Defending Slavery

Defending Slavery The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issue of African slavery in America in the antebellum by late eighteenth century and before the antebellum crisis as discussed in Paul Finkelman’s book: Defending Slavery. This paper will summarize the first part of book taking as a main topic racial aspects of the slavery. After the introductory summary , this paper will focus in two specific sections found in the second part of the book: “Religion and Slavery” and “Racial Theory and Slavery”. Lastly, this paper will analyze these two themes used as a justification of African Slavery in early history of America In his book “Defending Slavery”, Finkelman presents a collection of historical documents written by politicians, lawyers, clergymen and an anonymous author supporting proslavery. In the first part of the book, Finkelman, gives a briefly introduction to the arguments supporting pro slavery in America during the Antebellum. The thoughts defending slavery have in common that slavery in America was justified based on racial aspects. The sociological term “mudsill theory” was first used by James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina Senator. This term was placed as a strong racial argument in favor of slavery. The basic premise of this theory was that all great societies must have someone to do the menial labor, in order to create a distinction between social classes. In addition, according to this theory this low class labor must be assigned to blacks who were considered an inferior race. Under this context slavery did contribute to create an ample social gap between the “white” and “black” races. Religion and Slavery: In this section of the book, Finkelman gathered four documents written by three representatives of the Baptist and Protestant religion and by an anonymous person and edited by De Bow’s Review, a well circulated magazine in the South part of America within 19th century.

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