slave argument essay

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• Hester’s A: The Red Badge of Wisdom
• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
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• The Family Life of the Enslaved

A Pro-Slavery Argument, 1857

• The Underground Railroad
• The Enslaved and the Civil War
• Women, Temperance, and Domesticity
• “The Chinese Question from a Chinese Standpoint,” 1873
• “To Build a Fire”: An Environmentalist Interpretation
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Advisor: Peter A. Coclanis , Albert Ray Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; National Humanities Center Fellow ©2012–2015 National Humanities Center

Lesson Contents

Teacher’s note.

• Text Analysis & Close Reading Questions

Follow-Up Assignment

• Student Version PDF

How did proponents of slavery in antebellum America defend it as a positive good?

Understanding.

With an argument that was as much a critique of industrialism as it was a defense of slavery, Southern spokesmen contended that chattel slavery, as it was practiced in the American South, was more humane than the system of “wage slavery” that prevailed in the industrial North and Great Britain.

George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters , 1857, excerpts.

Informational text with moderately complex purpose and very complex text structure, language features, and knowledge demands. Tier 2 vocabulary words are defined in pop-ups (full list at bottom of page). Tier 3 words are explained in brackets.

Text Complexity

Grades 11-CCR complexity band. For more information on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.org .

Click here for standards and skills for this lesson.

Common Core State Standards

• ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.4 (Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text…)

Advanced Placement US History

• Key Concept 5.2 (IC) (Defenders of slavery…)

While under the Common Core Standards Cannibals All! qualifies as an informational text, it is first and foremost a passionately argued piece of persuasive writing. Published in Richmond, Virginia, in 1857, and aimed at both Northern and Southern readers, it sought to claim for the South the moral high ground in the increasingly fierce national debate over slavery. Fitzhugh maintained that both free labor, as practiced among industrial workers in the North and Great Britain, and slavery, as practiced in the American South, exploited workers. However, because slave masters owned their workers, they took better care of them than capitalists who merely rented theirs.

To help students grasp Fitzhugh’s argument, you might ask two questions: How many would wash a rental car? How many wash their own or pay to have it done?

To prepare students to judge Fitzhugh’s argument, assign three essays in Freedom’s Story from the National Humanities Center’s TeacherServe®: “The Varieties of Slave Labor” , “How Slavery Affected African American Families” , and “Slave Resistance” . (These essays are designed for teachers, but they are useful to students. You might divide the class into three groups and assign each an essay, then have each group respond to Fitzhugh in the light of their reading.) From these essays a series of questions emerges. How different in their response to the demand to make a profit were Southern plantations from Northern factories? How free were people whose family lives could be disrupted at the whim of a master? If the slave system was so good for slaves, why did they spend considerable time and energy trying to undermine and escape it?

Encourage students to challenge Fitzhugh’s definition of freedom. Have them come at it inductively. Why, according to Fitzhugh, are capitalists and slaves free? Why are slaveowners and laborers not free? Fitzhugh sees humans solely as economic entities. His definition of freedom is based entirely on the exchange of labor for reward. While it does include a sense of one person’s responsibility to another, that responsibility is based on the extent of one’s financial investment in the other person. Essentially, he thinks a person is free to the extent that he or she is not responsible for the economic well-being of others and to the extent that one’s economic needs are addressed by the efforts of others. Is that an adequate basis for a moral order? Does Fitzhugh’s idea of freedom have room for such concepts as equality, personal choice, or mobility?

A note about the interactive exercises. The first allows students to explore vocabulary in context. The second prepares them to write an essay, an argument from authority , refuting Fitzhugh’s case. It links to a PDF you can print and distribute. The PDF includes excerpts from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from which students can mine evidence to deploy against Fitzhugh. Selecting passages to serve as evidence and providing rationales for those choices offer an excellent opportunity for small group work. The PDF also features a model essay and an analysis of it that students can use to guide the writing of their own essays.

