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<title> "The argument has commenced...Slavery will every where be abolished, or every where be re-instituted." </title>
Slavery has been present throughout the human history, but never has it reached such proportion as it did in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1860, 4,000,000 blacks had been brought over from Africa to be sold as slaves. In this essay I will try to render the different views people had on slavery during this time, and I will use various, contemporaneous authors as a source. I will start with the arguments against slavery, which are much less then the arguments for. This reflects the general opinion from this time; the majority was either for slavery, or else not interested enough to take a stance. Therefore, there are not many texts that argument against slavery from this time.
	 To start with, I think it is important to point out the fact that even most of the abolitionists, who were against the slavery, still did not think of blacks and whites as equals. Abraham Lincoln for example, who was elected president in the North in 1860 and who made the Emancipation Proclamation, did not ever reveal any remarks or thoughts about black and white equality. Not much regard was paid to what was written in the Declaration of Independence eighty-five years earlier: that all men are created equal and that everyone has the right to freedom. Somehow, it never crossed most people's minds that blacks should be entitled to the same rights as whites.
	 There were a few exceptions, though. One of them was Wm. Lloyd Garrison, who wrote the preface to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by the former slave Frederick Douglass. Garrison was an abolitionist, but he was also one of the few who believed in racial equity, relating to blacks as "our brothers". In his preface, he speaks of Frederick Douglass as "an intellectual and moral being" [304] and talks about his eloquence as a prodigy. He also condemns slavery and quotes the Irishman Daniel O'Connell: "No matter under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still hideous. It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man" [306]. Garrison refers to slavery as evil and criticizes people in favor to be ignorant: "So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties which are daily inflicted on its victims" [307]. This statement reflects that many people just did not bother to take a stance for or against slavery, it was just excepted. Perhaps many would have changed their mind regarding slavery, if they had gotten the chance to see the cruelties that were committed.
	 So what were the arguments for slavery? The most common one was that blacks are inferior to whites, and that this gave the rights to keep blacks as slaves. Many supporters of slavery saw blacks as children who, and I quote from George Fitzhugh's Sociology for the South - Negro Slavery, "constantly must be controlled by parents or guardians" [310]. Fitzhugh also claims that blacks has no moral or intellect and that the South are doing them a favor to save them "from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism" [310]. Slaves had no legal rights in the South, and the slaveholders could basically do anything to their slaves without facing legal punishment. Even Fitzhugh is against this and wants the slaveholders to be punished "for any inhuman or improper treatment or neglect of his slave" [314]. 
	 Another argument that was used for slavery was that the slaves were better off than the working class of Europe. There were workers in Europe who worked under terrible circumstances for a bad salary that barely kept them alive. In comparison to this, the life of the slaves in the United States seemed better. The poem The Hireling and the Slave by William J Grayson deals with this argument: "To each alike applies the stern decree, that man shall labour; whether bond or free, for all that toil, the recompense we claim- food, fire, a home and clothing- is the same". The blacks were considered to be saved by the whites, because they did not think that the blacks could cope on their own. "The Negro freeman- thrifty while a slave, becomes a helpless drone or crafty knave, each effort to improve his nature foils; begs, steals, or sleeps and starves, but never toils, for savage sloth, mistakes the freedom won, and ends the mere barbarian he begun".
	 "Slavery established in the South a peculiar and noble type of civilization". (The lost cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates by Pollard) The South was, at least by its own citizens, considered to be a superior civilization with "superior refinements of scholarship and manners". Pollard says that slavery is what made this possible and that, even if cruelties existed, it was the price that had to be paid for "polished manners" and "many noble and generous virtues". Slavery made it possible for the whites to dedicate themselves to more noble activities, and according to Pollard it was envy that made the North criticize slavery. 
	 "Slavery will every where be abolished, or every where be re-instituted" [Fitzhugh, 314] The prophecy came through; slavery was at last abolished in the United States, but it took a war to accomplish that. The same ideas and opinions still exist today, though, especially in the South. Two hundred years of slavery does not wash off so easily.
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