In American history, the Fire-Eaters were a group of pro-slavery Democrats in the Antebellum South who urged the separation of Southern states into a new nation, which became the Confederate States of America. The dean of the group was Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina. Some sought to revive America's participation in the Atlantic slave trade, which had been illegal since 1808.
George Fitzhugh was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that the negro "is but a grown up child" who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as practiced by the Northern United States and Great Britain as spawning "a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another", rendering free blacks "far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition." Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized. Nonetheless, some historians consider Fitzhugh’s worldview to be fascist in its rejection of liberal values, defense of slavery, and perspectives toward race.
James Henry Hammond was an attorney, politician and planter from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835-36, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842-44, and United States Senator from 1857-60. He was considered one of the major spokesmen in favor of slavery in the years before the American Civil War.
Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb was an American slave owner, lawyer, author, politician, and Confederate States Army officer, killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg during the American Civil War. He is the brother of noted Confederate statesman Howell Cobb.
Nat Turner's Rebellion was a rebellion of black slaves that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, led by Nat Turner. Fugitive enslaved people killed from 55 to 65 people, at least 51 being white. The rebellion was put down within a few days, but Turner survived in hiding for more than two months afterwards. The rebellion was effectively suppressed at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, 1831.
Proslavery is an ideology that perceives slavery as a positive good.
Samuel Adolphus Cartwright was a physician who practiced in Mississippi and Louisiana in the antebellum United States. Cartwright is best known as the inventor of the 'mental illness' of drapetomania, the desire of a slave for freedom, and an outspoken critic of germ theory. During the American Civil War he joined the Confederate States of America and was assigned the responsibility of improving sanitary conditions in the camps about Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana.
William Goodell was an abolitionist and reformer born in Coventry, New York on October 3, 1792.
Albert Taylor Bledsoe was an American Episcopal priest, attorney, professor of mathematics, and officer in the Confederate army and was best known as a staunch defender of slavery and, after the South lost the American Civil War, an architect of the Lost Cause. He was the author of Liberty and Slavery (1856), "the most extensive philosophical treatment of slavery ever produced by a Southern academic", which defended slavery laws as ensuring proper societal order.
Adam Empie was an Episcopal priest in North Carolina and Virginia, who also taught and served as President of the College of William and Mary.
Thomas Ruffin Gray was an attorney who represented several enslaved people during the trials in the wake of Nat Turner's slave rebellion.
Nathaniel Beverley Tucker was an American author, judge, legal scholar, and political essayist.
Henry Ruffner, was an educator and Presbyterian minister, who served as president of Washington College. Although a slaveholder, Ruffner became known for criticizing slavery as impeding Virginia's economic development before the American Civil War, although that controversial position caused him to resign his college presidency and retire to his farm.
William H. Brodnax, was a nineteenth-century American militia Brigadier General and American politician from Virginia.
James Strange French (1807-1886) was a lawyer, novelist, and later hotel keeper.
Abolitionism in the United States was the movement which sought to end slavery in the United States and American involvement in the slave trade immediately, being active both before and during the American Civil War. In the Americas and western Europe, abolitionism was a movement which sought to end the transatlantic slave trade and set the enslaved free. In the 18th century, enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and Quakers and some Evangelical denominations condemned slavery as un-Christian. At that time, most slaves were Africans, but thousands of Native Americans were also enslaved. In the 18th century, as many as six million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them on slave ships bound for North America, including the Thirteen Colonies. The colony of Georgia originally prohibited slavery, before reversing the prohibition.
Jesse Burton Harrison (1805–1841) was an American anti-slavery lawyer and author.
Charles B. Dew (1937) is an American author and historian, specializing in the history of the Southern United States and the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era. He has published three books, one of which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is the Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College.
Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of White Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to a "necessary evil." They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North. Proponents of enslavement as "a good — a great good" often attacked the system of industrial capitalism, contending that the free laborer in the North was as much enslaved by capitalist owners as were the African people enslaved by Whites in the South.
William Andrew Smith (1802–1870) was an American college president and clergyman.
