Some historians have claimed that positive defenses of slavery were virtually nonexistent until the rise of abolitionism during the 1830s. Until then defenders of the “peculiar institution” tended to be defensive, even apologetic, explaining that although slavery is evil, America was stuck with the institution until it could be phased out gradually. Even if slavery were left legally unhampered, it would eventually die a natural death. (Economic inefficiency was the most common justification for this prediction.) To abolish slavery quickly would cause insurmountable social and economic problems, as free, uneducated blacks found themselves unable to assimilate with the white population. One solution, of course, was to ship liberated slaves (and even free blacks) to Africa where they would be better off. These colonization schemes invariably smacked of paternalism. Even though many slaves were born in America and knew nothing of Africa, much less how to survive in a wilderness, they would supposedly be better off living in that continent, even if they didn’t want to go.

Historian Larry E. Tise challenged this common belief about proslavery arguments. He demonstrated that arguments to the effect that slavery was a “positive good” arose before the rise of abolitionism during the 1830s. They did not spring up suddenly in response to the unrelenting attacks of abolitionists. And these early proslavery arguments, like their later manifestations, typically targeted natural rights as the theory that had to be undercut before a defense of slavery could be mounted.

Some major defenses of slavery were published in America between 1772 and 1775. Not all of these were based on racist beliefs, as one might expect. Consider The African Trade for Negro Slaves, Shown to be Consistent with Principles of Humanity, and with the Laws of Revealed Religion, published in 1772 by Thomas Thompson. As an Anglican missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), he drew on his time in Africa to point out that Africans were already enslaved before they were sold to Americans, so they might have ended up in far worse circumstances. Thompson denied that Africans were mentally inferior to whites or that they were innately barbaric or savage. His defense of slavery was based on the nature of civil society. The doctrine of equal rights and freedom is a fiction. “Absolute freedom is incompatible with civil establishments.” All civil societies have, and must have, gradations in freedom and privileges. Some people will always have more freedom than others, and slaves simply fall on the low end of this hierarchy. Hence slavery is part of a social system “designed and enacted for the public weal.”

In 1773, Richard Nisbet—a West Indian slaveowner who had moved to Philadelphia—published Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture. Nisbet attempted to rebut accounts of the horrors and inhumanity of slavery, calling those stories so implausible as to be “refuted by every school boy.” Nisbet then advanced an argument that would become exceedingly popular among nineteenth‐​century defenders of slavery: Slaves were actually better off than many free laborers, especially in Europe.