The southern response to British abolitionism: the maturation of proslavery apologetics.

ON JULY 4, 1833, JAMES HENRY HAMMOND DELIVERED AN ORATION FOR his future constituency in Barnwell, South Carolina. An ambitious young planter who had been a key player in the nullification movement earlier that year, Hammond represented a generation of white southerners who redefined the proslavery ideology that buttressed southerners against northern criticism in the years before secession. Like all Fourth of July orators, Hammond directed blistering criticism toward the British, whose tyranny had justified the American war for independence celebrated on that day. But Hammond went beyond the usual evocations of the distant abuses of 1776, proclaiming that the crimes of oppression to be tallied against the British had not ceased with the independence of the United States or even the War of 1812. Hammond informed his audience that a recent bill passed by the British parliament reduced the people of Ireland to an "absolute & unmitigated slavery" that undermined British claims to represent "freedom." To illuminate the oppression of the Irish, Hammond drew a comparison between the "slavery" of the Irish and that of southern slaves. Unlike the Irish, southern slaves had the right to "respectable" courts, and the British enacted curfews, which southern slaveholders had supposedly never done. The British still played the role of imperial oppressor by imposing a tyranny that contrasted sharply with the benevolent governance that Hammond claimed southerners exercised over their slaves. (1)

Hammond's portrayal of Britain as the brutal enslaver of the Irish hinted at one of the most important planks of the emerging proslavery argument: the contrast between the oppression imposed upon free white laborers and the alleged ease of life enjoyed by southern slaves. (2) The modern proslavery argument began to evolve when the spread of antislavery thought challenged slavery's moral legitimacy. Important justifications of slavery appeared in the late eighteenth century, and congressional debates on the statehood of Missouri in 1819 combined with the threat of insurrection in Charleston in 1822 to draw forth even sterner defenses of slavery in the 1820s. (3) But the 1830s marked a critical period when southern spokesmen made bold elaborations on the proslavery argument. During this decade the southern position on slavery shifted from defensive rationalizations to bold assertions that slavery had a positive influence upon society. (4) While not yet at the extreme of advocating that other societies adopt slavery as the best mode of ordering labor in a capitalist economy (as George Fitzhugh would recommend in the 1850s), southern theorists nonetheless argued that slavery had a positive value for southern society and that the alternatives of abolition or colonization were simply unthinkable. (5)

The catalysts usually posited for this transition to an unflinching proslavery rhetoric are the nullification movement in South Carolina and the emancipation debates in the Virginia legislature that followed Nat Turner's leadership of a slave rebellion in 1831. The Virginia debates broke the "seal" on southern discussion of the abolition of slavery and resulted in Thomas R. Dew's widely influential Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (Richmond, 1832). Nullifiers had claimed that South Carolina could declare federal tariff legislation unconstitutional, but in March 1833 the state legislature compromised with President Andrew Jackson (after Congress approved the Force Bill authorizing Jackson to use the U.S. military against South Carolina). Historians have recognized the nullifiers' challenge to the authority of the federal government as a move to preempt the influence of abolitionists in Congress. (6) But most historians of the South have neglected the critical importance of Britain's abolition of colonial slavery in 1833, an act that emboldened American abolitionists in the North and left the southern states as the last slaveholding region in the Anglo-Atlantic world. This essay argues that the rise of British abolitionism, crowned by Parliament's abolition of West Indian slavery in August 1833, played a critical role in mobilizing southern thinkers to formulate an ever-bolder argument that alleged black slavery to be a humane and modern institution. (7)

Hammond's implicit defense of southern slavery on the Fourth of July in 1833 indicated the everyday significance of British abolition to white southerners. For at least a year before Hammond's speech any American who read newspapers would have learned that Britain was seriously considering the abolition of slavery in its West Indian colonies. The abolition debates in Parliament received extensive coverage, especially in South Carolina, and the connections between British abolitionists and the nascent American movement were well known. (8) In August 1833 a series of essays entitled "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery" appeared in the Charleston Mercury under the pseudonym Pliny. In a reasoned, benevolent tone the essays asserted the moral superiority of southern slavery through a learned triangulation between transatlantic points. On the one hand, the brutality of Britain's "manufacturing system" revealed the hypocrisy of British reform, while on the other, the harshness of slavery in the British West Indies demonstrated that, by comparison, southern slavery was singularly humane. Pliny's essays appeared as the culmination of a news cycle in which the Mercury had closely followed the debates in the British parliament on the abolition of colonial slavery. The Mercury intended the essays to be its final comment on what the paper regarded as Britain's fanaticism, stating quite plainly that Britain's act was no precedent for the southern United States. (9)

While it seems impossible to determine the identity of Pliny, the pseudonymous allusion to the Roman historians and the essays' many references to contemporary thinkers and British and American periodicals provide clues to this writer's social and educational background. Pliny cited Blackstone, Gibbon, Hume, Malthus, and contemporary histories of South Carolina, as well as the Edinburgh Review and the Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register. Such broad learning indicates a privileged social background and a classical education, perhaps abroad or in the North. Pliny's focus on the British abolitionists and his use of contemporary newspapers point to an engagement with the contemporary events of the Atlantic world. He was of the planting class, probably from South Carolina. (10)

South Carolina had deep connections to the British West Indies beginning in the colonial period when planter-migrants from Barbados brought African slaves and the plantation system from the island to the mainland in the 1660s and 1670s. (11) Antebellum histories of South Carolina recognized the state's historic links to the Caribbean, and Carolina newspapers frequently reported and commented on West Indian news. (12) As the state tried to diversify its economy in the nineteenth century, the West Indies provided an important market for South Carolina's rice, corn, and wheat, and the Mercury carried regular reports on the state of the markets in the West Indies. (13) But the most important connection between South Carolina and the British West Indian colonies was the centrality of African slavery to their social and economic systems. (14) South Carolina was the only colony, and later state, on the North American mainland where slave density neared that of the British West Indies. The slave population of the West Indies in 1830 averaged about 80 percent of the whole. In South Carolina blacks accounted for 56 percent of the population in 1830, but in the coastal, rice-producing counties, whites were a West Indian-like minority. In Georgetown County, for example, blacks exceeded 90 percent of the population. This fertile region produced valuable rice and cultivated the South Carolinian aristocracy that later spread into the upcountry and dominated the state's politics until the Civil War. When Carolinians looked to the West Indies, they saw a society that resembled their own. (15)

Pliny was not the first pseudonymous author to use the pages of the Mercury to expound on the dangers of British abolitionism in the West Indies. In 1827 the Lowcountry planter Robert J. Turnbull penned a series of essays entitled "The Crisis" under the pseudonym Brutus. (16) Turnbull compared the colonial relationship between the British West Indies and the Parliament in Britain to the relationship between the southern states and the federal government. In 1827 the crisis faced by the West Indian planter class seemed dire when compared to that of the southern states, which enjoyed relative peace. Several years after Britain ended the legal slave trade at the beginning of 1808, British abolitionists revived their efforts against slavery and its abuses, and in 1815 Parliament considered the controversial Registry Bill, which would have required all slaveholders to register their slaves in an attempt to curtail illegal importations from Africa. In 1823 Parliament tried to force the colonial legislatures to pass a series of measures intended to ameliorate colonial slavery (forbidding the whipping of slave women, for example), laws that gradually eroded the power of the slaveholder. Slave rebellions followed both parliamentary actions, and West Indians were quick to link the rebellions to the abolitionist agitation in Parliament. (17) Southerners knew about these abolitionist-inspired (as they believed) rebellions in the West Indies, and it was for precisely this reason that Turnbull addressed the South at that moment--when the rise of antislavery sentiment in the North had only begun to pose a similar threat. (18)

The transatlantic nature of abolitionism demanded that the South pay attention to the West Indies. Turnbull saw great danger in the parallels between the Colonization Society in the United States and the abolitionist movement in Britain. He argued that British abolitionists had been "even more cautious" than their American counterparts when they first called for the abolition of the slave trade. They had concealed their true motives in those early years and eventually called for the abolition of slavery itself. Turnbull accused the Colonization Society of the same tactics and exhorted the South not to stand for it. He reminded the South that "WE have the POWER" to halt the federal government before the Colonization Society could become an abolition society. The southern states were not "weak colonists," Turnbull wrote; they were "Sovereign and Independent States" who did not have to yield to any authority that threatened their interests. But if southern leaders were "patient and submissive before Congress," he warned, white southerners would soon resemble "the weak, the dependant, and the unfortunate colonists of the West-Indies." (19) Turnbull focused the attention of the South on the crisis that faced West Indian planters; when those events reached a climax in 1833, Pliny heeded Turnbull's warning and crafted a learned defense of southern slavery.

