. (They also pretend as if abolitionist propaganda has been swallowed whole ever since the war, which is patent nonsense. Everyone who knows anything about the relevant historiography knows that it's widely recognized that the abolitionists skewed the facts.)

23 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Totally uninformed, December 13, 2004

By 

Stephanie "Stephanie" (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Southern Slavery: As It Was (Paperback)

Those who want to learn about slavery in the U.S. would do will to avoid this polemical and totally uninformed screed. Though it adorns itself in the veneer of scholarship, it is far from historically informed nor do the authors appear to have conducted any research at all. In sum: this is not a history of slavery at all, but a new expression of pro-slavery thought.