ShmoopTube

00:00

[ musical flourish ]

00:03

And here's your shmoop du jour,

00:05

brought to you by the high road,

00:07

where the air is thin and your moral standing is thinner.

00:10

[ chuckles ]

00:10

Check out this excerpt right here.

00:12

But see how...

00:16

[ mumbles ]

00:21

[ mumbling continues ]

00:23

Okay, lovely. And the question:

00:25

The rhetoric expressed above in defense of

00:28

enslaving American Indians most nearly matches

00:30

the rhetoric employed by southern slaveholders in which of the following decades?

00:36

And here are the potential answers.

00:38

[ mumbles ]

00:44

All right, well how can we characterize the rhetoric from the excerpt?

00:48

Well, the rhetoric talks a lot about the rudeness and barbarism

00:51

and the inherently slavish nature of the American Indians.

00:55

Sounds like someone woke up on the racist side

00:57

of the bed this morning.

00:58

Yeah, talkin' about you.

00:59

So the question wants us to figure out what time period

01:02

southern slaveholders were using this same argument

01:04

to defend their own institution of slavery.

01:06

Well, let's see what we got.

01:08

Was it in the 1750s?

01:10

Well, seems a bit early, right?

01:12

Slavery was still widely accepted in the American colonies

01:15

in the 18th century, even if there were pockets of dissent

01:18

brewing in the north. That means we can eliminate A and B.

01:21

Were Southerners using this kind of morally superior language

01:25

in the 1880s? Well, now that seems too late.

01:28

Remember, the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery,

01:30

was adopted in 1865, so by the 1880s,

01:33

slavery had no place in American society.

01:36

So, cross D off as well.

01:38

And that just leaves us with C, the 1850s,

01:40

which sounds about right. In the early 19th century,

01:43

abolitionists started to protest slavery in the United States,

01:46

so slaveholders had to find ways to justify the existence

01:49

of such a horribly abusive institution.

01:52

Just like the excerpt, Southerners argued

01:54

that slaves were naturally inferior and needed protection

01:58

from the kind slaveholders in order to survive.

02:01

Well, you want some mustard on that heaping pile of, uh, baloney?

02:05

So, the 1850s, right before the Civil War broke out,

02:08

is our answer. Hard to believe those Southerners

02:10

made so much noise when they didn't even have a leg to stand on.

Full Transcript