Abolitionists Vs. Pro-Slavery Idealists

by Aidan Noell.

In the Antebellum era, especially the years leading up to the Civil War, the struggle between the abolitionists and those who argued for the continuation of slavery was deeply rooted in society and multidimensional. For southerners, slavery was critical to their way of life; therefore, they did everything they could to fight for the acceptance- or, if nothing else, the tolerance- of slavery. Conversely, abolitionists found slavery to be an abomination that must be stopped.

For the defenders of slavery, arguments thought strong enough to overwhelm the abolitionist theories were repeated and held taught to the pro-slavery ideology. As their morality and intelligence was attacked by anti-slavery sentiment, pro-slavery authors and politicians used the economy, religion, and paternalism to defend themselves. For example, South Carolinian Senator William Harper claimed that without slavery, whites would be impoverished, in both the United States and in Europe. The southern economy was so deeply tied to slavery that it would, arguably, disintegrate without that backbone. Religious arguments from pro-slavery advocates evolved over the era. At first, the situation was said to date back to the Curse of Ham; however, eventually the argument strengthened into one claiming it to be “God’s will” for the whites to enslave the blacks. The paternalistic argument was very popular, claiming slave owners saw their slaves as quasi-children. George Fitzhugh, a pro-slavery theorist, resolved that slaves were “happier and freer” than those working for wage labor in the northern states or Europe, due to slave owners’ provision of comforts and necessities for the slaves.

Abolitionists used their own economic, religious, and non-paternalistic views on slavery to counter these pro-slavery arguments. Many slave narratives, such as that of Frederick Douglass, did a lot to prove that “paternalistic” slave holders were few and far between. Douglass wrote of harsh conditions, insufficient food, and families torn apart. As a child, he was removed from his own mother and sold to another farm. This was far from a unique situation- most slaves never really knew their parents or siblings as such. Religious arguments centered on the idea that slavery was a sin. If people were made in God’s image, then the buying and selling of said human beings was sinful and immoral. A popular secular anti-slavery argument upheld America as the land of freedom, and declared the enslavement of a race to be hypocritical to this ideal. Finally, slavery would arguably impede the economic development in the South, as a dead-end means for a successful market. Anti-slavery arguments were unpopular, even in the north; however, the abolitionists did a good job of responding to the pro-slavery arguments.

Aside from the paternalistic argument offered earlier, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass made numerous other claims that discredited the pro-slavery ideology. A main point of distress for Douglass was the touting of religion by slave holders, when he felt that their acts were far from Christian. He asserts that “the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes,- a justifier of the most appalling barbarity…”. Douglass felt that the real reason behind the pro-slavery religious arguments was to offer protection from their own guilt, and furthermore to offer protection from abolitionists who called them out on their lack of Christian behavior. Similarly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe disproved the argument some pro-slavery idealists tried to make, concerning the overall happiness of slaves. Some slaveholders and their supporters liked to say that slaves were taken care of, fed and provided for, and were overall really happy individuals. But in Stowe’s novel, she portrays slaves who are hungry and dissatisfied with their way of life. Novels and narratives like that of Stow and Douglass made it harder for non-abolitionists in the north to ignore the dangers of slavery, due to a feeling of empathy for real people attempting to live under such difficult circumstances. This did a great deal of good for the abolitionist movement as a whole. In the end, though many were still indifferent about the idea of abolition versus continuation of slavery, at least they were opened up to the flipside of the popular pro-slavery narrative.