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David Paterson makes a good point. In fact, abolitionists continued to define southern slavery as "man stealing" and condemned by the Bible since they argued all human beings are born free. Southern slaveholders and proslavery ideologues, on the other hand, distinguished between the foreign (note, not the domestic) slave trade and slavery while dealing with the man stealing argument. The notion however that some southern proslavery theorists who defended slavery in the abtract did not use racial arguments is false. As I have argued elsewhere, even the most "theoretically sophisticated" proslavery writers (Fitzhugh, Hughes, Holmes etc) never hesitated to resort to crude racialist arguments. Manisha Sinha
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