Conspiracy Theory Theories: David Brion Davis' The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style
A conspiracy to promulgate a conspiracy theory?
David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style, Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1969 (reissued 1982)
The distingushed scholar David Brion Davis delivered some lectures - published as a short book - effectively applying Richard Hofstadter’s analysis in his book The Paranoic Style in American Politics (who had examined “fringe” movements like Birchite anticommunism and the like) to examine the antebellum theories of a Slave Power conspiracy to hijack the American ship of state and steer it onto the shoals of proslavery policy.