"Everyone was OK with slavery back then"

Someone said, "Everyone was OK with slavery back then."

Where This Comes Up

Most of the time, you hear this from someone apologizing for a slaveholding ancestor. This argument also comes up in defense of Confederate monuments, sometimes with the extrapolation that the United States would lose most of our material culture from before the Civil War if there was a total rejection of contributions of enslavers, e.g., "We might as well tear down the White House if we are getting rid of everything having to do with slaves."

When This Started

This is an outgrowth of the Lost Cause mythos which started forming during the Civil War. According to the Lost Cause, slavery wasn't that big of a deal. If anything, it was an overall good that was occasionally abused by people who would abuse their power anywhere. Since slavery was such a benign institution, no one paid it much mind. As more generations separate the present from the Civil War, "we were OK with it" becomes "they were ok with it."

What Part is True

Legalized slavery was more accepted before the Civil War as evidenced by how many people practiced it.

Why It's Complicated

• Enslaved people were, generally speaking, not OK with it.
• Prominent American abolitionists pre-date the Constitution.
• Some people didn't want slavery because it is immoral.
• Some people didn't want slavery because it competed with the white labor market.
• Some people wanted to send anyone of African descent "back" to Africa.
• Some people didn't want slavery because they didn't want Black people as part of white society at all.
• Some people didn't want slavery because they hated the elite planter class it created.

Who Talked About It

"If we allow slaves we act against the very principles by which we associated together, which was to relieve the distresses. Whereas, now we should occasion the misery of thousands in Africa, by setting men upon using arts to buy and bring into perpetual slavery the poor people who now live there free."

James Oglethorpe, 1st Governor of Georgia, 1739

"Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him."

Frederick Douglass, "What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?" 1852

Click Here to read "What, to the slave, is your Fourth of July?" in full (starts on bottom half, column 4, page 2)

Click Here to browse issues of The Liberator, an abolitionist paper based out of Boston from 1831-1865.