Rare Book Monthly
Slavery in the United States [1836]: It's a Long Road to the Mountaintop<br>By James K. Paulding
Slavery in the United States by J. K. Paulding. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836
In trying to make his case he argues that the African is better off a slave than free, arguing in National Socialism era Kaiser Wilhelm Institute terms http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/staff/material/schmidt/symposium.html ) their inherent inferiority. He patiently explains that the white father can better provide for the enslaved than they can for themselves. For the increasing tenseness of the issue he blames “abolition-mongers” for inciting slaves to rebellion thus forcing enlightened southern masters to restrict slave attendance at church and otherwise in groups, something, he implies, they would not otherwise do.
He does not make much of the economic arguments that are today cited as important underpinnings for the civil war. In fact, his arguments are more along the social line. The Irish will not take kindly to his view of them as the dregs of Europe though he finds their long term prospects encouraging while finding Black possibilities dim. He advances the case that southern whites didn't invent crappy behavior. They simply inherited and continue it and are now caught with large investments in slaves as northern and European abolitionists relentlessly pressure the United States citizenry to reject this institution while failing to address the significance of a large slave population that, in gaining its freedom, could destabilize the south in both social and economic terms. He was right to be concerned although the moral position was indefensible.
He does not believe that a free black population could support itself or would join to support a white power structure. He believes that southern whites are victims twice: once at the hands of history that has placed slaves in their possession and once at the hands of the abolitionists that place the freeing of the “negro” (his term and capitalization) above property rights and concern for social order. He suggests that the southern investment in slaves is a significant impediment to discussions and one has to wonder if serious negotiations to reimburse slave holders might have resolved one of the practical issues that underpinned southern opposition to ending slavery.
He makes an interesting, if unreliable case, that the “negro” preferred slavery to an unspecified freedom that would force them to develop and use skills that had not been nurtured. But one has only to think of the widely publicized problems that citizens returning from prison today can experience in making their way back into society, to understand that such concerns are not specific to Blacks then or now. By comparison, Blacks faced enormous issues, many if not most of which they were not prepared for. Education, which had sometimes been provided to slaves decades earlier was, by the 1830s, considered dangerous to slaveholders who felt the need to keep their subjugated population ignorant.
Mr. Paulding makes the standard circumstantial arguments for inferior Black mental capability even as he explains that educating slaves has become dangerous because of abolitionist pressure. It seems that some of his principal claims for inferior Black ability stem directly from their unwillingness to accept that slavery is their natural position. He ignores the inherent contradiction.
