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It's still in the works, but suffice it to say, they took the abolitionist argument and countered it with a perversion of God's white superiority over other races and fused with with what is known as Southern paternalism. They enlisted clergy to argue this from a religious standpoint, because past justifications were being met with religious scrutiny. These distortions were pushed by the various Protestant churches to justify slavery, as some means to take slaves away from unbelieving traders and place them into an environment where they might embrace Christianity. Since one's self is not able to be taken, they claimed it was only labor that was being used. When the slaves died, they would then be afforded a Christian afterlife, where they would not have had one before. This helped to justify the psychological splitting of the self, so the slaveholders and non-slaveholders could come to terms with that institution and still see themselves compliant to Christianity.


It's still work in progress, as I have only performed the base and cursory secondary source readings to compile the annotated bibliography.


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