Books & Publications > Comments on The Southern Debate over Slavery

In petitioning state legislatures and county courts, southerners -- white and black -- exposed slavery's deepest secret: slavery was not what the law, the master, or the white man said it was. Instead, these memorials revealed slavery's complex reality and the on-the-ground struggles of slaves and their owners, free people of color, and white nonslaveholders. In The Southern Debate over Slavery, Loren Schweninger has assembled a sample of these extraordinary documents. His book will quickly become a standard source for the study of antebellum society.
-- Ira Berlin, author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

I cannot imagine a more important resource for scholars and students of slavery studies than The Southern Debate over Slavery. Every research library in the country will have to secure a copy of this volume.
--Darlene Clark Hine, editor, Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America.