The issue of slavery is one that has so impacted the course of American history that we are still feeling its effects. Many people today ask themselves how freedom loving people like the Americans of the early 19th century could hold an entire race of people in bondage. It is a good question and one that deserves a good answer. The answer is readily understood by the man who realizes that early American society simply thought differently than we do today.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the worldview of those who could support the institution of slavery, is to compare it to events and practices in our own lives. We have all seen the flyers stuck on telephone poles and in shop windows that announce an owner's loss of a pet. Such flyers include a description of the animal and usually include either a picture or a reward or both. Compare such flyers to the following account taken from the South Carolina Gazette on August 13, 1737:

RUN AWAY from the plantation of Isaac Porcher on Wassamsaw, a new
Angola Negro Man, named Clawss, he is a small Fellow, and very black,
he had on when he went away a Breeches, Jacket, and Cap of white Plains,
pretty much worn and dirty, and Person who shall apprehend the said
Negro Man and bring him to his master or to Goal in Charlestown, or give
information so as he may be had again, shall receive 2 [lb] reward and all
Charges paid by Isaac Porter.

White slave-owners simply thought of their slaves as having no more rights or moral standing than we today give to our common pets!
The hypocrisy of slavery in the American colonies was evident from the beginning, but became all the more evident in the prelude, duration, and aftermath of the American Revolution. Abigail Adams expressed this thought when she wrote to her husband, "[...]it always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me. Fight ourselves for what we are daily ebbing and plundering from those who have as good a right [to] freedom as we[...]" What a dubious moral standing slave-owners found themselves in when they began to hail freedom as their divine right!

One of the chief ways in which the early 19th American society justified slavery was by saying that the enslaved of this country where better off than they had been as "savages" in their mother countries. Edmund Ruffin put forward this argument in support of slavery in his work, The Political Economy of Slavery in which he said, "[...]the introduction and establishment of domestic slavery is necessarily

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