In the book The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of The American People, Volume I, political historian Alan Brinkley highlights a line of reasoning many Southern whites used to justify enslaving African Americans: “The defense of slavery rested, too, on increasingly elaborate arguments about the biological inferiority of African Americans, who were, white Southerners claimed, inherently unfit to take care of themselves, let alone exercise the rights of citizenship.”
In 1829, the state of Georgia established punishments for any enslaved or free black caught teaching another enslaved or free black to read or write. If the defenders of slavery sincerely believed that African Americans were intellectually inferior, then why would that kind of policy be necessary? Ironically, it admits that educated African Americans existed. How else could one enslaved black teach another enslaved black? It was clear that blacks were capable of learning and teaching, which threatened the theory used to justify slavery.
If support for slavery was based on the belief that blacks were incapable of assimilating into civil society, then why didn’t proslavery views immediately come to an end at first sight of examples of civilized, educated blacks before the Civil War? Slavery survived the eloquence of Fredrick Douglass. It nearly survived Sojourner Truth. Supporters of slavery were not persuaded by the intelligence and refinement displayed by many blacks. It could be that the supposed inferiority of blacks was not the basis of slavery in the first place. The inferiority of African Americans was a myth that outlived slavery itself. It outlasted W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The most obvious motive for slavery was not biological. It was financial. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History describes the impact of a popular product of slave labor: “One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth.” Perhaps it was not the belief that blacks were inferior that inspired support for slavery. Perhaps it was support for slavery that inspired the belief that blacks were inferior.
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