Pro Slavery Argumentative Essay

Yet antebellum women moved towards using the individualism rhetoric to explore women’s roles. As the roles of men and women became radically distinct under the separate spheres philosophy, white women’s roles as homemaker and mother became glorified. They became seen not as naturally dependent on men but equal but different. For example, even moderate Catherine E. Beecher who claimed women had inferior roles because of the “Creator,” compared women to employees to express their freedoms. Reformers like Margaret Fuller also used the separate spheres argument, but Fuller reiterated Emerson’s ideas about individualism, writing “We [women] only ask of men to remove arbitrary barriers…. I believe it needs that woman show herself in her native dignity.” Thus women
The long-term shift from Divine Order to biological and cultural discrimination towards African Americans also used the familial argument. Thomas Jefferson in “Notes of the State of Virginia” secularized the argument of inferiority. He used a pseudoscientific method to prove their biological inferiority, which he claimed made them more suited for agricultural labor, and he alluded famous African American poets and artists use of Western culture to prove their cultural inferiority. He claimed enslaved African Americans had to stay enslaved for their own protection, comparing the situation to a father and child. Antebellum slaveholders also maintained the familial argument to greater extents. For example, William Drayton in “The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists” claimed the abolitionists did not have “manly” argument. Rather, he pointed out the abolitionist, using the philosophy of the self-made man, often ignored poverty among white southerners. This lead to Stephen A. Douglas’s complete rejection of the “divine law,” implying a move toward complete