Slavery????????

Question

Where can I find some primary source documents that show opposition to slavery and some that supported slavery? (slavery in the U.S.

Answer 1

Here's my little collection. it should keep you busy... hope it also helps!

ANTI-SLAVERY

Here are writings from the late 18th and early 19th century, first against the slave trade and then for abolition. I'll start with the American material you are interested in, but also include some British material (since the two movements WERE connected).

William Garrison's writings (including articles for The Liberator):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison#Works_online
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberator

American Anti-Slavery Society
http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/18.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/a#a3914

Sarah Grimke, "An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States"
http://antislavery.eserver.org/religious/grimkeepistle/

Collections of Anti-Slavery Literature
http://antislavery.eserver.org/tracts/
http://antislavery.eserver.org/treatises/

Other web sites with anti-slavery writings, new and old:
http://antislavery.eserver.org/contemporary/
http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/

Important BRITISH writers....
great web site -- site index:
http://www.brycchancarey.com/siteindex.htm
(includes list of articles on key anti-slavery activists... some of the articles link to specific writings)
Notice especially:
Olaudah Equiano -"The Case Against the Slave Trade"
http://www.brycchancarey.com/equiano/extract5.htm

Thomas Clarkson, "An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species" (1786)
http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=0590

William Wilberforce
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=42041
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AMERICANS ARGUING *FOR* SLAVERY

Note that these arguments all came much LATER than the anti-slavery arguments -- as a justification in response to the anti-slavery & abolitionist movements. (This is important to note for several reason. For example, much of the anti-slavery movement was rooted in evangelical Christianity, using biblical arguments. Thus those who came up with biblical arguments to DEFEND slavery were typically trying to rebut the anti-arguments, that is, to try to OVERCOME the strong Christian argument AGAINST slavery.)

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

"Certain physical and spiritual peculiarities of the ***** necessitate his subjection to the white man. It is for his own good tat he is subjected. As long as this was doubtful or not clearly seen, the South itself was opposed to slavery. It remonstrated with England for imposing the institution upon it, and with Massachusetts for insisting upon a continuance of the slave-trade for twenty years after the adoption of the federal compact. The South is now fully convinced of the benefits and blessings it is conferring upon the ***** race. It is beginning to catch a glimpse of the true nature and extent of its mission in relation to this vast and growing institution. The government of the South is to protect it [the African slave]; the Church of the South is to christianize it; the people of the South are to love it, and improve it, and perfect it. God has lightened our task and secured its execution by making our interests happily coincide with our duty.

"We anticipate no terminus to the institution of slavery. It is the means whereby the white man is to subdue the tropics all around the globe to order and beauty, and to the wants and interests of an ever-expanding civilization. What may happen afar off in the periods of a milliennial Christianity we cannot foresee. No doubt the Almighty in his wisdom and mercy has blessings in store for the poor *****, so that he will no longer envy the earlier and more imposing development and fortunes of his brethren. Some shining Utopia will beckon him also with beautiful illusion into the shadowy future. But with those remote possibilities we need not trouble ourselves. His present duty is evidently "to labor and to wait."

"The southern view of the matter, destined to revolutionize opinion throughout the civilized world, is briefly this: African slavery is no retrograde movement, no discord in the harmony of nature, no violation of elemental justice, no infraction of immutable laws, human or divine—but an integral link in the grand progressive evolution of human society as an indissoluble whole.

" The doctrine that there exists an "irrepressible conflict" between free labor and slave labor is as false as it is mischievous. Their true relation is one of beautiful interchange and eternal harmony. When each is restricted to the sphere for which God and nature designed it, they both contribute their full quotas to the physical happiness, material interest, and social and spiritual progress of the race. They will prove to be not antagonistic but complementary to each other in the great work of human civilization. From this time forth, the subjugation of tropical nature to man; the elevation and christianization of the dark races, the feeding and clothing of the world, the diminution of toil and the amelioration of all asperities of life, the industrial prosperity and the peace of nations, and the further glorious evolutions of Art, Science, Literature and Religion, will depend upon the amicable adjustment, the co-ordination, the indissoluble compact between these two social systems, now apparently rearing their hostile fronts in the norther and southern sections of this country."


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
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76

George Fitzhugh
"Southern Thought" ((in DeBow's Review, October1857)
reprinted pp. 1-6 pf *Slavery as a Cause of the Civil War*, ed. Edwin C Rozwenc [series - Problems in American Civilization] Boston: D. C. Heath & Co,1963
copy at http://akbar.marlboro.edu/~jsheehy/courses/apoc-hope/fitzhugh.pdf

Fitzhugh defended the 'slave principle' more broadly (including white). He argued that "the ***** is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism for spawning a "war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another" -- rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized.
http://www.bookrags.com/George_Fitzhugh


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)


List of some arguments:

* Slavery was good for the slaves; the slave-owners took on the burden of caring for the interests of inferior beings, seeing that they would be fed, clothed and given religious instruction.

* In a comparative sense, Southern slaves were better off
than many of the immigrant workers in Northern factories who were confined in unhealthy workplaces for long hours.

* Slavery was the key to national prosperity—for both the North and the South; nearly 60 percent of U.S. exports of this era were cotton; the slavery advocates argued that if their economy were tampered with, the great industrial cities of the North would crumble; many Southerners viewed the North as a parasite, nourishing itself on slavery while at the same time criticizing it.

* Slavery was vital for the continuance of a superior Southern lifestyle which emphasized good manners and graciousness; they did not want to become like the fast-paced, money-grubbing North
http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h244.html

Add BIBLICAL justification - slaves found in the Bible, sometimes also the "curse on Canaan" (often MIS-understood as "curse on Ham")

_________________

John C. Calhoun, "Slavery a Positive Good" (1837)http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=71

"The 'Mudsill' Theory," by James Henry Hammond
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3439t.html

"The Universal Law of Slavery," by George Fitzhugh
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3141t.html

Southern editorials 1859-60
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/teaching/vclassroom/proslavewsht1.html
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/teaching/vclassroom/proslavewsht2.html
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/teaching/vclassroom/proslavewsht3.html

http://english.la.psu.edu/engl297a/journal/spring03/summers.htm
The Economic Viability of Slavery: Some Evidence from Antebellum American Literature
By Zeta F. Summers
in DELUGE: Department of English Literary Under-Graduate Essays Spring 2003, Vol 1, no. 1

Answer 2

the bill of rights i suppose or anything like that. you can also go to a 'debate' site (like policy debate) and they might have evidence there.