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<title> The argument has commenced...Slavery will every where be abolished, or every where be re-instituted </title>
In the middle of the nineteenth century a fierce debate took place in all of America, regarding the existence of slavery. The abolitionists in the North wanted the slaves in the South set free while the cotton-farmers in the Confederate states of the South wanted more slaves to work in their fields.
The first Negroes to arrive in America in 1619 was to begin with not slaves but indentured servants, working a few years for a master who paid the fair for the trip over the Atlantic and after four to seven years they became free. This arrangement was a common way for whites to get to the New Nation as well as for blacks. In the mid-seventeenth century however blacks were gradually made servants for life, and laws made it impossible for free blacks to have white servants. Slave-importation exploded and from being 50,000 black slaves in America in the beginning of 17th century rose to 4,000,000 in 1860.
By 1830 the use of slaves in the North had almost come to an end and the slaves had been freed. But their freedom did not mean the same freedom as for whites. The idea of white supremacy, the notion that the white race was superior to other races, was well spread throughout the entire nation and instead of enslavement of blacks the government instituted laws to restrict black people and to ensure that they stayed inferior to the white. They were often systematically separated from the white population in areas such as housing, education and transportation.
In the South, on the other hand, there was still a great deal of slaves and a great need for the future existence of slavery to provide workers to the cotton-fields. The picking of cotton was a time-consuming and exhausting labor, this meant that the plantation-owners could not afford hiring workers to do the job and they worked very hard at coming up with strong arguments to keep slavery in the South and to re-institute slavery in the North.
One man who worked to this end was George Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh Wrote a text called Sociology for the South: Negro Slavery, in which he discusses the sociological advantages to having blacks as slaves instead of having them free to govern themselfs. The idea of first releasing them and then trying to keep them at bay with rules and regulations is according to Fitzhugh not possible. According to him the Negro "is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child" (310). He also refers to the Negro as improvident and that "this defect of character would alone justify enslaving him" (310) and if they are freed "would become an insufferable burden to society" (310). Fitzhugh means that the society has the right to protect itself from this and that it "can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery" (310). 
Fitzhugh does agree with the abolitionists on one point and that is that the Negroes are inferior to the white but contrary to what the abolitionists think, Fitzhugh is certain that their freedom would lead to extermination due to incapacity to compete with the white people. He is also convinced that by enslaving the Negroes they would save them from a far more cruel slavery in Africa and from idolatry and cannibalism and therefore their lives. According WM. Lloyd Garrison there are few things that can be as cruel as the slavery of the South. To make his point he writes of scourgings, mutilations and brandings, whips, chains, paddles, bloodhounds and overseers, these are some of the cruelties acted out against the slaves and some of the equipment used to physically restrain him to the plantation. Then there is the banishment of knowledge in order not to enlighten them in how badly they are being treated and to psychologically keep him in their labor. Garrison means that all these contraptions and methods of restriction have but one purpose, to protect the oppressors, the plantation-owners and to them are indispensable. He ways this against the end towards which they work: "As if, [...] when all the right of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler" (WM. Lloyd Garrison: The narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass: preface 307).
The slaves were also, according to Fitzhugh, being saved from moral breakdown by protecting them from all the cruelties and crimes that humans can do and they were therefore better off than the free laborers in the North both physically and morally. In a speech in 1845 Daniel O'Connel, a distinguished advocate of universal emancipation, expressed a different opinion: "No matter under what [...] disguise [...], slavery is still hideous. It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man" (WM. Lloyd Garrison: The narrative of the life of Fredrick Douglass: preface 306). 
Fitzhugh continues throughout his text to connect to the fact that the Negroes are an inferior race and compare them to another inferior species, the animals. "The earliest civilization of which history gives account is that of Egypt. The Negro was always in contact with that civilization. For four thousand years he has had opportunities of becoming civilized. Like the wild horse, he must be caught, tamed and domesticated. When his subjugation ceases he again runs wild" (312). One man who would argue that point is the ex-slave Fredrick Douglass whom had escaped his master's plantation in Talbot county, Maryland. Douglass was born on a plantation and lived there until his escape and yet without receiving any education after he broke his iron fetters managed, according to Garrison, to write his own narrative, in his own style, to the best of his abilities.
There are many heavy arguments made by these writers both for and against slavery and it took a long time but in the end the right side won and even though it took a civil war to settle the issue slavery was every where abolished (at least in the USA).
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