The Entrenchment of Slavery

         In 1851, southern physician Samuel Cartwright defines two "mental disorders:" Drapetomania, which causes slaves to escape, and dysaesthesia aethiopica, which causes laziness in slaves.  

         George Fitzhugh's  Sociology for the South  (1854) and Cannibal's All; or Slaves without Masters (1857) 

"woman has but one right, the right to protection, the right to protection includes the obligation to obey.  A husband, lord and master, nature designed for every woman."  George Fitzhugh.  Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of Free Society. 1854

"We are all, North and South, engaged in the White Slave Trade, and he who succeeds best is esteemed most respectable.  It is far more cruel than the Black Slave Trade, because it exacts more of its slaves, and neither protects nor governs them. We boast that it exacts more when we say, “that the profits made from employing free labor are greater than those from slave labor.”   The profits, made from free labor, are the amount of the products of such labor, which the employer, by means of the command which capital or skill gives him, takes away, exacts, or “expatiates” from the fee laborer. The profits of slave labor are that portion of the products of such labor which the power of the master enables him to appropriate.  These profits are less, because the master allows the slave to retain a larger share of the results of his own labor than do the employers of free labor…

When the day’s labor is ended, he is free, but is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which makes his freedom an empty and delusive mockery…The Negro slave is free, too, when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body; for the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel and everything else necessary to the physical well-being of himself and his family. 

The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husband by their masters. The Negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. The free laborer must work or starve. He is more a slave than the Negro because he works longer and harder for less allowance than the slave, and has no holiday, because the cares of his life with him begin when its labors end. He has no liberty, and not a single right."


The "sacred circle" of southern intellectuals: William Gilmore Simms, Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Frederick Holmes.   Together they published numerous articles calling for moral reform of the South, including a stewardship role of masters in relation to slavery.  


Senator James Jeffrey Hammond's Mudsill Theory,  extract from the "Cotton is King" speech, March 4, 1858  (full speech text) 

The "Cotton is King" extract  - 

"But if there were no other reason why we should never have war, would any sane nation make war on cotton?  Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet.   The South is perfectly competent to go on, one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton...  What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?  I will not stop to depict what every one can imagine, but this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it.  Cotton is king."


Other 1850s Southern Quotes: 


"Free society! we sicken at the name.  What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists...  The prevailing class [of the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant."  Georgia newspaper, 1856.

"...Slavery, the very source of our existence, the greatest blessing both for Master & Slave that could have been bestowed upon us." 

Stephan Dodson Ramseur, future Confederate general, writing from West Point (where he was a cadet) to a friend in the wake of the 1856 election. 

 "Democratic liberty exists solely because we have slaves . . . freedom is not possible without slavery."  Richmond Enquirer, 1856.