The pseudonym invoked the Roman historians Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger. Since the American Revolution, Roman figures had been popular noms de plume for American propagandists who imagined their world through a classical lens. (20) In his discussion of William Gilmore Simms's extensive use of pseudonyms, bibliographer James E. Kibler Jr. has noted that nineteenth-century authors did not always use pseudonyms to hide their identities but instead sometimes employed a pseudonym that enhanced the message of their writing. (21) As Turnbull evoked Brutus to remind his readers of the murderous potential of the federal government, Pliny probably drew inspiration from the reputations of both Roman scholars. Pliny the Elder was best known for his Natural History, which continued to influence European scientific thought into the seventeenth century. Drawn from a range of scientific works, the Natural History earned for the Elder a reputation as a great synthesist. Pliny the Younger was a nephew of the Elder, who helped to raise and educate him. The Younger was known through his published letters for astute analyses of the societies and politics of the Roman Empire. Pliny the Carolinian acted in the tradition of both his namesakes. Like the Younger, his essays commented on the societies of the Anglo-Atlantic world and the political trends that threatened his southern way of life. And like Pliny the Elder, his work synthesized a broad array of established knowledge to explain (and justify) the system upon which he and his class depended. (22)

Pliny's audience was the white merchant and planter class of the South and probably beyond, as newspapers were widely disseminated through the mail. (23) Donald M. Scott has argued that the press in the early nineteenth century played a critical role in "nationalizing" the young republic. (24) Even though regional interests and cultures formed nascent sectional identities, newspapers borrowed freely from one another, transcending sectional divisions that became powerfully divisive only in later decades. Pliny sought to reach a national audience through the newspapers. By adopting a philanthropic voice that resonated with the morality that pervaded the nation after the second great awakening, Pliny tapped into some of the same moral sentiments as abolitionists. (25) The essays sought to forge a national consensus on slavery and abolition, one assured of the moral worth of southern slavery.

The intent to reach a national audience can also be seen in the precedents that existed for Pliny's approach to his discourse on slavery's good. Robert Walsh Jr., for example, had made an argument remarkably similar to that of Pliny in his An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America, first published in 1819. Walsh's book was part of a transatlantic editorial dispute that expressed the antagonistic nationalisms of the Anglophone powers after the War of 1812. While the development of proslavery thought was not his primary intent, Walsh argued that "American negro slavery is almost wholly free from two of the grievances which characterize that of the West Indies--under-feeding and over-working." Foreshadowing the use of Malthus in proslavery arguments to come, Walsh asserted that the "irresistible proof" of the superior benevolence of American slavery lay in the census data of the young republic, which revealed that the American slave population had doubled in about twenty-six years. This he compared to Britain's own rate of population increase, which did "not double in less than eighty years." To embellish his assertions, Walsh made the oft-repeated argument that American slaves were given more meat than free laborers in Europe and that, to the shame of British elites, meat was not "attainable at all for the poorer classes of Great Britain and Ireland." Walsh went on to claim that American slavery would eventually be abolished, as southern leaders were "well aware of its pestilent genius." Walsh erred in this prediction, but his defense of the United States against the "calumnies" of British editors reveals an important lineament of the proslavery argument that would flourish when Britain, not the United States, abolished slavery. (26)

Understanding Pliny's context also requires another look at Thomas R. Dew's Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature. Dew's contemporaries and several generations of historians have recognized the importance of his essay, which Drew Gilpin Faust has called "the inaugural effort in the post-1830 proslavery movement." (27) Dew's essay first appeared in part in the American Quarterly Review of September 1832, nearly a year before the first essay in the "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery" series. Pliny wrote that he enjoyed Dew's essay and in his own argument followed some of the same lines as Dew's, such as citations of Malthus and repeated comparisons with the British. But their arguments possessed essential differences, and Pliny asserted that his series had been written "some time ago," before he had read Dew's work. (28)

Thomas Dew was a professor of political law at the University of Virginia when Nat Turner's band of rebels struck terror in the hearts of slaveholders throughout the South in 1831. Most whites believed that slave rebellions happened in other slave societies such as the West Indies--not in the United States. While it was true that far-ranging conspiracies had alarmed both Virginia and South Carolina in 1800 and 1822, respectively, few innocent whites had been killed in the relatively small revolts that peppered the history of the North American mainland since the earliest days of slavery. Nat Turner changed everything. (29) The antislavery sentiment of the revolutionary period had never fully diminished in Virginia, especially among nonslaveholders from the western portion of the state. The revolt at Southampton fired this sentiment, and western representatives such as William Henry Broadnax of Dinwiddie County were emboldened to propose plans for the gradual abolition of slavery in Virginia. (30) Men such as Broadnax were the "abolitionists in the Virginia legislature" to whom Dew addressed the arguments of his essay. Professor Dew devoted most of his attention to demonstrating the impracticality of the emancipation schemes and the colonization project; less than a third of his argument dealt with an abstract treatment of slavery itself. (31)

Unlike the fiery rhetoric of later proslavery spokesmen such as James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh, Dew employed a "pragmatic tone," gently admonishing antislavery Virginians for overreacting to the insurrection. (32) While many southerners linked Turner to the rise of William Lloyd Garrison and abolitionism in the North, Dew rarely mentioned "northern philanthropists" and then not as antagonists, but in support of his assertion of the impossibility of "emancipation without removal." (33) Dew interpreted Turner as an anomaly, "a demented fanatic, [who] was under the impression that heaven had enjoined him to liberate the blacks, and had made its manifestations by loud noises in the air, an eclipse, and by the greenness of the sun." Dew argued that the average American slave had nothing in common with Turner but instead had "imbibed the principles, the sentiments, and feelings of the white; in one word, he is civilized...." This alleged exceptionalism of the American black also answered those who raised the spectre of Haiti. Dew admitted that "Savages and Koromantyn slaves can commit such deeds" and posited that the revolution in Saint Domingue had been caused by such a population. Dew pointed out that during the decade before the Haitian revolution "more than 200,000 negroes were imported into the island from Africa." Dew further asserted that these slaves were predominantly "Koromantyn" and claimed that the demographic situation in Saint Domingue, combined with the rebellious tendency of "Koromantyn" slaves, had been key factors in the insurrection. By casting Turner as an exception and by explaining Haiti with a calm rationality, Dew hoped to allay concern among his fellow Virginians who felt threatened by the continuation of slavery. (34)

To further defuse antislavery arguments, Dew sought to enlist the conservatism of Britain on the question of abolition. On the second page of his essay as it first appeared in the American Quarterly Review, Dew pointed out that even "The Parliament of Great Britain, with all its philanthropic zeal ... has never yet seriously agitated this question, in regard to the West India possessions." (35) Later in the essay he quoted George Canning, who had been prime minister in 1823 when British abolitionists began to advocate amelioration and gradual emancipation. Canning opposed abolition and in debate had likened the prospect of freeing the slaves to the disastrous experiment of Mary W. Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. Dew quoted Canning at length: "In dealing with a negro we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance...." (36) By comparing the proposals of Virginia's abolitionists with the imaginary creation of a female British novelist, Dew attempted to undermine any credibility these men may have enjoyed in the patriarchal society of the Old South. And by quoting Canning, Dew invoked the steadiness of British conservatism, which had held firm in the face of the excesses of the French Revolution and was not likely to succumb to fanatical abolitionism. Dew shared Pliny's transatlantic awareness, but he was out of touch. Less than a year after Dew published his essay, Britain was convulsed with abolitionist agitation that resulted in the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. The Charleston Mercury covered these debates with rapt attention and responded with Pliny's "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery." Pliny offered a timely and unique formulation of the proslavery argument that was grounded in South Carolina's peculiar sensitivity to abolition in the British West Indies and carefully designed for a national audience.

