Kyle Bell

The United States has come a long way. It was only a century and a half ago that we still had slaves plowing fields, picking cotton and doing the daily chores of their master. Today, we have an African American president named Barack Obama. I think that it is important to not just understand the history of our country, but also the thinking behind these events. Did slaveholders find moral justification for their actions? What moral claims did abolitionists make? Was the American Civil War inevitable? These questions are answered in the words of people that lived during the period of slavery in my book The Slavery Debate in 19th Century America. Below is an excerpt:

Slavery is an issue that the United States has had to deal with since the early British colonies. As Frederick Douglass remarked in 1850, “The first spot poisoned by its leprous presence, was a small plantation in Virginia. The slaves, at that time, numbered only twenty. They now have increased to the frightful number of three million.” The moral, cultural, economic and political impact of slavery in the United States is profound in its magnitude. Slavery shaped the way our nation was formed in everything from political decisions regarding territory to legal recognition and rights of the nation’s inhabitants. This paper will venture to better understand the thinking behind both pro-slavery and abolitionists in the period before the American Civil War.

You can purchase The Slavery Debate in 19th Century America at Amazon.com for Kindle and at Smashwords for iPhone/iPod Touch, PC, Sony eReader and other formats. You can also find my other e-books on Amazon.com as well, including International Political Economy: Free Trade or Fair Trade? and Detroit: A City on the Brink. If you are a publisher looking to potentially publish my work (either a hard copy or a digital service other than Amazon), feel free to send an e-mail to kyle.bell @ gamefreaks365.com.