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Paternalism was used as an argument against the emancipation of slavery due to these mistresses providing better living conditions than the enslaved's counterpart in the factory-based north. [8] As a result of this conclusion, the whites would often manage basic rights of the enslaved such as child rearing and property.
Genovese placed paternalism at the center of the master-slave relationship. Both masters and slaves embraced paternalism but for different reasons and with varying notions of what paternalism meant. For the slaveowners, paternalism allowed them to think of themselves as benevolent and to justify their appropriation of their slaves' labor.
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.
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips wrote the first major historical study of the 20th century dealing with slavery. In American Negro Slavery (1918), Phillips refers to slaves as "negroes, who for the most part were by racial quality submissive rather than defiant, light-hearted instead of gloomy, amiable and ingratiating instead of sullen, and whose very defects invited paternalism rather than repression."
The article began as a devil's advocate work with the aim of challenging what Carlyle perceived to be a hypocritical movement for the abolition of slavery in Britain. Although the slave trade had been abolished by 1807, and slavery in the British Empire by 1833, nations such as the United States, Cuba and Brazil continued to legally allow ...
As slavery began to displace indentured servitude as the principal supply of labor in the plantation systems of the South, the economic nature of the institution of slavery aided in the increased inequality of wealth seen in the antebellum South.
The comprehensiveness of his scholarly attack on the "benevolent paternalism" theory of slavery was such that, per the Journal of Negro History book review in April 1931, "It will be necessary [for slavery apologists] to work out another program to cover up the truth for another fifty years."
For slaveholders the alternative to caring for sick slaves was to sell them quickly. These ledgers also served as a form of accounting when slaves were sold. These ledgers contained all the ‘upgrades’ done to or for the slave to secure their sale. An interesting point Johnson makes is how this suggest a form of paternalism.