Northerners produced most proslavery racist writing before 1822

Evidence

Until 1822—until Denmark Vesey—northerners had produced most of the racist books and tracts defending slavery. Writers like Charles Jared Ingersoll, James Kirke Paulding, and Robert Walsh—all from the North—defended slavery from British onslaughts in the 1810s. On October 29, 1822, Charleston Times editor Edwin Clifford Holland released the first proslavery treatise by a native southerner. Enslaved Africans, he said, could never “affect any revolution” because of “their general inferiority in the gifts of nature.” He was trying to calm his worried fellows. But they could disrupt society, he said, and Whites should always be on guard. “Let it never be forgotten, that our NEGROES … are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become DESTROYERS OF OUR RACE.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Supports Kendi’s causal inversion premise: the first Southern proslavery treatise emerges reactively after Vesey’s rebellion (fear-driven policy defense), not from prior Southern racial theory.
• QUESTION: Worth checking: was Holland genuinely first among native southerners, or does Kendi’s claim rest on a contestable definition of ‘proslavery treatise’?