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Full-Text Articles in History
Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert Forbes
Secular Damnation: Thomas Jefferson And The Imperative Of Race, Robert Forbes
Robert P Forbes
Race, we are told, is a “social construction.” If this is so, Thomas Jefferson was its principal architect. Jefferson consciously framed his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to check the rising status of Africans and to combat growing critiques of slavery from America’s European friends. Jefferson did this by importing the slaveholder’s sense of slaves as chattel into an Enlightenment world view, providing a metaphysical foundation for prejudice by transmuting the traditional Christian concept of the saved vs. the damned into material and aesthetic terms. Recasting in quasi-scientific language the ancient doctrine of the mark …
“Truth Systematised" : The Changing Debate Over Slavery And Abolition, 1761-1916, Robert Forbes
“Truth Systematised" : The Changing Debate Over Slavery And Abolition, 1761-1916, Robert Forbes
Robert P Forbes
No abstract provided.
Slavery And The Evangelical Enlightenment From "Religion And The Antebellum Debate Over Slavery (Univ. Of Georgia Press)", Robert P. Forbes
Slavery And The Evangelical Enlightenment From "Religion And The Antebellum Debate Over Slavery (Univ. Of Georgia Press)", Robert P. Forbes
Robert P Forbes
This essay shows how Scottish Common-Sense rationalism and evangelical religion conjoined in the later eighteenth century to create a powerful, mutually-reinforcing “Evangelical Enlightenment” with powerful antislavery implications. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 cleared the way for an unprecedented wave of socially-progressive, religiously-undergirded American nationalism. This threat stimulated slaveholders and their allies to defend the institution through strategies designed to preclude the alliance of a powerful national state with the sanction of religion—the only combination powerful enough to overthrow slavery in a free republic.