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152 Chapter 5 race war is “inevitable, cannot, we think, be doubted” (244). It must result from the very nature of African Americans:“The gratification of their ungoverned passions, their lust, their love of blood, and their hatred of the whites, would combine with the desire to secure the wealth of the citizens, possess their cities, seize their plantations, and prosecute those pursuits which, in the hands of the whites, have been attended with such great success and profit” (244). This is, it should be remembered, the same group previously characterized by Drayton as childlike, affectionate, innocent, unambitious, and devoted to whites.Thus, although there had never been an insurrection in a free state with a large free African American population , and although African Americans are devoted to whites, it cannot be doubted that race war is “inevitable.”18 This is not to say that abolitionists never made abstract arguments (assertions about the universality of human rights were crucial to their rhetoric) nor is it that proslavery rhetors never talked in specifics (Drayton and Dew are very specific when it comes to the cost of colonization, the number of slaves in the United States, and other, generally economic, issues ; Drayton goes into great detail about the rebellion in Saint Domingue; Freeman is very specific in discussing the prophecy of Noah). It is a question of rhetorical tendency—proslavery rhetors tend to use the abstract to explain or understand the specific, and antislavery rhetors tend to use the specific to explain or understand the abstract. In other words, Martineau demonstrates her abolitionist tendency, not by being offended by slavery, but by trying to find someone who had seen the pamphlets, by insisting on a particular, real, example. Slavery, Dew and Drayton say, aids and heightens civilization because it “impel[s] the master onward in the career of civilization” (Drayton 101) by giving him comfort, leisure, and luxuries. As it did so, “man became a refined and intellectual being” (Drayton 101). The word “man” in the last quote does not refer to all men, because he is not claiming that slavery re- fined or intellectualized slaves. Manhood is denied men of African descent . And womanhood is denied the women. Drayton, in an argument lifted from Dew (784–85), says “One of the most pleasing incidents of slavery is its amelioration of the condition of the female sex. Among all savage people women are degraded into slaves, the abject drudges of their brutal lords [. . .] One of the first fruits of slavery is the rescue of the gentle victims from their undeserved and wretched fate.The slave relieves the woman” (104). Of course, slavery does not relieve the slave woman, but, just as African American men don’t count toward what constitutes the experience of “men,” so one can make generalizations about “women” Extended Defenses of Slavery 153 that exclude the experience of free or enslaved African American women. It is significant that both “man” and “woman” are in the singular (just as proslavery rhetors talk about “the slave,” “the slaveowner” and capitalize Slavery). Drayton is not talking about real men and real women, but an abstract conception of man and woman-ness, one prohibited to African Americans.19 Social psychologists have discussed the epistemological significance of this tendency to argue in the abstract in regard to ingroup and outgroup identity construction. People “encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable ingroup and desirable out-group behaviors” (Maas et al. 981). Hence, the Slaveowner and the Abolitionist that Simms and other proslavery rhetors discuss are inherently good (for the first) and evil (for the second). Slavers who behave badly are individuated, as are slaves who learn to read, or rebel, or engage in any other kind of disruptive behavior. This language use “renders disconfirmation of preexisting ideas about in-group and outgroup difficult” (981). Or, as Van Eemeren and Grootendorst argue, because the assertions are so abstract, they are hermetic; an infinite number of counterexamples does not disprove the abstraction because each one is dismissed as particular. In one regard, though, this argument about what slavery does to (slaveowning white) man and (slave-owning white) woman was rhetorically problematic. As was discussed in an earlier chapter, since Jefferson, it had been a convention to bemoan the effect of slavery on slavers. Jefferson had argued that it made slave owners tyrannical, haughty, and prone to...

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