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This chapter continues an exploration of the distinctive ways in which Genesis 9:20–27 was read by American proslavery apologists with emphasis on the themes of order and disorder. It is argued that the way these themes animate proslavery commentary on the story of Noah and his sons reflects the popular belief that the “Negro” (Hamitic) character was exemplified in a penchant for disorder – including a desire for amalgamation.

This chapter explores the use of the story of Noah's sons and related passages in the biblical exposition of Benjamin M. Palmer (1818–1902), a representative proslavery intellectual and leader in the southern Presbyterian Church from the 1850s until his death in 1902. Palmer was not only an influential advocate of slavery and secession but also an apostle of the South's Lost Cause following the Civil War. The role of Ham's curse is traced through Palmer's writings before, during, and after the Civil War, through which it is demonstrated that, with the demise of American slavery, Genesis 9–11 was utilized to justify racial segregation. The postbellum need for a new system of domination for dealing with the African majority in the South corresponds to a shift in Palmer's reading of Genesis from Ham the impudent son to Nimrod the rebellious tyrant who ignored the separation of peoples instituted by God following the flood.

This chapter focuses on the presidential election of 1860 in Knoxville. It opens with a vignette of a famous encounter between William G. Brownlow and Alabama “Fire Eater” William Lowndes Yancey, a US Senator and one of the leading proponents of Southern secession should a Republican president be elected. Their encounter offers a framework for addressing the Second Party System as it functioned in Knoxville, and for exploring two themes utterly central to the way in which the townspeople contemplated the impending election: speculation as to the fate of slavery, and debate concerning the fate of white men. Developing these themes, the chapter explores East Tennessee's modest antislavery heritage and the evidence of class stratification in Knoxville and its environs. It argues that these factors rendered the proslavery argument that Parson Brownlow modeled during the secession crisis inherently unstable.

This chapter examines the role played by proslavery religion in the antebellum white South. American Protestantism faced an intractable crisis over slavery prior to the Civil War, and the country's three largest antebellum religious denominations—Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians—suffered schisms into northern and southern branches over the slavery question. The South's white Protestants grounded their argument in a conservative reading of the Bible that demonstrated unequivocally that their Triune God of Grace sanctioned the right of white masters to own black slaves. This chapter considers how proslavery theology emerged as a critical ideological building block in the making of southern sectionalism and, ultimately, the Confederacy. It explores the religious dispute over the slavery question within the antebellum and Civil War context, along with white southern Protestants' proslavery arguments after emancipation. It shows that the proslavery rhetoric in religion was never about the slavery question alone: it was about how Christians claimed to read the Holy Scripture.

This chapter describes the family history of Rebecca Harding Davis as a combination of residual gentility and relative deprivation. It shows how the failure of Davis’s father, Richard Harding, to succeed as an insurance broker in Wheeling, Virginia, meant that the gentry-class origins of her mother, Rachel Leet Wilson were gradually effaced. Davis’s contradictory class identity results, in “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), in her narrator identifying with both the cultivated Southern gentleman, Mitchell, and the dependent, working-class woman, Deborah. The chapter argues that the only consistently held position in the story is that putatively free white labour is actually equivalent to chattel slavery. In a fantasy resolution to the contradictions of her class identity, Davis affirms race as the only stable and enduring marker of identity.

This chapter explores the relationships between disability, amelioration, and abolition from the 1770s to the slave trade’s legal end in 1807. It reveals that both opponents and supporters of slavery utilized notions of disability and invoked concepts of monstrosity in their respective campaigns. Revolutionary emancipation, from Tacky’s War in Jamaica (1760) to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), gave rise to the gendered image of the armed, able-bodied, dangerous, and revolutionary black man, an image that circulated throughout the Atlantic world and haunted both pro- and anti-slavery discourse. Antislavery campaigners countered with the figure of the broken and beaten bondsperson as a way of envisioning a subject who in her or his freedom presented no physical threat to white society.

This chapter turns to the antebellum slavery debate and explains why strategies used by earlier antislavery Christians failed under the pressure of aggressive antebellum proslavery. Chapter 3 contends that making a biblical case against slavery in the antebellum context forced antislavery Protestants to acknowledge that moral progress had altered the meaning of the Bible. This chapter also details the role of Christian abolitionists and African American religious leaders, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the slavery debate.

This Introduction provides a brief background of the life, bonds, and challenges that faced the black slave community in Loudoun. Proponents of slavery claimed that conditions for the creation of a stable, nuclear family for slaves was made possible by the institutions of Loudoun, and that support, in terms of living costs and moral training, was made available to these people by their owners' generosity. Revisionists have argued against this view, citing instances where even the size of the slaveholdings could not provide the stability necessary for the formation of traditional families. Instead, flexible extended slave families were formed to provide nurture, education, and socialization for its members, to cope with the ever-present threat of displacement by their owners. In the next section, the lives of emancipated black people in the community are discussed and contrasted with their slave kinsmen, along with the emergence of opposition to the proslavery ideology.

