An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 by Durwood Dunn (Review)

An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 by Durwood Dunn (University of Tennessee Press, 1997)

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An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South Ezekiel Birdseye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 by Durwood Dunn (Review)

by Noel Fisher
Southern Cultures, Vol. 6, No. 2: Summer 2000

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 Tennessee. Birdseye, a businessman and abolitionist, possessed a coherent social and moral philosophyand 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.

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