Edward Brown (American lawyer)

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Edward Brown (born circa 1790) was a South Carolina lawyer who wrote an early and robust proslavery tract, Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery.[1] The book was published four years after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy. Brown's tract was a companion to other South Carolina proslavery works by Whitemarsh Benjamin Seabrook and was shortly before the more famous proslavery pamphlet by Chancellor William Harper (South Carolina politician).[2] His book is remembered for the phrase that "slavery is the stepladder by which civilized countries have passed from barbarism to civilization."[3]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Notes on the Origin and Necessity of Slavery (Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1826).
  2. ^ Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (Oxford University Press, 2009), 618 (discussing Brown).
  3. ^ Olayanju Olajide, The Complete Concise History of The Slave Trade (2013), 55.