During the early to mid-nineteenth century, as the United States evolved and expanded into new territory, differences intensified. The subject of slavery was at the center of those differences.
Those who maintained slavery met the Abolitionists’ challenge with vigor. To support their arguments, proponents of slavery used economics, history, religion, law, social good, and even humanitarianism.
Slavery supporters said that abolishing slavery abruptly would have had a devastating economic effect on the South, where dependence on slave labor was the basis of the economy. Cotton’s economy would implode. In the fields, the tobacco crop would dry out. Rice would no longer be profitable.
Slavery supporters contended that freeing all the slaves would result in widespread unemployment and turmoil. Uprisings, violence, and chaos would result as a result of this.
They fought for the status quo, which provided opulence and security for the slaveholding elite and all free people who benefited from the slave society’s bounty, by citing the mob’s “reign of terror” during the French Revolution.
The Role of the Negro in Nature
Slaves were thought to be physiologically inferior to their masters by certain slaveowners. Even in scientific circles throughout the 1800s, this argument was accepted seriously.
Slavery proponents said that slavery had existed throughout history and that it was the natural condition of men. Slaves were used by the Greeks, the Romans, and the English until relatively recently.
Slavery supporters pointed out that Abraham had slaves in the Bible. “Thou must not covet thy neighbor’s home,… nor his manservant, nor his maidservant,” they say, citing the Ten Commandments. Although slavery was ubiquitous across the Roman society, Paul returned a runaway slave, Philemon, to his owner in the New Testament, and Jesus never spoke out against it.
Defenders of slavery resorted to the courts, which had determined in the Dred Scott Decision that all blacks — not just slaves — had no legal standing in our courts because they were property, and the Constitution protected slave-owners’ rights to their property.
Slavery’s proponents said that the system was divine, and that it delivered Christianity to the heathen from across the sea. According to this reasoning, slavery was beneficial to the slaves. “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the beginning of history to the present day, acquired such a civilized and better state, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” observed John C. Calhoun.
Slave advocates contended that slaves were better cared for than the destitute of Europe and Northern laborers. They said that, unlike individuals who were dismissed from their jobs and left to fend for themselves, their owners would safeguard and support them when they were ill or elderly.
“The parties in this war are not only Abolitionists and slaveholders, they are Atheists, Socialists, Communists, Red Republicans, Jacobins on the one side and the advocates of order and controlled freedom on the other,” wrote minister JAMES THORNWELL in 1860.
Slavery, they argued, was like any other type of property, and hence could be expanded into freshly gained area.
The introduction and widespread use of the cotton gin was one of the key reasons for the resurgence of slavery. This machine enabled Southern planters to cultivate a kind of cotton known as short staple cotton, which was well suited to the Deep South’s environment.
Slavery was seen as a “positive benefit” for enslaved labor by them.
The abolitionist side would grow to control national politics if slavery was not expanded, and an increasingly dense population of enslaved people would lead to deadly insurgency and racial war, Southerners feared.
https://bowie1983book.com/will answer how did southerners view slavery and its expansion in the mid-nineteenth century?