Page 291 - American Stories, A History of the United States

One reason was that some non-slaveholders hoped to get ahead, and in the South
11.1 this meant acquiring slaves. Just enough more prosperous yeomen broke into the slave-
holding classes to make this dream seem believable. Planters, anxious to ensure the
loyalty of non-slaveholders, encouraged the notion that every white man was a poten-
11.2 tial master.
Even if they did not aspire to own slaves, white farmers often viewed black servi-
tude as providing a guarantee of their own liberty and independence. A society that

11.3 gave them the right to vote and the chance to be self-sufficient on their own land
encouraged the feeling that they were fundamentally equal to the largest slaveholders.
Although they had no natural love of planters and slavery, they believed—or could be
induced to believe—that abolition would threaten their liberty and independence. In
part, their anxieties were economic; freed slaves would compete with them for land
or jobs. But racism deepened their fears and made their opposition to black freedom
implacable. Emancipation was unthinkable because it would remove the pride and
status that automatically went with a white skin in this acutely race-conscious society.
Quick Check Slavery, despite its drawbacks, kept blacks “in their place” and made all whites, how-
What was the yeoman’s attitude ever poor and uneducated they might be, feel they were free and equal members of a
toward slavery?
master race.

A Closed Mind and a Closed Society

Despite the tacit assent of most non-slaveholders, the dominant planters never lost
their fear that lower-class whites would turn against slavery. They felt threatened from
two sides: from the slave quarters where a new Nat Turner might arise, and from the
backcountry where yeomen and poor whites might heed the abolitionists’ call and
overthrow planter domination. Beginning in the 1830s, the ruling element tightened
the screws of slavery and used their control of government and communications to
create a mood of impending catastrophe to ensure that all southern whites were of one
mind on the slavery issue.
Before the 1830s, the rights or wrongs of slavery had been openly discussed in
much of the South. Apologists commonly described the institution as “a necessary
evil.” In the Upper South, as late as the 1820s, there had been significant support for the
American Colonization American Colonization Society, with its program of gradual voluntary emancipation
Society Founded in 1817, the accompanied by deportation of the freedmen. In 1831 and 1832—in the wake of the
society advocated the relocation Nat Turner uprising—the Virginia legislature debated gradual emancipation. Repre-
of free blacks and freed slaves to
the African colony of Monrovia, sentatives of the yeoman farmers living west of the Blue Ridge Mountains supported
present-day Liberia. getting rid of both slavery and blacks to ensure white safety. But the argument that
slavery was “a positive good”—rather than an evil slated for gradual elimination—won
the day, and emancipation was defeated.
The “positive good” defense of slavery was an answer to the abolitionist charge
that the institution was inherently sinful. A host of books, pamphlets, and newspaper
editorials published between the 1830s and the Civil War carried the message. Who
was it meant to persuade? Partly, the argument was aimed at the North, to bolster
anti-abolitionist sentiment. But the message was also clearly calculated to resolve the
doubts and misgivings that southerners themselves had freely expressed before the
1830s. Much of the message may have been over the heads of non-slaveholders, many
of whom were semiliterate, but some of the arguments, in popularized form, were used
to arouse racial anxieties that tended to neutralize antislavery sentiment among the
lower classes.
The proslavery argument had three main propositions. The first and foremost
was that enslavement was the natural and proper status for people of African descent.
Blacks were innately inferior to whites and suited only for slavery. Biased scientific and
historical evidence supported this claim. Second, the Bible and Christianity were said
to sanction slavery—a position made necessary by the abolitionist appeal to Christian
ethics. Ancient Hebrew slavery was held up as a divinely sanctioned model. Saint Paul
was quoted endlessly on the duty of servants to obey their masters. Third, efforts were
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