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1074 An American Dilemma
instance of the Patriarch Abraham. His wives and his children, his men servants and his
maid servants, his camels and his cattle, were all equally his property. He could sacrifice
Isaac or a ram, just as he pleased. He loved and protected all, and all shared, if not
equally, at least fairly, in the products of their light labour. Who would not desire to
have been a slave of that old Patriarch, stern and despotic as he was? . , . Pride, affection,
self-interest, moved Abraham to protect, love and take care of his slaves. The same
motives operate on all masters, and secure comfort, competency and protection to the
slave. A man’s wife and children are his slaves, and do they not enjoy, in common with
himself, his property?*
Other protagonists of slavery resort to the some argument:
In this country we believe that the general good requires us to deprive the whole
female sex of the right of self-government. They have no voice in the formation of the
laws which dispose of their persons and property. . . . We treat all minors much in the
same way. . . . Our plea for all this is, that the good of the whole is thereby most effectu-
ally promoted. . .
.**
Significant manifestations of the result of this disposition [on the part of the Abolition-
ists] to consider their own light a surer guide than the word of God, are visible in the
anarchical opinions about human governments, civil and ecclesiastical, and on the rights
of women, which have found appropriate advocates in the abolition publications. ... If
our women are to be emancipated from subjection to the law which God has imposed
upon them, if they are to quit the retirement of domestic life, where they preside in stillness
over the character and destiny of society j ... if, in studied insult to the authority of God,
we are to renounce in the marriage contract all claim to obedience, we shall soon have a
country over which the genius of Mary Wolstonecraft would delight to preside, but from
which all order and all virtue would speedily be banished. There is no form of human
excellence before which we bow with profounder deference than that which appears in a
delicate woman, . . . and there is no deformity of human character from which we turn
with deeper loathing than from a woman forgetful of her nature, and clamourous for the
vocation and rights of men.*
. . . Hence her [Miss Martineau’s] wild chapter about the “Rights of Women,” her
groans and invectives because of their exclusion from the offices of the state, the right of
suffrage, the exercise of political authority. In all this, the error of the declaimer consists
in the very first movement of the mind. “The Rights of Women*^ may all be conceded to
the sex, yet the rights of men withheld from them.**
The parallel goes, however, considerably deeper than being only a structural part in
the defense ideology built up around slavery. Women at that time lacked a number of
rights otherwise belonging to all free white citizens of full age.
So chivalrous, indeed, was the ante-bellum South that its women were granted scarcely
any rights at all. Everywhere they were subjected to political, legal, educational, and
social and economic restrictions. They took no part in governmental affairs, were without
• Ibid.f p, a97.
**
Charles Hodge, “The Bible Argument on Slavery,” in E. N. Elliott (editor), Cotton
Is King, and Pro-SUmery Arguments (i860), pp. 859-860.
* Albert T. Bledsoe, An Essay on Liberty and Slavery (1857), pp. 223-225.
*W. Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” in The Pro-Slavery Argument (1853),
p. 248. See also Simms* “Address on the Occasion of the Inauguration of the Spartanburg
Female College,” August 12, 1855.
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