This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. The teacher’s guide includes a background note, the text analysis with responses to the close reading questions, access to the interactive exercises, and an optional follow-up assignment. The student’s version, an interactive PDF, contains all of the above except the responses to the close reading questions and the follow-up assignment.

Teacher’s Guide

Contextualizing questions.

• What kind of text are we dealing with?
• When was it written?
• Who wrote it?
• For what audience was it intended?
• For what purpose was it written?

As they fired back at their critics, defenders of slavery in antebellum America often maintained that slavery, as practiced in the South, was more humane than the system of “wage slavery” under which, they claimed, Northern and British industrial workers suffered. One of the most vehement proponents of this argument was George Fitzhugh (1806–1881), a Virginia lawyer, writer, and slaveowner. He believed that civilization depended upon the exploitation of labor. This led him to ask which system — slavery or free labor — exploited workers less. He concluded that slavery did, and made his case in Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters .

In the book Fitzhugh unapologetically acknowledges that the South is a slave society, but he claims that the North is, too. In both, capitalists seek to live off the muscle of others as much as any “Fiji chieftain” seeks to dine “on human flesh.” Hence, all capitalists — Northern and Southern — are cannibals. The central question is what form of society most effectively curbs their appetites.

Fitzhugh draws the distinction between the North and the South on the principle of capital’s obligation to labor. The problem, as he sees it, is that in the “free” Northern economy — he uses the words “free” and “respectable” with sneering irony — capital and labor are separate. Thus capitalists in the North endeavor to make “respectable” livings by squeezing the greatest amount of work out of laborers for the least amount of pay, only to abandon them when they cease to be useful. In the Southern slave economy, on the other hand, “labor is capital.” Slaves, of course, do the work of the plantation, but they also represent a substantial capital investment. Owners pay dearly for them and thus it is in their best interest to “protect… not oppress them.” “When slaves are worth near a thousand dollars a head,” Fitzhugh writes, “they will be carefully and well provided for,” even when their working days are over. Unlike the Northern “slaves to capital,” “the negro slaves of the South are,” in his view, “the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

Text Analysis

Close reading questions.

1. Fitzhugh uses the word “boast” twice in this paragraph. How might that word affect his pro-slavery readers? his anti-slavery readers? Test its impact by substituting other verbs: “maintain,” “contend,” “claim.” How do those verbs change the tone of the paragraph? The word “boast” would probably go a long way in winning over Fitzhugh’s pro-slavery readers. Here, they might think, is one of us — unapologetic, unashamed, confident. The word would probably repel his anti-slavery readers and dampen their willingness to entertain his argument. Substituting any of the suggested alternative verbs tones down the paragraph, makes Fitzhugh seem more reasonable, less truculent. It also makes us realize just how much of an in-your-face word “boast” is as Fitzhugh uses it. And, realizing that, we can legitimately ask why Fitzhugh is writing: to persuade Northern readers or bolster to Southern ones.

6. How does he portray capitalists? Cite specific words from the text to support your answer. Capitalists are predatory and oppressive. They are ever “wily and watchful,” always “devising means to ensnare and exploit” workers and deprive them of their liberty and rights.

7. Compare Fitzhugh’s portrayal of slaves with that of free laborers. As noted in the answer to question 9, Fitzhugh portrays slaves as happy, content, secure, and at ease with life. Free laborers, on the other hand, lead precarious lives, threatened by exploitation and starvation, oppressed and denied their rights, burdened by the cares of life during their productive years and faced with penury in their old age.

The following passage comes from The Cotton Kingdom , an 1861 volume in which journalist Frederick Law Olmsted compiled the dispatches he sent back to New York newspapers as he travelled through the South in the 1850s.

Have your students read the passage and write a brief essay in response to this question: Would Olmsted agree or disagree with the argument Fitzhugh makes in Cannibals All! ? Have them support their arguments with specific evidence from the text.