In early August 1833, when Pliny's essays began to appear, Charleston readers had already grown accustomed to opening the pages of the daily newspaper with a twinge of anxious curiosity. The quarrels with the federal government over nullification still echoed through the state, and indignant anti-Jackson editorials still occasionally appeared. In March and April of the previous year, readers had learned of a slave rebellion in Jamaica that had destroyed some two hundred plantations and threatened to spread to other islands. Jamaican whites immediately blamed evangelical missionaries for the rebellion, and some were arrested. White mobs tarred and feathered one of the missionaries and destroyed several chapels. According to William Birney, the rebellion in Jamaica created a "general panic" throughout the South. While the Mercury barely noticed the rebellion, newspapers with national circulation such as the Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register and denominational papers such as the Boston Christian Watchman and the New York Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion's Herald discussed the rebellion and its aftermath somewhat more extensively. (37) Niles blended news of the rebellion with pointed jabs at the nullifiers, commenting that "the prosperity of the British West India islands has been nullified" by the government in England. The Baltimore editor also believed that the insurrection in Jamaica heralded "a general 'nullification"' of slavery in the Caribbean and predicted that "a black belt" would soon extend from Cuba to Trinidad. (38) By July 1833 West Indian planters lived under a serious threat as Parliament was on the brink of abolishing slavery in the Caribbean. The Mercury could not help but stray from its traditional policy of paying little attention to abolitionist agitation. Indeed, perhaps it was precisely the time to draw attention to abolitionism and its effects, to make the rest of the South recognize that slavery was endangered. Turnbull's crisis was at hand.

On July 6, 1833, the Mercury revealed Turnbull's lasting influence by reprinting a news item on British abolition with editorial comment under the heading "SLAVERY.--WEST INDIES. STATE RIGHTS." The piece had previously been reprinted in Duff Green's United States Telegraph, John C. Calhoun's organ in Washington, D.C., and one of the most caustic pro-nullification papers. The author was responding to the commentary of the Richmond Enquirer, edited by Thomas Ritchie, an influential figure in Virginia politics and an enemy of the Mercury in the struggle over nullification. Ritchie had printed extracts from the parliamentary debates on abolition and commented that the West Indians' most serious problem lay in their lack of representation in Parliament, an unfortunate situation that southern slaveholders did not face. The editorialist in the reprinted piece considered Ritchie's opinions "the contradictions of a weak and trammelled judgment." As Turnbull had pointed out six years before, the West Indians' plight was entirely too similar to that of the southern states in relation to the federal government. In an imaginary dialogue between Ritchie and a representative nullifier that illustrated the reverberations of the nullification controversy, South Carolina's spokesmen explored the scenario that would occur if Tumbull's crisis were to come to pass. "Suppose the Federal Government, should do as the British Parliament has done, and bring out its scheme of Emancipation?" What was the South to do? "'Remonstrate,' says Mr. Ritchie." But what if remonstration were to fail, as it failed the slaveholders in the West Indies? Then we "Rush into revolution," said Mr. Ritchie, like our grandfathers in 1776. And you'll "Be hanged like dogs," thundered "A. Jackson, Esquire," echoing the thrust of the Force Bill. For the Mercury and likeminded editors elsewhere, the dialogue portrayed the lessons to be learned from the failure of the South to unify during the nullification crisis. The imminent demise of West Indian slavery was "calculated to open the eyes of the people" to the tyrannical powers of the federal government. (39)

The Mercury's dialogue revealed a deepening engagement with the Anglo-Atlantic world, and the editors' scuffle showed that divisions among "the various Souths" could be expressed in differing opinions on the lessons to be learned from that larger realm. (40) While Ritchie believed slavery to be protected within the constitutional fold, both the United States Telegraph and the Mercury saw a lesson for the South, whose rights were in the hands of a hostile majority. These papers thought it pertinent to comment on how the West Indian situation bore on recent events in the United States, but the Mercury had returned to Turnbull's message, showing that Carolinians continued to be peculiarly sensitive to West Indian events. Throughout July, the Mercury continued to cover the progression of the emancipation bill in the British parliament. For white Carolinians, the news was bleak, and coverage ranged from the worried letters of West Indian planters to reprinted parliamentary debates on the details of emancipation. (41) "Fanatical" abolitionists in the North would soon have the British precedent to bolster their movement, a precedent that would have to be countered. How would southern planters respond to such information?

Agitation had not worked for the nullifiers. In addition to most southerners outside South Carolina, there were even some in the state who had rejected the nullifiers' efforts to assert the state's right to circumvent the will of the federal government. Perhaps a different approach was necessary, something that would appeal to a calm, conservative mind. Pliny adopted such an approach and sought to contextualize southern slavery by situating its defense in historical precedent and modern thought. Pliny believed he could prove that the slavery at the core of southern society was right, good, and unique to the world, enabling Americans to confidently ignore abolitionist fanaticism in England and the North. The contemporary abolitionist focus on the West Indies was perhaps just, as slavery there was harsher and more brutal. But if criticism were to be aimed at the South it would be based upon false premises because, the argument went, domestic slavery in the South provided for its laborers the most humane conditions that people of that class could expect. Pliny's project was twofold: to make the case for the benevolence of southern slavery and to discredit the abolitionist movement. "English philanthropy" could be undermined by exposing the inhumane living conditions of British workers while shining a kinder, gentler light upon the character of southern slavery.

To achieve his object, Pliny sought to place the southern planting class in a position of moral and intellectual superiority. The essays approached the problem of the poor with two separate but complementary strategies. First, the author cultivated a tone that emphasized compassion for the poor rather than calculated self-interest. Second, Pliny grounded the essays' arguments in a broad intellectual discourse that drew from ancient Greek and Roman history, European history, and the writings of respected modern thinkers such as Blackstone, Hume, Gibbon, and Malthus. In addition to these sources, Pliny cited an array of contemporary British and American periodicals to support his analysis of the British poor laws, the parliamentary acts that structured official relief efforts for the destitute. The effect of these rhetorical strategies was to establish a seemingly humane, trustworthy voice that argued from a position of intellectual authority. (42)

Pliny intoned such a voice in the first number of the series, which laid out the essays' intention to ponder the advancement of the laboring classes. Pliny situated his discourse in the tradition of "humane and intelligent" thinkers like Hume, Malthus, and Southey who had labored to find solutions that would ease the burdens of the poor. Specifically, Pliny wished to understand "How far laws to assist [the poor], have been found to contribute to their welfare." (43) Throughout the essays Pliny would remind the reader of his benevolent intent: "'What! is nothing to be done for the poor?' Far from it, our wish is to place them in a better condition, and to direct the more efficient means of moral and religious motives to the advancement of their comfort." (44) Pliny's rhetorical flourishes aligned the essays' language with that of northern and British reformers so that despite major differences with these philanthropists on the slavery question, Pliny could reconcile the defense of slavery with contemporary ideas of social reform. Such a strategy allowed southern planters to feel comfortable in their ownership of slaves by situating southern slavery within a transatlantic discourse of moral sentimentality and benevolence that ran through disparate writings in the early 1830s (45)

