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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 2. The Ideological Clash in America
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86 An American Dilemma
definitely in motion. In the North where it was most unprofitable, slavery
was abolished in state after state during this revolutionary era. Also South-
ern states took certain legislative steps against slave trade and relaxed
their slave codes and their laws on manumission. It is probable that the
majority of Americans considered Negro slavery to be doomed. But in
the South the slaves represented an enormous investment to the slave
owners, and the agricultural economy was largely founded on slave labor.
When the G)nstitution was written, slavery had to be taken as an economic
and political fact. It is, however, indicative of the moral situation in
America at that time that the words "slave” and "slavery” were avoided.
"Somehow,” reflects Kelly Miller, "the fathers and fashioners of this basic
document of liberty hoped that the reprobated institution would in time
pass away when there should be no verbal survival as a memorial of its
previous existence.”®
In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the Abolitionist move-
ment was as strong in the South as in the North, if not stronger. A most
fateful economic factor had, however, entered into the historical develop-
ment, and it .profoundly changed the complexion of the issue. Several
inventions in the process of cotton manufacture, and principally Eli Whit-
ney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1794, transformed Southern agricul-
ture. Increased cotton production and its profitability gave impetus to a
southward and westward migration from the old liberal Upper South, and
raised the prices of slaves which had previously been declining.®
In explaining the ensuing ideological reaction in the South we must not
forget, however, that the revolutionary movement, typified by the Declara-
tion of Independence, represented a considerable over-exertion of American
liberalism generally, and that by the time of the writing of the Constitution
a reaction was on its way. In Europe after the Napoleonic Wars a reaction
set in, visible in all countries and in all fields of culture. The North
released itself rather completely from the influences of the European
reaction. The South, on the contrary, imbibed it and continued on an
accentuated political and cultural reaction even when the European move-
ment had turned again toward liberalism. Around the 1830’s, the pro-
slavery sentiment in the South began to stiffen. During the three decades
leading up to the Civil War, an elaborate ideology developed in defense
of slavery. This Southern ideology was contrary to the democratic creed
ot the Old Virginia statesmen ot the American Revolution.
The pro-slavery theory ot the ante-bellum South is basic to certain ideas,
attitudes, and policies prevalent in all fields of human relations even at the
present time.^ The central theme in the Southern theory is the moral and
political dictum that slavery did not violate the “higher law,” that it was
* See Chapters 10, 20, 2^ ai^d
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