University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern College and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War

University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War * Alfred L. Brophy * New York: Oxford University Press, 2016 * xxviii, 374 pp. * $39.95

Alfred Brophy's University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War is an expansive intellectual history of proslavery ideology. Brophy illuminates the influence of southern professors-"people of the mind"- upon politicians, judges, and lawyers, or "people of action" (p. 195). The pronounced turn from Enlightenment ideals that "all men are created equal" toward utilitarian proslavery arguments after 1830 by those on university campuses had a lasting impact on their students, who eventually constructed the jurisprudence of slavery and, ultimately, the rationale for secession.

After Nat Turners rebellion in 1831, Virginia legislators debated, but rejected, emancipation of slaves. William and Mary professor Thomas Roderick Dew responded to the debates in his influential Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, which...