Southern Pro Slavery Theory Report

This Mudsill theory claims that there must be, and has always been, a lower class for the upper classes to rest upon. Hammond, also a wealthy southern plantation owner, used this theory to justify what he saw as “the willingness of the non-whites to perform menial work: their labor enabled the higher classes to move civilization forward” (Boundless). In this view, any efforts toward class or racial equality ran counter to this theory, and therefore ran counter to civilization itself. Southern pro-slavery theorists argued that slavery prevented any such attempted movement toward equality by “elevating all free people to the status of citizen and removing the landless poor from the political process entirely” (Boundless). That is, those who