Nat Turner was an enslaved African-American preacher who led a four-day rebellion of both enslaved and free black people in Southampton County, Virginia, beginning August 21, 1831. The rebellion caused the death of approximately 60 white men, women, and children. Whites organized militias and called out regular troops to suppress the uprising. In addition, white militias and mobs attacked blacks in the area, killing an estimated 200 men, women, and children, many of whom were not involved in the revolt.
In American history, the Fire-Eaters were a group of pro-slavery Southern 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.
Edmund Ruffin was a wealthy Virginia planter and slaveholder. In the last three decades before the Civil War, his pro-slavery writings received more attention than his agricultural work. Ruffin staunchly advocated states' rights and slavery, arguing for secession years before the American Civil War and became a political activist with the so-called Fire-Eaters. Ruffin is given credit for "firing the first shot of the war" at the Battle of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and fought as a Confederate soldier despite his advanced age. When the war ended in Southern defeat in 1865, he committed suicide rather than submit to "Yankee rule."
James Henry Hammond was an attorney, politician and planter from South Carolina. He served as a United States Representative from 1835 to 1836, the 60th Governor of South Carolina from 1842 to 1844, and United States Senator from 1857 to 1860. 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 slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, led by Nat Turner. Rebel slaves 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.
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 of America was the movement which sought to end slavery in the United States immediately, active both before and during the American Civil War. In the Americas and western Europe, abolitionism was a movement which sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and set slaves free. In the 17th century, enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and English 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 British ships to North America. The colony of Georgia originally prohibited slavery.
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 Southern politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War. They defended slavery 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 slavery as “a good — a great good" often attacked the system of industrial capitalism, contending that the free laborer in the North was as much a slave to capitalist owners as were the Negro slaves to slaveholders in the South.
