The chattelization of northern whites: An evolving abolitionist warning

Abstract

A recurring abolitionist theme was that the failure to destroy southern black slavery would eventuate in the enslavement of northern white laborers. During the 1830s this theme was the particular province of a few evangelical, markedly antimaterialist 'left' abolitionists like William Goodell. More inclined than their cohorts to regard the northern social order as oppressive for increasing numbers of workers, these abolitionists were also more likely to accuse capitalist 'aristocrats' of aspiring to go further and chattelize their workers in emulation of their southern slavocrat allies. Such white-chattelization warnings, which assigned a virtually coequal role in the slave power to malevolent employers and other northern 'aristocrats,' were supplanted in the late antebellum period by ones that instead targeted slavery's mulattoization and the southern slavocracy's proclivity for exploiting this ongoing erosion in racial boundaries. These white-chattelization warnings, which Goodell also notably promoted, acquired greater antislavery support than had the earlier anticapitalist ones. The late-antebellum warnings substantially reflected the ascendance of northern nationalism and the additional legitimacy that it conferred on capital-labor arrangements in the free states.