ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the contradictions and paradoxes of Southern slavery society in America. The products of slave labor were crucial to the northern Atlantic economy in the mid-nineteenth century and constituted by far the most important item in the export trade of the free-enterprise capitalist American economy. Slaves have helped to stimulate controversies of great intensity and to produce something of a roller-coaster effect, as successive schools of interpretation have soared into prominence and then plunged into the critical depths. In American Negro Slavery, Ulrich B. Phillips treated the slave as the beneficiary of a patriarchal but unprofitable institution designed to maintain the South's cardinal principle of white supremacy. Stanley Elkin's Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life depicted the slave as the psychic casualty of an all-embracing repressive system and sought to emphasize his point by comparing the psychological damage suffered by slaves on the Southern plantation to that inflicted upon inmates of the Nazi concentration camps.
