Slavery 1820 History Essay Sample

Slavery 1820
Name
Course
Institution
Date
By the 1820s, slavery was under attack, and southerners countered by defending slavery as a positive good and used biblical examples to support their arguments. Explain what the southerners said, and why, and then discuss why by 1850 the national debate over slavery had changed from a primarily legal debate to a moral debate. What events caused this shift?
In the slave society, there were plantation owners, white yeoman, plantation slaves, city slaves, and free African-Americans. Slave owners and supporters of slavery downplayed that the institution threatened freedom and liberty but argued there was nothing wrong with the institution. The slave owners had a right to continue with the practice. Some of the proslavery supporters even questioned freedom and equality as universal when they viewed blacks as only being fit for slavery.
Southerners who supported slavery emphasized that the south was more suitable to grow cotton, and slavery was an essential part of the cotton economy. As such, the end of slavery would signal the end of the south’s staple cotton crop. They were suspicious that abolitionists were likely focused on the economic sabotage of the south. Furthermore, abolitionists were mainly from the North, and it appeared to some that the northerners wanted to interfere with the southern way of life. However, even the poor white supported slavery as the white southern society deemed blacks as inferior, and the proslavery ideology was also closely linked with support for segregation.
One of the arguments against slavery was that it was inhumane, but southerners justified the institution as necessary and positive. In 1835, South Carolina’s governor George McDuffie wrote a letter to the legislature that argued that slavery was consistent with the bible and black people were happy. To McDuffie (1835), African slaves were destined to live a life of servitude and were ta...