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The Cardinal Edge

Abstract

This paper explores how nineteenth-century Southern intellectuals appropriated and adapted Aristotle’s ancient defense of slavery to legitimize racial slavery in the antebellum United States. Although Aristotle’s theory of “natural slavery” emerged from the social and economic conditions of classical Greece, where enslaved people constituted essential components of the household, Southern thinkers tailored his argument to justify the peculiar institution. The paper begins by outlining Aristotle’s defense of slavery in his Politics, which states that some individuals naturally lack the capacity for rational deliberation, thereby benefiting from enslavement. Then, it traces how the American South’s investment in classical education allowed Aristotle's defense to permeate the South's intelligentsia. Proslavery writers such as George Frederick Holmes, Thomas Roderick Dew, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and George Fitzhugh drew on his ideas to argue that Black Americans were “natural slaves,” combining classical philosophy with biblical justification, racial pseudo-science, and claims of intellectual inferiority. This eventually culminated in the use of the positive good argument, which asserted that slavery produced mutual benefits by allowing enslavers to cultivate intellect and social prestige while providing enslaved people with paternalistic protection and guidance. These writers also attacked Enlightenment natural rights theory and portrayed northern free labor as a more exploitative system of “wage slavery,” insisting that social hierarchy was natural, necessary, and historically universal. Ultimately, this paper argues that while Southern polemicists reshaped Aristotle to defend slavery and elevate their own intellectual authority, their efforts deepened sectional polarization and reinforced the ideological foundations of a profoundly unjust system.

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