Senator James Henry Hammond, speech before the Senate, 1858:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind,” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est.” The highest proof of what is Nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.

A. Edwin Wilson, “The Sons of Noah,” 1950s (re-published 1981):

In the curse (Gen. 9:24-27) pronounced by God through Noah (called by God “a preacher of righteousness,” II Pet. 2:5), the descendants of Ham became the servile nations of the world. God pronounced the blessing upon Shem, that he was to be the channel of spiritual blessings to the world, and a blessing upon Japheth, that from him were to come the explorers, colonizers, and developers — those who would possess the whole of the earth. There is no equality on the earth among men, there will be no equality among them during the millennium, neither will there be equality among them during eternity.

© 2009, Mark Adams. All rights reserved.