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Civil Rights Movement

Proslavery Argument

by Anne C. Loveland

The proslavery argument served as an intellectual bond among Southerners who saw slavery as a moral institution.

In the quarter-century preceding the Civil War, Southerners advanced a wide range of arguments and theories—some old, some new—to justify the institution of chattel slavery. The distinctiveness of proslavery thinking during the years before the Civil War lay less in its content than in its tone or spirit. Defenders of the South’s “peculiar institution” were no longer on the defensive; their mood was no longer apologetic. Unlike most of their predecessors, they did not merely tolerate slavery; they defined it as a moral institution and many glorified it. They took the offensive on behalf of slavery partly in response to the attacks of Northern abolitionists. Perhaps the primary objective of their aggressive proslavery campaign was to dispel the doubts of Southerners as to the justice of slavery and to offer compelling proof to nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike that slavery found sanction in religion, science, and morality, forming an essential part of a civilized economic and political order.

Post 1830 proslavery discourse borrowed from a variety of sources, many of which had been used before immediate abolitionism posed a new threat to slavery. Proslavery apologists pointed to the existence of slavery in biblical times and throughout most of history, as well as to the notion of entailment, which blamed the introduction of slavery on the British and predicted social catastrophe should slavery be abolished. These arguments continued to dominate the thinking of most proslavery writers in the 1830s, as evidenced, for example, in Thomas R. Dew’s Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. Although this was once treated as the first work of the new proslavery discourse, later historians have seen it as the culmination of the earlier, less affirmative phase of proslavery writing in the South. Dew’s work, which was widely read, asserted that slavery was a preferred way of compelling efficient labor in the hot states of the lower South, the harbinger of the notions of perpetual slavery developed by later Southern apologists.

The Response to Garrison

Traditionally, historians have understood post-1830 pro-slavery as a reaction to the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s journal The Liberator (1831-1865), which marks the onset of immediate abolitionism, and the fear spawned by Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Both events occurred in 1831, but other issues intensified proslavery writing and abolitionist discourse during the 1830s.

Proslavery polemics seem to have escalated along a continuum, rather than suddenly appearing after 1831. Two interrelated themes characterized this escalation of Southern proslavery. The first was a reaction to the abolitionist mail campaign of 1835, in which Northern abolitionists attempted to flood the South with literature arguing that slavery was immoral. In response, Southern ministers and denominations took the lead in denouncing the moral foundations of abolitionists. Virulent anti-abolitionism became a major feature, perhaps the single constant, in Southern proslavery. Southerners denounced abolitionism as incendiary, a wanton and dangerous interference with Southern safety. Southerners construed abolitionists as intent upon fomenting rebellion among Southern slaves, and were also infuriated by the “Gag Rule” in Congress, which persuaded Northerners that Southerners would trample on the First Amendment or any other right to preserve slavery.

The second theme involved a defense of slavery more ideological in tone, which blended biblical literalism with conservative social theories, some of which were quite popular among New England Federalists during the early nineteenth century. This strain of thinking challenged industrial economics and modern reform movements, asserting that a stratified social order produced the best society possible. A heavy lace of paternal imagery, which threaded together honor and social responsibility, gave ornamentation to this new proslavery fabric. In the hands of John C. Calhoun, this two-pronged argument proved that slavery was not an evil, as the abolitionists claimed, but “a good—a positive good,” “a great blessing to both races,” and “the great stay of the Union and our free institutions, and one of the main sources of the unbounded prosperity of the whole.”

Typical of thinkers who championed this phase of proslavery writing was Thornton Stringfellow, a Baptist minister of Culpepper County, Virginia, whose Brief Examination of Scripture Testimony on the Institution of Slavery argued that slavery enjoyed “the sanction of the Almighty in the Patriarchal Age . . . that its legality was recognized . . . by Jesus Christ in his kingdom; and that it is full of mercy.” Godly Southerners, Stringfellow maintained, should withdraw from abolitionists, whose moral notions must originate from some other source than the Bible. In a speech before the U.S. Senate in 1858, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina held that African American slaves provided the “mud-sill” of society, whose labor was necessary but whose mean estate made essential their exclusion from the political process. Slavery was essential to free “that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement” for more enlightened endeavors. Fortunately, the senator observed, the South had found African Americans perfectly adapted to serve as the “very mud-sill of society and of political government,” “a race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes.”

The Prewar Era

During the 1850s, other Southern writers embraced more extreme proslavery theories, although these attracted more interest from historians in the twentieth century than from nineteenth century advocates. Henry Hughes, of Port Gibson, Mississippi, drew upon the infant discipline of sociology to buttress his proslavery views. He described slavery as “Ethical Warranteeism,” in which the slave labored for a master in return for food, clothing, and shelter. Josiah Nott, of Mobile, Alabama, embraced the theory of polygenesis, holding in Types of Mankind that African Americans resulted from a separate creation and were not Homo sapiens. Others compared Southern slavery with free labor in the North. In Sociology of the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857), for example, Virginian George Fitzhugh suggested that the Northern states would have to adopt some form of slavery to control the immigrant working classes, or else face moral and social chaos. Free labor, he asserted, produced class warfare in the North, while slavery permitted social harmony in the South. Southern masters had moral obligations toward, and were predisposed to kind treatment of, their slaves; Northern factory owners discarded their laborers at whim.

Most Southerners adhered to the less extreme argument based on the Bible and Plato. The proslavery argument became a justification for the entire Southern way of life, whose culture, social structure, and economy were believed to depend upon the institution of slavery. Its ubiquity helped bind Southerners together and produced the remarkable degree of unity among them in the days following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and his call for troops in April, 1861. Undoubtedly, the intensity and unanimity with which Southerners defended slavery had much to do with the fact that they had come to identify the system of slavery with Southern society as a whole and with their place in the Union.

Further Reading

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William S. Jenkins’s Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), the oldest monograph on proslavery thinking, remains a useful starting point. Drew Glipin Faust’s The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981) is an excellent anthology of proslavery writing augmented by a thoughtful introductory essay. William W. Freehling’s The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) shows the complex uses Southerners made of proslavery thinking and why a degree of intellectual unity was vital in a South divided against itself. Larry E. Tise’s Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1987) shows that proslavery thinking existed in both Northern and Southern states. Paul Finkelman’s Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003) presents viewpoints from proslavery, Southern thinkers based on religion, politics and law, economics, history, philosophy, expediency, and science. University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War, by Alfred L. Brophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), reveals connections between pre-Civil War southern universities and slavery.

See Also: Abolition; Bleeding Kansas; Compromise of 1850; Fugitive Slave Laws; Kansas-Nebraska Act; Liberator, The; Lincoln-Douglas Debates; Missouri Compromise; Scott v. Sandford; Turner’s Slave Insurrection.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Loveland, Anne C. "Proslavery Argument." Civil Rights Movement, edited by Michael J. O’Neal, Salem Press, 2020. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CivRight2e_0267.
APA 7th
Loveland, A. C. (2020). Proslavery Argument. In M. J. O’Neal (Ed.), Civil Rights Movement. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Loveland, Anne C. "Proslavery Argument." Edited by Michael J. O’Neal. Civil Rights Movement. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2020. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.