The Debows Review, 150 years ago this week, offers this old timey conservative, dare I say Burkean, defense of slavery:
Society is a whole, composed of many essential and necessary parts, and the whole becomes deranged when one of its great and necessary parts is destroyed. It is a series of subordination, a social chain and when one link is broken, all the chain’s destroyed. Domestic Slavery is an important and necessary link in that chain, and all society flies out of gear when that link is destroyed or removed.
If our theory be not true, how comes it that faith predominates with us, and infidelity, in its every form, rages elsewhere?
There is a single form of infidelity, and that is a disbelief in the Bible, to which we intend to confine our remarks for the present, and to attempt to show that the South adheres to Christianity, because the institution of slavery accords with the injunctions and morality of the Bible; and that all free society must reject the Bible if it approve its own institutions and disapprove slavery, because slavery is not only instituted and justified by the Christian God, but, much more, because Christian morality can be practiced only in slave society.
Slavery was deeply ingrained in southern society. Protecting, promoting and spreading slavery was the proximate cause of secession. The literature of the period is laced with these themes. Try as one might, you can't get very far away from these themes.
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