Slavery & Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the Old South

Southern Historical Association

Slavery and Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the Old SouthAuthor(s): Daniel KilbrideSource: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 469-486Published by: Southern Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2210004 .

Accessed: 17/02/2014 20:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Southern Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Southern History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 66.171.203.111 on Mon, 17 Feb 2014 20:45:05 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sha

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2210004?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Slavery and Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the

Old South

By DANIEL KILBRIDE

IN APPLYING UTILITARIANISM TO THE PROBLEMS OF SLAVERY AND THE SECTIONAL

crisis, Thomas Cooper's contribution to southern thought suggests that historians have failed to appreciate the diversity of ideas with which southerners justified their peculiar institution. Fundamentally, Cooper's use of utilitarianism and the ideas of Jeremy Bentham is less interesting for what it contributes to the proslavery argument than for what it suggests about the quality and diversity of the southern intellect. Cooper's erudition supports the growing perception that a significant minority of southerners were cognizant of contemporary intellectual trends. Cooper was no arm- chair philosopher, and he involved himself vigorously in the political controversies of his day. By defending slavery with a contemporary, secular, and progressive philosophy, he belies the notion that slavery somehow impeded the South's development within a modernizing, capital- ist world. Indeed, his utilitarian defense of the peculiar institution corroborates Michael O'Brien's suggestion that perhaps "the Old South was a different and evolving version of what an American modernity might have come to look like."'"

Emerging most forcefully just before and during the abolitionist crisis of the 1830s, Cooper's utilitarian critique placed the philosophical assump- tions of free labor, the abolitionists, and the emerging industrial capitalism of the North under ruthless, and ultimately contemptuous, scrutiny. In contrast to northern institutions, he insisted, southern slaveholding easily passed the test of utility-the greatest good for the greatest number-by

' Michael O'Brien, "On the Mind of the Old South and Its Accessibility," in O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore and London, 1988), 37. I would like to thank Bertram Wyatt-Brown for reading a previous version of this essay.

MR. KILBR1DE is a graduate student in the department of history at the University of Florida. THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LIX, No. 3, August 1993



470 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

providing for the best interests of blacks and whites alike. In Cooper's hands, utilitarianism provided a means by which the comparative morality of societies could be evaluated. The evaluation, he urged, should center on a comparison of their "facts"; that is, how well the societies cared for their members, regardless of the nobility of the ideals they endorsed. Cooper believed that, among other applications, utility provided an unbiased and empirical standard with which to measure the moral worthiness of societies and ideals. In practice, however, his pro-southern bias severely undermined the critical potential of his utilitarianism. It certainly allowed Cooper to lay bare the limitations of free labor with brutal clarity. Occasionally, he employed Benthamism as more than just a rhetorical technique and, in doing so, proposed concrete reforms for the South. To a significant degree, however, his virulent proslavery undercut the critical perspective that utilitarianism promised to the social observer.

To be sure, Cooper's conclusions regarding slavery contrasted sharply with those of Jeremy Bentham, who had asserted that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Thus the English philosopher was led to condemn slavery on the grounds that it did not promote general happiness. Bentham observed that practice demonstrated his point: "No one who is free is willing to become a slave: no one is a slave but he wishes to become free." Cooper, however, found slavery consistent with his utilitarian moral scheme. Although at times he had maintained that the "greatest happiness" formula applied to the "co- equal many," in his writings on slavery he insisted that the institution promoted the happiness of master and slave alike. Because of their moral and intellectual inferiorities, Cooper reasoned, the enslavement of Africans fit into the Benthamite calculus.2

Cooper's intellectual journey took him on a circuitous course before he found Benthamism in a very odd location-South Carolina during the nullification crisis. Controversy and intellectual changes had been no strangers to Thomas Cooper during his long and tumultuous career. Born in England in 1759, he matriculated at Oxford in 1779 but never took a degree. While he read law to placate his father, his heart lay in medicine. In the years just after entering Oxford, Cooper attended anatomical lectures and took medical courses. He took an active part in radical politics, authoring a pamphlet in opposition to the slave trade in 1787. He supported

2 JeremyBentham, A Fragment on Government in John Bowring, [ed.], The Works ofJeremy Bentham, Volume I (Edinburgh and London, 1843), 1,227; "Of Slavery" in Principles of the Civil Code in Works of Jeremy Bentham, I, 344; and Thomas Cooper, An Introductory Lecture to a Course of Law (Columbia, S.C., 1834), 7.



