The Course of the South to Secession

New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. First American Century Series Edition. Presumed first printing thus. Hardcover. Very good. xi, [3], 176, [2] pages. Footnotes. Includes Foreword, Introduction, The Central Theme of Southern History, and Index. Chapters cover Daughters of England; The Frame of Independence; The Virginia Dynasty; A Question of Ethics; An Answer of Race; and The Fire-eaters. Also includes The Central Theme of Southern History, and an Index. Reprint of the original 1939 edition. After the death of the author, his widow allowed the Georgia Historical Quarterly to publish these lectures, beginning in the issue of December, 1936, and continuing consecutively through March, 1938. To make them more available, the Committee on the Albert J. Beveridge Memorial Fund of the American Historical Association decided to republish them as a book. They are here presented as they were left by Professor Phillips, with slight editing, and as they were published originally in the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Ellis Merton Coulter (1890-1981) was an American historian of the South, author, and a founding member of the Southern Historical Association. For four decades, he was a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, where he was chair of the History Department for 18 years. He was editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly for 50 years, and published 26 books on the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Ulrich Phillips' The Course of the South to Secession traces the development of southern political philosophy from colonial times to the Civil War. Jefferson's political philosophy appealed to southerners because it exalted agrarian virtues and promoted a live-and-let-live ideology. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (November 4, 1877 - January 21, 1934) was an American historian who largely defined the field of the social and economic history of the antebellum American South and slavery. Phillips concentrated on the large plantations that dominated the Southern economy, and he did not investigate the numerous small farmers who held few slaves. He concluded that plantation slavery produced great wealth, but was a dead end, economically, that left the South bypassed by the industrial revolution underway in the North.
Phillips concluded that plantation slavery was not very profitable, had about reached its geographical limits in 1860, and would probably have faded away without the American Civil War, which he considered needless conflict. He praised the entrepreneurship of plantation owners and denied they were brutal. Phillips argued that they provided adequate food, clothing, housing, medical care and training in modern technology-that they formed a "school" which helped "civilize" the slaves. He admitted the failure was that no one graduated from this school. Phillips systematically hunted down and revealed plantation records and unused manuscript sources. An example of pioneering comparative work was "A Jamaica Slave Plantation" (1914). His methods and use of sources shaped the research agenda of most succeeding scholars, even those who disagreed with his favorable treatment of the masters. After the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s historians turned their focus away from his emphasis on the material well-being of the slaves to the slaves' own cultural constructs and efforts to achieve freedom. By turning away from the political debates about slavery that divided North and South, Phillips made the economics and social structure of slavery the main theme in 20th century scholarship. Together with his highly eloquent writing style, his new approach made him the most influential historian of the antebellum south.