Abstract: Brophy expands the literature about pro-slavery thought by analyzing the “ideas in circulation” at southern colleges and literary societies before turning to the pro-slavery thought of several well-known southern jurists. These popular ideas are more fugitive, less formal, but probably more widely available in the aggregate and thus more influential than systematic treatises. Brophy’s theme is that as the years passed, slavery’s defenders were increasingly attracted to a utilitarian defense of the institution as beneficial for masters and slaves alike. Important to the utilitarian defense was an emphasis on the importance of attending to the specific circumstances of society, in contrast to what Brophy’s subjects described as the sterile abstractions of Enlightenment thought. Much of the pro-slavery thought that Brophy describes will be familiar to specialists, but his work’s strength lies in bringing to historians’ attention a set of previously neglected materials. Brophy’s discussion of cases dealing with the legal limits to masters’ power to free their slaves supplements the attention typically given to Thomas Ruffin’s opinion in State v. Mann. Two of his chapters—one about Brown University’s president Francis Wayland and one about the travails of Frederick A. P. Bernard at the University of Mississippi—may be of greater interest to historians of education than to historians of pro-slavery thought. The discussion of Wayland brings to the surface concerns about how to evaluate past actions known today to be evil that are only implicit elsewhere the book. Brophy’s discussion of Thomas R. R. Cobb of Georgia, author of a major pro-slavery legal treatise, counterposes “cold legal reasoning” in slavery’s defense to the “passionate … sympathy” expressed in anti-slavery arguments (227). These “cold calculations of utility … derived from a perception of hierarchy … evidenced by nature” (231). That juxtaposition also appears in Brophy’s discussion of Ruffin, William Gaston of North Carolina, and Joseph Henry Lumpkin, the first justice of Georgia’s Supreme Court. Again, the formulation is familiar in previous work about the law of slavery, but Brophy valuably brings it to a new set of readers. Brophy notes in passing that slavery’s defenders sometimes also relied on sympathy, especially in their arguments that slave owners treated the human beings that they owned better than capitalist employers treated the human beings who worked for them. A more complete discussion of pro-slavery thought, even in its watered-down form in faculty lectures and literary addresses, might lead to some tempering of Brophy’s characterization of such arguments as utilitarian. His stress on the importance of taking local conditions into account is one area in which he might have deepened his analysis. Yet, even as it stands, Brophy’s book is a well-crafted introduction to pro-slavery thought as expressed in venues that historians have not visited often enough.