Excellent, excellent book covering the outward gaze of the South in years leading up to the American Civil War.

It's a well-worn adage that everyone imagines themselves the protagonist of reality, but we don't always consider how far history's villains went. In the case of Southern Slaveholders, they saw themselves at first threatened by British abolitionist fervor in the 1830s and '40s, followed by a dominant position to reap the next century's rewards in the 1850s. They truly counted racial science as of a piece with the advances in physics and the other basic sciences, and thought the technology of slave labor would become dominant after other empire's attempts with abolition inevitably failed.

The edifice of ideology they created to justify their racial domination was impressively evil, of course, and makes you glad they got smacked around in the '60s and during reconstruction; however, we still see the same sorts of justifications like efficiency or economic inevitability used to justify systems of domination or oppression throughout the world today—often treated as if they're some sort of natural law, and not an outgrowth of the artificial institutions we've built over centuries. You get the sense reading this book that many Southern writers, if pulled over a century and a half into the present, would be predisposed to writing on Substack.