美国独立战争前的反奴隶制斗争（二）_文学文化

　concluding perhaps that the antislavery movement was long on rhetoric and short on action, enslaved people of the plantation colonies attempted to seize freedom forcibly by fleeing to british armies, not in the manner of loyalists, but as revolutionaries eager to join the battle that they believed was meant to end the institution of slavery. slave uprisings in the south during the revolutionary period, coinciding as they did with an escalating international antislavery movement, raised a threat that was at once internal and external. the uprisings marked a political turning point in the revolutionary war and in the antislavery movement. beginning in 1779 the south became the main theater of war and the seat of much of the war's irregular and guerrilla warfare. no other region of the country suffered so much economic destruction or took so long to heal the scars of war. the war in the southern theater quickly degenerated into a civil war of unsurpassed brutality that pitted brother against brother, broke up households, divided families, produced massive destructive of the plantation economy and the slave labor system upon which it rested, and contributed in the postwar period to the emergence of a defensive counter-movement that formed the basis for the construction of the mythic image of the south that would emerge full-blown in the antebellum period.

　prior to the revolution there had been no organized pro-slavery thought, no pro-slavery literature beyond scattered individual writing. but in the aftermath of that war white southerners began to redefine themselves in relation to black southerners and to elaborate a defense of slavery that was partly an ideological response to antislavery argument. antislavery assaults during and after the war led to the development of the first pro-slavery theorizing in popular petitions, political debates in state assemblies, and pro-slavery writings. scriptural sanctions from genesis to revelations were invoked to prove that slavery was part of god's design. with the development of secular antislavery, with its emphasis on natural-rights arguments, pro-slavery spokesmen shifted their defense to republican ideology and forged out of its ambiguities the weapons that were to become the mainstay of southern pro-slavery arguments, the contours of which became visible as early as the 1780s.

　the first line of defense was the primacy of property rights. above all in the south, "property" meant slaves, which slaveowners equated with "liberty," a concept that they, in turn, translated as the freedom to own human beings. we can hear echoes of this analysis in the petitions of eight virginia counties demanding the repeal of the private emancipation act of 1782 and the rejection of methodist emancipation proposals: through the agonies of war, the petitioners intoned, virginians had "sealed with our blood, a title to the full, free, and absolute enjoyment of every species of our property, whensoever, or howsoever legally acquired." heightened slave rebelliousness during the war years had revived latent white fears of slave uprisings. acutely conscious of their own vulnerability, the petitioners drew on another element of republican ideology, the right of self-preservation. in a virtual catalogue of emancipation horrors, the virginians listed the inevitable outcomes: "want, poverty, distress to the free citizen, neglect, famine and death to the black infant 卼he horrors of all the rapes, murders, and outrages, which a vast multitude of unprincipled un-propertied, revengeful, and remorseless banditti are capable of perpetrating."