The Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America

5. Dew, Fitzhugh, and Proslavery Liberalism

Dew, Fitzhugh, and Proslavery Liberalism The proslavery movement in the antebellum South attempted to forestall a process of institutional change. The defenders of slavery were ultimately not successful in preventing the abolition of the Southern institution of racial slavery, an event that unleashed a process of institutional change that at least partially remade the South in the North’s image.1 This failure, however, seems to have been less a failure of the proslavery movement on a political or rhetorical level than it was a failure of Southern power. By all accounts, the defenders of slavery were successful within their own milieu.2 That milieu was liberal. Despite the way that they usually have been interpreted, the defenders of slavery did offer predominantly liberal proslavery arguments, as they were the arguments most likely to appeal to their predominantly liberal audiences in the South. Hence, they did not rely solely, or even primarily, on racist proslavery arguments, instead preferring to continually, even if never completely, recast the racist beliefs they shared with their audiences as liberal proslavery arguments . As I intend to demonstrate further in this and the next chapter , the public face of the proslavery movement was more liberal than it was racist or ascriptive.3 The defenders of slavery paid obeisance to both mainstream progressive and liberal beliefs.4 They argued that slavery was not a dying but a universal institution and that it possessed all the progressive features that the abolitionists attributed to free-labor, and not slave-labor, institutions. Furthermore, they contended, also in opposition to the abolitionists, that the continued existence of racial slavery in the South did not belie the nation’s special mission in history but, rather, advanced that mission. Like the abolitionists, they thus sought to portray themselves as progressive liberals and not as the reactionary racists that 5 93 scholars commonly depict them as being or that we might think they really were in their heart of hearts.5 In short, many of the same rhetorical dynamics that affected the proslavery movement also affected the antislavery movement.6 The movement became more liberal and “positive good” over time as the proslavery arguments shifted from antiabolitionist to proslavery. It also became more “impure” or contextualist over time as the proslavery arguments shifted from defending slavery to defending slavery and union. Proslavery figures insisted that the continued existence of racial slavery in the South did not create a “house divided” but that continued Northern agitation over the existence of the institution did. During the antebellum period, they refined these unionist proslavery arguments in an attempt to solicit more moderate Southern opinion. Ironically, the success of this tactic became the precondition of disunion during the secession winter of 1860–61.7 In this and the next chapter, I analyze several important pieces of proslavery rhetoric, dating from 1832 to 1860, to support the preceding interpretation of the defenders of slavery as progressive liberals equal to, though perhaps not as straightforward as, the abolitionists. In comparison to the secondary literature on the antislavery movement, the literature on the proslavery movement is inferior in quality. Also in comparison to the literature on the antislavery movement, the literature on the proslavery movement generally assumes that the movement was illiberal, not liberal, in nature. Louis Hartz’s Liberal Tradition in America propounded this view, and Rogers Smith’s Civic Ideals recently restated it.8 A related strain in the literature, running from Eugene Genovese’s Political Economy of Slavery to John Ashworth’s Slavery and Capitalism , interprets the proslavery movement as illiberal in the sense of being precapitalistic rather than racist or ascriptive.9 James Oakes’s Slavery and Freedom contests this view, as does Kenneth Greenberg’s Masters and Statesmen, although from a republican instead of a liberal perspective.10 Neither study, then, presents a systematic case for proslavery liberalism. In presenting that case, as I did in presenting the case for antislavery liberalism, I either significantly go beyond the existing secondary literature or depart from it. Also as I did in presenting the case for antislavery liberalism, I analyze the arguments of three prominent participants in the antebellum debate over the fate of Southern slavery, not to show that all their arguments were liberal ones, 94 | Dew, Fitzhugh, and Proslavery Liberalism much less explicitly or self-consciously so. Liberal principles were more implicit in the proslavery arguments than in the antislavery arguments, which is one...