Page 292 - American Stories, A History of the United States

made to show that slavery was consistent with the humanitarian spirit of the nine-
teenth century. The premise that blacks were naturally dependent led to the notion that 11.1
they needed “family government” or a special regime equivalent to the asylums for the
few whites who were also incapable of caring for themselves. The plantation allegedly
provided such an environment, as benevolent masters guided and ruled this race of 11.2
“perpetual children.”
By the 1850s, the proslavery argument had gone beyond mere apology for the
South and its peculiar institution to attack the free-labor system of the North. Accord- 11.3
ing to Virginian George Fitzhugh, the master–slave relationship was more humane
than the one between northern employers and wage laborers. Slaves had security
against unemployment and a guarantee of care in old age, whereas free workers might
face destitution and even starvation at any time. Worker insecurity in free societies led
inevitably to strikes, class conflicts, and socialism; slave societies, on the other hand,
could better protect property rights and maintain other traditional values because their
laboring class was better treated and more firmly controlled.
Proslavery southerners also attempted to seal off their region from antislavery
ideas and influences. Whites who criticized slavery publicly were mobbed or perse-
cuted. One of the last and bravest of the southern abolitionists, Cassius M. Clay of
Kentucky, armed himself with a brace of pistols when he gave speeches, until the threat
of mob violence finally forced him across the Ohio River. In 1856, a University of
North Carolina professor was fired because he admitted he would vote for the mod-
erately antislavery Republican party if he had a chance. Clergymen who questioned
the morality of slavery were driven from their pulpits. Northern travelers suspected of
being abolitionist agents were tarred and feathered. When abolitionists tried to send
their literature through the mails during the 1830s, it was seized in southern post offices
and publicly burned.
Fears that non-slaveholding whites and slaves would acquire subversive ideas
about slavery partly explain such flagrant denials of free speech and civil liberties.
Hinton R. Helper’s book The Impending Crisis of the South, an 1857 appeal to non-
slaveholders to resist the planter regime, was suppressed with particular vigor; those
found with copies were beaten up or even lynched. But the deepest fear was that abo-
litionist talk or antislavery literature would incite slaves to rebel. The Nat Turner
rebellion raised such anxieties to panic pitch. Laws made it a crime to teach slaves to
read and write. Other repressive legislation banned meetings unless a white man was
present, restricted the activities of black preachers, and suppressed independent black
churches. Free blacks thought to be potential instigators of slave revolt were watched
and harassed.
But repression did not allay planters’ fears of abolitionist subversion, lower-class
white dissent, and, above all, slave revolt. Proslavery propaganda and national events Quick Check
in the 1850s created panic and desperation. More southerners became convinced What were some of the strategies
that safety from abolitionism and its terrors required a formal withdrawal from the used by southern whites to fight
Union—secession. antislavery efforts?

Slavery and the Southern economy

11.3 How was slavery related to economic success in the South?
D espite their internal divisions, white southerners from all regions and classes

came to perceive that their interests were tied up with slavery, whether
because they owned slaves themselves or because they believed slavery
was essential to the “southern way of life” or “white man’s democracy.”
The expansion of slavery can largely be attributed to the rise of “King Cotton”—the
number of slaves in the South more than tripled between 1810 and 1860 to nearly
259