How did the southerners defend slavery?

Answer 1

In the beginning (only a few years after Jamestown), slaves were purchased on the open market to work the fields, since many of the early settlers were English gentlemen and did not work their own fields. In history, slavery has been a normal way to pay debts, so it was not always an immoral practice. However, as time progressed, prejudice developed where whites viewed blacks as less-than-human. You see many other examples of this phenomenon: Nazis had the same subhuman prejudice against Jews, many Muslims have the same view of Jews and Christians, some African tribes have seen each other the same way. Once you are convinced that another group is sub-human, slavery is not really wrong, in fact you can convince yourself that you are doing them a favor. This prejudice and need for labor perpetuated itself until it was forcefully stopped by the American civil war. Fortunately, Britain was able to stop slavery with a political solution without war (tribute to Wilberforce).

Answer 2

First, it is important to recognize that, beginning in the 1830s a number of Southern leaders and writers began to argue not simply in "defense" of slavery as something necessary or permissible. Instead they argued it was a positive GOOD and the way things OUGHT to be. (This was very different from the Southern founders, who thought slavery an evil that would die out over time.) Some even suggested that many modern ills had come from rejecting the proper order of things.


Here are a few of the arguments (though not every supporter would necessarily agree with them all):

* Slavery had been the NORMAL condition for many throughout history
* Slavery was good for the slaves - they were cared for, would slowly be raised up/improved (this might include the idea that the slaves were like children who needed such help... at least for now, maybe forever, maybe not)
* Slaves were better off (better working conditions) than industrial workers of the North
* Slavery was the foundation for the strong U.S. economy and its political institutions (the NORTH depended on it too... hypocritically!)
* Slavery was the foundation of the superior culture of the South (not driven by greed, as they believed the North was)
* the Bible supports slavery (they say), since biblical characters, including heroes, had slaves, ancient Israel had laws about treatment of slaves
* the Bible dictates it as "the curse of Canaan" (though Canaan was NOT black; many who use this argument mistakenly call it "the curse on Ham", who was associated with Africa, though with the nations the opposed Israel, including those in Mesopotamia)

(Note that some of these arguments were new ideas, developed specifically to counter the arguments of abolitionists, e.g., the biblical arguments.)

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Better to look for yourself at some of the classic examples of these arguments.


John C. Calhoun
Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions:
Revised Report 6 Feb 1837
http://www.wfu.edu/%7Ezulick/340/calhoun2.html
see 6.14 and following

Alexander Stephens Cornerstone Speech (March 21, 1861) -- arguing about the SUPERIORITY of the Confederate Constitution, in part because it corrected Jefferson's "error" that "all men are created equal"
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76

W. H. Holcombe, The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South (New Orleans: Delta Mamoth Job Office, 1860), pages 6-8.
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/NATION/HOLCOMBE.HTM


George Fitzhugh
"Southern Thought" (in DeBow's Review, October1857)
http://akbar.marlboro.edu/~jsheehy/courses/apoc-hope/fitzhugh.pdf
see also: http://www.bookrags.com/George_Fitzhugh

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And if you want more documents, with some discussion/explanation of these, you might look up the following books:


Books providing overview, documentation:
Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South: A Brief History with Documents (The Bedford Series in History and Culture)
by Paul Finkelman

The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Library of Southern Civilization)
by Drew Gilpin Faust (Editor)

Answer 3

Southerners defended slavery for a form of motives. One became that they felt the Africans were sub-human and/or not almost as good as white human beings. they oftentimes claimed that their slaves were dealt with more effective than Northern production unit workers. Many communities contributed to the starting up of the abolitionist circulate. between them should be distinct non secular communities, yet i visit't submit to in recommendations their names immediately. Harriet Beecher Stowe's e book, Uncle Tom's Cabin quite lit a hearth below the abolitionist circulate and made more effective human beings conscious. also, many northerners were antagonistic to slavery for economic motives and under no circumstances because they cared about the slaves. They felt that loose exertions in the south gave the southerners an economic earnings and they did not choose slavery spreading north because there became the terror that loose exertions from slaves ought to take jobs from demanding operating white human beings. To complicate concerns further, there have been northerners who were antagonistic to making slavery unlawful in the south because they feared that slaves ought to get away to the north and be paid a decrease salary to take their jobs. You requested about it being surprising. there became no longer some thing surprising about it. It turned right into a gradually project. And even as slavery became criminal in the north there merely weren't that a lot of them because farming in the north became on a smaller scale (no tremendous plantations) and so there became no choose for wide farming workforces. It turned right into a complicated project and that i desire i have not puzzled you.

Answer 4

They claimed that slaves were "childlike" and needed the care of "benevolent" and "parentlike" people to care for them. if these slaves were let out into the big bad world, what on earth would become of them? Certainly they would not be able to survive or would resort to violent acts against whites... Or so the south claimed.

They did whatever they could to prove to the rest of the world that slavery was a necessary institution - not just b/c owners needed free labor, but because it was a good thing in itself.

Answer 5

The pre-war South was an agrarian society and the crops they grew were labor intensive. The only profitable way to grow those crops was with the use of slaves.

Answer 6

very badly