SLA VERYAND UTILITARIANISM 471

suffrage extension and religious tolerance and defended natural rights and democracy against Edmund Burke and others. In 1791 the Manchester Constitutional Society asked Cooper to prepare an edition of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. As a member of that organization, he was invited by the Paris Jacobin club to speak in April 1792 while he was visiting in France. Delivering his "Address to the Society of Friends of the Constitu- tion," Cooper expressed his satisfaction with the progress of the French Revolution. Early in his visit Cooper had provoked the enmity of Robespierre and may have come to feel that his life was in danger. At any rate, he fled France and returned to England in May 1792.3

In England, government repression of radicals intensified, and two years after returning from France, Cooper left his home country forever, emigrat- ing to Pennsylvania with his mentor Joseph Priestley. Once in America he was drawn to Jeffersonian republicanism. His outspoken opposition to the Federalists led to prosecution and in 1800 a short jail term under the Sedition Acts. He taught chemistry briefly at Carlisle College from 181 1 to 1815 and later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1819 Cooper eagerly anticipated a position at the new University of Virginia, but word of his disdain for the clergy and his ridicule of transubstantiation and the Trinity reached Virginia before his appointment could be secured. Presbyterians, alarmed by his heterodoxy, blocked his confirmation, to his friend Thomas Jefferson's bitter regret. Late that year Cooper was hired to teach chemistry at South Carolina College. When president Jonathan Maxcy died the next year, the trustees elected Cooper president, a position he held until he resigned in 1834. Characteristically, he engrossed himself in local politics. By the late 1820s he had become a leader in the nullification movement. The speech of July 1827 in which he predicted that the Palmetto State would soon "be compelled to calculate the value of [the] union" signaled the pro-southern and conservative path that he would follow for the rest of his public career.4

Radical freethinker, Jeffersonian Republican, and nullifier: Cooper seems to have been a study in contrasts. A close look at his writings, however,

3 Thomas Cooper, Letters on the Slave Trade (Manchester, 1787); H. M. Ellis, "Thomas Cooper-A Survey of His Life," South Atlantic Quarterly, XIX (January 1920), 32-35; Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1787-1839 (New Haven, 1926; rpt., Columbia, S.C., 1961; references to reprint edition), 4-6 and 35-40; and for his intellectual changes see Stephen L. Newman, "Thomas Cooper, 1759-1839: The Political Odyssey of a Bourgeois Ideologue," Southern Studies, XXIV (Fall 1985), 295-305.

4 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York and London, 1965), 130; and Charleston Mercury, July 18 and 19, 1827.




reveals surprising consistency. Cooper promoted a utilitarian ethic throughout his long life. In 1789 he attested that utility, defined as "the tendency to pleasure," was the essence of virtue. Priestley, noted Cooper, had argued that "the good and happiness of [society's] member ... is the great standard by which everything ... must be finally determined." He thought his friend's dictum to be "obviously and intelligibly true." Still, Cooper's utilitarianism remained flexible enough to permit him to embrace notions of natural tights when he accepted Jeffersonian republicanism while in Pennsylvania. Not until later did he endorse the rigid moral mathematics characteristic of Bentham's brand of utility. In his youth Cooper may have actually met Bentham, and Bentham later sent his admirer a collection of his works via John Quincy Adams. However, Cooper did not explicitly endorse the Benthamite logic until 1830. Only then did he conclude that "the only criterion and rule-the only defensible end and purpose of every public law and measure, is the good of society; public utility."'5

