Ulrich Bonnell Phillips was the earliest, most widely read, and most influential twentieth-century historian of Afro-American slavery. An extraordinarily well-read, well-educated, shrewd, and intelligent white native of South Carolina, he was also an apologist for slavery, a man who believed that slavery was just and right because Africans were an inherently inferior people and slavery offered the best possibility for civilizing them. He was thus a participant – a key one, while ostensibly merely writing history – in the slavery debate. Although he wrote many decades after the publication of the narratives here considered – those of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass – he is still engaged in struggle with them. They join with many others before and after them in a debate of long standing about what slavery is, about its nature or its character.

Phillips's book, American Negro Slavery (1918), his first major salvo in the debate, emerged from a tradition of thinking about Southern slavery that began long before he first drew breath. The tradition's inception extends back to the eighteenth century, when slaveholders responded to attacks on slavery by attempting to justify slaveholding to themselves and to the world.