Been scoping out this book and came across some interesting quotes I think worth looking at. The following passage I'm copying from the book manually, please forgive any errors that I miss.

http://www.deliverusfromevilford.com/Deliver_Us_from_Evil/Home.html

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The value of independence among yeomanry and other common whites in the South appeared in bold relief when compared to the dangerous "unrepublican" dependence experienced by free workers elsewhere. In the North, Hammond contended, free labor had found a ruthless master in the "modern artificial money power system" under which "all are subjected to the dominion of capital-a monster without heart." Increasingly, the comparative status of slaves and free workers in other societies emerged as a staple of these discussions of how slavery protected common whites from the degradation and dependence, In 1836, Theophilus Fisk, a Universalist minister from Charleston, challenged abolitionists to look at the problem of northern labor as well as southern slaves. "Are there no slaves north of the Potomac?" Fisk asked. "Are there no white laborers at the North bending under the load of poverty and the fetters of ignorance....Look at the cotton mills of New England-half a million females-most of them young and tender." Fisk went on to assert "that there are more slaves in Lowell and Nashua alone than can be found South of the Potomac." In the South, Fisk continued, "between Master and slave, there is mutual dependence, and a mutual interest, at the North, all the interest is on one side, and all the dependence is on the other. While the white slave is profitable to the master, he is employed, but let sickness or old age lay upon him a palsying hand, and he is kicked into the gutter to stare, or sent to the alms house to die." Alabama Baptist Basil Manly insisted that "there can be no doubt" that southern slaved were "less worked" and no less "well fed and clothed" than the European peasants and the English workers or "the Laborer in the Northern States of America." Mississippi's Thomas Thorton compared treatment of the slaves in the South favorably with the "insolent lewdness in the treatment of poor factory girls" in the North.

In 1839, Abel Upshur, a Calhoun ally from Virginia's eastern shore, fleshed out the argument for slavery as the foundation for white independence and civic equality. In the South, where the "slaves are black", Upshur explained, the "white man is never a slave." The southern slave system drew a visible distinction designed to ensure that "the humblest white man" enjoyed "a high sense of his own comparative dignity and importance." Racial slavery served as an "impassable barrier" that "every white man, however his condition, is interested to preserve unbroken." Upshur maintained that slavery produced "throughout the southern states" a "remarkable independence, freedom, and equality among all classes of whites." In the South, Upshur contended, "no white man feels such inferiority of rank as to be unworthy of association with those around him. Color alone here is the badge of distinction, the true mark of aristocracy , and all who are white, are equal, in spite of a variety of occupation."

Moreover, Upshur also argued that slavery prevented dependencey among white by ensuring a widespread distribution of property, In Upshur's view, the widespread distribution of property ownership in the South not only ensured the independence of the plain white folk but also damped "the jealousies of the different classes into which societies are usually divided." "Equal in our rank, the spirit of leveling sees nothing to envy," Upshur maintained, "equal in our fortune, the spirit of agrarianism sees nothing to attack. " Thus slaveholding society contrasted nicely the the "natural jealousies of capital and labor" that exist in free societies. In a slave society, "labor and capital unite in the same person, Upshur maintained, The laborer is the slave, and the capitalist is the owner of the slave. Capital has a direct interest to see that the labor is not oppressed, and labor has nothing to hope from an attack on capital." Finally, Upshur explained, slavery made the white plain folk good republican citizens because in "our slaveholding communities, the white man, whatever his condition, is accustomed to exercise absolute authority over the negro... This single fact is enough to....render him extremely jealous of any encroachments upon his own rights....he cannot easily be persuaded to yield the proud distinction of a master, by becoming himself a slave."It was, "not an easy thing," Upshur concluded, "to make political slaves of men who are admonished every hour, not only that they are personally free, but that their freedom confers upon them at once, rank, dignity, and power." [/quote]

Self-serving malarkey and twaddle, to be sure, yet some interesting clarity of observation.

To be continued...

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The connection between white republicanism and slavery also united infidel with saint. South Carolina College president Thomas Cooper, who was both heralded as a state's rights radical and a skeptic and loathed as an infidel, articulated a compelling argument for slavery as a guarantor of white democracy. According to Cooper, the South could accept "universal suffrage" among whites without fear of empowering lower-class enemies of property. The autonomy of common whites in the South, Cooper maintained, contrast favorably with the dependent condition of workers at Lowell and Waltham, who, Cooper claimed, "were compelled to give their vote on printed calico" so that "their masters might be sure that they voted according to order." during the election of 1828. Cooper's thinly disguised religious skepticism drew the ire of James Thornwell. But Thornwell, though neither a democrat or Democrat, also defended slavery as a guarantor of white freedom and republican liberty, albeit on conservative grounds. Thornwell depicted the struggle for republican liberty between abolitionists and slaveholders as one that pitted "atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other." The theologian credited slavery with protecting "the principle of regulated liberty....resisting alike the social anarchy of communism and the political anarchy of licentiousness." The South, Thornwell contended, stood in support of 'representative republican government against the despotism of the masses on one hand, and the single supremacy of a single will on the other."

The asserted connection between white independence and black slavery grew stronger as the ideological reconfiguration of slavery took firm hold in the late antebellum decades. During the 1850s, W.L. Hudgen, a slaveholder from Upstate South Carolina, declared that "African slavery" was "of heaven appointment" because it was the system "best adapted to the freedom and equality of the white." In the same region, a Chester District resident claimed that because of black slavery "those invidious distinctions [among whites] which prevail in all free-soil states must be to a considerable extent unknown" in the South. Another Upcountry planter, Edgefield's Arthur Simkins, held that slavery united the "commonest cottager" with the "planter" as "master of his own domain" where a man's independence "jostles no one and no one jostles him."

The argument that black slavery secured white independence also found expression in the southern critique of "wage slavery" emerged with some vigor in the late antebellum era. Upcountry South Carolina lawyer William King Easley noted that northern "work shops" were "crowded with withered forms and haggard faces" working "amid the din of the looms and the roar of the spindles and wheels in their giant factories," where observers could hear. "the smothering cough of consumptive and starving operatives." Another Upcountry planter called on northern philanthropists to emancipate their own slaves-"slaves that were their own color, now everywhere reduced by the progress of their manufacturing system to a condition of toil and abject submission to their Master's will even more debasing than that of the Southern slave." Common whites in the South understood, South Carolina planter Benjamin Herdon Rice declared, "that...where Capital rules, where there are no black slaves, there must be white ones." [/quote]