"In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little development of soul, of beauty, or of grace. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government... Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand... We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves... [The North's] whole hireling class of manual laborers and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our slaves... Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated."
—Senator James Henry Hammond, speech to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858
Which of the following Northern arguments from the 1850s most directly challenged the perspective expressed in the excerpt?
- AThe executive branch of the federal government should exercise direct authority over new territories to decide their slave or free status through popular sovereignty.
- Free labor was economically and socially superior because it provided workers with dignity, a share of their production, and the opportunity for upward social mobility.Cevap
- CThe primary source of sectional conflict was federal tariff policy, which unfairly favored Northern industrial interests at the expense of Southern agrarian economies.
- DChattel slavery in the South was legally and economically equivalent to colonial-era indentured servitude, as both groups possessed contract-based pathways to eventual citizenship.