Nathaniel Beverley Tucker is best known as a major intellectual voice for the proslavery perspective in antebellum America. His ideas were founded upon a classical/legal education acquired among the political leadership of Virginia at the zenith of Jeffersonian republicanism. Those ideas were applied in a long legal career that helped shape the constitutions and laws of early-Republic Virginia and Missouri, a career that established him as a leading advocate of states' rights in the Jeffersonian tradition. As slavery came under increasing attack in the 1830s and 1840s, Tucker turned to magazine commentaries and fictional narratives in an effort to reach a more universal audience than did his many legal writings. He hoped to counter antislavery moralism and abolitionist propaganda with what he considered to be realistic portrayals of plantation life in the American South and of the ill effects that the destruction of slavery would bring to...