To understand the law of slavery, pro-slavery legal theorist Thomas R.R. Cobb wrote in 1858, one first must understand history and philosophy. Legal historian Alfred Brophy agrees with Cobb on little, but the two concur on the relevance of history and philosophy to the law of slavery. The result is Brophy's weighty University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of the Civil War.

Part I of Brophy's book uses impressive archival research to explore how professors, students, and orators at Southern colleges conceptualized slavery in the several decades leading up to the Civil War. Brophy picks up the story in the early 1830s, when the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia and the rise of abolitionism in the North turned Southern academics from gentle critics to staunch defenders of human enslavement. Pro-slavery arguments developed across the curriculum. Southern scholars invoked history, arguing that slavery had existed since ancient times and had exerted a progressive force on human development. They invoked theology, insisting that the Bible condoned slavery, and that enslavement had saved souls. They also invoked political theory (governance is better with slavery!), economics (the economy is better with slavery!), science (blacks are biologically suited to slavery!), and philosophy (slavery is ethically good for enslavers and enslaved alike!). Even mathematics did pro-slavery work. In the 1850s, Brophy shows, a mathematics book written by a Davidson College professor included a word problem that lampooned abolitionists and flattered enslavers (57).

Parts II and III consider the pro-slavery ideas of Southern politicians, lawyers, legal writers, and judges during the antebellum years. Like the “people of the mind” on Southern college campuses, these “people of action” defended slavery with increasing zeal as time passed. Brophy carefully examines their appellate rulings, legal treatises, and legislative debates, and finds that many of their arguments were strikingly similar to those employed by Southern academics (195). Rather than calling the “people of the mind” the intellectual leaders of the pro-slavery cause and the “people of action” the intellectual followers, or vice versa, Brophy asserts merely that the two groups developed their pro-slavery arguments “in conjunction” with each other (256).

A brief final chapter considers the role that academics and their arguments played in the secession debates of 1860 and 1861. During these debates, which culminated in war, Southerners drew heavily on the pro-slavery ideas that they had rehearsed for decades, on and beyond their college campuses.

University, Court, and Slave illuminates what might be called pro-slavery romanticism. Most discussions of American Romanticism's links to slavery have emphasized anti-slavery Romanticism in the North. Brophy, by contrast, focuses on pro-slavery Romanticism in the South. For several decades following independence, he argues, an Enlightenment ethos prevailed throughout the nation. This ethos emphasized timeless, universal values, epitomized by Thomas Jefferson's statement that “all men are created equal.” Imbued with Enlightenment thinking of this sort, many Southerners were uneasy with—or even guardedly critical of—slavery in the initial decades following independence. As time passed, however, white Southerners drifted away from universalizing Enlightenment values toward a Romantic approach that stressed historical context and local circumstance. “White Southerners moved … from the belief that all men are created equal to a sense that there was a sliding scale of freedom,” Brophy explains. “That sliding scale gave racial groups … only the freedom that they were entitled to, calibrated to their history” (254). According to Brophy, this Romantic style of pro-slavery reasoning flourished both on and beyond Southern campuses during the antebellum years.

Brophy's book is a useful contribution to the burgeoning literature on slavery and universities, although with a few twists. Most recent contributions to this field have focused on Northern schools; Brophy looks South. Most have emphasized slavery's tangible impact on collegiate history: financing, building construction, and campus life. Brophy emphasizes the intangible: how campus communities thought about slavery. Most recent scholarship has focused fixedly on campus; Brophy strays well off campus, devoting almost half of his book to ideas that emanated from nonacademic sources, such as Southern judges and Northern abolitionists. Finally, whereas recent scholarship about slavery's substantial impact on Northern universities has jolted some readers to action, Brophy's scholarship about slavery's vise grip on elite Southern minds seems less likely to jolt, despite being arguably more historically consequential.

University, Court, and Slave reminds legal historians that, below State v. Mann, Dred Scott, the secession ordinances, and every other visible chunk of pro-slavery law lurked massive icebergs of pro-slavery thought. Southern colleges and universities contributed importantly to the development of these icebergs. Brophy's book also serves as an important reminder that smart, cultured, learned people can use their intellectual gifts for ill as well as good; just being a scholar does not mean that you will get things right.