As a general rule, the larger the body of negroes on a plantation or estate, the more completely are they treated as mere property, and in accordance with a policy calculated to insure the largest pecuniary returns [profits]…. It may be true, that among the wealthier slave-owners there is oftener a humane disposition, a better judgment, and a greater ability to deal with their dependents indulgently and bountifully, but the effects of this disposition are chiefly felt, even on those plantations where the proprietor resides permanently, among the slaves employed about the house and stables, and perhaps a few old favourites in the quarters. It is more than balanced by the difficulty of acquiring a personal interest in the units of a large body of slaves, and an acquaintance with the individual characteristics of each. The treatment of the mass must be reduced to a system, the ruling idea of which will be, to enable one man to force into the same channel of labour the muscles of a large number of men of various and often conflicting wills.

Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853–1861 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), p. 192.

Vocabulary Pop-ups

• pittance : small, inadequate amount of money
• capital : In these excerpts, capital is used to mean (1) money as profit, accumulated wealth; (2) money invested to make money in business and finance; (3) the northern workingman’s employer, i.e., the northern capitalist-industrialist.
• delusive : deceptive, illusionary
• raiment : clothing
• infirm : enfeebled, disabled
• despotism : unjust and cruel authority; tyranny
• ennui : boredom; listlessness resulting from lack of interest
• corporeal : bodily
• cumbered : burdened
• inculcated : instilled, taught

Image: “Oh Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” tobacco package label, lithograph by Robertson, Seibert & Shearman, New York, 1859 (detail). Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-08346. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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Module 11: Cotton Is King — The Antebellum South (1800-1860)

Southern pro-slavery arguments, learning objectives.

• Identify the main proslavery arguments in the years prior to the Civil War

Defending Slavery

Figure 1 . John C. Calhoun, shown here in a ca. 1845 portrait by George Alexander Healy, defended states’ rights, especially the right of the southern states to protect slavery from a hostile northern majority.

With the rise of democracy during the Jacksonian era in the 1830s, enslavers worried about the power of the majority. If political power went to a majority that was hostile to slavery, the South—and the honor of White southerners—would be imperiled. White southerners keen on preserving the institution of slavery bristled at what they perceived to be northern attempts to deprive them of their livelihood. Powerful southerners like South Carolinian John C. Calhoun highlighted laws like the Tariff of 1828 as evidence of the North’s desire to destroy the southern economy and, by extension, its culture. Such a tariff, he and others concluded, would disproportionately harm the South, which relied heavily on imports, and benefit the North, which would receive protections for its manufacturing centers. The tariff appeared to open the door for other federal initiatives, including the abolition of slavery. Because of this perceived threat to southern society, Calhoun argued that states could nullify federal laws. This belief illustrated the importance of the states’ rights argument to the southern states. It also showed enslavers’ willingness to unite against the federal government when they believed it acted unjustly against their interests.

As the nation expanded in the 1830s and 1840s, the writings of abolitionists—a small but vocal group of northerners committed to ending slavery—reached a larger national audience. White southerners responded by putting forth arguments in defense of slavery, their way of life, and their honor. Calhoun became a leading political theorist defending slavery and the rights of the South, which he saw as containing an increasingly embattled minority. He advanced the idea of a concurrent majority , a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority.

Calhoun’s idea of the concurrent majority found full expression in his 1850 essay “Disquisition on Government.” In this treatise, he wrote about government as a necessary means to ensure the preservation of society, since society existed to “preserve and protect our race.” If government grew hostile to society, then a concurrent majority had to take action, including forming a new government. “Disquisition on Government” advanced a profoundly anti-democratic argument. It illustrates southern leaders’ intense suspicion of democratic majorities and their ability to effect legislation that would challenge southern interests.

