This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. About the Publisher, Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Excerpt from The Slave Power, Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs. He has published articles in a number of journals including the American Historical Review, Past and Present, the Journal of Southern History, the William and Mary Quarterly, and the Journal of the Historical Society. The author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South Debating Slavery: Economy and Society in the Antebellum American South and Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, Smith is also the editor of The Old South. from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where he is now a professor of history. Smith also traces the book's reception by successive generations of historians of the slave South. Smith's new introduction to the work places The Slave Power in historical context by explaining the intellectual milieu in which the book was written (including a treatment of classical liberal economic thought in Great Britain), the book's friendly reception in Union circles, and its rejection by war-torn Confederates. Casting the Civil War as a contest between an economically defunct and politically aggressive Southern slave power and a liberal, capitalist, free-wage-labor North, Cairnes offered an interpretation of the origins of the Civil War that has remained as compelling and controversial as it was when first published.

When Cairnes-one of the nineteenth century's preeminent classical liberal economists-characterized Southern slavery as inefficient and backward, his opinions carried enormous weight, earning him applause in the North and castigation in the slave- holding South. It remains among the most important works on the political economy of Southern slavery.

Cairnes's seminal work on slavery, was widely acclaimed upon publication in 1862 as a brilliant attempt both to explain the essential cause of the American Civil War and to shape European policy concerning the struggle. An early assessment of the contest between an economically defunct and politically aggressive Southern slave power and a liberal, free-wage-labor North

The Slave Power by John E. Cairnes