I will provide a portion of a speech made by the Honorable L. Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi in the US House of Representatives on February 21, 1860.

Now, sir, I do not wish the point of my argument misunderstood. I am not seeking to show a Bible sanction of southern slavery as it now exists. that." My point is, that the principle with which you are warring upon us, is I do not ask your assent to condemned by the ordinance of God and the language of Scripture. I say that God would never, even " for local and temporary purposes," have given permission for that which comes in conflict with those immutable principles of natural right of which he is the author. When he established slavery among the Jews, he established the principle that there may be conditions and circumstances under which slavery is not "hateful to God or unjust to man." Nor does this argument justify Turkish slavery, Algerine slavery, or white slavery ; it justifies no sort of slavery except that which justifies itself by the rightfulness of its own conditions and circumstances. And this is the ground upon which we of the South place our cherished institutions.

We maintain that these justifying circumstances do exist in relation to our institution of negro slavery. They consist in the unfitness of the black race for a condition higher than that of slavery. Our proposition is, that when these two races are brought into contact, the supremacy of the white man must be acknowledged, and his right to govern both races with reference to the happiness of both. This is the principle upon which, until recently, the legislation of all your northern States was founded. They all asserted the supremacy of the white man and the subordination of the black man.

The gentleman from Connecticut [Mr. Ferry] stated that the object of our Revolution was to establish " universal equality in political rights, and the indefeasible title of all men to social and civil liberty." He ought to have had the candor to have held up his own State to public reprehension for violating this principle; for in Connecticut he knows the negro has neither political nor social equality ; that he is deprived of the right of voting ; that he is legally incompetent as a witness against white men, and excluded from the right of intermarriage with whites. Those gentlemen guard sedulously enough against all contact of this race with themselves, or their own class of society. I could not insult that gentleman more grossly than to ask him if he is willing to throw open the sacred precincts of his family, and allow the negro to come in as an equal member. No, sir ; but he is for freeing his labor, and possibly for giving him the right of voting, and by that means bringing him in contact and equality, not with himself but with the laboring white freemen of the North; and why such a proposition does not kindle a consuming flame of indignation among those laboring freemen of the North, is one of those political phenomena for which I will not undertake to account.

Sir, the only cause of the difference between the legislation of northern and southern States upon the subject of slavery, is, that the negroes are not sufficient in numbers at the North to make it necessary to reduce them to the condition of domestic servitude, while with us that condition is indispensable to the good order and welfare of the whole society. And it is demonstrable —and I will make it so appear, if I have time —that the negro in the southern States has reached a moral and intellectual development superior to his race in any other position in which he has been placed. That he contributes more, in his present condition, to the good of mankind, their moral and intellectual progress, than in any other position in which he has been placed. What was his condition when he was first brought here? Look at him upon his native continent. The most humane explorers of the African continent tell us that they exist there without social or political order, without modesty or shame, some of the tribes not even reaching the civilization of the fig-leaf.

The Southern Society was, in no way, ashamed of slavery. In fact, there is more than ample evidence that they were very proud of the institution and there are many examples of people extolling the practice and claiming to have reached its final perfect form in this type of slavery. "Polite" society was founded upon the institution of slavery. It permeated the overall society to an extent that is hard to describe in modern terms. A southern farmer's almanac in the late 1850's even had a section detailing the proper care and treatment of slaves right along side the other farm management advice. It was common to give children their own personal slaves.

They referred to enslaved people as slaves and as property. There was no social stigma against slavery in the south. (Granted, overseers and slave auction owners were viewed as impolite society, but it wasn't necessarily that they worked with slaves. It was more that they weren't gentlemen).

Within the Southern states, there’s no real reticence to use the phrase. Advocates would sometimes use synonyms or seek to take the edge off of the practice when addressing northern audiences. John C. Calhoun in his “positive good” speech referred frequently to “labor” when discussing the relationship between white slaveowners and Black slaves. While he did not often refer to the slaves directly, he specifically divided the nation between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states.

Jefferson Davis, in a speech to Massachusetts Democrats at Faneuil Hall in Boston, in 1858, referred repeatedly to “domestic affairs” and “property,” but also bluntly referred to the debates over “African slavery.”

Political speeches of the antebellum era often referred to states as either slaveholding or non-slaveholding. Slaves, when mentioned at all, may be referred to by their race, as “laborers,” or as slaves.

And, perhaps most notably, the secession commissioners and the declarations of causes during the secession crisis were quite explicit about the links between slavery and the Confederate cause. Mississippi bluntly states in the opening line of the second paragraph that, “ Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery...”