One of the things I want to do is post some of the sources I used in University, Court, and Slave. A lot is available already on the net, especially books.google, including Thomas R. Dew's Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature and A Digest of the Laws, Customs, Manners, and Institutions of Ancient and Modern Nations, William A. Smith's Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery; Thomas R.R. Cobb's An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, Justice John A. Campbell's many articles on the legal history of slavery, Ebenezer Starnes' novel, The Slaveholder Abroad, and Caroline Hentz' Stolen Child. But some of the sources aren't readily available on the net. I'm going to start with Elisha Mitchell's book The Other Leaf of the Book of Nature, which presented a proslavery attack on Francis Wayland. Mitchell's book was more moderate than other proslavery attacks on Wayland, such as those by Albert Taylor Bledsoe of the University of Virginia and George Baxter of Hampden-Sydney. Mitchell was a professor here at UNC and we have a science building named after him.
Some of my key sources are the addresses given at college literary societies and at college graduations. A lot of them are now easily available on the net, such as William Gaston's 1832 address here at UNC and his 1835 address at Princeton. Increasingly the University of Alabama literary addresses are on the net, such as Joseph W. Taylor's 1847 address -- but his more important one to Southern University isn't yet. Some of the other addresses at Princeton and a number of other schools are scarce, such as James McDowell's 1838 address that is quite critical of abolitionists. This represents a mid-way point for McDowell, who was shifting towards a more proslavery position. There are two addresses, also from Princeton, that are quite important: those by David Kaufman and Abraham Venable , Venable also delivered a graduation speech at Wake Forest. In fact, Wake Forest produced a lot of proslavery addresses, such as S. S. Satchwell's address at Wake Forest in 1858, which provided a "scientific" defense of slavery. I also use several more moderate Phi Beta Kappa addresses by Timothy Walker at Harvard in 1850 and Daniel Lord at Yale and William Greene at Brown in 1851. There were, to be sure, a few addresses that were anti-slavery or otherwise cut against the grain at southern schools -- like Gaston's 1832 address at UNC, William Rodman's address at Wake Forest, and Henry Tutwiler's 1834 address at the University of Alabama. The artist William Richard's address at Erskine fits here, too.
RMT Hunter's 1839 address to UVa alumni is more moderate than you might expect (though it has some proslavery references). Hunter is someone who looms large in my monument dedication work and for a talk at VMI in the early 1850s. He's more openly proslavery later in life, thought still more moderate than many in Virginia. Many of the UVA addresses deal with federalism and its implications for slavery, such as M.R. Garnett's 1850 address to alumni. Washington College has people on both sides of the debate -- some antislavery , especially President Henry Ruffner, and proslavery, notably Ruffner's replacement as president, George Junkin. Both Ruffner and Junkin delivered revealing addresses, as did Junkin's son. I make some use of John R. Thompson's 1850 graduation graduation address at Washington College and E.L. Magoon's 1846 Washington College address. In fact, I use addresses at schools extensively. This goes back to work I've been doing for years on northern literary society addresses -- sort of Emerson's American Scholar in context. One of these days I will get that project finished. That method has proved very useful in gauging the nature of ideas in circulation on southern college campuses. One of my favorites along those lines is Joseph W. Taylor's Plea for the University of Alabama. Taylor also gave a much more moderate address at Howard College and a more radical address, on the eve of Civil War, at Southern University in Greensboro, Alabama. There are some other quite revealing addresses at Alabama, including those by Edward Bullock, John Archibald Campbell (and at UGA), and Willim Gilmore Simms.
The UVA faculty and students loom large in this story. I use Albert Taylor Bledsoe's Liberty and Slavery book, several of George Frederick Holmes' articles, and three of James Holcombe's speeches -- his 1853 address to UVA alumni, his 1856 address to the Virginia Historical Society, and his 1858 address to the Virginia Agricultural Fair -- which focused on slavery as consistent with natural law. I also use the Virginia University Magazine extensively.
And then there are the debates around secession, in which academics loomed large. James Henley Thornwell delivered a sermon on what was at stake with Lincoln's election. James Holcombe spoke to the Virginia legislature on secession. Thomas Cobb of Georgia spoke several times publicly in favor of secession -- and later took to the battlefield to defend the Confederacy.
I'm now very interested in the Garland family of Lynchburg, Virginia -- because their members appear in so many different roles in the story of schools and slavery. Hugh Garland appears as an orator at Hampden-Sydney and at the end of his life as a lawyer for Dred Scott's owner. His brother Landon Cabel Garland was professor at Washington College, then later president at Randolph Macon and at the University of Alabama. Their cousin (I think it is) Samuel Garland purchased about 50 humans from Washington College and sent them to work on the family's plantations in Mississippi. I talk about their story some more at The Conversation.
One of my favorite sources, about which I want to talk a lot, is the trial of Frederick Barnard by the University of Mississippi trustees for taking the testimony of a slave against a student.
You can get a preview of University, Court, and Slave on books.google.
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