Slavery as a positive good in the United States
Slavery as a positive good in the United States was the prevailing view of Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil.
[4] However this perspective rapidly changed as the worldwide demand for sugar and cotton from America increased and the Louisiana Purchase opened up vast new territories ideally suited for a plantation economy.
In response, pro-slavery advocates fought against the abolitionists with their own morality-based defense, which invariably stressed their view that slaves were both well treated and happy, and included illustrations which were designed to prove their points.
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, If in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transplanted Europeans denounced Atlantic creoles as audacious rogues and if in the eighteenth century the nascent planter class condemned the newly arrived Africans for their "gross bestiality and rudeness of their manners", nineteenth-century white Americans redefined blackness by endowing it with a new hard edge and confining people of African descent to a place of permanent inferiority.
It appears that this new premise was first expressed by Robert Walsh in 1819: The physical condition of the American Negro is on the whole, not comparatively alone, but positively good, and he is exempt from those racking anxieties—the exacerbates of despair, to which the English manufacturer and peasant are subject to in the pursuit of their pittance.
[11]: 135 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.
On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our glorious region.... As a class, I say it boldly; there is not a happier, more contented race upon the face of the earth.
Lightly tasked, well clothed, well fed—far better than the free laborers of any country in the world ...—their lives and persons protected by the law, all their sufferings alleviated by the kindest and most interested care....Sir, I do firmly believe that domestic slavery regulated as ours is produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.
[14]: 134 After traveling through Europe, Hammond concluded that free laborers were being exploited by soulless materialism in England and the North, where workers had the "liberty only to starve", while Southerners were far more protective, assuming "responsibility for every aspect of the lives" of their slaves.
Thus, the greatest threat to democracy was seen as coming from class warfare that destabilized a nation's economy, society, government, and threatened the peaceful and harmonious implementation of laws.
Southern pro-slavery theorists asserted that slavery eliminated this problem by elevating all free people to the status of "citizen", and removing the landless poor (the "mudsill") from the political process entirely by means of enslavement.
[17] John C. Calhoun, a political theorist and the seventh Vice President of the United States advocated for the idea of "positive good" slavery.
Calhoun argued: Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually...
[25] 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.
"[citation needed] Most Southern slaveholders and intellectuals favored Calhoun's ideas and maintained that the institution of slavery "benefited both master and servant".
[27] 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".
[30]: 44 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.
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.
[32] 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.
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".
[43] 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".
