6 - Position-Taking in the Nation

Summary

For several decades before the Civil War, many families, mostly white, were slave rich. In Mississippi, 47 percent of white families owned at least one slave, while, for example, 20 percent of Arkansas white families owned slaves. Slave holding planters, and even those, like John Marshall, who were not planters, resolved the contradiction between advocating for equality and their dependence on slave labor. In a telling biography, Without Precedence, Chief Justice Marshall and his Times, Joel Richard Paul wrote soberly, “Slavery made it possible to regard all white males as equal, regardless of their social status. Tradesmen saw themselves as the social equals of wealthy plantation owners because they were both white. Unlike Europe, where class identity divided rich and poor and posed a constant threat to the social order, in eighteenth–century Virginia, the underclass was all black and mostly enslaved"