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How Supporters of Slavery Used Legal, Religious, and Economic Arguments to Defend the Institution

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How Supporters of Slavery Used Legal, Religious, and Economic Arguments to Defend the Institution
Throughout the history of the United States, there have always been conflicts between the North and the South. Basically throughout the 1900s, the North and South acted somewhat childishly towards each other about different topics. As the North became more industrialized and self sufficient, the South stayed behind and depended heavily on other countries for manufactured goods in exchange for cotton. The North felt superior to the South, and the South was not pleased about that. Although most Northerners didn 't care much for slavery, there were handfuls that were abolitionists and attacked the South on their "backwards" economy that depended on slavery . In the South, not everyone was a slaveholder as one may think; there were actually more non slaveholders than slaveholders simply because slaves were expensive "property that only the wealthier Southerners could afford. Although many Southerners didn 't own slaves, they still did not attack the institution of slavery. Why? The answer is simple, many non-slaveholders hoped to become slaveholders one day. They also accepted the racist ways on which slavery was based. Both Southern slaveholders and non-slaveholders didn 't like the idea of emancipation simply because they feared that blacks might believe themselves equal with whites and back then, that seemed ridiculous . They concluded that emancipation would cause a race war and were therefore against any sort of abolition of slavery . This is why the supporters of slavery used legal, religious, and economic-2-arguments to defend the institution, they were simply accustomed to the lifestyle slavery provided for them and they weren 't going to let it go without a fight.

The supporters of slavery knew how to defend the institution well, especially when it came to legal rights. How could they protect the institution of slavery in their favor while using something that was common ground with the North as well? Southerners used the common ground of the constitution and


Bibliography: .Eaton, Clement. The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 . 19612.Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. 19973.Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. 19934.Information on South Search (Google). Online, Internet at http://docsouth.unc.edu/browse/subject/c.html5.Boyer, Clark, Kett, Salisbury, Sitkoff, Woloch. The Enduring Vision. Houghton-Mifflin. 2004. 6.Dred Scott Case Search (Yahoo). Online, Internet at http://library.wustl.edu/vlib/dredscott/7.The Fifth Amendment Search (Google). Online, Internet at http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html8.Wage Slavery Search (Dictionary). Online, Internet at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/wage%20slavery
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