| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

All Honor to Jefferson? The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis. By Erik S. Root. (Lanham: Lexington, 2008. viii, 255 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-2217-4. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-7391-2218-1.)

Erik S. Root's All Honor to Jefferson? is a forcefully argued book that examines the "public debate" over bondage in Virginia "between the Founding and the Civil War" (p. 2). Wishing "to elucidate the moral controversy over slavery," Root argues that the state's founders were dedicated emancipationists who believed in the principles of natural rights and that slavery had to be eliminated (ibid.). By the late 1820s, however, a new generation of leaders, driven by "self-interest" (p. 108), rejected emancipation and turned to the "positive good" theory, most famously articulated by Thomas Roderick Dew, a professor at William and Mary College in the 1820s and 1830s.

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