Pro-slavery ideology in the United States

Characterizing American perceptions of slavery at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in the 1998 documentary series ''Africans in America: America's Journey Through Slavery'', the historian Douglas R. Egerton said: A narrative that enslaved Africans lived in a carefree, comfortable state dates back to the late eighteenth century. This argument mostly focused on the economic feasibility of enslaving people for their labor despite the inherent subjugation and degradation of human beings. The enslaved people of the time were members of what historian Ira Berlin called the revolutionary generations and in his pivotal 1998 work Many Thousands Gone he described the transition in popular sentiments about the Africans and their descendants among ethnically European settlers of North America as, But by the 1810s a new rationale arose that began to treat legalized enslavement as a "positive good" and not as an economically "necessary evil", while still affirming its alleged economic benefits. It appears that this new premise was first expressed by Robert Walsh in 1819: Such justification about the "goodness" of enslavement for those who were enslaved became more common in the 1820s. By the late 1820s, the defense of institutional slavery saw it as mutually beneficial for state governments, enslavers, and enslaved people alike. Legal enslavement drifted from being seen as an economic system of private enslavers to a political and philosophical position that portrayed enslavement as possessing national importance, providing benefits to the states, including more tax revenue. A well-known example of this new pro-enslavement approach was voiced by Governor Stephen D. Miller in his 1829 speech to South Carolina's legislators: Not long after Governor Miller's speech, the general defense of involuntary servitude drifted towards a position where a "proper social order and foundation of social welfare played a major role" in the pro-enslavement debate. Another economic defense of slave labor came from economist Thomas Roderick Dew, professor at and then president of the College of William and Mary, who downplayed the evil of owning humans after the Virginia House of Burgesses almost passed legislation for the emancipation of enslaved people in 1832. Dew supported enslavement on philosophical, economic and Biblical grounds, arguing that chattel slavery was not necessarily an immoral system. ==James Henry Hammond and the mudsill theory==

On February 1, 1836, Congressman James Henry Hammond from South Carolina spoke on the House floor for two hours about the perceived menace of abolitionism. He launched an attack on pro-human rights proponents in the North, while defending the social and economic benefits to whites of enslavement in the South. Hammond's speech on enslavement was considered a new departure in the American Congress, distinguished as the "first explicit defense of slavery as a positive good". In that 1836 speech, Hammond attempted to justify the practice: A Democrat, Hammond was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1842. He was best known during his lifetime as an outspoken defender of the South and the institution of slavery. In his famous Mudsill Speech (1858), Hammond articulated the pro-slavery political argument during the period at which the ideology was at its most mature (late 1830s – early 1860s). ==John C. Calhoun and "positive good" slavery==

John C. Calhoun, a political theorist and the seventh Vice President of the United States advocated for the idea of "positive good" slavery. Calhoun was a leader of the Democratic-Republican Party in the early nineteenth century who, in the Second Party System, initially joined the proslavery Nullifier Party but left by 1839. Though having refused to attend the inauguration of Democratic president Martin Van Buren two years before, Calhoun voted with the Democratic Party for the remainder of his career. To Calhoun, slavery was a great benefit for an inferior race that had no ability to exercise their freedom positively. Calhoun argued: The concept of slavery as a positive good came to the forefront in Calhoun's February 6, 1837, speech on the US Senate floor. In an attempt to disarm the abolitionists' moral outrage over slavery as "man-stealing" and ignoring the anti-slavery tradition of the Founders, Calhoun, like many proslavery Southerners, pointed to the ancient world to help them defend the institution of slavery, especially Aristotle's theory of natural slavery. Greek democracy along with the grandeur of the Roman republic provided Southerners with a perspective that great cultures and slavery were inseparable. Attempting to claim the moral mantle for the social defense of involuntary servitude, Calhoun declared: In that 1837 speech, Calhoun further argued that the slaveholders took care of their slaves from birth to old age, urging the opponents of slavery to "look at the sick, and the old and infirm slave, on one hand, in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress, and compare it with the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poor house" found in Europe and the Northern states. Such an assertion was predicated on the virtues of benevolent paternalism, the glory of past civilizations, and the traditions of white supremacy. In an effort to illustrate that the North was also guilty of treating and exploiting its free laborers like slaves, Calhoun declared in his speech "that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilised society in which one portion of the community did not... live on the labour of the other." Most Southern slaveholders and intellectuals favored Calhoun's ideas and maintained that the institution of slavery "benefited both master and servant". He believed that free laborers in the North were just as enslaved as the Negro workers in the South. However, in the case of slaves in the South, Calhoun argued that Negros were receiving special protection under a caring and paternalistic master, and therefore were more fortunate. To bolster the prospects of slavery, he asserted that liberty was not a universal right but should be "reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving", which would exclude both free and enslaved Negros. Moreover, in 1820, Calhoun explained to John Quincy Adams that slave labor was the mechanics by which to maintain social control, calling it the "best guarantee for equality among whites". ==Effects of the "positive good" argument for slavery==