While Pliny primarily addressed southern slaveholders, the author also sought to reach a wider, national audience, including conservative readers in the North. In the 1830s northern opinion was by no means aligned with the few abolitionists who wished to emulate the successful British movement. During the 1820s efforts by free African American leaders in the North to cultivate respectability in their communities drew the ire of whites across the social spectrum who refused to accept the fluidity of racial boundaries that could result from black uplift. The rise of militant abolitionism in the early 1830s exacerbated these tensions, and mobs organized by "gentlemen of property and standing" threatened abolitionists and African American communities all over the North. Furthermore, both major political parties endorsed varying degrees of white supremacy as the North began to exhibit an increasingly modern racial landscape. (46) Nevertheless, the British precedent in abolishing West Indian slavery would prove powerful, and Pliny took care to identify with certain streams of northern thought as well as to praise specific northern institutions.

In his second essay Pliny alleged that in the British debate on ending West Indian slavery, abolitionists had "noticed" an old racialist argument of Bryan Edwards. Pliny implied that Edwards had defended the transatlantic slave trade on the basis of black racial inferiority. This was inaccurate. Edwards, a West Indian planter, historian, and member of Parliament, had indeed defended the slave trade in 1793, but not from a racialist stance. (47) Edwards's primary argument against the abolition of the slave trade rested on the presumption that the other European nations involved, namely France and the Netherlands, would continue the trade. Abolition of the slave trade "by the British nation only" would in no way decrease the violence within Africa that British abolitionists decried. (48) Pliny's misrepresentation of Edwards's argument was strategic. By affirming Edwards's assertion of African racial inferiority Pliny appealed to white readers with racialist opinions throughout the country, but in falsely linking Edwards's racialist arguments to his defense of the transatlantic slave trade Pliny opened a rhetorical space that allowed him to distance his thought from the now-fallen West Indian planters. The moral repugnancy of the transatlantic slave trade was generally agreed upon in the Anglo-Atlantic world of 1833, and Pliny could only gain by rejecting the importation of Africans. He explicitly condemned Edwards's endorsement of the slave trade and assured his audience that southerners joined their northern brethren in praising "the wisdom and humanity" of the United States for having abolished the trade. (49) In the 1850s southern leaders would advocate the opposite, but in August 1833 the impending moment of British abolitionist success called for a heavy dose of moral posturing. (50) Pliny's denunciation of Edwards was a major departure in southern thought. By disavowing any connection to the most prominent defender of slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic world, Pliny created ideological distance between the South and the West Indies, whose systems of slavery had been linked since the 1660s.

Another way Pliny attempted to appeal to northern opinion was through outright flattery. After discussing the effects of the poor laws in Britain, Pliny looked at how the poor were treated in Scotland and then in the North. Pliny asserted that he had discovered one of the best systems for dealing with poverty in a Niles' Weekly Register article on establishments for the poor in Massachusetts. The towns of Danvers, Salem, and Ipswich had developed largely self-sufficient farms for the express purpose of supporting paupers, a system superior to the English workhouse because "the health and comfort, and morals [of the poor] would all be benefited...." (51) Pliny's tactical flattery had several effects. The essay privileged New England's philanthropic approach to the poor at the expense of British reform efforts while reminding readers of the essays' original intent. And as with the disavowal of the slave trade, Pliny's admiring attention to New England approaches to poor relief aligned him with conservative reformers in the North.

For Pliny, the history of the English poor laws demonstrated the devastation wrought by "great and sudden changes in the condition of society." The first of these changes was the Reformation, which had bestowed acknowledged "blessings" but had also destroyed the Catholic institutions that had supported the poor. The Reformation had also erased "the state of celibacy imposed on the Clergy," which had allowed priests and nuns to spend most of their time serving the poor. Another change had been the discovery of the New World, which enriched Europe's colonial powers and encouraged "a rapid increase of population." For Pliny the confluence of these events resulted in the development of poor laws that were devastating to the comfort and well-being of the laboring classes. (52)

A second manifestation of the great and devastating changes in Europe could be seen in the social relations of European society. According to Pliny, there had been "two distinct constitutions of Society" in the history of Europe. The first was feudal, characterized by the "dependence of the inferior on the superior classes." The second could be seen in the "civilized" Europe of his time, where the people were free from feudal obligations. From the perspective of the poor, which Pliny wished to appropriate, feudal society was undoubtedly superior because the relationship between the vassal and the lord, in addition to the benevolence of the Church, had provided for the poor. But the Reformation had destroyed these organic bonds, and "as far as human happiness [was] concerned," Europe had been a better place under feudalism. Culpability for the decline of the poor lay in "the manufacturing system," which degraded the industrial poor to a base existence as "slaving machines" while increasing their numbers. To make matters worse, "the manufacturing system" failed to pay workers adequately. Such enforced poverty, "without the compensating advantages of domestic slavery," rendered the British working class the most oppressed and miserable of the civilized world. For evidence, Pliny quoted extensively from Robert J. Southey, who had expressed his horror at the conditions of the English laboring class. According to Southey, English workers lived in appalling conditions from childhood throughout their unnaturally short lives. They were malnourished, deprived of fresh air, abused by bosses, and forced into monotonous and unceasing labor in crowded factories. (53) Southern readers could rest assured that their society, in stark contrast to Southey's portrayal of England, resembled the benevolent system of feudal Europe and that poverty did not exist in the South to the same degree that it did in modern Europe. (54) Pliny imagined that white southerners had maintained the feudal relations between the classes and that modern changes would bring no benefit to the South's tranquil and humane system of labor.

Pliny's discussion of the history of the English poor laws led him to broader conclusions concerning human nature. The working classes lived according to the laws of necessity: "There is no law of our nature more beneficial, than that which compels man to labor for his support.--Wherever attempts have been made, to mitigate it by human institutions, or this effect has been produced by the accidents of local situation, we find his condition depressed." Poverty, in Pliny's thought, stemmed from an aberration in nature or a fault in the governance of society. Thus, in tropical climates that sustained life without work, society sank "into ignorance, vice and sloth." (55) Likewise, when the English poor laws were enacted, the poor "accustomed themselves to consider a support as a lawful right," thereby altering the natural law that would necessitate work. By the time Pliny addressed the subject, the Edinburgh Review had reported, according to Pliny, that 95 percent of the population of England and Wales were relieved in some way by the poor rates. For Pliny these appalling figures were an inevitable result of the poor laws, which violated the natural law that supposedly governed the laboring class. The imposition of the poor laws swelled the population of paupers and now threatened "to subvert the institutions of that country." (56)

As nature compelled laborers to work, nature also encouraged the wealthier members of society to exhibit "[t]he inherent principle of benevolence" that led to charity. As the poor, artificially supported by the poor laws, abandoned their natural inclination to work, so too did the wealthy, when relieved of the responsibility of exercising charity, abandon benevolent activities. Public relief blunted the inherent benevolence of the wealthy, who then became indifferent to the suffering of the poor. Furthermore, when legislation interfered with the innate inclinations of the rich and the poor, the entire society tended to unravel. The natural "sympathy" that existed between the wealthy and the laboring classes dissolved in the solvent of social legislation. For Pliny, the well-being of society depended upon the grateful acceptance of charity happily dispensed. (57)

There were two conclusions that flowed from Pliny's analysis of natural class relations. The first was the folly of social engineering. For Pliny, "the political sin of this age, is over legislation" because, as the discussion of European history had revealed, it was natural that the wealthy would help the poor and the poor would be grateful. The poor laws had interrupted this harmony, resulting in poverty and social unrest. Second, but of even greater importance in 1833, Pliny's focus on the failure of the poor laws sought to discredit British notions of reform. British reformers had increased the suffering of the poor and brought their society to the brink of social unrest. Fortunately the United States had ignored this precedent, but abolitionism, another form of social legislation, threatened to influence by example. Pliny could only "exclaim with wonder, can it be to establish such a system in this new world, that our Constitution is to be overthrown, our liberty destroyed, and even the Union dissolved?" (58) By identifying the budding abolitionism in the North with the failure of British poor laws, Pliny associated Britain's social disintegration with both English influences and social legislation.