Calhoun’s Defense of Slavery

In this 1837 speech, John C. Calhoun, then a U.S. senator, vigorously defended the institution of slavery and stated the essence of this new intellectual defense of the institution: Southerners must stop apologizing for slavery and reject the idea that it was a necessary evil. Instead, Calhoun insisted, slavery was a “positive good.” He went further, making legal arguments about the Constitution protecting states’ rights to preserve slavery. Calhoun then offered a moral defense of slavery by claiming it to be a more humane method of organizing labor than the conditions wage laborers faced in industrial cities in Europe and the northern United States.

• In what ways does Calhoun use legal arguments to defend the idea that Congress cannot interfere in the institution of slavery?
• How does Calhoun go beyond the traditional legal defenses of slavery and attempt to convince the audience that slavery is, indeed, good for all involved?

Link to Learning

Watch this video from Heimler’s History channel to learn more about some of the main pro-slavery arguments , including the social hierarchy argument, the civilization argument, the economic argument, the racial argument, and the biblical argument.

White southerners reacted strongly to abolitionists’ attacks on slavery. In making their defense of slavery, they critiqued wage labor in the North. They argued that the Industrial Revolution had brought about a new type of slavery—wage slavery—and that this form of “slavery” was far worse than the slave labor used on southern plantations. Defenders of the institution also lashed out directly at abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison for daring to call into question their way of life. Indeed, Virginians cited Garrison as the instigator of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion.

The Virginian George Fitzhugh contributed to the defense of slavery with his book Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society (1854). Fitzhugh argued that laissez-faire capitalism, as celebrated by Adam Smith, benefited only the quick-witted and intelligent, leaving the ignorant at a huge disadvantage. Enslavers, he argued, took care of the ignorant—in Fitzhugh’s argument, the enslaved persons of the South. Southerners provided enslaved persons with care from birth to death, he asserted; this offered a stark contrast to the wage slavery of the North, where workers were at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control. Fitzhugh’s ideas exemplified southern notions of paternalism.

George Fitzhugh’s Defense of Slavery

George Fitzhugh, a southern writer of social treatises, was a staunch supporter of slavery, not as a necessary evil but as what he argued was a necessary good, a way to take care of enslaved persons and keep them from being a burden on society. He published Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society in 1854, in which he laid out what he believed to be the benefits of slavery to both the enslaved persons and society as a whole. According to Fitzhugh:

[I]t is clear the Athenian democracy would not suit a negro nation, nor will the government of mere law suffice for the individual negro. He is but a grown up child and must be governed as a child . . . The master occupies towards him the place of parent or guardian. . . . The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition. . . . Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.

What arguments does Fitzhugh use to promote slavery? What basic premise underlies his ideas? Can you think of a modern parallel to Fitzhugh’s argument?

The North also produced defenders of slavery, including Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor of zoology and geology. Agassiz helped to popularize polygenism , the idea that different human races came from separate origins. According to this formulation, no single human family origin existed, and Black people made up a race wholly separate from the White race. Agassiz’s notion gained widespread popularity in the 1850s with the 1854 publication of George Gliddon and Josiah Nott’s Types of Mankind and other books. The theory of polygenism codified racism, giving the notion of Black inferiority the lofty mantle of science. One popular advocate of the idea posited that Black people occupied a place in evolution between the Greeks and chimpanzees.

Figure 2 . This 1857 illustration by an advocate of polygenism indicates that the “Negro” occupies a place between the Greeks and chimpanzees. What does this image reveal about the methods of those who advocated polygenism?

concurrent majority:  a majority of a separate region (that would otherwise be in the minority of the nation) with the power to veto or disallow legislation put forward by a hostile majority

polygenism:  the idea that Black people and White people come from different origins

• US History. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/12-3-wealth-and-culture-in-the-south . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction
• John C. Calhoun, u201cSlavery as a Positive Good,u201d 1837. Provided by : The Bill of Rights Institute, OpenStax, and contributing authors. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:iQkwpaR_@8/6-25-%E2%9C%92%EF%B8%8F-John-C-Calhoun-Slavery-as-a-Positive-Good-1837#fs-idm205300544 . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]