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A Southern Stewardship: The Intellectual and the Proslavery Argument

1979; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2712487

1080-6490

Drew Gilpin Faust,

Anarchism and Radical Politics

decades before the Civil War has long puzzled historians.Yet the very distastefulness of the proslavery argument has intrigued modern scholars, who have sought to understand how writers and thinkers-individuals in many ways like themselves-could turn their talents to such abhorrent purpose.But we have too long regarded the proslavery argument either as an object of moral outrage or as a contributing cause of the Civil War.For those who elaborated its details, it had a different meaning.To understand how slavery's apologists came to embrace conclusions we find unthinkable, we must look beyond the polemics of the slavery controversy.Many of the bewildering aspects of the defense of slavery are best understood as expressions of the special needs of an alienated Southern intellectual class concerned with questions more far-reaching, yet in some ways more immediately personally relevant, than the rights and wrongs of human bondage.The Southern man of mind did not doubt that slavery was a social good that could be supported by rational argument.But in taking up the public defense of the peculiar institution, he sought as well to advance his particular values and to define for himself a respected social role within a culture known for its inhospitality to letters.Antebellum Southerners themselves recognized that the proslavery argument would achieve little in the ideological warfare between the sections."We think it is hardly to be expected," one proslavery theorist conceded in 1843, "that anything which can be said at this late date ... will at all diminish the wrongheaded fanaticism and perverse intolerance of the Northern Abolitionists."This essayist's avowed aim was to do