| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Harold D. Tallant. Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2003. Pp. xiii, 307. $45.00.
Kentucky has often been called the state that seceded after the Civil War. In this study of antebellum attitudes toward slavery and the politics of antislavery reform in Kentucky, Harold D. Tallant offers an intriguing explanation. His study also invites a comparative look at other so-called "middle ground" slaveholding states that, like Kentucky, remained (more or less) with the Union in the Civil War.	1
The antislavery movement in Kentucky was dominated by conservatives, although a few radical abolitionists were tolerated but gained little support there. The cornerstone of the conservative position was the conviction that slavery was a necessary evil, and conservatives were frequently slaveholders themselves. At the Frankfort Emancipation Convention in 1849, half of the 150 delegates held over 3,000 slaves. When other slaveholding states moved to the militant defense of slavery as a positive good, slaveholders in Kentucky did not. When reformers in other states moved from gradualist to immediatist positions on emancipation, Kentucky reformers did not.	. . .

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