Customer Reviews

Southern Slavery: As It Was

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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.)

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.

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.

As a Christian, I found this monograph to be wicked. The authors' use the Bible to justify southern slavery is pure evil, regardless of how "well" individual owners may have treated their slaves. This monograph literally made me sick to my stomach but made me aware that evil disguised as Christianity is unfortunately alive and well in the US.

In this short pamphlet, Christian reconstructionist Doug Wilson and neo-Confederate leader Steve Wilkins claim to set the historical record straight on African-American slavery. In reading this hackneyed work - full of factual misrepresentations, distortions, and outright lies - one is never quite certain whether to laugh hysterically or to vomit from their outrageous claims and paranoid jeremiads. One learns, amongst other things, that the south is God's promised land, racial slavery is biblically-sanctioned and humane, African-Americans enjoy being enslaved, masters rarely indulged in sexual exploitation, the south was a harmonious multi-racial community, and that, by defending slavery, the Confederacy was really defending the word of Jesus. As if this weren't risible enough, the authors then go on to say that slave emancipation has somehow led to sodomy, abortion, feminism, male effeminacy, and a host of other perceived evils in current US society - while all along `liberal' academics have conspired to slander the US south and to keep these blissful 'truths' of slavery from the public. Phew! Needless to say, their work is really nothing more than hate speech masquerading as religious commentary, and this little book has actually generated some public controversy in Oregon and northern Idaho in recent years. Whatever their personal beliefs may be, Wilson and Wilkins have certainly written a racist book skillfully marketed to readers sympathetic to movements like neo-Confederatism, the KKK, the Church of the Creator, Christian Identity, and the Aryan nations. If you aren't into deeply paranoid, hallucinatory, and phobic rantings from the extreme racist right, this book might not be for you.

This review is about the books content with a comment at the end

The first commandment was to "love thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind and all thy strength." The second is like unto it: "Love thy neighbor as thyself" I wonder how you can claim to be a follower of Jesus Christ, love your neighbor, and make them a slave.

Their statement that there were not thousands of abolitionists protesting in the streets is absurd. Slavery has been a loudly, violently, and consistently disputed issue since before the Declaration of Independence...P>Numerous independant sources are cited.

People in Northern Idaho are always being accused of being racist. In fact nothing is further from the truth. In our community people from all over the world live together and go to school at our university. We care for them as our neighbors without consideration of their race, or religeon.

This book is published in Moscow, Idaho, that is true, And they have a right to publish whatever they wish just as I have a right to compose this review - but we don't agree with them.

And please don't buy this book.

This book tackels such heavy and serious topics as a) Slavery was not nearly as bad as we have been told b)There were not mass selling of families that caused them to be split up c) The slaves themeselves thought fondly of slavery d) Slaveholders were usually good Calvenist Christians who treated there slaves with tenderness and cared for their souls e)Black slave men would never have never allowed 'their women' to be sexually molested, and to say so would be racist .Unfortunately there is remarkably little factual basis for these beliefs within this book. The main points are either touted as known 'facts' or paraphrases from ONE slave narrative. Such a topic deserves sound and exhaustive historical facts to even begin to approach these subjects with serious thought. This book was a major dissapoinment.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, a newsletter devoted to monitoring and exposing hate groups, has published an article on Steven Wilkins, the author of this book. A look at the article might help prospective buyers understand where Wilkins is coming from.

Creepy ramblings from a racist on the the "benifical relationship" slaves had with their owners.
I mean, forget the pictures of bloody whipped backs you've seen.
Forget the shackles in museums and lynch mobs captured in photos...
it was a good relationship....
um...
what a crazy mo-fo.

[...]As for it being racist, here are some excerpts that a recent newspaper article ran. Anyone who claims anything in this pack of lies has even so much as a grain of truth either is totally ignorant or totally corrupt. Or both. Don't be fooled.

"To say the least, it is strange that the thing the Bible condemns (slave-trading) brings very little opprobrium upon the North, yet that which the Bible allows (slave-ownership) has brought down all manner of condemnation upon the South." (page 22)

* "As we have already mentioned, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was not perfect or sinless, but the reality was a far cry from the horrific descriptions given to us in modern histories." (page 22)

* "Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." (page 24)

* "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." (page 24)

* "Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." (page 25)

* "But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." (page 27)

* "Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South -- and had a much easier existence." (page 30)