The Slave Trade: Slavery and Color

Published in 1925, this is a scholarly excavation of America's original sin. Jervey traces the tangled history of slavery and racial classification from the earliest colonial settlements through the Constitutional debates that would define a nation. He examines how legislative decisions, from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the Missouri Crisis, gradually hardened racial lines and codified inequality into law. The book engages what Jervey terms the 'Negro Question,' not as a simple moral puzzle but as a socio-political problem that confounded statesmen, jurists, and ordinary citizens across centuries. Rather than a polemic, this is an institutional history: Jervey catalogs the arguments, the compromises, and the shifting justifications that allowed slavery to persist and eventually explode into civil war. For readers interested in understanding how racial hierarchy was constructed, debated, and ultimately embedded in American institutions, this early twentieth-century perspective offers both period insight and a foundation for deeper inquiry.