Calhoun's specific arguments, forcible as they
were--and they are certainly the most cogent that can be used in defence
of such a thesis--were particularly popular, or, in fact, were ever used
by any but himself. Perhaps there was a well-founded feeling that they
proved too much. For Calhoun's case was as strong for white servitude as
for black: it was a defence, not especially of Negro Slavery, but of
what Mr. Belloc has called "the Servile State." More general, in the
later Southern defences, was the appeal to religious sanctions, which in
a nation Protestant and mainly Puritan in its traditions naturally
became an appeal to Bible texts. St. Paul was claimed as a supporter of
the fugitive slave law on the strength of his dealings of Onesimus. But
the favourite text was that which condemns Ham (assumed to be the
ancestor of the Negro race) to be "a servant of servants." The
Abolitionist text-slingers were not a whit more intelligent; indeed, I
think it must be admitted that on the whole the pro-Slavery men had the
best of this absurd form of controversy. Apart from isolated texts they
had on their side the really unquestionable fact that both Old and New
Testaments describe a civilization based on Slavery, and that in neither
is there anything like a clear pronouncement that such a basis is
immoral or displeasing to God. It is true that in the Gospels are to be
found general principles or, at any rate, indications of general
principles, which afterwards, in the hands of the Church, proved largely
subversive of the servile organization of society; but that is a matter
of historical, not of Biblical testimony, and would, if followed out,
have led both Northern and Southern controversialists further than
either of them wanted to go.

It would, however, be hasty, I think, to affirm that even to the very
end of these processes a majority of Southerners thought with Calhoun
that Slavery was "a positive good." The furthest, perhaps, that most of
them went was the proposition that it represented the only relationship
in which white and black races could safely live together in the same
community--a proposition which was countenanced by Jefferson and, to a
considerable extent at least, by Lincoln. To the last the full
Jeffersonian view of the inherent moral and social evil of Slavery was
held by many Southerners who were none the less wholeheartedly on the
side of their own section in the sectional dispute. The chief soldier of