Why was slavery bad?

Everyone in today’s America agrees on certain core moral truths.  Including, that slavery was bad and racial prejudice wrong. 

But historians have found zero examples of individuals questioning the morality of slavery before the Quakers began trumpeting bizarre objections to what was a universal practice – it had always been part of human life going back to the ancient Romans and Greeks and, as far as anyone could tell, always would be part of human life.  Historians have scoured the record but just haven’t found anyone before the Quakers thinking, “this is just wrong.”  The people who lived in that climate can't really be blamed for supporting slavery, they were purely a product of their times.  But it’s a different matter entirely once the Enlightenment came along, and radical new notions of individual equality, and the British abolished slavery, and the northern US – and yet Southern plantation owners were still arguing for the practice. 

So just what were the mental or moral errors that supporters of slavery or of racial discrimination (or the culture as a whole if you prefer) made? 

Seems to me there were 3 fundamental errors:

• Selfishness.  The most fundamental error was one of selfishness.  Not a lot to say about that:  You suffer, I benefit, too bad.  Violation of Golden Rule, understandable by 5-year-olds.   Perhaps a better word than error is “sin.” 
• Dehumanization.  Viewing slaves as inferior.  The mistake here is one of looking at people who occupy an inferior, degraded social position, and figuring that that position is a “natural” outgrowth of their essential nature rather than a historical accident.  (Interestingly, the Romans never felt a need to see their slaves as biologically inferior – that racialist ideology only grew up as a defensive reaction to the rise of Enlightenment individualism and the idea that “all men are created equal.” )
• Acceptance of hierarchy.  Most people do not think about the world they inherit, they just accept it as The Way Things Are.  Insofar as they were born into a world where blacks were lower down on the social ladder than themselves, any assertion of rights or equality by blacks was perceived as a outrageous assertion of position that violated the Order of Things.  This is hard to recapture for us liberal atomistic individualists, but think of the anger that you might feel if a brand new young intern in your office tried to boss you around in your area of expertise.  For all you know, the intern is a genius, and is better at what you do than you.  But you don’t keep an open mind to that possibility, you just get angry, “where does he get off telling me what to do?” Chances are you're right – but you're also reacting to a violation of hierarchy and a challenge to your place and your status in it.  That’s how a white Southerner saw assertions of equality by blacks.

Some historians have written of the “wages of whiteness” – how whites benefitted psychically from the sense of superiority these racist systems conferred – and how they paid, dearly, through the exploitation that elites made of those attitudes among whites.

So here’s the really interesting question: who is making these same errors today? 

More anon . . .

Comments

[Joe]

This is a very useful website. It definitely helped my son with his industrial revolution project for his social studies class. Thanks!

[ben webber]

slavery was good

[leupe]

good job

[Alex]

I think Leupe shows us pretty clearly that slavery really wasn't that bad of an idea.