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American statesman John C. Calhoun was one of the most prominent advocates of the "slavery as a positive good" viewpoint.. Slavery as a positive good in the United States was the prevailing view of Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to seeing it as a crime against humanity or a necessary evil.
Arguments in favor of slavery include deference to the Bible and thus to God, some people being natural slaves in need of supervision, slaves often being better off than the poorest non-slaves, practical social benefit for the society as a whole, and slavery being a time-proven practice by multiple great civilizations.
John H. Van Evrie's book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition – setting out the arguments the title would suggest – was an attempt to apply scientific support to the Southern arguments in favor of race-based slavery. [53]
Harper is likely best remembered as an early and important representative of pro-slavery thought. His Memoir on Slavery, first given as a lecture in 1838, and reprinted in the Southern Literary Journal, classed Harper as a leading proponent of the notion that slavery was not merely a necessary evil, but as a positive social good.
Southern states had a long tradition of using states' rights doctrine since the late eighteenth century to support slavery. [16] A major Southern argument in the 1850s was that federal law to ban the expansion of slavery into the territories discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states.
Georgetown University students voted in favor of paying reparations to the descendants of slaves that the school sold in the 1800s when it was in debt.
Gadsden was in favor of South Carolina's secession in 1850, and was a leader in efforts to split California into two states, one slave and one free. Other Southern writers who also began to portray slavery as a positive good were James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh.
More than 150 years after slaves were freed in the U.S., voters in five states will soon decide whether to close loopholes that led to the proliferation of a different form of slavery — forced ...