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This chapter aims to explain the ideas about slavery, rape, and commerce embedded in and produced by the passionate desires of Franklin and his partners. For years, historians interpreting the institutions and ideology of nineteenth-century southern slavery focused their attentions on explaining slaveholders' paternalist defenses of their planter institution. Like some of their sources, such histories have often explicitly or implicitly portrayed the domestic slave trade as a contradiction within an otherwise stable system. Recent works have returned the issue of that trade to the forefront, arguing that the commerce in human beings was an inescapable and essential feature of the region's pre-Civil War society and culture. Franklin, Ballard, and their associates reveal themselves as being so devoted to their picture of the slave trade as a fetishized commodification of human beings that it may be necessary to insist on mystification as one of the necessary bases of the economic expansion of the antebellum South.

This chapter examines the complexities of British reactions toward the American Civil War. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was a literary phenomenon across the Atlantic, selling 1,500,000 copies in Britain and her colonies. The commercial frenzy surrounding Stowe's novel also spurred numerous new anti-slavery tracts and reinforced the crowds attending public meetings to hear fugitive slaves and other abolitionist lecturers. Yet just a decade after this frenzy, Britain responded so uncertainly and ambiguously to the American Civil War. There was no direct pattern of support for North or South based on social class or political party, but rather a wide variety of responses. Those who agreed on other political questions found themselves at odds over the rebellion. The chapter traces the conflicting and apparently baffling pattern of British responses to the American Civil War to the huge variety of plans and ideas that existed for dismantling Southern slavery in the decades before.

This chapter examines George Fitzhugh's infamous critique of northern capitalism, in which he proposes southern slavery as evincing the most humane, most affectionate, and most liberating relationships to be found in the Western Hemisphere. Knowing their place in the hierarchy of human relations and protected by masters who act with the instinct of fathers, “negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.” Although misguided abolitionists might succeed in eradicating slavery, observes Fitzhugh, “human law cannot beget benevolence, affection, maternal and paternal love. . . . It can never create between the capitalist and the laborer, between the employer and the employed, the kind and affectionate relations that usually exist between master and slave.”