Before the 1830s, the support for slavery was weakening in the South. During this period many Southerners agreed that, in the abstract, slavery constituted an evil. They claimed that they had not participated in its introduction, and laid the blame of the existence of the institution on "old Grandam Britain". Nonetheless, few Southerners were willing to also call slavery "a sin". After the abolitionists escalated their intellectual attacks against slavery, pro-slavery Southerners felt threatened, and retaliated with their own philosophical and morality-based justifications to defend involuntary servitude. The pro-slavery adherents felt compelled to take a hardline stance and engaged in a vehement and growing ideological defense of slavery. Pro-slavery intellectuals and slaveholders began to rationalize slavery as a positive good that benefited both owners and the enslaved. Calhoun believed that the "ownership of Negros" was both a right and an obligation, causing the pro-slavery intelligentsia to position enslavement as a paternalistic and socially beneficial relationship, that required reciprocal "duties" from the enslaved. Another aspect of "slavery as a positive good" motivated some Southern white women to offer the enslaved on plantations material goods, as well as maternal care of those they considered "unfit or feeble-minded Negros". However, all black people were generally, though not universally, believed to be an inherently inferior "race", the schooling of whom would be a waste, as they could not be educated. Some plantation mistresses spent considerable time in an attempt to "civilize" their enslaved laborers by providing food, shelter, and affection. In this sense, antebellum Southern women saw the enslaved as childlike, in need of protection. While engaging in this type of activity, they also attempted to convince the plantation enslaved, who were denied contact with the many abolitionist newspapers, that their condition was far better than those of the white or black factory workers in the industrial North. ==George Fitzhugh's extreme defense of slavery==

George Fitzhugh was a slave owner, a prominent pro-slavery Democrat, and a sociological theorist who took the positive-good argument to its final extreme conclusion. Fitzhugh declared that "the unrestricted exploitation of so-called free society is more oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery". In later years, Fitzhugh not only supported slavery for blacks, but like other proslavery intellectuals, came to the conclusion that it was also suitable for whites, if considered unfit. He believed that whites, if trained well and domesticated, could be as "faithful and valuable servants" as blacks. Taking an authoritarian position, Fitzhugh argued that "All government is slavery", and that "No one ought to be free." And yet he, like other proslavery theorists, believed that "slavery ultimately made democracy work", by referencing the history of Classical Athens, the Roman Republic, and other ancient societies with democratic characteristics, all of which had slavery. Fitzhugh maintained that slavery was the best institution to ensure "the rights of man". ==The Southern Democrats' role in reshaping the issue of slavery==

Founded in 1828, the Southern Democrats' success and prominence across the political landscape has been attributed to its ability to reshape the issue of slavery as a "morally beneficial institution", especially to the more radical faction of Southerners within the Democratic Party. By the mid-19th century, the Democrats of the Second and Third Party Systems had become not only the most ardent defenders of slavery, but the most important institutional supporters of slavery. Andrew Jackson, who owned throughout his life up to 300 slaves, was the first U.S. President (1829–1837) to be elected from the newly founded Democratic Party. Jackson was accused of beating his slaves, and also of banning the delivery of anti-slavery literature through the mail, calling abolitionists monsters who should "atone for this wicked attempt with their lives". In the Democratic South, many pro-slavery activists within the Southern intelligentsia and political community took the position that they were simply "upholding the great principles which our fathers bequeathed us". They regarded the practice of holding other humans in chattel bondage as a "constitutional freedom" that was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. As the Southern armies began suffering defeats in the battlefield, the New York Times opined that the Southern Democrats' devotion to slavery held a "stubbornness of fond infatuation such as the world has seldom seen". ==See also==