Kevin:

Have a look at Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, which points to proslavery Christian theology as a major source of ethical philosophy (and critique of utlitarianism) in the antebellum South.

Doug Deal
History/SUNY Oswego

ps. It would be interesting to have a discussion on this list of the new book by Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Historian Donald Mathews summarizes the author's argument as follows: "Unlike many scholars, Charles Irons takes seriously the interaction between black and white believers in the antebellum South. In this innovative and painstaking study, the author demonstrates how this interaction--flawed, agonistic, and paradoxical--played out within institutions where both races engaged each other. The result is an understanding of the ambiguity and irony that afflicted religion in the Old South...." Irons himself describes his book as "in some ways... an ecclesiastical version of [Anthony] Iaccarino's and [William] Link's political analyses; while they argue [in Iaccarino, "Virginia and the National Contest over Slavery in the Early Republic, 1780-1833," PhD. diss., UCLA, 1999; and Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (2003)] that Virginia slaves altered the political process, in this work I argue that slaves altered the ecclesiastical processes through which white Virginians forged a politically relevant proslavery argument." (p.15)

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