the mind of a
man of southern birth and northern environment in manhood.

The author furnishes adequate background for this work in tracing the
slave trade, beginning with the exploitation of Guinea and proceeding
to a detailed consideration of the maritime traffic. Slavery as it
existed in the West Indies is portrayed in his account of the sugar
industry. In the continental colonies it appears in his treatment of
the tobacco industry, rice culture and the interests of the northern
colonies. He shows how the struggle for the rights of man resulted in
a sort of reaction against slavery in the North and the so-called
prohibition of the African slave trade.

In his discussion of the introduction of cotton and the domestic slave
trade, there are few facts which cannot be obtained from several
standard works. His treatment of types of plantations, with reference
to their management, labor, social aspects and tendencies, is more
informing. The contrast between town and country slaves, the
discussion of free Negroes, slave crime and the force of the law, do
not give us very much that is new. On the whole, however, the book is
a valuable piece of research giving a more intensive treatment of
economic slavery than any other single volume hitherto published.

On the other hand, the book falls far short of giving a complete
history of the institution of slavery. In the first place, the book is
too much of a commercial account. The slaves are mentioned as
representing both persons and property, but this treatise lacks
proportion in that it deals primarily with the slaves as property in
the cold-blooded fashion that the southerners usually bartered them
away. Very little is said about the blacks themselves, seemingly to
give more space to the history of the whites, who profited by their
labor, just as one would in writing a history of the New England
fisheries say very little about the species figuring in the industry,
but more about the life of the people participating in it. It is
evident that although a southerner, Mr. Phillips has lived so far from
the Negroes that he knows less about them than those who have
periodically come into contact with them but on certain occasions have
given the blacks serious study. This is evidenced by Mr. Phillips' own
statement when he says in his preface, that "a generation of freedom
has wrought less transformation in the bulk of the blacks than might
casually be supposed." This failure to und