7 Ways Some White People Justified American Slavery

Blacks Are Inferior

In discussing the peculiar institution, Thomas Jefferson, no less than the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the third president, wrote, “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowment of body and mind.” Scientists initially said Blacks had smaller brains and even less gray matter in their brains

Blacks Are Physically Different

During a debate, the so-called great emancipator himself, Abraham Lincoln, said of the two races: “There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

It’s in the Bible

Slaveholders justified slavery by citing Bible passages that fit their needs. Two of the most often used were Ephesians 6:5—”slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling”— and Titus 2:9 — “tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect.”

Slavery Was Natural for Blacks

Whites convinced themselves that slavery was helpful to Black people because they needed to be watched over and cared for. White slaveholders were protecting enslaved people from those who “proposed by the tyranny of legislation to set bounds to their freedom of thought and action” by setting them free.

Blacks Are Immoral 

This is how the “Negro” is described in the first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1798), “Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance … strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.”

Blacks Aren’t Fully Evolved

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which placed races of people along an evolutionary chain, said Blacks froze at puberty in their development and were comparable to white adolescents — thus needed to be cared for by whites.

Slavery Kept Blacks Sane

This one came about as a result of the 1840 census, which claimed that “insanity and idiocy” was up to 11 times more prevalent in Northern free Negroes than Southern Negroes — leading Secretary of State John C. Calhoun in 1844 to conclude that the data proved the “necessity of slavery” because it protected Blacks “from mental death.”