As we know, Americans are very good at finding reasons to support the status quo no matter how wrong, how unjust, or how immoral it might be. It won't surprise you, then, that after the Missouri Compromise and especially after the failure to stop the Indian Removal Act produced a surprising amount of abolitionist activity, some Americans decided they had to redouble a defense of the labor force that produced all that cotton and all that tobacco.
So, in the context of the Tea Party and birthers and tenthers and other varieties of Obama haters, here are the arguments these respectable American citizens advanced during the 1830s to explain why slavery could not be abolished.
Some more background here. The Tallmadge Amendment, advanced during the negotiations over the Missouri Compromise, used the language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to prohibit slavery in any new territory being organized from the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. It delayed the admission of Missouri as a state for a year because the House passed it and the Senate rejected it in 1819. The admission of Missouri as a slave state was only made possible by the state of Massachusetts petitioning that the district of Maine become its own state in 1820. Southerners understood that this meant their "peculiar institution" was suddenly under siege.
The Southern "solution" to the problems of slavery in 1820 was embodied in the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817 to send free African-Americans to Africa as an alternative to emancipation in the United States. Free African Americans, which the Society meant to mean that slaveowners would free their slaves in order to deport them. This was considered the "respectable" solution to the problem.
(http://personal.denison.edu/... - and that's Henry Clay's signature in the lower-right-hand corner)
In 1822, the ACS secured land in Africa for its enterprise, which was organized as the country of Liberia in 1847. All you need to know is the name of the capital city to understand what was happening there.
(Perry-Castañeda Map Collection, University of Texas, Austin)
Presumably, these former slaves who had accepted Christianity would bring its message to the heathen Africans they settled among. This kept everyone happy until the early 1830s. We've already seen the impact of the Indian Removal Act on antislavery activity. There was, however, another catalyst in the person of Nat Turner, a slave and an unlikely rebel. In 1821 he ran away from the overseer of the estate which enslaved him, but he returned after 30 days. In 1825 he had a vision of blood drops on ears of corn in the fields, and of hieroglyphs and pictures drawn (in blood) of men on the leaves of trees.
In 1828 Turner tells us a spirit appeared, telling him that Christ had laid down the yoke He had borne for men’s sins and, as Turner said in The Confessions of Nat Turner, “that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first. In 1831 a solar eclipse appeared to Turner to be the sign that the appointed time had arrived, and August 13, when a disturbance in the atmosphere turned the sun bluish green, Turner knew it had. He and six confederates hacked the members of the household who owned Turner to pieces, took some rifles and muskets, and proceeded to ax, club or shoot every white person they found for one day and one night. Turner escaped capture until the end of October.
(Horrid massacre in Virginia, from Authentic and impartial narrative of the tragical scene which was witnessed in Southampton County (1831); Rare book room, Library of Congress)
Nat Turner's Rebellion was not a real threat to the slaveholding regime, because most slaves in the area did NOT rush to join the rebels, but it WAS the deadliest domestic insurrection before the Civil War, and the Virginia Legislature had to come to terms with the situation. It began to debate schemes to gradually reduce and eventually eliminate the black population of the state, and the debate had some surprising features. Conservatives dismissed the insurrection as something that had been blown out of proportion by alarmists and extremists. The Abolitionists in the legislature (yes, southern abolitionists DID exist) countered that the constant threat of rebellion produced an almost unbearable anxiety in the white population and contributed to a steady out-migration of planters (never mind that cotton was more profitable than tobacco). The legislature finally ruled, by a vote of 65-58, that it was “inexpedient” to act on various schemes for the abolition of slavery while resolving to support the state-sponsored colonization of free blacks and manumitted slaves. Then, after considerable debate, the legislature reneged on the voluntary-state-supported removal of free blacks and mulattos, but it passed new restrictions on slaves and free blacks that prohibited them from preaching or attending unsupervised religious gatherings.
So to the anti-antislavery arguments. We'll start with the Southern argument, which is more complex than the Northern argument. It is obviously the product of racist thinking, and it has several elements. First is the argument that democracy is dependent on the leisure of the people at the top of society. Southerners delighted in reminding the abolitionists that slavery, as practiced by the Greeks and Romans, had allowed the leaders of society to avoid manual labor which gave them the time to attend to affairs of the state; thus slavery was a prerequisite to a ruling elite within a democratic society.
Slavery was defended as an opportunity to remove Africans from the mire of barbarity and paganism. It was also defended as a morally neutral institution – if slaveholding was a source of sinful abuse, that was the slaveholder’s fault; further, if a man became an owner of slave’s involuntarily through inheritance and if the law prevented manumission could you legitimately call the slaveholder a sinner? This, incidentally, is the pro-slavery argument that Harriet Beecher Stowe destroys in Uncle Tom's Cabin. There was also an economic defense: slavery was profitable. Profitability was at the heart of the defense of slave labor.
But we can't forget that all of this discussion was taking place at the heart of the Second Great Awakening. Increasingly, the Southern defenders of slavery understood that slavery had to be defined as a Christian institution if there was any hope of saving it, and this resulted in the development of a scriptural defense of slavery.
The key text comes from Genesis, 9:20-27 (I'm using the King James version here, because that's what the people who developed the argument used)
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
(
The Drunkenness of Noah, Giovanni Bellini, c. 1515, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon, France)
Put simply, God inaugurated slavery and the curse specifically applied to blacks, since Ham and his offspring Canaan were apparently darker-skinned than Noah's other two sons. That's Ham over there on the left of the painting.
This, of course, isn't the only place the Bible discusses slavery. Leviticus 25 goes into great detail about the owning and selling of slaves. The heart is in verses 44-6:
Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, [shall be] of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids; Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that [are] with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession; And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit [them for] a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour.
This applies to the buying, selling, holding and bequeathing of slaves as property (gentiles, not other Jews). The Biblical defense of slavery also observed that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Job held slaves.
This has had a significant impact on fundamentalism in the United States. For southern clergy, the religious argument against slavery could be --and was -- seen as infidelity and a challenge to the literal authority of the Bible. I suppose it's ironic that people who refer to a passage in Leviticus to condemn homosexuality are using a tactic that found its first expression in the United States to defend slavery. The Methodist Church split into Northern and Southern branches based on their support or opposition to slavery in 1844; the Baptists did the same thing in 1845.
As the 19th century went on, some southerners began to describe slavery as a positive good, the most harmonious association of work and capital, and recommended it be expanded to all workers regardless of their race.
Now, for the Northern defense of slavery. It's mostly based on economics: Northern politicians asserted that slavery was a “southern” problem and that Northerners should leave the South alone, while textile mill owners and other merchants argued that slavery was the best way to produce the raw materials they needed for their mills. Anti-antislavery Northerners also argued that slave-produced products like sugar, rice and tobacco were vital to the national economy. but the North wasn't free of racist arguments either -- the Free-Soil Democrats believed that the West should be a “white man’s country.”
As the 19th century went on, the South became more strident in its defense of slavery, while the North mostly moved away from an anti-antislavery position, but those developments wouldn't become obvious until the Mexican war was well underway. Racism? The only American I could find in the antebellum United States who didn't have a racist bone in his body was John Brown, and we'll discuss him at length later in this series.
7:29 AM PT: Thanks, Black Kos Community. I have to administer a make-up exam this morning, so I'll be away for the next 4 hours or so. I'll catch up on the comment thread as soon as I get back (wireless doesn't work well on my college campus).