Addresses the basic conflict between the Enlightenment's humanitarian credo and slavery, the opposing beliefs of the pro-slavery movement and the abolitionists, and the resulting changes in the perceptions of blacks brought about by the emancipation literature of the French philosophers and writers of the eighteenth century. (BJV)

Analyzes "The Great Auction Sale of Slaves, at Savannah, Georgia" (1859), a popular work by Mortimer Neal Thompson, an American humorist better known by his pseudonym, Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B. The book is one of the most readable, credibly authentic accounts of the abuses of slavery. (BJV)