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By Root 1454 0

’s Cabin. The last example of proslavery fiction was published in Georgia in 1864, as General Sherman was launching his scorched-earth campaign across that same state. It provides a kind of evolutionary “high point” (and last gasp) in the development of the proslavery argument. The novel came from the pen of Ebenezer Willis Warren, a forty-four-year-old Protestant pastor from Macon, Georgia. It was entitled Nellie Norton: or, Southern Slavery and the Bible: A Scriptural Refutation of the Principal Arguments Upon Which the Abolitionists Rely: A Vindication of Southern Slavery From the Old and New Testaments.5 The title suggests what becomes all too apparent when reading proslavery literature: to the defenders of slavery the Bible was unquestionably on their side. Wouldn’t it make sense for us to try to understand how so many Bible-reading, Bible-believing, Bible-quoting, and Bible-preaching people could be so horribly wrong for so terribly long?

As the story opens in 1859, Nellie Norton, a beautiful young New Englander, naively believes slavery is cruel. Then she travels with her mother south to Savannah to visit relatives who own a plantation with slaves. She becomes convinced, after long arguments, that:

Slave owners are victims of “malignant abuse” and “wicked and malicious slander” by ignorant, arrogant Northerners.

“The world is wrong [on the issue of human slavery], and the South must set it right.”

“The world is in error, and is dependent upon the South for the truth.”

“The welfare of the negro is best promoted when he is under the restraints of slavery.”

“Slavery is the normal condition of the negro.”

As the novel ends in 1860, Nellie falls in love with a wonderful slave owner and turns her home into a hospital for wounded Confederate soldiers. One can trace five lines of argument through the novel. First, there is the classic and ever popular ad hominem argument, asserting that abolitionists are despicable people. According to positive characters in the novel, abolitionists are “ruthless” and “fanatical,” taking positions “which embody the worst forms of infidelity ever known to the world.” They are sounding “the funeral knell of a pure Christianity.”6 One character asserts, “I tell you, [abolitionists are] an offense against God, the Bible, religion, the peace of the Christian world, and against common sense, and the more enlightened experience of the age.”

Second is the argument from tradition, asserting, as one character does, that slavery is woven into the fabric of creation and society: “The truth is, the world never has, and never can exist without slavery in some form…. Where is the country or the period of history wherein slavery did not exist in some shape or other?…Slavery has always existed, and will continue so long as there is a disparity in the intellect or energy of men.”

Third, characters in Nellie Norton argue that the South is a kind of paradise, and slavery is an Edenic way of life:

“The slaves have many rights. The right of life and limb, the right to be fed and clothed, to be nursed when sick, and cared for in old age when they become helplessly infirm. They are rightfully entitled to protection from ill treatment.”

Slave children are “fat and saucy, jolly and lively,” and they constantly enjoy “cheerful songs and merry laughter.”

Adult slaves are “happy Ethiopians” with “bright countenance[s], …smiling face[s], and ivory teeth” who “are fed bountifully, clothed well, nursed when indisposed, and afforded [a] suitable diet.” They “talk, and laugh, and sing, and pat, and dance” and are constantly “singing, dancing, laughing, chattering.”

Slave masters are “highly cultivated…men of superior general intelligence, refined, polite, [and] genteel…. I know of no case where the master lives on his plantation with his slaves but what they are treated with justice and moderation.”

Fourth, side by side with these effusive celebrations of the joys of slavery come darker arguments based on a doctrine of “negro inferiority.” Repeatedly in Nellie Norton, blacks are said to be “exceptions to the