The Southern Response to British Abolitionism: The Maturation of Proslavery Apologetics

Abstract

ON JULY 4, 1833, JAMES HENRY HAMMOND DELIVERED AN ORATION FOR his future constituency in Barnwell, South Carolina. An ambitious young planter who had been a key player in the nullification movement earlier that year, Hammond represented a generation of white southerners who redefined the proslavery ideology that buttressed southerners against northern criticism in the years before secession. Like all Fourth of July orators, Hammond directed blistering criticism toward the British, whose tyranny had justified the American war for independence celebrated on that day. But Hammond went beyond the usual evocations of the distant abuses of 1776, proclaiming that the crimes of oppression to be tallied against the British had not ceased with the independence of the United States or even the War of 1812. Hammond informed his audience that a recent bill passed by the British parliament reduced the people of Ireland to an absolute & unmitigated that undermined British claims to represent freedom. To illuminate the oppression of the Irish, Hammond drew a comparison between the of the Irish and that of southern slaves. Unlike the Irish, southern slaves had the right to respectable courts, and the British enacted curfews, which southern slaveholders had supposedly never done. The British still played the role of imperial oppressor by imposing a tyranny that contrasted sharply with the benevolent governance that Hammond claimed southerners exercised over their slaves. (1) Hammond's portrayal of Britain as the brutal enslaver of the Irish hinted at one of the most important planks of the emerging proslavery argument: the contrast between the oppression imposed upon free white laborers and the alleged ease of life enjoyed by southern slaves. (2) The modern proslavery argument began to evolve when the spread of antislavery thought challenged slavery's moral legitimacy. Important justifications of slavery appeared in the late eighteenth century, and congressional debates on the statehood of Missouri in 1819 combined with the threat of insurrection in Charleston in 1822 to draw forth even sterner defenses of slavery in the 1820s. (3) But the 1830s marked a critical period when southern spokesmen made bold elaborations on the proslavery argument. During this decade the southern position on slavery shifted from defensive rationalizations to bold assertions that slavery had a positive influence upon society. (4) While not yet at the extreme of advocating that other societies adopt slavery as the best mode of ordering labor in a capitalist economy (as George Fitzhugh would recommend in the 1850s), southern theorists nonetheless argued that slavery had a positive value for southern society and that the alternatives of abolition or colonization were simply unthinkable. (5) The catalysts usually posited for this transition to an unflinching proslavery rhetoric are the nullification movement in South Carolina and the emancipation debates in the Virginia legislature that followed Nat Turner's leadership of a slave rebellion in 1831. The Virginia debates broke the seal on southern discussion of the abolition of slavery and resulted in Thomas R. Dew's widely influential Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond, 1832). Nullifiers had claimed that South Carolina could declare federal tariff legislation unconstitutional, but in March 1833 the state legislature compromised with President Andrew Jackson (after Congress approved the Force Bill authorizing Jackson to use the U.S. military against South Carolina). Historians have recognized the nullifiers' challenge to the authority of the federal government as a move to preempt the influence of abolitionists in Congress. (6) But most historians of the South have neglected the critical importance of Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in 1833, an act that emboldened American abolitionists in the North and left the southern states as the last slaveholding region in the Anglo-Atlantic world. …