A Defence of Negro Slavery, as it exists in the United States.

Notes

First edition of the Mississippi anti-abolitionist's work summarising pro-slavery arguments supported by religion and new racial science. The eleven chapters consider the biblical foundations of slavery within early Judaism and Christianity, the history of African slavery, the abolitionist position of England on the topic, the dangers and ineffectuality of emancipation, and the moral, intellectual, and economic benefits of slavery to both slaves and their masters. Of its circulation history, the historian G. Ward Hubbs notes that Estes "was distributing the thousand copies that he had printed to the west Alabama towns between Montgomery and his own Columbus, Mississippi, as well as in Mobile and New Orleans. The Alabama Beacon liked Estes' work enough to excerpt his lengthy articles, the only proslavery work to receive such treatment" (p. 71).