Why called peculiar institution

After the invention of the cotton gin, the yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after Demand was fueled by other inventions of the Industrial Revolution, such as the machines to spin and weave it and the steamboat to transport it. By midcentury America was growing three-quarters of the world's supply of cotton, most of it shipped to England or New England where it was manufactured into cloth.

As far back as the Missouri Compromise in , sectional lines had been steadily hardening on the slavery question. In the North, sentiment for outright abolition grew increasingly powerful.

Southerners in general felt little guilt about slavery and defended it vehemently. In some seaboard areas, slavery by was well over years old; it was an integral part of the basic economy of the region. Although the census showed that there were nearly four million slaves out of a total population of There were some , slave owners out of about 1.

Fifty percent of these slave owners owned no more than five slaves. Twelve percent owned 20 or more slaves, the number defined as turning a farmer into a planter.

It is easy to understand the interest of the planters in slave holding. But the yeomen and poor whites supported the institution of slavery as well. They feared that, if freed, blacks would compete with them economically and challenge their higher social status. Southern whites defended slavery not simply on the basis of economic necessity but out of a visceral dedication to white supremacy.

As they fought the weight of Northern opinion, political leaders of the South, the professional classes, and most of the clergy now no longer apologized for slavery but championed it. Southern publicists insisted, for example, that the relationship between capital and labor was more humane under the slavery system than under the wage system of the North. Before the old patriarchal system of plantation government, with its personal supervision of the slaves by their owners or masters, was still characteristic.

Gradually, however, with the introduction of large-scale cotton production in the lower South, the master gradually ceased to exercise close personal supervision over his slaves, and employed professional overseers charged with exacting from slaves a maximum amount of work. In such circumstances, slavery could become a system of brutality and coercion in which beatings and the breakup of families through the sale of individuals were commonplace. In other settings, however, it could be much milder.

In the end, however, the most trenchant criticism of slavery was not the behavior of individual masters and overseers. To be sure, it's obvious to me that slaves are persons, while I find the personhood of fetuses deeply problematic. But I don't think it's facially ludicrous to declare that they are persons.

To me that means that "Feminists for Life" cannot, as I've heard declared, be an oxymoron; it seems perfectly possible to embrace all the other tenets of whatever you want to define as feminism, and also regretfully believe that since fetuses are persons, we cannot embrace this particular means of women's liberation. The third thought is sort of related: there's a lot of instrumentalism in arguments about the Civil War in some libertarian circles.

The Civil War, in my humble opinion, makes it impossible to jointly hold two beliefs dear to libertarian hearts: 1 No country should ever wage aggressive war 2 States or for that matter, smaller geographic units have the right to secede from the polity if it stops meeting their needs. The South posed no immediate military threat to the North; they wanted to leave the Union, not invade it. Even a prudential argument doesn't work very well on this metric--we killed more confederates than Iraqis both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population, and the south was far more economically devastated by the war than Iraq will have been.

I reject proposition one and say that aggressive wars can be justified on humanitarian grounds. Prudentially, they probably rarely work, but as a matter of moral theory, okay, it was worth having the Civil War to get rid of slavery.

Yes, even if we did it under the penumbra of "preserving the union" rather than "ending slavery". Others bite the bullet and say, okay, we didn't have the right to invade the South.

This is logically consistent, but it leaves you with the problem of saying that aggressive wars are worse than slavery. There is thus a largish cottage industry among those who hold this view in claiming that slavery would have ended anyway. Time on the Cross is a pretty thorough refutation of this belief. Slavery was not an economically inefficient institution that was withering away. It's doubtful that we could have had our moral cake and eaten it too.

Certainly, the book makes it clear to me that the very least we could have hoped for was decades more of slavery. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. The Right to Criticize American Institutions. Letter to C. Change of Opinion Announced. Letter to Owen Lovejoy. Fragment: On Slavery. Fragment: Notes for Speeches. Letter to Salmon Portland Chase. Letter to George Ashmun.

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Tenure Of Office Act. Excerpt from The Life of Jefferson Davis. Farewell Speech. Democratic Party Platform of The Policy of Aggression. Crittenden Compromise. Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce a Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States. Fragment on the Constitution and Union. First Inaugural Address Speech at Independence Hall. Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congres Virginia Ordinance of Secession.

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Black Codes of Mississippi. State of the Union Address Report on the Condition of the South. We Want No Confederacy without Slavery. Reply of the Colored Delegation to the President. Address Before the General Assembly of the State o Ex parte Milligan. Reconstruction Acts. Veto of the First Reconstruction Act. Party Platforms of Executive Documents on State of the Freedmen.

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Colfax Massacre Reports. Inaugural Address The Civil Rights Case. Speech in the Senate. Chapter Reconstructing the South. Speech on the Presidential Veto of the Bank Bill. Letter to Winfield Scott. Ex Parte Merryman. Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Proclamation Suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

Order of Retaliation. Proclamation for Thanksgiving Letter to Albert G. Reply to Delegation from the National Union League. Ex Parte Milligan. Articles of Impeachment Against Andrew Johnson. The Coming Woman. Speech to Red Cloud and Red Dog.

Civil Rights Act of On the Constitution and the Union. The War—Its Cause and Cure. Battle Hymn of the Republic. A Brand Plucked from the Fire. The Future of the Negro. The Heavenly Vision. Slavery and Abolition. Chapter War for Union or Abolition?