> the anti-Bellum south did a pretty good job "defending" its slavery by
> pointing out that the north was populated with wage slaves.
Brian wrote:
> You're right: apologists of slavery in the South often defended the
> institution by pointing out the cruelty of 'free' Northern
> wage labor. Eric Foner's _Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of
> the Republican
> Party Before the Civil War_ delves a bit into these polemics: "Your whole
> class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves," S.
> Carolina Senator James Hammond, a Fire-eater, stated.
Yes, this is a fascinating subject, and it gets complicated. In earlier times southern whites often argued that slavery would wither away. After the American Revolution, there was a strong manumission movement in the upper south. This is also when the "colonization" movement gets started. These movements were influenced by the ideals of the revolution, and led to the formation of emancipation and colonization societies, which persisted in the south for about a generation. Both southerners and northerners in Congress voted to abolish the slave trade in 1808, and barring slavery from the Northwest territories was uncontroversial.
Following the Nat Turner rebellion in 1829, and with the rise of an abolitionist movement in the north, southern opinion hardened on the subject.
As sectional feeling polarized in the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Mexican War, the pro-slavery argument was advanced still more frequently. Far from being a temporary evil that would eventually disappear, slavery was instead seen as a positive social good, and an essential element of a distinctively southern "way of life." In addition to those already mentioned, another extreme exponent of this view was Edmund Ruffin of South Carolina.
The vehemence of the pro-slavery argument, though, seems to have been in inverse proportion to the south's underlying conviction that the institution had a future. One influential interpretation of the Civil War, which you will find ably summarized in James McPherson's _The Battle Cry of Freedom_ (now the standard one-volume history of the conflict), holds that southern secession was a conservative "pre-emptive counter-revolution." The south, believing that it was destined to be overrun by a booming, populous, rapidly industrializing north, seceded to preserve its essentially premodern social structure. The pro-slavery argument was hardly designed to appeal to northern opinion, but rather was intended to instill a sense of "southern nationalism." It was "successful" only in the sense that it helped to solidify southern elite opinion in favor of the rightness of slavery, and to silence qualms about both its morality and its economic viability that had existed a generation before.
I am away from my books just now, so can't give any more cites, but the Foner is excellent, concise and well-written, and McPherson's book is magisterial. Another standard work that canvases the arguments over slavery (and much else as well) is David Potter's _The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861_, good but long.
Jacob Conrad