Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky.

Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky. By Harold D. Tallant. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2003. Pp. xiv, 307. $45.00, ISBN 0-8131-2252-X.)

On several occasions during the 1840s, northern antislavery activists predicted that Kentucky would be the first major southern state to free its slaves. In Evil Necessity Harold D. Tallant convincingly demonstrates why this was a plausible assumption and why it was decidedly incorrect. Concentrating on white antislavery reformers, Tallant provides a thoroughly researched, intelligent, clear, and frequently enlightening history of the slavery issue in Kentucky politics, from the formation of the state's chapter of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1829 to the expulsion of its more radical abolitionists in 1859.

For those who are familiar with the antebellum struggle over slavery and Kentucky's role in it, Tallant's first four chapters should prove rewarding reading. The key to his approach is his understanding of the ambivalence of most of the state's white inhabitants concerning the enslavement of African Americans. Kentucky whites generally believed that this border state's diversified economy did not require slave labor, that the employment of black slaves hurt the interests of white wage laborers, and that slavery retarded progress. They also believed that slavery violated Christian and republican precepts. But simultaneously white Kentuckians dreaded the prospect of living among emancipated African Americans, whom they regarded as members of a debased and dangerous race.

Others have noted this ambivalence, but Tallant is the first to so thoroughly explore its intellectual and political ramifications in Kentucky's debate over slavery. He establishes that, while few in the state joined in the Deep South defense of slavery as a positive good, there were also very few who denounced slaveholding as a sin in itself or as an absolute evil. Instead, most Kentuckians who supported slavery and most Kentuckians who claimed to oppose slavery--Tallant calls the latter group "antislavery conservatives"--regarded it as a necessary evil (p. 62). They all agreed that their state needed slavery to control African Americans, so long as large numbers of them lived there. Both proslavery Kentuckians and "antislavery conservatives" supported the ACS scheme to send the state's free African Americans to Liberia in West Africa. The "antislavery conservatives" were also more willing to limit the growth of the state's slave population than to free it. Once it became clear that a large-scale black exodus was infeasible, they gave up on all but a vague commitment to initiating gradual abolition at some unspecified future date.

Tallant's last four chapters, dealing with the true antislavery activism of Cassius M. Clay, with the proslavery victory at Kentucky's constitutional convention of 1849, and with the career of Kentucky's most radical native abolitionist, John G. Fee, tell a more familiar story. Tallant nevertheless tells it well, as he confirms the findings of recent studies on these subjects. In regard to another ambiguous situation, he notes that, although both Fee and Clay faced mob violence, Kentucky was more tolerant than other southern states of open opposition to slavery. More important, though, is his earlier analysis of why it is often difficult to distinguish between the rhetoric of those Kentuckians who supported slavery and those who claimed to oppose it.

STANLEY HARROLD

South Carolina State University