Time Changes Everything

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Recommended: Economic consequences of the slave trade

Time will inevitably change everything. That being said, more than roughly a century and a half ago the institution of racial slavery was a heavily debated societal issue, which led to the Civil War. It is my own personal opinion that slavery is best defined as the absolute ownership of another human’s life as personal property, and this practice of racial slavery served widely as one of the only means for economic prosperity throughout the Deep South. Wealthy plantation owners, subsistence slaveholding farmers, and even northern abolitionists who were involved in the purchasing cotton from southern slave states and weaving that cotton into clothes for sale benefited economically from slave labor. This unique American practice of forced labor was especially horrific compared to other forms of slavery because it targeted a specific ethnic group to be human bondservants who were typically indebted for life to masters, while dehumanizing everyone of that same ethnicity in the process. This truly incriminating social injustice did not rest easily with American’s conscience. Often being seen as undemocratic, slavery was in needed of a persuasive moral justification in order to avoid abolishment. This “moral justifier” often presented itself in the form of religion in which slavery was argued to be a socially moral upstanding institution, an argument supported by several verses in the bible referring to how slaves should behave towards their masters. Historians have often studied this complex relationship between religion and slavery in American history, and this paper will also seek to examine the impact that Christianity had on the convoluted issue of slavery in antebellum American society. Some Christian preachers like George Whitefi...

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...the Governor of South-Carolina.”
Pattillo, Henry. “The Plain Planter’s Family Assistant; Containing an Address to Husbands and Wives, Children and Servants.”
Whitefield, George. “Three Letters from the Reverend Mr. G Whitefield: viz….Letter III. To the Inhabitants of Maryland, Virginia, North and South-Carolina, Concerning Their Negroes.”
Oakes, James. “I Own My Slaves, But They Also Own Me”: Property and Paternalism In The Slave South.” Reviews In American History Dec 2010: 587-594. History Study Center. Web 23 Apr. 2014.
Young, Jeffery. “Richard Furman, 1823.” Proslavery and Sectional Thought In the Early South, 1740-1829. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. 226. Print
Young, Jeffery. “George Whitefield, 1740.” Proslavery and Sectional Thought In the Early South, 1740-1829. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. 68. Print

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