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Southern Slavery Benefits

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Torn between the economic benefits of slavery, white southerners grew more and more defensive of the intuition. This institution didn’t bring much revenue to the North, as opposed to the South who was dependent on the free labor. Free labor meant everything to the white southerners, who owned plantations and exported cotton to countries such as Britain and England. Not only did the south defend Slavery for economic benefits, but they also believed that African Americans were inferior, it was a good thing for the enslaved, and it served as the “basis for the southern way of life”. With Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, the South grew more dependent on slavery. Ambition led to an increase of slaves that could work the cotton …show more content…
South’s agriculture was profitable that few southerners saw a need for industrial development. Also, slave owners had invested their money on their property; plantation owners were not about to sell their slaves and build factories such as the ones in the North. There was a belief that African Americans were inferior; southern whites, slave owners or not, as well as some northern whites, believed that the black race was not prepared to live “on equal terms” with whites. Moreover, white southerners claimed that slaves were unfit to take care for themselves since they were illiterate and were the inferior race with no educational opportunities. Even Abraham Lincoln accepted the inferiority of black people. Additionally, John C Calhoun stated that slavery was a positive good. The south strongly believed that slavery was good for slaves because unlike the factory workers in the North who experienced the horror of the factory system and lived in pestilential cities, slave owners protected their slaves when they were sick. The Southern society also defended slavery because it was the only way that the two races could live together in peace, and it was good for the entire country because the southern economy was the key to the prosperity of the nation. They believed the South was a stable and orderly society, and in short, slaves were supposedly safe, secured, and

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