The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830--1860 by Drew Gilpin Faust

The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830--1860 Reviews

• 
  Erik

  It would be easy to dismiss antebellum defenders of slavery as monsters. But Faust's approach finds value in studying their attempts to justify the peculiar institution. Ideologues like James Henry Hammond ("Cotton is king") and Thornton Stringfellow (who helped form the breakaway Southern Baptist denomination to get away from the preaching of northern Baptists against slavery) put other American political thought into perspective. This exercise is as helpful to the historian as it is to the analyst of contemporary politics.
  
  Pro-slavery thought was not unique in American political philosophy, but explored the same trends as mainstream political thought, on both the right and the left. On the conservative side, valuing tradition and of course, hierarchy. And on the liberal side, a critique of industrial capitalism as practiced in the North as "wage slavery," cruel and exploitative of free workers.
  
  The overlap of pro-slavery propaganda with concerns of the labor movement on the left is perhaps the most interesting to us today. According to southern ideologues, capitalists were worse than slaveholders. A southern planter, they argued, had to take good care of his slaves if for no other reason than self interest. To protect his investment in human chattel, the slaveowner was motivated to provide safe and healthy living quarters, adequate food and clothing, and ongoing healthcare and even spiritual guidance. Southern ideologues went further than this, claiming that slaveowners generally felt a sense of noblesse oblige and developed reciprocal bonds of affection with their enslaved people.
  
  Wbether this actually happened in practice, or whether some slaveowners were cheap or uncaring or even cruel (as we know some or many were) the pro-slavery writers do not adequately address. They merely assert that bad treatment of slaves was the exception rather than the rule, which of course I find unconvincing.
  
  But back to their argument, by contrast with a southern planter who has a financial interest in maintaining his enslaved workers to a certain minimum standard, a New England factory owner didn't have to worry about the wellbeing of a worker outside of working hours. If extreme poverty and deprivation caused the death of an employee, then the capitalist would simply hire a replacement, and at a much lower cost than the southern planter had to pay to buy and maintain a slave.
  
  Bemoaning the cruel fate of free workers under the heartless rule of greedy capitalists in northern states and in Britain alike, George Fitzhugh, the most extreme author of this volume, even argued that slavery should be extended from black people to lower-class whites, similar to serfdom and other vassalage relationships in feudalism. Fitzhugh claimed that abolitionism was already on the wane when he wrote in 1857, and that the British and French already regretted emancipating their slaves and were in fact trying to reestablish pseudo-slavery through employing "coolies" in their overseas colonies.
  
  He praised the South for sticking to its (still only metaphorical) guns by rejecting abolition and projected that the political philosophy of the slaveowner would prove to be not the voice of the past but the vanguard of a bright future where modern slavery would ensure both a stable social order without street crime and workers' revolts while serving both the master (with profits) and the slave (with protection).
  
  Reading essays by men who promoted slavery and hinted at secession in the years before the Civil War was a chore at times, and the experience was nothing as uplifting as reading about inspiring heroes of abolition like Garrison or Frederick Douglass. But seeing the propaganda from the other side first hand helps put the stories of abolitionists and unionists in starker contrast. It shows what was at stake then more clearly. And it helps us understand the stubborn persistence of a politics of hierarchy both racial and beyond race that survived the Civil War and end of slavery to thrive throughout the 20th century and even claim adherents in the present day.
  
  Finally, many people on the left have criticized America's founding fathers and founding documents as hypocritical or even regressive, rejecting the American project as oppressive to people of color and others. Will those folks on the left be disconcerted to know that pro-slavery ideologues made similar criticisms?
  
  Pro-slavery writers especially hated Thomas Jefferson for his Enlightenment philosophy and rejected the Declaration of Independence's claim that "all men are created equal." Their critique came from the right, and they claimed that Jefferson and the Declaration were wrong not because Jefferson was a racist or because the Declaration was not inclusive of people of all colors, but because Jefferson and the Declaration were too friendly to abolition and rights for black people
  
  Yet, the result of slaveowners' criticism was the same as the result of criticism by "woke" left activists -- to reject the American project.
  
  We remember where that rejection led in 1861: to the secession of the southern states to form their own country dedicated to a long future for slavery and completely free of pressure from abolitionists. The pro-slavery ideologues featured in Faust's book helped create the justification for secession back then. And though their side lost on the battlefield in 1865, in the war of ideas they continued to fight and in America's politics, they often prevailed.
  
  A century and a half after Appomattox, pro-slavery writers' faith in hierarchy continues to inform American politics today, from the straight-up racism of the alt-right to the milder hierarchy of rich and productive "makers" vs poor and lazy "takers" of Ayn Rand and her followers among free-market types from Alan Greenspan to the Koch brothers.
• 
  Nick

  Necessarily a slog to read, insofar as all the arguments presented are inherently and foundationally wrong, building on each other in a towering Babel of terribleness; but also an interesting window into the origins of flawed intellectual frameworks that long outlived their original context.
• 
  Jason Kinn

  I'm glad this book exists, even though it might make White Americans feel bad about their ancestors. It is a collection of seven essays written by notoriously racist enslavers. The essays purport to offer intellectual defenses of enslavement in the face of international and intranational condemnation between 1830 and 1860. The arguments these Americans offered:
  
  * a Biblical defense: in the Bible, enslavement was common; God said virtually nothing against the practice; if it was good enough for back then, it is good enough for now;
  
  * a pure racist belief that Black people were not human;
  
  * an economic argument—that enslavement was the only way to grow cash crops on a large scale;
  
  * a whataboutism argument—that the abolitionists lived in industrial areas where the workers were often in dire, life-threatening poverty, so how dare they speak against slavery;
  
  *the paternalist argument—that Southern men were the ones who bore the burden and responsibility for the women and the enslaved human beings, and that they should be lauded for that.
  
  This collection was difficult to read, but Drew Gilpin Faust (who later became president of Harvard) did a great job editing and providing context.
  
  
• 
  Thomas McConnell

  I purchased this book primarily as a text for my daughters to understand proslavery arguments prior to the Civil War. Faust presents several full and extracted texts of Proslavery tracts from a thirty year period prior to the Civil War and a handy introduction to the historical overview of developing Southern though. Before purchasing this text, I would recommend checking for the authors on Google Books to get them for free.
• 
  Sarah

  Perfect for studying American slavery to give an incite into primary accounts from the time