People often think that slavery was always good for the slave owners in that it provided them with a pool of cheap labour. For instance, when the proslavery advocate read the word slave in a particular verse, the abolitionist insisted on the word servant. Jefferson had destroyed political traditions. always been upon moral grounds. The other form of rebuttal to southerners' biblically based arguments occurred when some abolitionists shifted their morally based arguments away from Scripture to appeals to the human conscience. The Liberator's editor was not the only voice among the abolitionists, and many others in the movement spoke as resolutely or nearly as inexorably as Garrison did. In the latter passage Joshua and the Israelites turn the Gibeonites into their slaves. Torn between the economic benefits of slavery and the moral and constitutional issues it raised, white southerners grew more and more defensive of the institution. Gale Library of Daily Life: Slavery in America. The appeal of the theory to some southerners was that it assigns blacks to be genetically inferior to whites. The advantage that the southern apologists had over the abolitionists in using Scripture is that while slavery is mentioned numerous times in the Bible, the references do not censure the institution. The final decade before the Civil War witnessed an ever-expanding antislavery sentiment in the North. The Civil War was about slavery, but it wasn’t “just about slavery”. Abolitionists contrasted such sins with "the pure ideals of Yankee evangelicalism" that imbued the households of true Christians, most definitely their own, in the North (Stewart 1976, p. 41). In the southern system the role of the church was to instruct each party in the ways that it should fulfill its obligations. Boston: Thomson and Wadsworth, 2008 (upcoming). On this subject, I do not wish to think, to speak, or write with moderation" (Hyser and Arndt 2008 [upcoming], p. 186). Moreover, other northerners eventually accepted the abolitionists' dedicated stance for the rights of slaves as constituting a defense for the rights of white citizens in the country against the aggressiveness of pro-slavery southerners. The latter, which is discussed at the end of the article, contributed to the antislavery argument. . It was the effectiveness of the abolitionists' campaign for immediate emancipation, in both its content and the manner of its presentation, that incited the various southern responses, including the pro-slavery moral arguments. Escaped from slavery to become one of the most Carson, Clayborne; Emma Lapansky-Werner; and Gary B. Nash. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Even more decisive for the pro-slavery apologists were the passages in Leviticus 25:44-46 and Joshua 9:27. Slavery was only being gradually abolished in the North when the Constitution was ratified. Top Tag’s. Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by the threat of violence or some other method of abuse. Although, during the thirty years from the first issue of the Liberator in January 1831 to the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, the abolitionists had failed to convince a majority in the North to join their crusade, they did have two notable achievements. We believe in absolute moral objectivity. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976. The African slave trade began in the 1200s. moral issue of slavery Essay Examples. They are treated as animals and not as humans. Newspaper publisher and abolitionist promin…, In colonial North America, the nonviolent Society of Friends stood almost alone in condemning slavery, which has led to the common misperception that…, Horace Greeley Slavery can broadly be described as the ownership, buying and selling of human beings. Unerground. Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moral slavery can be defined as the morality issue that was deemed to exist between a slave and the master. No longer do we read of Divine Revelation. The editor of the Liberator was William ? In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Secondly, as James Brewer Stewart notes in his book, while the abolitionists did not become popular and their cause of immediate emancipation that led to universal brotherhood was not nationally adopted, their strong stance against repression made them martyrs of their cause. Northerners were not … As John Ashworth (1995) notes in his study of slavery during the antebellum period, the moral arguments of the abolitionists should be taken seriously, but they should also be understood within a particular socioeconomic context. 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