Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, as Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States: With the Duties of Masters to Slaves.

Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, as Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States: with the Duties of Masters to Slaves (1856), edited by Thomas O. Summers, D.D., is one of the most extensive and intellectually developed proslavery apologies produced in the antebellum South, representing the considered philosophical and theological defense of the institution by William Andrew Smith (1802-1870), President of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. The volume comprises thirteen lectures originally delivered to students of Moral Science at Randolph-Macon College beginning in 1844, in which Smith argues that slavery is a fundamental principle of the social state and that domestic slavery as an institution is fully justified by the condition and circumstances of society. The lectures treat slavery in a variety of ways, finding validity for it as an abstract principle both as instituted by the Bible and as a reflection of the authoritarian bases of religious and civil government, while Smith argues for the fitness of the system to supply the needs of enslaved people and against the idea of equal rights for unequal people, refuting emancipation by warning that civil chaos would result. As a primary document of antebellum Southern intellectual and religious culture, the volume holds considerable historical significance: published three years before John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and five years before secession, it represents the considered position of a Methodist minister and college president who brought the full apparatus of moral philosophy and biblical scholarship to bear in defense of an institution whose defenders were acutely aware that the terms of the national debate were shifting rapidly against them.