Pliny's analysis of the failures of British reform provided a seemingly secure moral position from which to herald southern slavery as a positive good. Like most proslavery theorists of the time, Pliny's defense of slavery in the United States was racial, but with his proclaimed concern for the poor, Pliny portrayed slavery as a system of labor that drew its value from the natural traits of the wealthy and the working classes. Indeed, the author believed that England would one day resolve its "difficult political problem" by resorting to "domestic dependence ... or an entire independence." In other words, Pliny felt that the only solution to the tensions between the British classes was to establish "domestic dependence," a form of slavery, or chaos would result. As for the South, Pliny was "perfectly convinced that wherever there is an inferior cast[e] with a distinct and marked character, this condition of domestic dependence, is the happiest for them." (59)

"Happiest for them" was ground upon which morally sensitive slaveholders could stand, especially when the misery of free workers in Britain influenced the definition of happy. But most important was the definition of them, for to make southern relations between the classes unique and conducive to the slavery of workers, the workers themselves had to be unique. For Pliny, the happiness of the South's black slaves lay in their natural inferiority. God and nature had created the peoples of African descent as "a distinct caste" of humanity. The biblical story of Noah and his son Ham placed black people in a lesser "moral station" than whites, while nature made the African peoples "separate and distinct by as palpable marks as is possible...." The slaves' origins in Africa, "a remote and almost inaccessible portion of the globe," supported a philosophical and religious denial of "common parentage" with whites. So the argument went: "when domestic slavery [was] formed of such a species, the protection they obtain in such a state of dependence, makes it the best condition for them." (60)

As human nature maintained cordial relations between the wealthy and the laboring classes, so the natural inferiority of black people, dating to Ham's violation of Noah, fit them best for a state of complete domestic dependence, or slavery. It was not only blacks' inferiority that mandated slavery; their "social relation to communities of European descent, must be unchanged, as it is really and radically unchangable." Due to their inferiority, Pliny argued, blacks could never survive alongside communities of whites. They needed to be protected within the institution of slavery. It was best for them. (61)

For the classically trained reader, Pliny developed his argument through an analogy that paralleled slavery in the Roman Empire with slavery in the South. The fifth essay invoked Gibbon's rendering of Roman slavery: "When Rome was semi-barbarous, slaves were treated inhumanly, but when she became enlightened and civilized, humanity also became a common virtue, and was extended to them." The amelioration of slavery in the Roman Empire occurred in the same way it had in the South. When Rome became "united under the laws of one Sovereign" and captured slaves from the many wars stopped arriving in the empire, Roman slavery became milder. By necessity, the Romans had to maintain their slave populations through natural reproduction by encouraging marriage and families among their slaves and by easing their material conditions. This settled existence tended "to alleviate the hardships of servitude," the slaves became more valuable, and "the humanity of the [master] was encouraged by a sense of his interests." The easing of Roman slavery had issued from the changing source of slaves. As slaves became more difficult to procure for sale, masters had become more humane so the slave population, and therefore the masters' wealth, could increase Pliny noted that in the South "a similar consequence has resulted from the abolition of the [transatlantic] slave trade," which had rendered southern slavery as humane as its classical counterpart. This parallel would have resonated with southern slaveholders and their elite allies in the North who could find in Gibbon's description of Roman slavery a comforting description of bondage in the United States. (62)

But the example of Roman slavery also presented Pliny with a problem. In fact it was perhaps the root of his problem, as he attributed British abolitionism to a mistaken interpretation of slavery's history. According to Pliny, Britons believed that "In Greece and Rome freed men often became distinguished, and enjoyed the intimacy of the greatest men.... and as soon as the legal impediments were removed, every mark of separation was destroyed." Such an interpretation of slavery did not consider the distinctive quality of slavery in the West Indian colonies and in the southern states. But European "public opinion [was] formed under these impressions"; it was only natural that "an impatience and abhorrence of such a state should now exist, and this ... may account for the mistaken zeal of the English people on the West India question. To this source may also be attributed the mad policy which lost to France the fine Island of St. Domingo." For Pliny, Greek and Roman slavery were quite different from slavery in the Americas in that masters and slaves in the classical world "were all of the same family of the human species." Unlike in ancient times, racial divisions in the West Indies and the South made slavery essential to the well-being of society. English and northern ignorance of the realities of Atlantic slavery fueled the abolitionist movement that threatened to rupture the West Indies and now looked toward the South. (63) Given the seriousness of the potential challenge, Pliny offered even more evidence to help planters confidently defend their institution in the face of insult from across the Atlantic, from the North, or from within their own communities.

Moving beyond parallels with ancient history, Pliny sought to justify southern slavery with the population theories of Thomas R. Malthus. (64) Pliny wrote that Malthus's essay had to some extent "originated our enquiry" and that the British scholar's work had "a character above the influence of criticism." (65) This was a not-altogether believable claim, as Malthus had been critical of slavery, and Pliny fully intended to both dispel those criticisms and invoke Malthus's thought in support of southern slavery. Pliny's use of Malthus supplemented the historical discussions and the counterpoint of the suffering English poor in order to position southern slavery on an even firmer intellectual foundation.

Malthus had been critical of slavery due to "the checks on population, which are peculiar to a state of slavery, and which render a constant recruit of numbers necessary." (66) Presumably, the state of slavery was so harsh that slave populations could not maintain their numbers, a difficulty that had faced both ancient Rome and the West Indies. For Pliny, there were two problems with Malthus's application of his theories to slavery. The most obvious contradiction lay in the history of South Carolina, which showed that the slave population there had grown even after the American ban in 1808 on the importation of slaves through the transatlantic trade. According to Pliny, South Carolina's slave population had "increased as rapidly as any people, placed under the most favorable circumstances." He traced South Carolina's slave population from ninety thousand in 1771 to three hundred thousand at the time of writing and noted that the slave trade had contributed to this population for only two years between 1788 and 1808. (67) The numbers revealed a healthy population of slaves, and Malthus's theories lent credence, it seemed, to Pliny's claims for the benign nature of southern slavery. Slaves' numbers had increased, so it must be good for them. (68)

Confronted with the success of British abolitionism, Pliny designed a comparative approach that articulated American exceptionalism by distinguishing southern slavery from its West Indian counterpart. Pliny argued that Malthus, like most other Europeans, had not only neglected the facts of South Carolina's history but had also failed to understand the many forms that slavery could take. Pliny saw "various degrees of slavery" in European history that other theorists of slavery had failed to acknowledge. As there had been different types of bondage in the Old World, it was only logical that the New World would also manifest multiple versions. Southern slavery, the argument went, differed fundamentally from the West Indian variation. (69) This was important if Pliny were to reach a broad, national audience. If West Indian slavery could be made the harsher counterpoint to southern slavery, abolitionist criticism could be drawn away from the South. In 1833 most abolitionist literature that circulated in the Anglo-Atlantic world was focused on slavery in the West Indies. Pliny sought to uncouple southern from West Indian slavery with an assertion of southern exceptionalism that could deflect the easy transfer of arguments used in the West Indian debates to the case of the South.

