Now then put the shoe on your foot for a bit. All your life the religious leaders, your preacher (and remember religion played a lot bigger part in life then than it does now esp in the South) had told you with biblical support that slavery was fine. You also know that, with minor exceptions, slaveowners were good people and treated their property well for economic reason if not humanitarian. You also know that the only way, just about, to get into the elite of your society was to somehow acquire land and slaves if you could be so fortunate. All this you "know" and have known since birth.
BCR
It's always a sticky wicket to judge 19th century morality by 21st century standards but.........
The idea of the abolition of slavery was not birthed, fully formed, from the fertile mind of Henry Ward Beecher in the 1860s. [I use him as an example because I lived up the block from his Brooklyn pulpit.] Thomas Paine railed against the institution in pre-Revolution days. By the mid 1800s, it was still controversial, but no longer a new idea. With no basis for my belief (other than the workings of my amazing and wonderful mind), I would submit that a number of slavery's defenders knew it was wrong but there no way out of it without wreaking economic and political ruin upon themselves and their heirs. Kinda like having a tiger by the tail. Further, I would suggest that many people, who had no direct interest in owning slaves, could see the handwriting on the wall and understood that their already difficult economic circumstances would become much worse if they suddenly had to compete with free black labor. Given the demographics of the South, the political implications of free blacks becoming full citizens must have been truly frightening. Jim Crow, please call your office.
Alternatively, I have no doubt that some influential anti-slavery figures were cynically exploiting the issue for political gain. Never underestimate the power of hypocrisy, cynicism, and self interest to drive the course of human events.
It's always fun--if entirely pointless--to speculate about how things would have turned out if events which never occurred had occurred, but.........
If the South had seceeded without a fight, there would have been a war a few years later anyway. The abolitionists were rapidly becoming the opinion elite in the North, and the war would have been more explicitly motivated by punishing the South over the issue (assuming they did not quickly abolish the institution). It wouldn't be any more true that slavery would have been the sole motivation, but it would have been the main rhetorical justification on both sides--regardless of who fired the first shot.
My 2�.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
