Ever wonder how slavery lasted so long? What were people thinking?

Well, here's a good answer. This speech, delivered to the Senate by Senator James Hammond of South Carolina less than three months before the "House Divided" speech, lays out what's become known as the "mudsill theory" to justify slavery.

Oh, and if you're wondering, a "mudsill" is part of the foundation of a building. So he's basically saying America is built on slavery. Yuck.

Hammond's argument is threefold: (1) a slave class is necessary to support the elites, who are the ones leading society to greatness, (2) Black people are better off as slaves, and (3) manual laborers in the North are basically slaves, but actually are worse off.

It's pretty true that the plantation owners needed slaves to maintain their profits, and therefore, their position of power. That's not what he's talking about, though. He genuinely believes that Black people are inferior in intellect, but well-built for labor, and therefore everybody wins from the whole slavery arrangement.

Yeah. This guy is 100% despicable.

Don't believe it? He claims that whites made black people slaves because they are "of another and inferior race," and that "[t]hey are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations." (Source)

That's right—he's saying the slaves are totally fine with being enslaved, because they're so unintelligent they can't think of a better way of living. Clearly Mr. Hammond is the one suffering from "intellectual weakness."

Comparing labor forces between the North and the South, the senator claims:

Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. (Source)

According to Hammond, slaves are better off than the working class in the North. Their forms of labor are essentially the same, he says, except that slaves are taken care of for life (he also says they're "well compensated," which is so, so untrue).

As frustrating as it can be to read speeches like this, it's important to understand how the South, and even a number of westerners and northerners, kept the institution of slavery alive for so long. This is the kind of thinking that Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and abolitionists were fighting against, and these were stakes if they lost. The belief that Black people were inferior was definitely not limited to the South…but obviously many people in non-slave states managed to figure out that they were capable human beings.

You probably wouldn't want people like James Hammond moving their plantation business into your area, and people like those in Lincoln's audience would have felt the same way.