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INTRODUCTION The Proslavery Argument in History The controversy over slavery in the antebellumUnited States did not end with abolition of the South's peculiar institution. In the century that has followed Appomattox, historians have debated the sources and meaning of the slavery agitation nearly as vigorously as early nineteenthcentury Americans argued about human bondage itself. But a disproportionate amount of this scholarly attention has been devoted to antislavery movements and ideologies. Whereas studies of abolitionism have established it as both a product and an index of fundamental aspects of nineteenth -century culture, historical treatment of proslavery has emphasized its aberrant qualities, identifyingit as the evanescent product of the unique civilization that flourished in the South during the last three decades before the Civil War. Many scholars have felt uncomfortable contending with zealous defenses of a social system that the twentieth century judges abhorrent , and, like David Donald, they have found the proslavery movement "astonishing."' In recent years, however, interpretations of proslavery thought have shifted. Perhaps more accustomed to the notion of a timeless and geographically extensive American racism, scholars have begun to place proslavery within a wider context, to regard it as more than simply a distasteful manifestation of a collectiveparanoia gripping the South in the years before the Civil War. Historians have come to view the proslavery argument less as evidence of moral failure and more as a key to wider patterns of beliefs and values. The defense of human bondage, they recognize, was perhaps more important as an effort to construct a coherent southern social philosophy than as a political weapon of short-lived usefulness during the height of sectional conflict. In defending what they repeatedly referred to as the "cornerstone" of their 1. David Donald, "The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History, XXXVII (1971), 3. For a useful summary of the extensive literature on abolition, see James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), and Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 1 INTRODUCTION social order, slavery's apologists were offering posterity an unusual opportunity to examine the world view of articulate southerners, their sources of social legitimation, and their self-conscious definition of themselves.2 Slavery became a vehicle for the discussion of fundamental social issues—the meaning of natural law,the conflicting desires for freedom and order, the relationship between tradition and progress, the respective roles of liberty and equality, dependence and autonomy. "The question of negro slavery," one apologist recognized in 1856, "is implicated with all the great social problems of the current age."3 Addressing topics of deepest import to Americans North and South, the proslavery argument embodied the South'sparticular perspective on those philosophical, moral, and social dilemmas confronting the nation as a whole. "Proslavery thought," as one recent scholar has remarked, "was nothing more or less than thought about society."4 A significant aspect of the reorientation of modern scholarship toward a widening interpretation of proslavery's significance has been a growing interest in its persistence over time. Although a few scholars of the 1930s and 1940s noted proslavery's early origins,5 most historians continued to associate the defense of slavery with a movement of the South away from Jeffersonian liberalism in the late 1820s and 1830s. After abolitionist WilliamLloyd Garrison began to denounce slavery in The Liberator in 1831, these scholars explained , the South rapidly abandoned its Revolutionary American heritage and took up the almost polar opposite position of proslavery reactionism.6 2. The reference to slavery as the "cornerstone" of the southern social order has most frequently been attributed to an 1861speech of Alexander Stephens,but contemporary southerners recognized the origin of the phrase in a speech by George McDuffie of 1836.SeeJames Henry Hammond to M. C. M. Hammond, July 23,1859, in James Henry HammondPapers, Library of Congress. For other examples of the use of this concept, see Hammond, "Hammond 's Letters on Slavery," in The Pro-Slavery Argument as Maintained by the MostDistinguished Writers of the Southern States (Charleston: Walker, Richards & Co., 1852), 111; George Frederick Holmes, "Slavery and Freedom," Southern Quarterly Review, 1(1856), 87, 92; Edmund Ruffin, The Political Economy of Slavery (Washington: L. Towers, 1857), 5, 23. 3. Holmes, "Slavery and Freedom," 95. 4. Larry Edward Tise, "Proslavery Ideology: A Social and Intellectual History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1790-1840" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1975), 57. 5. See especiallyWilliam...

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