Last year when the slavery booklet flap was at its height, and the booklet itself was out of print, I said that the material was going to be released in revised form. Well, that form has grown into a small book, and the day of publication draweth nigh. The title of the book is Black and Tan, and is “a collection of essays and excursions on Slavery, Culture War and Scripture in America.” The original Southern Slavery As It Was booklet is now about half its original length, and is just one chapter in the book.
We expect this new book to sell at least twenty-four copies, and would be willing to wager that fifty percent of the purchasers will be local critics with no sense of proportion at all. Since their idea of critical interaction is killing ants on the sidewalk with a baseball bat, tongues out the sides of their mouths, we thought it would be a good idea to have the manuscript looked over beforehand by someone whose opinion of it would be truly valuable. Critics are easy enough to find, but most of them around here belong to Secularist Crimson Jihad and do not really have the capacity for thoughtful interaction. Many of them have just one thought on this kind of subject, like a solitary marble in a jar, and they rattle when they try to say anything.
So we sought out Dr. Eugene Genovese, one of America’s truly great historians. His mastery of this period in our history is widely acknowledged and honored from all directions. Although he and his wife were in the final stages of getting two books out the door, he was kind enough to read through the manuscript and provided helpful criticisms that he described as “nitpicking,” but which really were genuinely helpful. In addition, he also provided us with the following blurb for the cover, for which I am very grateful.
“The Reverend Douglas Wilson may not be a professional historian, as his detractors say, but he has a strong grasp of the essentials of the history of slavery and its relation to Christian doctrine. Indeed, sad to say, his grasp is a great deal stronger than that of most professors of American history, whose distortions and trivializations disgrace our college classrooms. And the Reverend Mr. Wilson is a fighter, especially effective in defense of Christianity against those who try to turn Jesus’ way of salvation into pseudo-moralistic drivel” — Eugene Genovese
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