Cooper defined utility quite broadly as "whatever has a tendency to promote the design intended." For the purposes of society, this meant the "comfort and happiness" of humankind promoted by "reasonable means." Cooper's peculiar utilitarianism had a long and improbable pedigree. Cicero, wrote Cooper, was a utilitarian, as were Leibnitz, Thomasius, Puffendorf, Helvetius, Hartley, Hume, and Priestley. Cooper had read widely, and in the last decade of his life he came to admire Bentham's legal theories. Eventually he adopted Bentham's moral and political philosophy, counting himself "among the number" of his "followers." Thus, although Cooper advocated a utilitarian ethic throughout his public career, the particular sources of his philosophy changed over time. For most of his life, this outlook supported radical, democratic causes. During the final twenty years of his life, however, Cooper's flexible utilitarianism evolved into a rigid Benthamism. Moreover, in contrast to the allegiances of his youth and middle age, the elderly Cooper used utilitarianism to promote conservative institutions. He recognized that his utilitarianism placed him in an ironic position in America. "In England," he wrote to James Henry Hammond, "I was, and should still be a decided radical, altho' here, I incline to the Conservatives." The "Northern aristocracy" of manufacturers who lived off the labor of the starving poor was "saddled w/ patronage & corruption"

5 Maurice Kelley, Additional Chapters on Thomas Cooper (University of Maine Studies, 2d Ser., No. 15, 1930), 31; Cooper, "Of Dr. Priestley's Political Works & Opinions," in Joseph Priestley, Memoirs ofDr. Joseph Priestley, to the Year 1795 (2 vols.; Northumberland, Pa., 1806), II, 352; PeterJ. King, Utilitarian Jurisprudence inAmerica: The Influence of Bentham andAustin on American Legal Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York and London, 1986), 146; and [Thomas Cooper], "Agrarian and Education Systems," Southern Review, VI (August 1830), 25; see also [Thomas Cooper], "Bentham's Judicial Evidence," ibid., V (May 1830), 381-426.



SLAVERYAND UTILITARIANISM 473

and turned him away from American "progressives." His odyssey, then, was from radicalism to reaction within a lifelong utilitarian framework.6

Cooper was one of the very few Americans to preach a strict Benthamite creed. Perhaps he was the only thinker to accept the doctrine in all its aspects. For Cooper, utilitarianism was a moral philosophy, a way to order society. Others used the doctrine for more limited or specific purposes. Several prominent legal scholars, including Edward Livingston of Louisi- ana and David Hoffman and David Dudley Field of New York, espoused Bentham's approach to legal reform. The proponents of the American codification movement were familiar with Bentham's ideas, but no Ameri- can other than Cooper championed a consistent Benthamite scheme for any appreciable length of time. The English philosopher corresponded with a number of prominent Americans, including James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and Richard Rush. His admirers included Aaron Burr, the Maine philosopher John Neal, and Edwin Lawrence Godkin. No Benthanite school ever emerged, however, because his followers "founded no Utilitar- ian Club ... established no Westminster Review." Paul Palmer has thus observed that "it is not surprising that they made but few conversions to the faith." Even Cooper, a prolific writer, could not translate his enthusiasm into a wider appreciation for Bentham's ideas in America.7

Besides Cooper, English churchman William Paley was, through his writings, probably the most influential utilitarian in the United States. Scholars, however, have divided over how much authority Paley enjoyed in this country. His Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was widely used as a college textbook in the early nineteenth century, but D. H. Meyer insists that "there is little evidence to support the conclusion that his moral theory was ever widely accepted." Paley's utilitarianism, however, was far less rigid than that espoused by Cooper and Bentham. Advocating a utility softened by theology, Paley's "ideas combined elements of the Anglican faith and eighteenth-century utilitarianism." Although very few Americans

6 Thomas Cooper, Introductory Lecture, 27 (first quotation), 28, and 29 (second quotation); and Cooper to James Henry Hammond, March 20, 1836, Vol. 6, James Henry Hammond Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington).

