Many white southerners declared themselves the true heirs of the American Revolution. They claimed to be inspired by “the same spirit of freedom and independence” that motivated the founding generation. Like their ancestors of the 1760s and 1770s, their political language was filled with contrasts between liberty and slavery and complaints that outsiders proposed to reduce them to “slaves” by interfering with their local institutions. Southern state constitutions enshrined the idea of equal rights for free men, and the South participated fully in the movement toward political democracy for whites.
Beginning in the 1830s, however, proslavery writers began to question the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy so widely shared elsewhere in the nation. South Carolina, the only southern state where a majority of white families owned slaves, became the home of an aggressive defense of slavery that repudiated the idea that freedom and equality were universal entitlements. The language of the Declaration of Independence—that all men were created equal and entitled to liberty—was “the most false and dangerous of all political errors,” insisted John C. Calhoun. Proslavery spokesmen returned to the older definition of freedom as a privilege rather than a universal entitlement, a “reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike.”
A plate manufactured in England to celebrate emancipation in the British empire. After a brief period of apprenticeship, the end of slavery came on August 1, 1838. At the center, a family of former slaves celebrates outside their cabin.
As the sectional controversy intensified after 1830, a number of southern writers and politicians came to defend slavery less as the basis of equality for whites than as the foundation of an organic, hierarchical society. Many southern clergymen, in the course of offering a religious defense of slavery, argued that inequality and hence the submission of inferior to superior— black to white, female to male, lower classes to upper classes—was a “fundamental law” of human existence. A hierarchy of “ranks and orders in human society,” insisted John B. Alger, a Presbyterian minister in South Carolina, formed part of the “divine arrangement” of the world.