History of Slavery Part 1

Speaking in July 1773 at the Virginia Constitutional Convention, George Mason described slavery as “that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our People.” Two years later, Patrick Henry urged his fellow Southerners to look for a time “when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil.” This was the tone. And Southern states joined Northern states in excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory and in abolishing the African slave trade.

The tone persisted through the early nineteenth century. “Until the 1820s,” John Blassingame writes in The Slave Community, “many planters, convinced of the immorality of bondage, joined with clergymen in seeking its abolition.” During this period, the South had more than a hundred antislavery organizations, and manumissions of slaves were fairly common, especially in Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. Yet historian Stanley Elkins points out that by the 1830s “the hostility to slavery that had been common in Jeffersonian times . . . all but disappeared.”

How did this happen? According to Blassingame, planters launched a massive campaign to uphold slavery in the wake of the abolitionist and antislavery pressures generated by the Revolution. The goal was to unify the slave community in defense of the plantation. Mob attacks were organized against antislavery ministers. “By the 1840s,” Blassingame writes, “the propagandists had largely succeeded in silencing the churches.” Then they began browbeating the clergy into becoming advocates of slavery.

Around the same time, planters organized a campaign throughout the South—largely successful—to block literature from antislavery societies from being delivered through the mail. In response to political pressure, every Southern state except Maryland and Kentucky passed laws prohibiting teaching slaves to read and write. Many Southern legislatures adopted measures banning manumissions, some forced free blacks to leave the state, and a few even invited free blacks to enslave themselves. By the 1850s some slavery apologists like William Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett were calling for the reopening of the African slave trade.

This was a new and different South, and to the incredible good fortune of the planter aristocracy, there was a political party, the Democratic Party, to represent their interests and press their claims, both at the local and the national level. Working with and through this party, the planter class found itself equipped with a full-blown moral, legal and political philosophy of the plantation, one that historians say no previous class of slave-owners ever developed.

Source: Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party (2018) by Dinesh D'Souza.