I Donald J. Senese, "Legal Thought in South Carolina, 1800-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1970); Charles M. Cook, Tihe American Codification Movement: A Study ofAntebellurm Legal Reform (Westport, Coim., and London, 1981); Maxwell Bloomfield, American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776-1876 (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1976), 81; King, Utilitarian Jurisprudence, 230-33; Paul A. Palmer, "Benthamism in England and America," American Political Science Review, XXXV (October 1941), 862 and 865 (quotations); and Chilton Williamson, "Bentham Looks at America," Political Science Quarterly, XVII (December 1955), 544.




showed much interest in utilitarianism as a formal philosophy, Paley's practical and religious approach may have appealed to Americans who, according to Wilson Smith, "were strongly utilitarian in practice.""

Despite Cooper's endorsement, Bentham's ideas were greeted coldly by southern intellectuals. Even Cooper's ex-student and correspondent, James Henry Hammond, exclaimed a decade after his teacher's death that utilitarianism was "cankered with worldly cares & scarcely looking beyond the morrow.... unmindful that Christianity has revealed a soul to man." Cooper's philosophy fared just as poorly with yet another intellectual companion, Hugh Swinton Legare, who wrote that utilitarianism "aims at cultivating the understanding alone, at the expense of the imagination and sensibility," wreaking "havoc ... in the soul of man." The demand for empirical verification of material and historical "facts," so common in the proslavery literature, complemented Cooper's utilitarian creed particularly well. But while the Scottish common sense philosophers sought to "give a full account of human behavior based on observation and induction," Cooper pushed past their ideas to advocate a remorseless materialism. He denied that the existence of ideas, facts, objects, or anything else could be verified on any basis except physical reality. To southern intellectuals, such a hard, practical philosophy fit too well the crass materialism that polluted their age-and, they may well have thought, their northern neighbors. Both Hammond and Legare regarded Bentham's practical doctrine as an affront to the spiritual nature of morality and the complexity of human nature. As Paul Palmer has suggested-and these southern critics bear him out-the evangelical and romantic tendencies of southern culture found utilitarianism's spare, secular rationalism uncongenial. Moreover, Benthamism proposed ethical and legal approaches that were both inflex- ible and schematic. This necessity contrasted sharply with the southern fabric of community-centered justice and morality. Cooper's system seemed atheistic and revolutionary, qualities that were anathema to those southerners who embraced an ethic designed to perpetuate stability and public morality.9

8 Paley's book was published in London in 1785. D. H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia, 1972), 167. For contrasting views, see Wilson Smith, Professors and Public Ethics: Studies of Northern Moral Philosophers Before the Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1956), 44-63 (second and third quotations on p. 45); and D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley: A Philosopher and His Age (Lincoln, Nebr., and London, 1976).

9 Hanunond is quoted by Drew Gilpin Faust in A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South (Baltimore, 1977; rpt. ed., Philadelphia, 1986; references to reprint edition), 168, also 55-56 and 71-72; [Hugh Swinton Legare], "Jeremy Bentham and the




Cooper's attachment to a modem, materialistic strain of European philosophy was very unusual among slavery's apologists. Drew Gilpin Faust notes that few proslavery spokesmen emerged from the context of Ssmoral science" to argue from a social scientific framework. Even so, southerners were more aware of contemporary intellectual developments than historians have commonly recognized. George Frederick Holmes dabbled with Auguste Comte's ideas but found that positivism ""articulated a large proportion of the evils of the day and embodied the rest" through its denial of religious truth. Although Holmes eventually found Comte's ideas distasteful, George Fitzhugh and especially Henry Hughes took inspiration from Comte's thoughts and developed them into a distinctive philosophy "clothed ... in the technical language of an emerging social science," as Stanford M. Lyman observes. Like Fitzhugh, Holmes, and Hughes, Cooper applied the most current products of European thought to the sectional crisis. 10

