Nat Turner Views On Slavery

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Many slaveholders in the south in the early 19th century did not think they had to defend their ideas on slavery. No one at the time opposed the laws and culture of slavery in the south so there was no need to be on the lookout for outsiders who wanted rebel against slavery to end it. That is until the rebellion of Nat Turner in the 1830s which sparked a movement in the southern territories to defend their ideas on slavery using biblical passages and racial arguments in defense from the Northern abolitionists. With the uprising against slavery from the north, this pressurized the south in keeping what they thought was unavoidable to society but the rise of slavery has affected both the political and geographical aspects of America to decide …show more content…
White slave owners in the south viewed slaves not as people but merely as their own property. Slaves were needed to tend to the crops on the plantations, especially to harvest “King cotton” which made southern states to remain mainly as a rural and agricultural based economy. The fact that labor was needed and slaves were there in the south was a good enough reason for slavery to continue as is. But this perspective changed when Nat Turner struck terror into the hearts of white American’s in 1831 with his slave uprising. White slave owners needed a reason to keep slavery legal in the south against the northern abolitionists who opposed slavery, thus they started to justify slavery with biblical passages to show it was God’s word to enslave these people for their own good and compared slavery that dated all the way back to the Greek and Roman empires. To further defend themselves against the northern abolitionists, an argument they proposed was that “blacks were unfit for freedom” (Goldfield, The American Journey, 236). With these racial arguments, they deemed blacks as inherently inferior to whites and that slavery is what helps both races coexist with one another in society. Even whites who were poor and did not own slaves benefitted from this system, it gave even the poorest whites legal and social status making them superior to …show more content…
The reason was slavery” (Goldfield, 306). The north and south already having different perspectives on the rise of slavery also had many other things that were different such as the north being a more industrialized and urban society than the south. The south was more agricultural and rural thus heavily depended on slave labor while the north instead had free wage labor. They also had different religious and social differences in regarding to slaves in that the southern states had a high illiteracy rate compared to the north. The south did not think of education as a basic right but as a privilege for those that were considered elite or important in society. “Southerners associated black slavery with white freedom; northerners associated it with white degradation” (Goldfield, 307). As long as the color of their skin is white, he will always be considered better than those with darker skin, this is what helped established white people who did not own slaves to not be slaves
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