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.A “great deal,” Pinckney lamented, “has been said on the subject ofslavery—that it is an infamous stain and blot on the States that hold them, not onlydegrading the slave but the master, and making him unfi t for republican govern-ment; that it is contrary to religion and the law of God; and that Congress ought todo everything in their power to prevent its extension among the new States.” In anarrow compass, Pinckney refuted these criticisms point by point.“Is there a singleline in Old or New Testament, either censuring or forbidding it [slavery]?” Pinckneyasked rhetorically.Jews, Greeks, and Romans, Pinckney contended, had held slavesin the biblical world.Apart from England, the Charlestonian noted, the notion ofliberty languished throughout the early-nineteenth-century world, and the lowerclasses were found “half-starved, half-naked, and in the most wretched state ofhuman degradation.” Even in England, Pinckney contended, “the comforts” of thelower classes “are far inferior to those of our slaves.” In New York and Philadelphia,the South Carolina founder continued, the streets were “crowded with idle, drunkennegroes at every corner,” proving to his mind that “freedom is one of the greatestcurses you can infl ict on [blacks].” By contrast, the aging Charlestonian claimed, inthe plantation South, “every slave has a comfortable house, is well fed clothed andtaken care of; he has his family about him, and in sickness has the same medical aidas his master, and has a sure and comfortable retreat in old age.” The “mild treat-ment” accorded southern slaves, Pinckney maintained, upheld the region’s honor.For“slavery to exist, there must be discipline,” the founder conceded, but the “disciplineought to be mild.” 114202 P A T E R N A L I S MR I S I N GBut not even Pinckney sounded as aggressive a tone as South Carolina’s senatorWilliam Smith, the Upcountry’s redoubtable champion of reopening the Africanslave trade nearly two decades earlier.A York District planter-lawyer approachingsixty years of age in , Smith had emerged as one of the South’s most out-spoken strict constructionists.In a variety of speeches to the Senate during theMissouri controversy, Smith moved, albeit tentatively, away from the assumption,explicit in Richard Johnson’s remarks, that slavery remained a “necessary evil.” 115Smith directed his attention to refuting the famous denunciation of slavery off eredby the young nation’s leading apostle of liberty, Thomas Jefferson.ReversingJefferson’s much-quoted assertion from Notes on the State of Virginia that “the wholecommerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterouspassions,” Smith countered that “the whole commerce between master and slave ispatriarchal.” The paternalistic slave owner, Smith contended, “had no motive” for“boisterous hostility” because such ill will was both “at war with his interest” and“at war with his comfort.” In fact, Smith argued, southern slaves were “so domes-ticated, so kindly treated by their masters,” that southerners worried little aboutinsurrection.Rather than living in a state of “constant alarm” or “constant danger,”Smith maintained, southerners knew that abolitionists could not “excite one amongtwenty [slaves] to insurrection.” Smith contended that most southern slaves were“well fed, well clothed, and supremely happy.” Indeed, Smith claimed that slaveson the whole were so well treated in the South that there was “no class of laboringpeople upon the globe, except in the United States,” that was “better clothed, betterfed, or more cheerful.” Nor, in Smith’s view, did the observation of slavery duringchildhood breed arrogance and despotism in young whites, as Jeff erson feared.Withblack children as “constant associates,” Smith suggested, young whites developed somuch aff ection for young slaves that “in thousands of instances there is nothing butthe shadow of slavery left” when whites and their youthful slave companions reachedadulthood.116Smith’s sweeping contradiction of Jeff erson’s contention that slavery wasunrepublican shocked his northern listeners, who heard the South Carolinian’sremarks, whether accurately or not, as a bold departure from previous southerndefenses of slavery as a necessary evil.Smith certainly never explicitly called slaverya positive good, and his confrontational style may have shaped northern perceptionsof his speeches as much as the substance of his comments did.But even if Smithstopped short of arguing for slavery as a positive good, he nonetheless off ered anaggressive defense of paternalism, of a “patriarchal” commerce between masterand slave, as an ideal and practice that rendered southern slavery compatible withChristianity and republicanism.Smith’s account replaced Jeff erson’s “boisterous pas-sions” with the tender mercies of domesticity.117 A robust application of paternalism,Smith contended, eff ectively meliorated whatever evil rested inherently in slavery.In fact, paternalism meliorated the evils of slavery so eff ectively that often only the“shadow of slavery” remained [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]