Slavery was reframed as positive good rather than lesser evil in 1837

Evidence

Calhoun shared his latest and greatest proslavery strategy on the Senate floor on February 6, 1837. Agitated by a Virginia senator’s earlier reference to slavery as a “lesser evil,” Calhoun rose to “take higher ground.” Once and for all, Calhoun wanted to bury that old antislavery Jeffersonian concept. “I hold that … the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two [races], is, instead of an evil, a good—a positive good,” he said. Calhoun went on to explain that it was both a positive good for society and a positive good for subordinate Black people. Slavery, Calhoun suggested, was racial progress. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 473

Categorization

• SHARE: For anyone into rhetoric of justification: Calhoun’s ‘take higher ground’ move — reframing a conceded evil as a positive good — is a clean example of racist ideas manufactured to defend policy.