As a leading figure in the antebellum intellectual arena, Cooper was quite familiar with philosophical developments in Europe. His use of a new and progressive English philosophy suggests that scholars have defined the philosophical base of the proslavery argument too narrowly. His articles and correspondence of the late 1820s and the 1830s indicate a philosophical strain of thought well outside the parameters set up by recent interpreters of the proslavery argument. However, many of Cooper's opinions on slavery echoed those of other proslavery apologists. Although he approached slavery differently than other southerners did, he reached similar conclusions. Slavery, he reasoned, was economically viable; it was principled because it provided for the good of the slave, who was the moral and mental inferior of the master race. But Cooper found slavery to be consistent with a modem and progressive philosophy. The peculiar institution, he believed, had a future in a world governed by utilitarian ethics. Whereas hostile

Utilitarians," Southern Review, VII (August 1831), 296; Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Proslavery Argument in History" in Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1981), 11-12; Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey,A History of Philosophy in America (2 vols.; New York, 1977), I,204; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Designfor Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 261; Michael O'Brien, A Character of Hugh Legard (Knoxville, Tenn., 1985), 149; and O'Brien, "The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism," Journal ofAmerican Studies, XX (August 1986), 174. The local, flexible character of southern justice is described by Bertram Wyatt-Brown in Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), 390-396 and 400-401.

10 Faust, "Proslavery Argument in History," 11 (quoted phrase); O'Brien, "On the Mind of the Old South and Its Accessibility," 35-36; Faust, Sacred Circle, 65 (quotation on positivism); and Stanford M. Lyman, "Henry Hughes and the Southern Foundations of American Sociology," in Lyman, ed., Selected Writings of Henry Hughes: Antebellum Southerner, Slavocrat, Sociologist (Jackson, Miss., 1985), 19.




contemporaries saw slavery as economically and morally backward, Coop- er used the most modem and secular of philosophies to argue that it was not

Benthamism was present in Cooper's argument that slavery was economically efficacious and in his justification for enslaving blacks, and it formed the basis for his critiques of the free labor and natural rights philosophies. In order to defend the South, which Cooper thought best exhibited the social benefits of utility in action, he also applied arguments gleaned from decades of proslavery apologies. He studied proslavery literature deeply and kept himself and his correspondents up-to-date with "able matter" with which to counter the arguments of antislavery advocates.11

Proslavery literature had a number of common arguments, and Cooper was quite willing to use them all, even those that he derided. Like the vast majority of proslavery apologists, he appealed to scripture in order to justify domestic servitude. Since he was a notorious anti-cleric and materialist, his frequent references to scripture sound hollow and self-serving, which, indeed, they are. While he was in England, Cooper had cited scripture in his arguments against the slave trade; after moving to South Carolina he used the Bible in defense of slavery, which reflects his desire to attack the abolitionists with the strongest available weapon. Moreover, Cooper was no stranger to quarrels with the clergy. His inclusion of scriptural defenses probably emerged from a desire to "maintain pretense" and not to offend the faithful in South Carolina. "No polemicist, North or South, could ignore the pertinence of Holy Scripture," one scholar has noted, and Cooper was no exception. 12

Cooper's virulently sectional analysis of the realities of free society constituted convincing evidence for the utilitarian morality of slavery. Some historians have asserted that proslavery arguments were seldom attached to disunionist sentiments. However, Cooper, in his public and private writings, stridently advocated secession and the defense of southern rights. In his opinion, any northern attempt to interfere with the South's peculiar institution would imperil the Union. Privately he wrote that "the South has two leading interests, on either of which this part of the Union, will assuredly persevere in their demands, at the foreseen expense if

II Cooper to James Henry Hammond, February 6, 1836, Vol. 6, Hammond Papers. 12 Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840

(Athens, Ga., and London, 1987), Chap. 5; William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1935), 65; Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "The Religious Ideals of Southern Slave Society," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXX (Spring 1986), 5 (first quotation); and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Proslavery and Antislavery Intellectuals: Class Concepts and Polemical Struggle" in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 327 (second quotation).