The term intimate landscape is used by photographers to refer to images that capture small portions of broad scenic landscapes while illustrating their interconnectedness. The intimate landscape framework informs a novel archaeological approach for examining discrete landscapes in and around dwelling sites. These household landscapes are dynamic spaces connected to diverse discourses on the individual, local, regional, and global scales. In chapter 6, Fogle studies the impact of a nineteenth-century, proslavery agricultural reform discourse on enslaved households and their associated landscapes at a South Carolina cotton plantation.

This chapter considers which models from antiquity seemed most appropriate to the understanding of the momentous arguments framed (and violently contested) in antebellum America from the 1830s to the Civil War. How and why African Americans mobilized knowledge of classical texts and antiquity in their fight for liberty and equality, and how, along with abolitionists, they legitimated, debated, and contested their political and cultural identity through references to Greek and Roman antiquity, is demonstrated. Those who the ancients saw as ethnically other 'barbarians', the Abolitionists found inspirational: the Carthaginians resistance to Rome, and Medea's defiance of Jason, for example. At the same time proslavery advocates, pointing to the ancient world’s reliance on slavery, also quarried antiquity, particularly Aristotle’s writings, in support of their position, while Herodotus and the texts related to the Roman Republican heroes were used with equal passion by polemicists on both side of the slavery debate.

Southern academics, politicians, and polemicists claimed Aristotle as a notable progenitor of the proslavery cause. This chapter argues that this use of Aristotle was more than ‘learned embroidery’ but a significant consideration of his political philosophy. It details three contexts within which these propagandists turned to Aristotle: they relied upon Aristotle to anchor their proslavery activism in a sophisticated philosophical objection to natural rights theory; they appealled to Aristotle to shore up their view that the North practiced wage slavery; they exploited Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery to identify black Africans as slaves. The widespread practice among Southern intellectuals of citing of Aristotle is not ornamental but evidence of a dynamic engagement. The Aristotle they prize may be nearly unrecognizable to today’s moral philosophers and political scientists but this episode in the reception history of Politics Book I shows that Aristotle could provide an intellectual framework for a toxic way of thinking about human differences.

One common objection to the colonization movement was that it distracted from the fight for the abolition of slavery. Chapter 7 argues that the rift over slavery in America was deepening; antislavery and proslavery movements were moving toward extremes rather than reaching compromise or consensus. The chapter opens with the brutal murder of abolitionist newspaperman Elijah Lovejoy and discusses the gag rule passed in the US House of Representatives, which automatically tables any proposed legislation for the abolition of slavery. For enslaved and free black people in the United States, things are getting worse.

After decades of working to convert slaves, from the 1760s the SPG became embroiled in new trans-Atlantic debates about abolition and emancipation. While some accounts have seen statements made by some figures associated with the SPG as contributing to the development of abolitionism, this chapter reconsiders the SPG’s engagement with antislavery campaigners. It examines the multiple proslavery and pro-slave trade texts produced by SPG affiliates to reveal the depth of support for the institution within the Society. It also considers how the Society’s ongoing ownership of several hundred people gave it a prominent place in national debates about slavery’s history and future. It is a testimony to the strength of the Society’s embrace of slavery that its members remained unwilling to change their corporate position on slavery until forced to do so by the legal enactment of emancipation around the British Empire.

Chapter 7 investigates Hutchison's published essays on slavery and the division of the Presbyterian Church. Her essays and journal entries provide glimpses of her thoughts about the abolition movement, southern benevolence, the division of her church, and the moral dilemmas of slavery. The tension between her long-held beliefs about gradual emancipation and the actual practice of slaveholding created a moral quandary during her later years. Eventually, she risked everything and began secretly to teach slaves to read, which was in violation of North Carolina's slave codes. By 1845, all of her sons had joined her in the South, but after 30 years in the region, she ultimately returned to the North. This chapter explores the influences that led to that decision.

In agreeing to survey for the Native Americans, surveyor John Brown no doubt realized that ridding Kansas of illegal settlers was good for both Ottawas and abolitionists. Earlier that spring, Major Jefferson Buford of Eufaula, Alabama, had arrived in the Territory with four hundred resolute proslavery conscripts recruited from several Southern states. Buford and other bands of militants, assuming that the “official” proslavery territorial government would take no action against them, established their camps on Indian lands and federally owned tracts surrounding the Free State settlements of Topeka, Lawrence, and Osawatomie. Along with them, a large number of claim-jumping Missourians had crossed into the Territory not only in order to vote proslavery, but to suppress their neighbors' votes and seal off the Kansas border, denying entry especially to newcomers from Northern states. They were in effect occupiers, seizing operational bases on already-owned land to carry on a war of intimidation.