The Progress And Intelligence Of Americans - Softcover

Marvin T. Wheat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0371730635 ISBN 13: 9780371730638

Publisher: HardPress, 2021

Synopsis

The Progress And Intelligence Of Americans by Marvin T. Wheat is a Civil War–era polemic defending slavery as a divinely ordained, natural order and urging territorial expansion and the expansion of slave labor into tropical lands. The work contends that slavery is morally, economically, and strategically superior to free labor in tropical climates, and it presents a deterministic, ethnocentric hierarchy of races as natural and constitutional. It lays out a program of acquisition and settlement across Mexican territories, Central America, the West Indies, and parts of South America to form new slave states and sustain national wealth through cotton, sugar, coffee, spices, and minerals. The author employs biblical exegesis, pseudo-scientific claims about physiology and ethnology, and constitutional rhetoric to frame abolitionism and emancipation as threats to national unity and divine order. The narrative is dense with expository digressions on geography, climate, botany, and economic data, aimed at convincing readers that slavery provides a stable, productive system for tropical development. It critiques abolitionists, Lincoln, and radical Republicans while presenting an addendum that systematizes race-based theory. The work closes with a call for unity, constitutional fidelity, and the expansion of slaveholding as a “divine mission.”

Edition details

• Publisher: HardPress
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0371730635
• ISBN 13: 9780371730638
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 634