BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South, by Lacy K. Ford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011,673 pp., $24.94, paperback.Deliver Us From Evil is a fine-grained analysis of the distinctive development of elite southern White opinion on the institution of slavery during the period between the drafting of the United States Constitution and the mid-1830s. This is not a history of slavery from 1787 to 1835, but a history of the southern discourse on slavery during that time from the perspective of the elite White southern male (although there are several elite White southern female voices included from time to time, and at least one Black voice). Written by Lacy Ford, a Professor of history at the University of South Carolina, this significant work will substantially influence the understanding of the development of the place of Black Americans in White southern political discourse.The tensions in southern opinions on slavery centered around issues of morality, the control of free and enslaved Blacks, and the economic impact of even the most subtle political decision made about the institution of slavery (although it was starkly apparent that morality was often subsumed in the attempt to balance control and economics) all placed within the context of an emerging Republic based on the principles of liberty and the increasingly unstable geopolitics of slaveholding-from major international insurrections, to forceftd domestic and international voices objecting to the institution, and the waning of the international slave trade. Ford emphasizes that there was not one southern view on slavery in the early Republic, but a broad array of views that changed geographically and over time in response to arguments about the future of slavery; the emancipation, diffusion, or colonization of Black populations; the proper methods for subduing enslaved populations and preventing insurrection; and the rhetorical justifications for slavery. Ford differentiates how the demographics and economics of broad regions-the Upper South and the Lower South-created broad coalitions of interest; how within the Upper South and Lower South the interests of individual states shifted with economic pressures and the need for control of enslaved populations; and how, within individual states, regional needs often created conflicting interests.Ford robustly and subtly treats an impressive number of themes, including the emergence of racial superiority as a justification for the treatment of Blacks, the burden placed on a slaveholder's ability to manumit, the waxing and waning of the interest in colonization, the degree to which free Blacks were allowed to participate in civil society, whether elite Whites viewed religion among the enslaved as a positive or a negative, the interest in expanding slaveholding territories, and, most importantly, the ever-present fear of insurrection that permeated White consciousness. …