This book analyses the impact of American Revolutionary ideology upon conceptions of the place of slavery in American society. The ambivalence involved in a libertarian revolution occurring in a slave society was as obvious to eighteenth-century Americans as it is to twentieth-century historians yet the obvious sincerity of Southern Republicanism and the persistence of slavery have presented a paradox with which historians have hardly come to terms.

This book analyses the impact of American Revolutionary ideology upon conceptions of the place of slavery in American society. The ambivalence involved in a libertarian revolution occurring in a slave society was as obvious to eighteenth-century Americans as it is to twentieth-century historians yet the obvious sincerity of Southern Republicanism and the persistence of slavery have presented a paradox with which historians have hardly come to terms.