ABSTRACT
William Henry Stiles was a lawyer and plantation owner of Savannah, Georgia. Stiles's address is at heart a defence of slavery. He argues for the rights of slaveholders by showing their inheritance of a conservative American revolutionary tradition, grounded in constitutional law and local self-government. Stiles had earlier documented his diplomatic tenure in Europe in Austria in 1848-49. For Stiles the European revolutionaries were utopians because they were questing after human rights, seeking to establish social democracy overnight in places whose political tradition was one of provincial deference to the central authority. Stiles, as a US diplomat in Vienna, had witnessed various ethnic minorities of Habsburg Empire seeking independence, and also heard news of contemporaneous uprisings against monarchy in France and the Italian states. Stiles's pamphlet shows how exceptionalist discourse could champion American defence of self-government and disparage others' attempts to replicate the American example.
