Polemical Pain by Margaret Abruzzo

Author:Margaret Abruzzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Utility, Providence, and the Natural Slave

As happiness grew more central to Americans’ conceptions of morality, apologists for slavery recognized the importance of arguing that slavery, far from torturing enslaved blacks, actually made them happy. In 1844 James Shannon, president of Bacon College in Kentucky, built a proslavery argument on the claim that “happiness is the end and aim” of existence.73 Even a student writing a last-minute essay fell back on the piety that slavery promoted “human happiness.”74 Yet, as antislavery writers had long pointed out, few people would actually choose to switch places with a slave, despite the golden rule. Claims that whites would benefit from enslavement were few and far between. Indeed, in 1862 howls of protest erupted in New Orleans when the Catholic bishop Augustin Verot denied that slavery’s legitimacy depended on race.75 No matter how often slaveholders called slavery an “enviable lot,” claims of its inherent benevolence relied, implicitly or explicitly, on racial assumptions.76 Polemicists now routinely argued that blacks, unlike whites, would find happiness in slavery. Apologists increasingly described slavery as a benevolent divine plan. God’s providence had suited blacks for slavery; they would best achieve happiness in that state. Claims for the intrinsic benevolence of slavery were closely intertwined with notions of essential, biological racial difference.77

During the 1840s, claims that God had specially designed blacks, unlike whites, to find happiness in slavery formed the core of proslavery argumentation. Proslavery apologists built a new set of arguments on a foundation that racism made compelling but did not create: natural theology and utilitarianism. Natural theology and theories of utility both contributed to the broader revulsion against pain in Anglo-American intellectual life. William Paley, whose theory of moral motivations irked professors, played a far less controversial role in antebellum colleges with his Natural Theology (1802). God, Paley argued, had benevolently designed the world to maximize creatures’ happiness. In God’s benevolent contrivances, creatures and environment suited each other perfectly. God customized each creature with different needs and appetites appropriate to its unique environment; creatures’ happiness lay in staying in their allotted niches.78 This emphasis on contrivance provided good fodder for proslavery writers to chew on.

And chew they did. Numerous apologists echoed Shannon in insisting that blacks would find happiness in their allotted role as slaves. God designed blacks, destined for slavery, to be happy in it, just as He had suited other creatures to their environments. That whites would be unhappy as slaves was beside the point, since God had not designed whites for enslavement. As Louisa McCord explained in 1851, “Happiness and wretchedness, independent of absolute bodily suffering,” depended not on the circumstances of life but “upon the suitableness of the character to the circumstances.” Whites would “rebel” at slavery, while an enslaved black “finds, perhaps, his happiest existence.” Forcing whites into slavery or blacks into freedom was as inappropriate as forcing a square peg into a round hole.79 Not everyone rooted these differences in roles in physiology, but Americans in the 1840s grew more likely to see happiness as a function of particular, rather than universal, needs and wants.

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