Slave Ownership In The Southern United States

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a few southern white plantation owners and that most of the white population was unaffected by it. The author spends nearly half of his thirty-seven paragraph article displaying the past and present attitudes of the general population through several case studies which he lists chronologically and explains in brief detail. He tries to discredit a handful of them while, at the same time, injecting his own views. In an attempt to persuade the reader he sets up his side of the debate by citing a few case studies that promote his hypothesis and concludes by relating some of his own opinions and findings including a study where he makes a seemingly strong comparison between those of the population who invested in the slave labor market in 1850 and those who invested in the stock market in 1949. In the first half of the article Olsen sets up the arguments he is going to challenge by showing what historians from the antebellum US through the present, believed the distribution of slaves ...

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that judgment appears to have rested primarily upon a moral repugnance toward slavery." He then begins to investigate the prevailing attitude toward slavery in the past as well as the attitude of historians in the 20th century. Olsen blames the antebellum antislavery movement for the origin of the accusations that southern slavery was politically and economically oligharchical. A prime example is the viewpoint of the Republican party. In a speech to the people of the United States in 1856 the address asserted that non-slaveholders in the South "were reduced to a vassalage little less degrading than that of the slaves themselves…although the white population of the ...

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