The government investigated 19 suspects in three cases and prosecuted and convicted three
slaveholders, a slight increase from one investigation, two prosecutions, and two convictions the previous reporting period.
Southern oligarchs were, of course,
slaveholders. Yet for Nabors, the essential fact is that they used their wealth to entrench themselves in power at the expense of both African Americans and the white majority.
The final explosive tipping point, not surprisingly, came over the issue of whether or not
slaveholders could serve as missionaries.
Turner's childhood
slaveholder, Benjamin Turner, was a Methodist who had prayer meetings at his home and Nat Turner was encouraged to attend.
CATHOLICS,
SLAVEHOLDERS, AND THE DILEMMA OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM.
Not every
slaveholder openly acknowledged having an enslaved mistress or fathering enslaved children.
In his 1835 publication, Slavery, Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing distinguished between the wrong of slavery and the character of the
slaveholder. Because all men "partake of the errors of the community in which they live," explained Channing, "the same acts in different circumstances admit and even require very different conclusions." While mitigating the
slaveholders' sin, Channing maintained that slavery was evil by attributing its evil to its operation as a system.
Through his examination of Levy, Monaco discovers not only that late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Jews were attracted to contradictory philosophies--messianism, the Enlightenment, assimilation, anti-assimilation--but also that abolitionist sentiment contained many threads--including that of a racist
slaveholder interested in preserving an economic and social hierarchy until he deemed blacks capable of handling their freedom.
American and Loyalist
slaveholders were desperate to obtain compensation for property lost during the war, and few had many scruples regarding the entitlements of blacks.
Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimke Family's Journey from
Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders by Mark Perry.
She does so by giving her heroine (Frances O'Connor) speeches right out of Austen's personal correspondence and by highlighting the barbarity and authoritarianism of the patriarchal lord and colonial
slaveholder.
Thus, the upshot of Faust's tour through the actual and artistic world of Confederate women seems to be a recognition that, the destabilizing impact of the war notwithstanding, these women found their traditional position in the
slaveholder ideology to be reassuring, rather than constraining.