Captures the white South's intellectual, social, and political interests shaping "the slavery question" from the founding through the Jacksonian era.
A major contribution to our understanding of slavery in the early republic, Deliver Us from Evil illuminates the white South's twisted and tortured efforts to justify slavery, focusing on the period from the drafting of the federal constitution in 1787 through the age of Jackson.
Rarely has anyone heard this case made with the force and detail that Lacy K. Ford, chairman of the University of South Carolina's history department, has pulled together in his important new work... Those seeking the slaves' perspective won't find much here, as the author readily notes up front, but there's arguably no single better book for anyone wishing to explore the mind-set that kept them in chains.