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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.
Farr argues that Locke's theoretical justifications of slavery were inadequate to justify his practical involvement in the slave trade. He sees this contradiction as ultimately unsolvable: Locke never addressed, much less resolved, this contradiction. On Afro-American slavery, silence seems to have been his principal bequest to posterity.
The harsh conditions on the frontier increased slave resistance and led owners and overseers to rely on violence for control. Many of the slaves were new to cotton fields and unaccustomed to the "sunrise-to-sunset gang labor" required by their new life. Slaves were driven much harder than when they had been in growing tobacco or wheat back
Various interpretations of Christianity were also used to justify slavery. [76] For example, some people believed that slavery was a punishment that was reserved for sinners. [76] Some other Christian organizations were slaveholders.
While these justifications were common in America at the time, [187] [188] Mormons canonized several scriptures giving credence to the pro-slavery interpretation of the Curse of Ham [189] and received scriptures teaching against interfering with the slaves of others. [185]
Joseph Smith's views on Black people varied during his lifetime. As founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, he included Black people in many ordinances and priesthood ordinations, but held multi-faceted views on racial segregation, the curses of Cain and Ham, and shifted his views on slavery several times, eventually coming to take an anti-slavery stance later in his life.
Though slaves were present in other states, most were forced to work in agriculture in the South. According to H. W. Brands, because of the declining productivity of crops like tobacco due to soil exhaustion, many of the drafters of the Constitution assumed that slavery would die out naturally in the South as it had done in industrialized North.
Slaves could be held if they were captives of war, if they sold themselves into slavery, were purchased from elsewhere, or if they were sentenced to slavery by the governing authority. [67] The Body of Liberties used the word "strangers" to refer to people bought and sold as slaves, as they were generally not native born English subjects.