Aristotle in the Antebellum South: Natural Slavery, Democracy, and the Ancients

Aristotle in the Antebellum South addresses two questions related to the use of the classical past in the context of the proslavery argument as it developed in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. First, what specific ideological needs did Aristotelian ideas about natural hierarchy serve in the antebellum South? Ideas about natural slavery explicitly marked as Aristotelian had been universally rejected by slavery's apologists almost from the moment of their formulation in the fourth century BCE. Second, why did the generation of Americans that came of age in the first half of the nineteenth century focus almost exclusively on the evils of Rome of the late Republic and early empire, while the founders had looked to early republican Rome as a model for the new nation? The answers to both questions, unsurprisingly, have much to do with race and slavery, but this is only part of the problem. In this book, Daniel Richter addresses reasons beyond southerners simply looking to the past for precedent and justification for their own racialized and gendered hierarchies. Richter suggests that racism, in the sense of an ideology that maintains that the inferiority of a descent group is innate, unchangeable, and permanent, is a justification of slavery that is peculiar to democratic societies that conceptualize their republican freedom in terms of nature. Read more