A Slave Owner Defends Slavery

By Charles P. Roland, University of Kentucky

Presentation to CCWRT on 19 November 2009, Summarized by Mike Rhein

Photography by Dan Reigle

©Cincinnati CWRT, 2009

Slavery: a word evoking a sad chord from a solemn chapter in our American past.

Even though slavery as an institution died in the South as the guns of our American Civil War fell silent in 1865, through the decades since that war with all the attendant issues of reconstruction, civil rights, riots and racial hatred, it has become our national scar tissue. The wound may have “healed,” but it still grates our national psyche.

Dr. Charles Roland, Alumni Professor Emeritus at the University of Kentucky, speaking to our CCWRT Nov. 19, dealt with the slavery debate that had existed for decades prior to and during the “War Between the States.” He creatively framed to the audience this nationally contentious subject within a structure of a fictitious letter written by a fictitious character, Frank Lawrence, a Louisiana sugar plantation owner and slaveholder, to his former College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) friend, Frederick Darcy in Freeport, Illinois (site of the second debate between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858) on Jan. 20, 1861. Dr. Roland, based his letter format on years of study involving antebellum era writings reflecting the debate on the issue of slavery.

Frank Lawrence, not a secessionist, refers to the American nation’s “deplorable condition” during January, 1861 in terms of “fear and trembling” (this writer notes it is interesting that Dr. Roland chooses Jan. 20 as the Lawrence letter date; by Jan. 20, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama and Georgia had voted to secede from the Union. Louisiana would secede on Jan. 26. Lawrence’s growing fear and dread reflected many Southerners’ anxiety towards the secession trend.

In response to Frederick Darcy’s inquiry on his views of slavery, Lawrence wished to “summarize my feelings” on this subject by delving into the history of its formation, citing “a few Africans (indentured servants)” sold by a Dutch slave trader in 1619 in America, emphasizing a “system transformed into slavery” due to the slaves being “suitable” to the country’s “climate” and “environment.” By the 1660’s, Lawrence notes, there were statutes enacting slavery and slave codes adopted. He adds that 13 colonies had legalized slavery by the end of the American Revolution. He states that the cotton gin’s invention in the 1790’s was a “stimulus” to the South, enabling it to be a “cotton kingdom.” Lawrence cites there were four million slaves in 15 states, one of which, South Carolina, possessed slaves as two-thirds of its population.

Lawrence, in a stab at Northern criticism of the South’s slavery status, stresses that “many (slave) ships “were of “Northern registry.” To dispel the North’s notion of widespread slavery control in the South, Lawrence informs Darcy of the following facts: “three-fourths of white families do not have slaves; the great majority of the South are independent farmers; white independent farmers and herdsmen and Southerners in the back country do not feel competition with slave labor” (and) “do not feel disadvantaged.” The Louisiana sugar planter defends slavery as a “means of policing and controlling a large slave population (as) incapable of civilization.”

Lawrence, a resident of Napoleonville, Louisiana, feels that “a happy servant is a good servant,” adding, “we house our servants in comfortable quarters,” providing “a plantation infirmary” whereas in the North, “common laborers in factories and mines” in contrast to Southern slaves, have shorter life-spans according to a previous “federal census,” and that Northern workers make only $1.50 per week.” He supports his servants when they are “ill or too old” and promotes a religious atmosphere in having a “chapel constructed on my plantation.” Lawrence stresses that his slaves “enter into wedlock,” with him being “against sexual license,” adding, “Marriages are done properly according to Episcopal form.”

Lawrence concedes to his longtime friend that “not all owners are conscientious,” inflicting “unreasonable punishments” and are “promiscuous with slaves.” Responding to “abolitionists accusing us of whipping slaves to work,” Lawrence says, “We determine the servant’s true nature of the offense” and that “we do not whip to draw blood.” However, he expresses dismay that the “poor, less- educated whites’ treatment of servants (is) lamentable.”

Lawrence finished his letter with his thoughts on the politics of the day. He states that the introduction of the practice of slavery was “regrettable” and that it has caused a “demographic upheaval of the times. He also laments that the Compromises of 1820 and 1850 were “nullified” by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 and the impact of the “Dred Scott Decision of 1857 have led to the present crisis. Emphasizing that he had opposed secession, Lawrence says to Darcy that he “voted for John Bell of the Constitutional Party” (in 1860) and that the “majority of Louisiana and the South have voted for Unionist candidates.” Because Lincoln and other Northerners rejected the Crittenden Compromise, Lawrence fears that war is inevitable as the die is now fatally cast.

Frank Lawrence, in summary, is symbolic of many individuals, North and South, who were increasingly torn in heated debate over the societal and political subject of, as historian Kenneth Stampp termed it, the “peculiar institution.”

In the question and answer portion of the program, Dr. Roland commented that in the absence of the Civil War, there is no indication that slavery would have ended any time soon. He stressed that John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry Raid in 1859 and the successful Haitian slave revolt were on the minds of many Southerners. Dr. Roland noted that, from the Southern point of view, “slavery was flourishing,” and that “there was no substitute for slave labor.” Dr. Roland pointed out that the post-war reconstruction period was a “failure,” because it “ran headlong with the problem of what to do with freed slaves.” He concluded with a telling observation: “There are still serious social problems in our society today that go back to slavery.”

Dr. Roland delivered a unique angle to the slavery issue with the imaginary letter approach by a Southerner to his Northern friend. He, in a way, reminds us that many gut-wrenching issues in our country’s history have ripped our national fabric: the American Revolution, Vietnam and Iraq, to name a few. Slavery, in its various tentacles stretching through myriad forms and effects in our American past, still echoes mournfully. The Civil War ended in 1865 in places like Appomattox Courthouse and Durham Station, but the subject of race still haunts us today.