The proof lay in the numbers, and the discussion allowed Pliny to characterize the different forms of slavery in the Americas. The diminution of slave populations asserted by Malthus had occurred in "the West India Colonies, from a severity of treatment, or a climate too unhealthy for even the African constitution." This had not happened under southern slavery, in which slaves "have civil and moral rights, acknowledged by public opinion, and secured as well by the laws, as by the apprehension of loss of reputation, when they are transgressed." In Pliny's imagined society, a genial climate and a humane, lawful master class supported the comfortable world of the enslaved black people of the American South. Southern slavery was unique. (70)

Slaveholding elites in the American South were cosmopolitan, educated individuals who understood the role of intellectual discourse in the political shaping of the world. A central component of abolitionism was its intellectual and moral challenge to the legitimacy of slavery; the proslavery argument attempted to answer that summons. In the United States during the early 1830s there were two moments when slaveholders felt their security in slave property particularly threatened--in 1831 when Virginia's legislature responded to Nat Turner by debating abolition and in 1833 when the British abolished slavery in their West Indian colonies. Both events represented the tangible power of abolitionist thought; both events elicited a proslavery response. The differences between the arguments set forth by Thomas R. Dew and Pliny reflected the particular exigencies of each moment. Dew used most of his text to undermine the proposals of the gradual emancipationists in the Virginia legislature. He presented Nat Turner as an anomaly and visualized slavery lasting well into the twentieth century. (71) Pliny's argument was more subtle. Like a military strategist he triangulated between the miseries of the British poor and the harshness of West Indian slavery, arriving at the conclusion that British reformers were hypocrites and southern slavery was part of God's benevolent design.

Pliny borrowed components of his argument, but the elements he forged together bad remarkable longevity on both Atlantic shores. In August 1844 the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson composed a public letter, To the Christian and Well-Disposed Citizens of the Northern States of America, that denounced American slavery as the "greatest evil." (72) James Henry Hammond, having just completed a term as the governor of South Carolina, answered this attack. In public letters to Clarkson, Hammond followed the same line of argument Pliny had laid out more than eleven years before. Clarkson's view of slavery must have been based on West Indian examples, Hammond argued, as southern slaves were well fed, justly treated, and happily increasing in numbers. Hammond did not need to dig as far as Pliny bad for evidence of the miseries of the British poor. Parliamentary reports on the condition of laboring children provided a wealth of evidence that demonstrated the wicked effects of industrial capitalism upon the lives of workers. Furthermore, Hammond cited the London Quarterly Review as representative of a growing number of British publications that now viewed emancipation in the West Indies as a disaster. (73) In June 1850 New Orleans editor James De Bow gleefully reprinted the British author Thomas Carlyle's "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," which lambasted abolitionism through a contrast of the easy lives of the "indolent two-legged cattle" of the emancipated West Indies with the "doleful Whites" of famine-stricken Ireland. (74) Carlyle's racist pamphlet foreshadowed the "divided hearts" exhibited by the British during America's Civil War, but his argument looked back to the transatlantic precedents of Walsh, Pliny, and Hammond. (75)

Slaveholders' wealth, identities, prestige, and future prosperity all depended on the permanence of their right to own black Americans as slaves. From the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, transatlantic abolitionism developed into a serious threat to the long-term security of slave property. Abolitionist accomplishments before 1833 paled in comparison to the abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies, when nearly eight hundred thousand black slaves were freed by an act of Parliament. From the perspective of planters in the West Indies and the American South, British abolition was a radical act--the unjust appropriation of property by a tyrannical government and the ultimate demonstration of the potency of abolitionist thought. Elite white southerners participated in the same intellectual milieu in which British abolition took place, and beliefs that inspired abolitionists in the North were serious threats to southern partisans. British abolition forced southern thinkers to broaden the terms of their proslavery stance. Polemicists such as Pliny and Hammond highlighted the suffering of Britain's laborers in order to cast doubt on the moral superiority of the free labor system. They portrayed West Indian slavery as the harsh counterpoint to American slavery to clothe southern slaveholders in a benevolent light. Theirs was an argument of sinister brilliance that attempted to undermine the precepts of antislavery while placing American slavery beyond the abolitionist critique. Pliny revealed that poignant moment of British abolition--a critical event in the history of the American South.

(1) "An Oration Delivered at Barnwell C. H. on the 4 July 1833. By James H. Hammond," James Henry Hammond Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.), microfilm, reel 2. Hammond probably referred to the Coercion Bill, passed by the first reformed Parliament in April 1833. The bill empowered the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland with restrictive powers such as martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus, but Hammond's target was the reformed Parliament itself, many of whose members had been elected on a wave of abolitionist agitation. On the Coercion Bill see Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867 (London, 1959), 269; and A. D. Kriegel, "The Irish Policy of Lord Grey's Government," English Historical Review, 86 (January 1971), 40-42. On abolitionist influence in the reformed Parliament see Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (London, 1972), 16-17. For more on Hammond see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge, 1982). Research for this article was supported by a dissertation fellowship from the Boston College History Department and short-term fellowships from the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization, the Huntington Library, and the Virginia Historical Society. The author would like to thank Lynn Lyerly, David Quigley, Todd Romero, Joan Cashin, James Brewer Stewart, and the Journal of Southern History's three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments upon this essay.

(2) Historiography on proslavery comparisons of slaves and British workers includes William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935), chap. 7; Wilfred Carsel, "The Slaveholders' Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery," Journal of Southern History, 6 (November 1940), 508-9; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 58-63; Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens, Ga., 1979); and Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens, Ga., 1987), 79-82. On the proslavery argument generally, in addition to the above, see David Donald, "The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History, 37 (February 1971), 3-18; Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore, 1977), esp. chap. 6; Faust, "Introduction: The Proslavery Argument in History," in Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1981), 1-20; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Modernizing Southern Slavery: The Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York and Oxford, 1982), 27-49; and Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), chap. 5.

(3) Tise, Proslavery, 77-79; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1965), 76-82, 108-11.

(4) Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought, 65-89; William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, chap. 9; Faust, "Introduction," 4-7.

(5) On George Fitzhugh see George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters, edited by C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), vii-xxxix; and Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), 118-244. The interpretation of proslavery thought advanced in this essay departs from these earlier works, both of which saw Fitzhugh, who did not publish until the 1850s, as sui generis.

(6) [Thomas R. Dew], "Abolition of Negro Slavery," American Quarterly Review, 12 (September 1832), 193 (quotation); Faust, "Introduction," 8-9, 21-77; Lacy K. Ford Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York and Oxford, 1988), chap. 3; Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2000), chap. 2; Alison Goodyear Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832 (Baton Rouge, 1982). For an engaging discussion of the importance of the early 1830s see also Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York, 2001).

(7) A major exception to this is Joe Bassette Wilkins Jr., "Window on Freedom: The South's Response to the Emancipation of the Slaves in the British West Indies, 1833-1861" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1977). Wilkins appears to have followed up on William Freehling's suggestion in his landmark Prelude to Civil War that "The English Emancipation Bill was, I think, one of the more important reasons for the intensity of the Great Reaction." See Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 307n10, as well as his more recent The Road to Disunion. Vol. 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York and Oxford, 1990), 160-61, 254, 290. On the influence of British abolition upon American abolitionists see Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-slavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (New York, 1933), chap. 3; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1976; rev. ed., New York, 1996), 46; William E. Channing to Lucy Aikin, May 30, 1833, in Anna Letitia Le Breton, ed., Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D. and Lucy Aikin, From 1826 to 1842 (London, 1874), 171; Ralph R. Gurley to James G. Birney, August 21, 1833, in Dwight L. Dumond, ed., Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857 (2 vols.; New York, 1938), I, 84-85; and Second Annual Report of the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Presented January 15, 1834 (Boston, 1834), 13. See also James G. Birney, Letter on Colonization, Addressed to the Rev. Thornton J. Mills, Corresponding Secretary of the Kentucky Colonization Society (New York, 1834), 14; David Root, The Abolition Cause Eventually Triumphant. A Sermon, Delivered Before the Anti-Slavery Society of Haverhill, Mass[achusetts], Aug. 1836 (Andover, 1836), 20; and David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), chap. 3.

