America did not invent slavery but slave owners certainly used the supposed “inferiority” of black people to justify slavery. These arguments usually ranged from property rights, casting African slaves as naturally subservient, “civilizing slaves” in exchange for labor, or that slaves are naturally violent people who will kill them all if set free.

For example, Jefferson Davis, president of the confederacy once wrote “We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him: Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude”.

Alabama espouses African slaves as violent and inferior in its secession document: “ the election of Mr. Lincoln [is] a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South…nothing less than an open declaration of war—for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.”

Texas claimed slavery was mutually beneficial and that Africans are naturally subservient to whites: “the servitude of the African race…is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both”