Mr. Lee

[Thomas Thorne]

Michael Korda is one of my favorite authors and I am in the happy condition of looking forward to reading some of his books for the first time. I would commend "Charmed Lives", his memoir of his family of Hungarian expatiates who dominated the British film industry and his biographies of Eisenhower and Lawrence of Arabia. I have not yet read the Grant bio.

Joe Beckert repeats the comforting belief that even without the Civil War, slavery was doomed in North America. I wish that were so. I don't subscribe to the Charles William Ramsdell climate thesis that argued slavery could only flourish in areas suitable to cotton cultivation. Railroads were the largest antebellum slave owners. Southerners,being ingenious Americans,might well have created interesting new ways to retain slavery and still make a profit.

One of the most fascinating beliefs in the mindset of the South was its belief that the only alternative to slavery was to grant full freedom and equality to African Americans. They did not have the Yankee hypocrisy that damned slavery but accepted racial subordination as the natural order of things.
Tom