Quotes About Proslavery

Laws banning the importation and interstate transfer of slaves contributed to the evolution of proslavery doctrine by drawing a line between slave trading and slaveholding. That line originated as a useful fiction written by planters in the upper South during the revolutionary era.

Planters clung to their proslavery beliefs even when there were facts to the contrary because the stakes involved in abandoning them were too high. They could not reject or even compromise their central myths, for to do so would mean condemning a whole culture as a lie...Ideologies, once constructed, have lives of their own. Any evidence which might have contradicted the planters' basic beliefs faced an a priori denial.

Ironically, as Illinois Sen. Richard Yates pointed out, opponents of expansionism employed arguments extremely reminiscent of proslavery ideology, while its supporters upheld the principle that nonwhites could be successfully incorporated into the body politic. (No people, quipped Nevada Sen. James W. Nye, were "too degraded" for citizenship: "We have New Jersey, and all things considered, it has proven a success.")

Most striking, however, was the position taken in the 1840s by William Lloyd Garrison and his wing of the abolitionist movement. The Garrisonians had come to agree completely with the southern view of the Constitution as a proslavery document.5°

Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.

As prominent Baptist historian Walter "Buddy" Shurden has pointed out, it wasn't until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination.

It is manifestly vital to the success of the anti-slavery cause, that the authority and influence of proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers should be destroyed.

The short-lived Confederate States of America was a signal event in the history of the Western world. What secessionists set out to build was something entirely new in the history of nations: a modern proslavery and antidemocratic state, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.

He argued that the general had been sacrificed to appease the proslavery sentiment of the border states and because of Lincoln's constitutional conservatism.

As a final objection to Blair's entreaty, Douglass once again addressed the pernicious effects of colonization, which he saw as proslavery theory in disguise. Douglass insisted that slavery, racism, and future black equality be discussed as a single question, to be settled on American soil within American institutions.

A few months later, Everett followed up with another missive repeating the argument that while this war may not be an abolitionist one on the Union's part due to constitutional restraints, it was a proslavery one on the Confederacy's part.