When northerners criticized southerners for owning enslaved people, southern intellectuals had an answer for them. They had developed an entire philosophy and the most significant component of this was a man named George Fitzhugh. And Fitzhugh's argument with something like this, an enslaved person was, from the time that they were born until the time that they died were taken care of. When they were young they didn't have to work, and yet they were fed. When they were older, although they labored, they had food provided for them, they had shelter, they had clothing. When they were ill they were taken care of. When they were old and decrepit they were taken care of. So the system, even though the system extracted labor from them, the system took care of them throughout their lives.

In the North, Fitzhugh argued, on the contrary. A northern worker was employed as a child, so they experienced child labor. They were not paid for their livelihood at a descent wage. They were also not paid for their rent. They were not given food. They had to take all of the money that they got from their labor and use that for livelihood which the slaves did not.

Now the argument that does not enter into Fitzhugh's discussion, of course, is that there was such a thing as mobility, not to mention the fact that one population is enslaved and cannot move and another population has the ability to leave that job to go to another job, to go west. So this idea of mobility, this idea of not being chattel, This idea of being able to move from one place to another does not enter into Fitzhugh's arguments. The whole idea of civil rights which northern workers had, by the antebellum era, all white males, the majority of white males could vote. So they had rights. Enslaved people had no rights, indeed the Dred Scott decision handed down by the Supreme Court decreed that not just enslaved, but black people had no rights. So it is an argument that was used, and it was an argument that many, many southerners accepted. But it was an argument that was certainly speechless, in my opinion.