Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: Justifications for slavery

Image frequently used on wanted posters for runaway slaves (1837)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown's The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001) includes an essay to "Modernizing Slave-Owning Rhetoric", which details the trends in the first half of the 19th century of how defenders of slavery justified the Peculiar Institution, with emphasis on how they were expressed by Southern Christian clergymen.

He sees three major trends in proslavery advocacy. One was to justify it as "crude chattel bondage". The second trend defended the institution as "familial proprietorship, in which reciprocal, parent-child obligations and affections gave meaning to those involved". And the third was to see slavery as "state racial regulation, an interposition of government between white and black".

Although Wyatt-Brown makes passing reference to the justications for slavery changing in relation to changes in the institution of slavery itself, he doesn't dwell on that aspect, which I discussed in ... Of the patriarchial, "familial" justification, he writes:

It was laregely an outgrowth of Christian evangelicalism. Contrary to the claims of slavery's apologists, slaveholding benevolence never achieved more than spotty succes. The ideal of Christian stewardship over bondspeople was established as a way to distinguish respectability [among slaveowners] from churlishness.

The latter attitude was a theological twin - or perhaps older sibling - to the pseudoscientific racism propagated by characters like Richard Colfax and Samuel George Martin.

Whether large-scale plantation slavery in the 1830s was actually more benevolent in its physical treatment of the slaves is a factual question that I can't address in this post. But it is important to note that the patriarchal system became part of the Southern brand ideology that defended slavery as a permanent necessity for the allegedly inferior black portion of humanity.

Wyatt-Brown notes an important aspect of the "familial" ideology as it was actually implemented: "That system required a deeper appreciation of the psychology and wants of the dependent [slave] class, yet it still mandated that those beneath were obliged to give more in love and service than those who rules." In other words, it required the master to more firmly implant the ideology of slavery into the minds and souls of the slaves themselves. He argues:

The point of stressing the evolutionary character of slave culture is not to argue that the system would have died peacefully in a gush of Victorian sentiment but for Yankee intervention and war. [A favorite Lost Cause argument] Far from it. Establishing the ideal of Christian masterhood and strengthening state controls fell short of genuine black autonomy of any kind. The evolutionary process was not toward freedom but rather toward more refined means of perpetuating black dependency, either through acts of personal benefaction or through state regulations that also ensured white rule. One could argue that in fact patriarchal slavery was more psychically damaging in fashioning the subservient personality than was chattel bondage. Under the latter formuala, there was no reason to penetrate the slave's soul in order to save it, only to extract his labor. In any case, the evolution of slavery - "the domestication of domestic slavery," as Willie Rose calls it - was the chief point of departure for Southern antebellum polemics. (my emphasis)

Wyatt-Brown goes through some of the typical Biblical arguments for and against slavery. He notes that planters generally found a religious justification for the Peculiar Institution more congenial than the more secular but full-throated defenses of slavery from the pens of advocates like George Fitzhugh. Part of the charm for slaveowners for religious positions that opposed abolition but relied on moral persuasion to modify excessive cruelty by slaveowners was no doubt the fact that such admonitions had no binding force and little evident effect in actual practice.

The third category of proslavery justification in Wyatt-Brown's essay is more vaguely defined, even by his own description. But he sees the increasing use of state regulations to enforce and defend the institution of slavery as an evolution in proslavery ideology that was cut short in its development by the Civil War.

The evolution of the institution and the increasing pressure on it from slave resistance and free-state opposition was the context in which the increased use of the state to defend slavery took place. The establishment of the Confederacy could be seen as the farthest level that this trend reached, with its expressed central purpose of defending the institution of slavery.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008, slavery