A Defense of Virginia and the South

Rating:
Summary: An Unseasonable Classic
Review: Dabney opens the book declaring the unseasonableness of such a book -- as unseasonable as seeing the bleached ribbs of the Ark on Mt. Arrat would have seemed to the architects of Babel's Tower just 101 years after God saved Noah and his family from the world-wide flood.

Now, more than a quarter of a century after the South was crushed and became the only region in our American occupied by a foreign force (the Union), by reading Dabney we might realize that the Southern man loved his slave, and the Northern merchantile-industrialist merely saw the eradication of slavery with a profit-motive to promote New England and the Unitarian Universalist heresy -- all while claiming the "Negro" as a man but treating him as a beast.

Why, I ask, if the North loved the Negro did the Underground Railroad go to Canada? Answer, because no bigoted Unitarian/Universalist Abolitionist Northerner would associate with a black man -- while the Southerners took them into their homes and worshiped together in the family pews.

This book shows the terrible object of the Emancipation Proclamation: to unleash (only) Southern Slaves who, with the master out fighting the War, could rape and kill the women and children on the farm. It was only because of the kindly relation between the "Southron" mistress and the Slave that Lincoln's unholy object did not succeed.

Even now, it is unseasonable to speak of such things -- but it is right.

Rating:
Summary: Here's Your Chance to Understand
Review: The prejudiced sensibilities of today's sub-culture of the aggressively perpetually-offended will be riled to blithering incredulity when it finds out that slavery is not condemned in the Bible, but rather is therein acknowledged and regulated. But, the PC fascists will never know that such a position is truthful, reasonable, and defensible unless the votaries of truth summon the courage to read and honestly consider Robert Lewis Dabney's *Defense of Virginia and the South*.
Replete with history and logic, and written in Dabney's typically intense and eloquent prose, this book is a much-needed antidote to the standard, hackneyed, predictable knee-jerk reaction to the standard, hackneyed, predictable caricature of the South in general and slavery in particular, and should be read by everyone who wants to counter latter-day South-hating bigots and mesmerized, pied-pipered, intellectual lemmings who are obsessed with burying the South under a mountain of obloquy and falsehood.
Don't expect to amiably received should you admire or quote *Defense*. Most of the book's critics have never read it, and will respond with some self-accessorized, vitriolic mantra of one of today's pop anti-South Svengalies. Those critics who have actually read *Defense* will probably have read it through the filter-lens of public school/state college political correctness; they had previously made up their minds then, and they don't want to be confused or inconvenienced now with facts or true thinking.
A "must-read" for free-thinkers who want a first-hand account of the times and people that have been so maliciously slandered and libeled by the American neo-kulturkampf.

Rating:
Summary: Historically Interesting But Morally Repugnant
Review: This book was written after the Civil War by a Presbyterian theologian who wanted to vindicate the Southern cause. His defense of the South is really a defense of slavery. The basis for Dabney's defense of slavery is the Bible. He equates abolitionists with the guillotine using Jacobins of the French Revolution, regarding anyone who would oppose slavery as the antithesis of Christianity. Dabney does not even regard the golden rule as hostile to slavery. Like Borgia Popes, Jimmy Swaggart and the troubles in Northern Ireland this book could either be an embarrassment for Christians or a vindication for atheists. A Defense of Virginia and the South should only be read for historical value. It can provide the contemporary reader with an unsettling insight into the educated, articulate mind of a mid 19th century Southerner who fervently believed in the Confederate cause. But the purported "Christian" morality of this book is an affront to human dignity.

Rating:
Summary: Historically Interesting But Morally Repugnant
Review: This book was written after the Civil War by a Presbyterian theologian who wanted to vindicate the Southern cause. His defense of the South is really a defense of slavery. The basis for Dabney's defense of slavery is the Bible. He equates abolitionists with the guillotine using Jacobins of the French Revolution, regarding anyone who would oppose slavery as the antithesis of Christianity. Dabney does not even regard the golden rule as hostile to slavery. Like Borgia Popes, Jimmy Swaggart and the troubles in Northern Ireland this book could either be an embarrassment for Christians or a vindication for atheists. A Defense of Virginia and the South should only be read for historical value. It can provide the contemporary reader with an unsettling insight into the educated, articulate mind of a mid 19th century Southerner who fervently believed in the Confederate cause. But the purported "Christian" morality of this book is an affront to human dignity.

Rating:
Summary: To any Christian
Review: This is a book that is a must read, it will benifit any Christian, it offers a truth that many are afraid to give. It is about the Institution of Slavery, and the Constitution and the Bible. Dr. Dabney was a great writer, all of his books are very intresting. This is perhas the best twenty dollars you will ever spend. Deo Vindice.