response 3 questions about the atlantic slave trade (History)

Proslavery thought in the South after 1820, Part 2

6. Proslavery Thought in the South

There were 6 basic categories of arguments that many southerners used after 1820 to try and explain why slavery was essential for the entire nation.

Their arguments were a mixture of half-truths, incomplete comparisons, over simplified data, pseudo-science, and outright lies meant to justify the economic exploitation and legalized brutalization of human beings.

A. History

· According to southerners, all societies everywhere, beginning with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, had slaves.

· The South required slaves to harvest cotton, which was beneficial to the Southern economy.

· Therefore, people in the South were not doing anything different or radical by owning slaves; rather it was anti-slavery activists who were radical and doing something different.

· More important, history showed that slavery was necessary because it freed smarter people from physical labor and enabled the leaders of civilization to engage in affairs of the state, diplomacy, politics, etc., to make the country better.

· Some Southerners even wrote history books arguing that all ancient societies, such as the Chinese and the ancient Israelites, preferred black slaves because they worked harder.

B. Religion

· According to Southern pastors and church leaders, the Bible was full of examples showing important people like Abraham, king David, and Solomon owning slaves.

· The books of Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus in the Old Testament had many rules and regulations for governing slaves.

· (Southerners neglected to mention that the Bible did not demonstrate its version of slavery was “chattel” slavery as per the laws and regulations created in 1800s America.)

· Also according to many southerners, in the New Testament Paul the Apostle ordered slaves to be obedient to their masters, in one instance even ordering a runaway slave to return home !!

· Some Southern church leaders even argued that the “mark of Cain” referenced in the book of Genesis after Cain killed his brother Abel was black skin.

· More important according to many southern church leaders who tried to justify the existence of slavery, slavery had made pagan, backward people, i.e., Africans, into Christians and helped to civilize them.

· This was a debt that black people and the rest of America owed to southern slave owners, allegedly.

C. Economics and the “Humaneness” of Slavery

· The argument from Economics was that slavery was important to the southern economy and beneficial to the national economy because of the international cotton trade.

· (England and other European nations paid massive amounts of money for southern cotton since they had very little open farmland to grow these crops.)

· More important according to southerners was the idea that slavery and plantation life was the more “humane” alternative to working in the free wage system in the northern cities.

· According to many southerners, workers in the north were the “true” slaves because they worked nonstop for low wages and did not have a sense of “family” that existed on the slave plantations in the south.

· On plantations, slaves were part of a family in which the head of the family was the slave owner, who looked out for the welfare of his slaves.

· So therefore, slavery was the more humane form of labor.

D. Law

· The legal defense of slavery was that the Constitution guaranteed southerners the right to own slaves

· But the legal defense also argued that black people had to be enslaved because black people were “naturally” too violent.

· According to this southern defense of slavery, if they were freed black people could not handle freedom and would destroy society.

· White women would be targeted by black men for rape and assault.

· As a result, according to this line of thought, slavery was a service to all society because by keeping black people in chains it protected everyone ese.

E. Medicine and Science

· Several southern doctors carried out studies in the 1820s and dissected the corpses of slaves who had died.

· This was pseudo (false) science because these doctors claimed that they found evidence of the supposed biological inferiority of black people.

· (Side note--Of course we know today that even on a DNA, genetic level, humans are 99.99% similar not different hence the availability of common cures and medicines for whites, blacks, and all other ethnic groups !!)

· In the 1820s these southern doctors purported to find the following differences between slaves and white people that showed, in a supposed scientific sense, that slaves were naturally inferior:

-The brains of slaves were smaller than the brains of white people.

-The emotional centers of their brains were larger and more developed than the centers of reason in their brain.

-Their bodies produced natural chemicals that helped them work better in the sun and in tropical climates.

-Their muscles were better designed to carry heavy loads, making them naturally better workers.

F. Politics

Many prominent southerners simply said that the Declaration of Independence was wrong…not all men were created equal !!

7. Race as the Deciding Factor

For 2 reasons all the Proslavery Thought arguments can be reduced to preserved inferiority based on race:

· First, only race and arguments from race could support the obvious challenge that slavery posed to the values of universal equality and freedoms that formed the foundation of the 1776 Revolution against England, the Declaration of Independence, and even the Constitution (“All men are created equal…with certain unalienable rights”).

· Second, if race was not the basis of slavery, then the reasons that southerners used to explain why slavery was necessary could be applied to other groups in America, such as Irish and German immigrants, who started arriving in America in large numbers during the 1830s and 1840s.

Americans tended to look down on the Irish and German immigrants, because they tended to be Roman Catholic, poor, and foreigners.

But distinctions of race or culture that allowed the enslavement of white people had never been acceptable in the history of the United States, and indeed in the history of the western world !!

Even Irish and German immigrants were constantly being granted access to social privileges, such as American citizenship, despite whatever other discrimination they might have faced.

This was because after cultural assimilation the Irish and Germans could pass as ethnically white.

But black people for the most part had not been granted access to such considerations, and indeed even the Supreme Court later ruled in 1857 (Dred Scott) that blacks were not Americans and never had been.

As a result, Proslavery thought in the south after 1820 was really all about racial differences and preserving the southern economy based on slave labor.

Responses (Due Monday April 20):

Explain in 2-3 sentences what Proslavery Thought in America was in the 1820s?

How did shifts in global slavery in the 1820s affect slavery in America?

How did the Proslavery legal defense of slavery justify it?

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