University of Tennessee Press, 1997

Dunn offers readers not only a well-chosen collection of Ezekiel Birdseye’s provocative letters to New York Abolitionist Gerrit Smith, but also a richly insightful, solidly grounded essay on antebellum East Tennessee. Birdseye, a businessman and abolitionist, possessed a coherent social and moral philosophy—and a wide-ranging curiosity—and his letters take up such topics as the degrading moral effects of slavery, its harmful influence on the southern economy, farming practices, the progress of temperance and abolitionism, and church affairs. Unfortunately, Dunn does not fully consider the validity of Birdseye’s observations. But historians concerned with slavery and economics, the social and political structure of the Appalachian South, abolitionism, and the sources of southern unionism will find much to ponder in his work.