The pro-slavery Americans used various methods to justify slavery in a nation where “all men are created equal” and among them is the religious justification. The pro-slavery Americans used numerous documents from the Antebellum era that outlined the reasons God supported the use of African Americans as slaves. Similar to Abraham servants, these records claimed that Africans were brought to America to fulfill a divine purpose of promoting the growth of Christianity. Therefore, the Americans had a right to overwork Africans to death in an attempt to prepare them for their missionary role of teaching their societies ways of Christianity.
They employed the North Carolina law of the year 1831 that forbid teaching slaves the arts of reading and writing. According to this law, slaves were used even in the ancient civilizations hence proving that they were subordinate to the Whites (Hoffman, 2012). Therefore, the white people from the south were afraid that once the slaves could read and write, they would start disobeying or run away. Besides, the growing abolitionist movement and the constant slaves’ revolts proved the need to abolish slave education. This method was used to control the slaves by making them believe that they did not have any rights.
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Additionally, the pro-slavery Americans used the Samuel Cartwright document to justify slavery and the notion that all men are equal. Samuel Cartwright was a southern doctor who studied the peculiar disease of the African Americans who were commonly used as slaves. According to him, it is the creator’s will to control slaves and be cruel to all ‘negroes.’ The reason is that God created them to be submissive or knee-benders due to their physical structure. Besides, the peculiar diseases of the African Americans proved that God wanted them to be punished since they were lesser beings. Hence, the pro-slavery Americans argued that slaves had no legal rights as humans.
References
Hoffman, E. C. (2012). Major problems in American history: Documents and essays . Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
