Books, Arts & Manners: The Ambiguous Muse

Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, by Larry E. Tise (University of Georgia, 568 pp., $40)

For reasons that have more to do with contemporary politics and the intellectual fashions of our time than with an interest in history per se, we have experienced in the past two decades a veritable explosion of commentary on the phenomenon of American Negro slavery. Indeed, it is now clear that there have been too many of these books—that they are so numerous and so predictable that they actually get in the way of serious consideration of their subject. This literature exists primarily to give to those who write it an opportunity to demonstrate their own moral refinement—as “ethical proof” of their right to instruct those benighted conservatives of this latter day such as do not, in retrospect, hate slavery to the point of distraction, as if it were an infamy still among us and a key to contemporary policy disputes. It is easy to lose patience with such a superfluity of painless rectitude. We can gather from its noisy display no sense of the “peculiar institution” as part of the overall pattern of American life at earlier moments in our national history, nor any explanation of why our forefathers were unable to agree about how to regard slavery, once it was established in their midst.

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M. E. Bradford

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Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, by Larry E. Tise (University of Georgia, 568 pp., $40)

For reasons that have more to do with contemporary politics and the intellectual fashions of our time than with an interest in history per se, we have experienced in the past two decades a veritable explosion of commentary on the phenomenon of American Negro slavery. Indeed, it is now clear that there have been too many of these books—that they are so numerous and so predictable that they actually get in the way of serious consideration of their subject. This literature exists primarily to give to those who write it an opportunity to demonstrate their own moral refinement—as “ethical proof” of their right to instruct those benighted conservatives of this latter day such as do not, in retrospect, hate slavery to the point of distraction, as if it were an infamy still among us and a key to contemporary policy disputes. It is easy to lose patience with such a superfluity of painless rectitude. We can gather from its noisy display no sense of the “peculiar institution” as part of the overall pattern of American life at earlier moments in our national history, nor any explanation of why our forefathers were unable to agree about how to regard slavery, once it was established in their midst.