A South-Side View of Slavery; Or, Three Months at the South, in 1854.

Adams, a prominent Boston pastor, once spoke out against slavery but after brief trip to the South antagonized both abolitionists and fellow clergymen with A South-Side View of Slavery. Here he defends slavery with biblical references and claims that slaves were better off than those who "work for the shops in New York." Adams speaks of benevolent slave owners and recalls meeting slaves whose politeness, he writes, could not "have been learned under the lash." Arguing African Americans were happy to be slaves, he says the country should not be divided by slavery. Instead "we ought to be the happiest people on earth... The south is best qualified to lead the whole country in plans and efforts for the African race. We will follow her." Adams also challenged Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) "by suggesting it was impossible for fiction to be accurate... William Lloyd Garrison, appalled by A South-Side View of Slavery, reprinted in the Liberator a thorough critique which originally appeared in the Christian Examiner" (Refugees from Slavery, ix-x). This controversial work also prompted former slave William Wells Brown to speak out in public against Adams and, in 1856, to author "a now-lost play, Experience, that was said to have satirized Adams' views" (William Wells Brown, 298n).