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II. WILLIAM HARPER Memoir on Slavery ". . . an institution which has interwoven itself with everyfibre of the body politic; which has formed the habits of our society, and is consecrated by the usage of generations." William Harper was born in Antigua in 1790, the son of a Presbyterian minister who moved with his family to Charleston in 1799. Young Harper graduated from South Carolina College in 1808 and was admitted to the bar in 1813. After army service in the War of 1812, Harper opened a law office in Columbia. In 1818 he moved to Missouri, where he soon became chancellor, the highest legal officer of the territory, then, after the admission of Missouri to the Union, of the state. In 1823 he returned to South Carolina and in 1826 served briefly in the U.S. Senate. In 1828 he represented Charleston in the state legislature and was elected speaker of the lower house, where he became leader of an antitariff coalition. Even when he left the legislature to become chancellor of South Carolina later the same year, Harper remained politically active and was an ardent supporter of Nullification. As an appeals court judge from 1830-35, Harper wrote decisions noted for their powerful presentation of the states' rights position. In 1835, Harper left the bench to reassume the position of state chancellor. He continued to speak and write on sectional issues until his death in 1847.' Harper's Memoir on Slavery was originallyan anniversaryoration delivered in Columbia in 1837 before the South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning. The speech was printed in pamphlet form early in 1838. Two years before, after northerners had begun to escalate their abolitionist attacks, Harper had made an address to the same organization in which he called upon southerners to undertake a detailed inquiry into the complicated questions surrounding the rising controversy over slavery.Ap1 . On Harper's life, see J. G. DeR. Hamilton, "William Harper," Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1932), IV, 287; Charleston Courier, October 15, 1847. 78 Memoir on Slavery parently, the South Carolinian took his own advice to heart, for his Memoir represented a careful examination of the issues and a confident advocacy of the institution not evident in his earlier oration.2 Whereas Thomas Dew had dealt chiefly with the immediate circumstances of slavery in Virginia, Harper began his essay with the sweeping statement that slavery "exists over far the greater portion of the inhabited earth." Far from being a peculiar institution, human bondage must be "deeply founded in the nature of man and the exigencies of human society." Harper declared his intention to broaden the appeal of the proslavery argument by going beyond the "present position of the Slave-Holding States" to consider slavery as "a naked, abstract question." Harper attacked the Revolutionary heritage with its "well-sounding but unmeaningverbiage of natural equality and inalienablerights" and rejected another of the favorite doctrines of the Founding Fathers by arguing for the inherent and permanent inequality of blacks apart from any environmental influence. Whilelaunching a direct assault upon the misguidedness of northern reform and philanthropy , Harper insisted that social improvement could result only from individual moral uplift and could never come from precipitous tampering with institutions that had evolved over time. Slavery, he proclaimed, was essential to the South and "the habits of our society." Far from being an evil to be extirpated, slavery was the "sole cause of civilization." Demonstrating a new level of assertiveness and self-assurance, Harper's essay was reprinted in 1852 in The Pro-Slavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States and in the 1860 collection of proslavery classics, Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments.3 Memoir on Slavery The institution of domestic slavery exists over far the greater portion of the inhabited earth. Until within a very few centuries, it may be said to have existed over the whole earth—at least in all those portions of it 2. William Harper, Anniversary Oration. South Carolina Society for the Advancement of Learning (Washington, D.C.: Duff Green, 1836); William Harper, Memoir on Slavery, Read Before the Society for the Advancement of Learning of South Carolinaat Its Annual Meeting at Columbia, 1837 (Charleston: James S. Burges, 1838). 3. William Harper, "Memoir on Slavery," The Pro-Slavery Argument as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (Charleston: Walker, Richards & Co., 79 [3.133.79.70] Project...

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