Content area
Full Text
By Merton L. Dillon. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. x + 300 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $16.95.)
More than fifty years ago Clement Eaton published Freedom of Thought in the Old South (1940), a book that has become a classic. Eaton emphasized how the white fear of abolitionism and slave revolt traumatized the region and led to stringent political and police measures to control both white dissent and black action. Reading Merton L. Dillon's Slavery Attacked gives one a fleeting sense of deja vu. With far greater specificity than Eaton, Dillon has written a comprehensive history of the internal and external threats to slavery, real and perceived, from the very founding of slavery in Virginia through the Civil War.
Dillon's research net was cast wide, and he diligently searched through...