| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky. By Harold D. Tallant. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. xiv, 307 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8131-2252-X.)

The venerable judge George Robertson of Kentucky openly spoke out against slavery in the antebellum era, prompting Abraham Lincoln to praise him in 1855 as "'no friend to slavery in the abstract'" (in William H. Townsend, Lincoln and the Bluegrass, 1955, p. 219). Yet when a Union officer refused to return Robertson's fugitive slave in 1862, he was denounced by the Kentucky jurist as a vile slaver stealer, indicted in the criminal court for aiding runaways, and successfully sued for damages in the civil courts. In many ways, Robertson symbolized the paradox of a people who questioned the belief that slavery was a positive good but stoutly resisted any outside interference with the institution.

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