Debating Slavery
Thornton Stringfellow, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery (Richmond, 1856)
This very different book in the Commodore Collection dates from the height of America’s conflict over slavery — the years immediately preceding the Civil War — when some white Southerners argued that the institution was not just justifiable, but a positive good. Published in Richmond, Va., in 1856, Scriptural and Statistical Views in Favor of Slavery argues that enslavement was divinely sanctioned in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. It also uses census data to demonstrate that the slaveholding South was more prosperous than the free North.
It is unclear whether this volume and the 1793 and 1799 antislavery ones all descended in the same family line. Still, they show that white people on the Eastern Shore had access to a wide range of opinions and arguments about slavery and race — even as laws attempted to shut down all debate on the topic.
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