This was definitely a strategy that they used after the 1830s. Around this time slaveholding southerners began to change their defense of slavery from being a "necessary evil," to that of a "positive good," that benefited society and the enslaved. In the wake of Uncle Tom's Cabin's widespread success a cottage industry of pro-slavery novels emerged from the Southern press and magazines like DeBow's Review tried to rationalize slavery as another form of animal husbandry. Recent scholarship on slave leasing has shown that though slaveholding was largely limited to the wealthy, the thriving market in slave leasing allowed members of the middling classes to temporarily avail themselves of enslaved property. The recent text, "The Origins of the Southern Middle Class" argues that for non-slaveholding members of the middle class the emergence and success of slave powered industries and the proliferation of slave built internal improvements like railroads and turnpikes allowed professionals to see slavery as a force that could energize and modernize the Southern economy for all people. Keep in mind that this was concurrent with the proliferation of "free soil" ideology in the North that argued that slavery undermined the value of white laborers in free states and that even in areas where slavery did not exist its political and economic effects were driving down wages and foreclosing opportunities for non-slaveholders. As this ideology gained power, slaveholders were forced to combat it with their own "positive good" arguments...