(8) Boston Courier, June 10, 13, July 10, 15, 1833 (semi-weekly edition, microfilm, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.); Charleston Mercury, July 6, 10, 11, 16, 23, 27, 30, August 2, 5, 6, 1833; Greensboro (N.C.) Patriot, May 8, 22, 1833; Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, July 28, 1832, pp. 388-89, September 1, 1832, p. 7, November 24, 1832, p. 194, April 6, 1833, pp. 81, 93-96; New Orleans Bee, April 3, 1833. On abolitionist connections between Britain and the United States see Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, 1972) and R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1983). For southern awareness of these connections see Charleston Mercury, July 23 and August 5, 1833.

(9) Quotation is from "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2," Charleston Mercury, August 10, 1833. The series began on August 9, 1833, and appeared every day except August 11 until August 15. The articles appear on the second page of each issue, which the Mercury traditionally devoted to domestic and foreign news and political commentary. Wilkins notices these essays in "Window on Freedom," 58-59. Ironically, during this same period reformers in Britain (such as William Cobbett) who proposed improvements to benefit the working class employed a similar comparison between West Indian slavery and British industrial "wage-slavery" to agitate for the amelioration of industrial conditions. See Seymour Drescher, "Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Antislavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain," Journal of Social History, 15 (Fall 1981), 3-24.

(10) On the importance of classical training for southern authors see Christie Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South (New York, 1994); Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002), 13, 21-22, 74-76; and Richard Lounsbury, "Ludibria Rerum Mortalium: Charlestonian Intellectuals and Their Classics," in Michael O'Brien and David Moltke-Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, 1986), 325-69. While the gender of Pliny is uncertain, it seems likely that the Carolinian essayist was a man. According to Christie Anne Farnham, the South led the Western world in women's education, but this effort did not begin until 1839. This essay will therefore employ male pronouns. See Farnham, Education of the Southern Belle, 11.

(11) Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972), 46-83, 111-16; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 3-36; David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), 193-223.

(12) David Ramsay, Ramsay's History of South Carolina, From Its First Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (1809; rpt., 2 vols. in 1, Newberry, S.C., 1858) I, 2; II, 113, 118-19, 122, 130; William Gilmore Simms, The History of South Carolina ... (New York, 1860), 49. See also John Drayton, A View of South-Carolina, As Respects Her Natural and Civil Concerns (Charleston, 1802), 169-71, 218-19. Drayton did not discuss the early Barbadian migrants to South Carolina, but he recognized the West Indies as a crucial trading partner and believed that West Indians would send their sons to the schools he hoped South Carolina would develop.

(13) Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States To 1860 (2 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1933), n, 609: Alfred Glaze Smith Jr., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State." South Carolina, 1820-1860 (Columbia, S.C., 1958), 71-73; Charleston Mercury August 21, 30, 1827, September 20, 1827, and generally.

(14) While not specifically concerned with South Carolina and the British West Indies, comparative studies by historians such as Roderick A. McDonald and Michael Mullin reveal the existence of a shared culture of plantation slavery that connected the British West Indies and the American South. See McDonald, The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1993) and Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana, 1992).

(15) B. W. Higman Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore. 1984), 77; Julian J. Petty, The Growth and Distribution of Population in South Carolina (Columbia, 1943), 75; Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism, 123. See also Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State. The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990), chaps. 1-4; and Sinha, Counterrevolution of Slavery, 10-14.

(16) Brutus [Robert J. Turnbull], The Crisis: or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government (Charleston, 1827).

(17) Lowell Joseph Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (New York, 1928), chaps. 11-12; Temperiey, British Antislavery, 1-12; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, 1982), chaps. 20-21; H. McD. Beckles, "Emancipation by Law or War? Wilberforce and the 1816 Barbados Slave Rebellion," in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790-1916 (London, 1985), 84; Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York and Oxford, 1994), 251-92.

(18) [Turnbull], "The Crisis--No. 1," Charleston Mercury, August 17, 1827; [Turnbull], "The Crisis--No. IV, Charleston Mercury, August 21, 1827; [Turnbull], Crisis, 6.

(19) [Turnbull], Crisis, 128-29, 64.

(20) Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 22-26. Caroline Winterer writes that Americans' interests in the classics shifted from Rome to Greece beginning in the early 1830s, as the nation's cultural arbiters sought to nourish the new democratic society from democracy's source in Greece rather than the derivative culture of Rome. In choosing a Roman pseudonym, Pliny drew from the revolutionary tradition of resistance to authority, not contemporary classical trends. See Winterer, Culture of Classicism, chaps. 1-2.

(21) James E. Kibler Jr., Pseudonymous Publications of William Gilmore Simms (Athens, Ga., 1976), 4-5.

(22) John Edwin Sandys, "Pliny, the Elder" and "Pliny, the Younger." in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.

(23) Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Richard B. Kielbowicz, News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information, 1700-1860s (Westport, Conn., 1989), 62-64.

(24) Donald M. Scott, "Print and the Public Lecture System, 1840-60," in William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass., 1983), 290.

(25) Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, chap. 1; Stewart, Holy Warriors, 164-65; Ronald G. Waiters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, 1976), chap. 3.

(26) Robert Walsh Jr., An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America. Part First, Containing an Historical Outline of their Merits and Wrongs as Colonies; and Strictures upon the Calumnies of the British Writers (Philadelphia, 1819), 408-21 (quotations on pp. 408, 413-14, 421); Tise, Proslavery 45-50.

(27) Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, 22.

(28) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6," Charleston Mercury, August 15, 1833. On the publication history of Dew's essay see Kenneth M. Stampp, "An Analysis of T. R. Dew's Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature," Journal of Negro History, 27 (October 1942), 380.

(29) On Gabriel's conspiracy see Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993) and James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997). On Vesey's alleged conspiracy see William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 53-65; Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, Wis., 1999); Edward A. Pearson, "Introduction: Culture and Conspiracy in Denmark Vesey's Charleston," in Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 1-164; and Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd set., 58 (October 2001), 915-76. The broadest survey of American slave revolts is still Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943; rpt., Millwood, N.Y., 1977).

(30) Alison Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 87-169.

(31) Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust. ed., Ideology of Slavery, 39 (quotation). In the original version in the American Quarterly Review, a seventy-seven page essay, only the last nineteen pages are devoted to defending slavery as a positive good. See [Dew,] "Abolition of Negro Slavery," 247-65.

(32) Faust, "Introduction," 8.

(33) Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed. Ideology oat. Slavery, 51 (quotations); Alison Freehling, Drift Toward Dissolution, 83.

(34) Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, 68-69. While Dew's assertion of the ethnicity of Haiti's rebellious slaves is dubious, he actually underestimated the massive immigration that preceded the Haitian Revolution. Approximately 37,000 Africans entered St. Domingue each year from 1783 to 1792 for a total of about 370,000. See Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, 1990), 22.

(35) [Dew,] "Abolition of Negro Slavery," 190.

(36) Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, 60. Canning was quoted by Sir Robert Peel, who opposed abolition, during the parliamentary debates in June 1833. Peel is quoted in Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York and Oxford. 2002), 129. On British abolitionism see Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York and Oxford, 1987) and David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (London, 1991).

