The advertisement of this pro-slavery pamphlet
made a one-time appearance in Harper’s Weekly.
Samuel A. Cartwright, the author of the appendix,
was a racist physician whose medical specialty was
listed somewhat ominously as "Negro
diseases." He was also one of the few Southern
Democrats to support Senator Stephen Douglas’s
position on slavery in the Kansas territory. Douglas
wanted slavery to be decided by the territorial
residents themselves (popular sovereignty). Note
that the advertised pamphlet is aimed particularly
at Democratic clubs for use in the upcoming
elections.
With the rise of abolitionism in the 1830s, the
white Southern defense of slavery began to change
from presenting the institution as a necessary evil
to alleging that it was a positive good. The latter
position was argued from various perspectives—religious,
philosophical, sociological, and so forth. The
pro-slavery defense became more strident and
pervasive as sectional tensions over the slavery
issue rose in the 1850s.
Among the arguments proffered for the defense of
slavery were biological ones advanced by members of
the Southern intelligentsia. Men like Cartwright and
Josiah Nott, an ethnologist at the University of
Alabama, contended that blacks were biologically
inferior to whites. Their theories assumed a
separate creation for blacks and whites, an idea
which violated traditional Christian belief and thus
compelled most white Southerners to look elsewhere
for pro-slavery arguments. The biological thesis,
therefore, remained the peculiar orthodoxy of the
educated elite.
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