author
David Christy
1802–1882
A nineteenth-century Ohio journalist and polemicist, he wrote widely on slavery, colonization, agriculture, and religion in the years leading up to the Civil War. His books capture the arguments and anxieties of a deeply divided America, even when modern readers strongly disagree with his views.
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About the author
Born in 1802, David Christy was an American writer associated with Ohio. Records of his publications show a long career as an author and public commentator, and library listings connect him with books and pamphlets on slavery, African colonization, agriculture, and church politics.
He is best known for Cotton Is King (1855), a work that argued for the economic importance of cotton and defended slavery in the language of political economy. Other works linked to him include African Colonization by the Free Colored People of the United States and Pulpit Politics, which show how strongly he engaged with the major moral and political controversies of his time.
Today, Christy is mainly remembered as a figure in the print culture of antebellum America rather than as a literary stylist. His writings are useful as historical documents because they preserve influential pro-slavery and colonization arguments that shaped public debate in the decades before the Civil War.