(37) Craton, Testing the Chains, chap. 22; William Birney, James G. Birney and His Times: The Genesis of the Republican Party with Some Account of the Abolition Movements in the South before 1828 (New York, 1890), 104. Niles' Weekly Register, edited by Hezekiah Niles, was a newsmagazine with an economic focus; for its national significance see Norval Neil Luxon, Niles' Weekly Register: News Magazine of the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge, 1947). Reports on the Jamaica insurrection include Charleston Mercury, February 14, March 16, April 2, 7, 1832; Baltimore Niles" Weekly Register, February 11, 1832, p. 437, February 18, 1832, p. 448, February 25, 1832, p. 479, April 21, 1832, p. 124, June 30, 1832, p. 323; Boston Christian Watchman. January 27, February 17, 24, March 9, April 20, June 8, 29, 1832; New York Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion's Herald, February 17, April 20, May 18, 25, July 6, November 30, 1832.

(38) Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, July 28, 1832, p. 388. Similar predictions about the results of West Indian emancipation include Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, August 18, 1832, p. 441. April 6, 1833, pp. 81, 93-96; New Orleans Bee, April 3, July 24, August 5, 1833.

(39) Charleston Mercury, July 6. 1833; Washington. D.C., United States Telegraph, July 3, 1833.

(40) William Freehling, Road to Disunion, 16-19 (quotation on p. 18).

(41) Charleston Mercury, July 10, 16, 22, 23, 27, 30, 1833.

(42) Bryan Edwards used a similar technique in his defense of the slave trade. See Bryan Edwards. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (4 vols.; Philadelphia, 1806), II, 323.

(43) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1," Charleston Mercury, August 9, 1833.

(44) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 4," Charleston Mercury, August 13. 1833.

(45) Frank Thistlethwaite. The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959), chap. 3.

(46) James Brewer Stewart, "The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1791-1840," Journal of the Early Republic, 18 (Summer 1998), 181-217; Stewart, "Modernizing 'Difference': The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776-1840," Journal of the Early Republic, 19 (Winter 1999), 691-712; Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York. 1970). See also Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and 'Race' in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998).

(47) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2." For a biographical sketch of Edwards see Olwyn M. Blouet, "Bryan Edwards and the Haitian Revolution," in David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic. World (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 44-57.

(48) Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, II, 309-25 (quotation on p. 317).

(49) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2."

(50) Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African Slave Trade (New York, 1971).

(51) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 4." One article in Niles' Weekly Register, possibly the one from which Pliny drew, actually deals with pauperism in New York, Delaware, Massachusetts, and other states, and while Salem is cited in the article, the towns of Danvers and Ipswich are not. See "Pauperism," Baltimore Niles' Weekly Register, June 26, 1824.

(52) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1" (quotations); "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2." While Pliny acknowledged the "blessings" of the Reformation, his discussion of the painful changes that accompanied the Reformation and his lament at the loss of the Church's "venerable institutions" reveal a surprising admiration for the institutions of the Catholic Church. "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1." Such writing supports older interpretations of the Old South as backward-looking. See Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965).

(53) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2." Pliny probably took the passage by Southey from Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella [Robert J. Southey], Letters from England (1808; 3rd American ed., 2 vols.; Philadelphia, 1818), 1, 262-64. I would like to thank Paul Zall of the Huntington Library for this reference.

(54) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 3," Charleston Mercury, August 12, 1833.

(55) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 3."

(56) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 1." Pliny was digging for evidence to support his argument. The article he cited was titled "Report from the Select Committee on the Poor Laws ..." and was published in 1818. It discussed the "Causes and Cure of Pauperism." Edinburgh Review, 29 (February 1818), 261-302.

(57) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 4."

(58) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 2" (second quotation); "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 3" (first quotation).

(59) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery. No. 2."

(60) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."

(61) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6" (quotation); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968), 17-20, 41-43. See also Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997), 103-42.

(62) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 5," Charleston Mercury, August 14, 1833.

(63) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."

(64) For a survey of the uses of Malthus by southern proslavery writers see Joseph J. Spengler, "Population Theory in the Ante-Bellum South," Journal of Southern History, 2 (August 1936), 360-89. Seymour Drescher offers an extensive discussion of the impact of Malthus's theories on the British debate on abolition in Mighty Experiment. 41-53.

(65) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 57"

(66) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."

(67) Ibid.

(68) Despite Pliny's attention to Malthus, he (and others) missed a key rhetorical opportunity. As Seymour Drescher has shown, Thomas Fowell Buxton, the leading British abolitionist in Parliament, attacked West Indian slavery on explicitly Malthusian grounds during the abolition debates in 1831, which Pliny could have used to further demonstrate the humanity of southern slavery. Southern papers did reprint Buxton's arguments in 1833 but only as an example of the abolitionist side of the debate. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 48-49; Greensboro (N.C.) Patriot, May 8, 1833; Charleston Mercury, July 22, 1833.

(69) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 5."

(70) "Poor Laws and Domestic Slavery, No. 6."

(71) 1929 to be exact. Dew, "Abolition of Negro Slavery," in Faust, ed., Ideology of Slavery, 70-71.

(72) [Thomas Clarkson], To the Christian and Well-Disposed Citizens of the Northern States of America, August 30, 1844. Privately printed, copy in the Thomas Clarkson Papers (Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.). See also "Thomas Clarkson to the Christian and well-disposed citizens of the northern states of America," in The Liberty Bell. By Friends of Freedom, 6 (Boston, 1845), 36-51. William L. Garrison reprinted the letter in the Boston Liberator, January 31, 1845.

(73) James Henry Hammond, "Hammond's Letters on Slavery," in The Pro-Slavery Argument; as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States ... (Charleston, S.C., 1852), 99-101, 128-31, 135-37, 14546. Hammond's letters were first published in the Columbia South Carolinian in 1845. They were reprinted twice in pamphlet form and reprinted in serial form in James De Bow's Commercial Review in 1849-1850. See James Henry Hammond, "Slavery at the South," Commercial Review, new set., 1 (October 1849), 289-97; "Gov. Hammond's Letters on Slavery--No. 2," ibid., new ser., 1 (December 1849), 490-501; "Gov. Hammond's Letters on Slavery--No. 3," ibid., new ser., 2 (February 1850), 122-33; and "Gov. Hammond's Letters on Slavery--No. 4," ibid., new ser., 2 (March 1850), 252-64. For more on this phase of Hammond's career see Faust, James Henry Hammond, 278-82. For the shift in British opinion on West Indian emancipation see Drescher, Mighty Experiment, chap. 12; and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore, 1992), chap. 6.

(74) "Carlyle on West India Emancipation," Commercial Review, new ser., 2 (June 1850), 527-38 (quotations on pp. 534 and 529). Carlyle's essay, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," was first published anonymously in Fraser's Magazine, 40 (December 1849), 670-79, and later as a pamphlet entitled Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (London, 1853), The essay was reviewed for a southern audience in "'British and American Slavery," Southern Quarterly Review, 8 (October 1853), 369-411. Carlyle's polemic received a stinging response from John Stuart Mill, which De Bow did not reprint. [Mill], "The Negro Question," Fraser's Magazine, 41 (January 1850), 25-31. Northern readers, however, had easy access to both essays through Littell's Living Age, a gleaning magazine published in Boston, which commented on the "grief' expected among Carlyle's admirers; Mill was not identified. See "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," Littell's Living Age, 24 (February 9, 1850), 248-54 (quotation on p. 248); and "The Negro Question," Littell's Living Age, 24 (March 9, 1850), 465-69. The entire debate along with a useful introduction can be found as a single volume in Thomas Carlyle, The Nigger Question; John Stuart Mill, The Negro Question, edited by Eugene R. August (New York, 1971).

(75) R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2001).

MR. RUGEMER is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Boston College.