Pro-slavery advocates before and during the Civil War worked to defend the morality and necessity of American chattel slavery, and one of their defenses was that African-American slaves were actually much better treated than free white Americans.

George Fitzhugh wrote in Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters, published in 1856, of the benefits of American chattel slavery for African-Americans versus the plight of free white Americans.

But we not only boast that the White Slave Trade is more exacting and fraudulent (in fact, though not in intention) than Black Slavery; but we also boast that is tis more cruel , in leaving the laborer to care for himself and his family out of the pittance which skill or capital have allowed him to retain. When the days labor is ended, he is free, but is overburdened with the cares of family and household, which makes his freedom and empty and delusive mockery. But his employer is really free, and may enjoy the profit made by others labor, without a care, or a trouble, as to their well-being. The negro slave is free too, when the labors of the day are over, and free in mind as well as body; for the master provides food, raiment, house, fuel, and everything else to the physical well being of himself and his family. The masters labors commence just when the slaves end. No wonder men should prefer white slavery to capital, to negro slavery, since it is more profitable, and is free from all the cares and labors of black slave-holding.

The defenders of American chattel slavery argued that free white Americans were wage slaves, forced to work long hours for low wages in horrid working conditions, which was actually quite true. This gave credibility to the pro-slavery argument in the minds of white Americans in 1856.

Slaveholders asserted that they were benevolent to their slaves and actually treated their slaves well, whereas northern factory owners and other employers abused and overworked their white American employees and then callously cast them out of their work places to fend for themselves, casting the freedom of white Americans as a miserable existence.

Pro-slavery advocates argued that African-American slaves, on the other hand, lived secure lives of comfort and security under the paternalistic care of enlightened and benevolent Christian slave holders.

Indeed, Fitzhugh argued that The negro slaves in the South are the happiest, and in a sense, the freest people in the world, and that they were well treated, living in a utopian world without stress or want.

Free white American workers, on the other hand, were described as wage slaves who were held in thrall by greedy psychopathic employers, and thus abolitionists and free soil advocates were villains who wanted to wrench the slaves from their utopian existence in slavery into the horrific misery that free white Americans had to endure in their daily lives.

This view of slavery still persists in the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, which persists to the present day.

Grady Atwater is site administrator of the John Brown Museum and State Historic Site.

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George Fitzhugh and the defense of slavery | Voices | republic-online.com - Miami County Republic