necessary, of secession and war. They are 1st to be quiet and unmolested on the question of domestic servitude; & 2ndly The Tariff on the faith of the Compromise Act." The advent of the abolitionist campaign signaled to Cooper that the North would no longer honor southern interests. Cooper did not draw direct connections between the antislavery movement and the motivations of tariff advocates, although both groups, he felt, sought to interfere with the South's legitimate interests. However, Iarry E. Tise's assertion that South Carolinians were unable, and later unwilling, to translate their nullification arguments into proslavery discourse leads him to conclude that their arguments remained national in scope. It is true that Cooper did not apply his sectional rationale for nullification, based on the illegitimate application of political power by the North, as the focus of his proslavery argument. He did assail the North for interfering with the South's internal affairs. But the crux of his sectional proslavery argument lay in a comparison of the sections' respective social and labor systems, an analysis that was not part of his nullification rationale."3

Cooper's fears that northern moral and intellectual attacks on slavery would eventually be politically successful illuminate his thoughts on free society. Some historians have argued that the proslavery critique of free society should be understood in teims of southerners' guilt over slaveholding. "The need to soothe troubled Southern consciences by proving the 'positive good' of slavery and its superiority to all other labor systems," writes James M. McPherson, "was probably the main motive behind the critique of capitalism." Recently, James Oakes has argued that southerners' attacks on the evils of industrialism should be understood as "a diversion thrown down in frustration." Southerners' critiques of northern and British societies, he suggests, were not serious aspects of the proslavery argument. Oakes emphasizes the liberal antecedents of both northern and southern culture. Indeed, he has recently argued that liberalism provides the foundation for the proslavery argument. Oakes dismisses the southern critique of northern society, with its profound hostility to liberalism, as a rhetorical flourish irrelevant to the main lines of proslavery ideology. 14

13 Tise, Proslavery, 331-36; Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 130-3 1; and Cooper to Martin Van Buren, April 11, 1828, and Cooper to Van Buren, April 14, 1837 (quotation), in Vols. 7 and 28, Van Buren Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). Privately Cooper charged that "all the tariff men rely on exciting a revolt among our slaves." He never elaborated on this theme, however, and never drew a connection between the abolitionists, whom he stigmatized as traitorous, hypocritical, and deceitful, and the slave revolts. Cooper to David McCord, July 16, 1828, Thomas Cooper Papers (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Colum- bia).

14 James M. McPherson, "Slavery and Race," Perspectives in American History, III (1969), 463; and James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History ofnAmerican Slaveholders (New York, 1982),




Despite his tepid economic defense of slave labor in his Lectures on the Elements ofPolitical Economy and his somewhat less hesitating sanction in his Two Essays, Cooper's adoption of Bentham's utilitarianism led him to endorse slavery as the most efficient labor system for the South. The superiority of all labor systems was relative, he declared. By the 1830s he endorsed slave labor in explicitly Benthamite tenms. "At what period in the history of the world has the system of domestic slavery been out of use, where it has been found useful and convenient to adopt it?" Cooper asked rhetorically. He concluded that "it is fitted for some people and some climates, and there it prevails.... this has been, is now, and I suspect ever will be the rule. It must ultimately be resolved, like all other questions relating to the social state of man, into expedience. Is it productive upon the whole, of a balance of good or of evil?" Adopting an economic perspective, he concluded that slavery provided for the best economic interests of both the South and the nation at large. Cooper contended that, once the obscur- ing cloud of ideals had been abandoned, material reality, or fact, would emerge as the single legitimate basis for judgment. Nothing, economic systems included, was superior by virtue of ideal, abstract strengths. Free labor's theoretical superiority withered away in his mind when southern slavery proved by observation to "be productive on the whole, of a balance of good." Scientific observation and careful calculation of social benefits were the only relevant standards."5

Cooper used his utilitarian economic perspective to demonstrate the morality of slavery by showing that the South advanced the interests of its people better than the North did. The comparative good of different societies had to be measured by the only acceptable standard, "the experience of past ages and events, the careful analysis and comparison of historical facts, and the lights of extended knowledge and civilization... ." Like many proslavery apologists, Cooper maintained that facts, not ideals, provided the basis for morality. The most glaring fault of free society, Cooper complained, was the state of the working classes. For the mass of these people, the progressive promises of the free labor ideology turned out to be

138. For the guilt-over-slavery argument, see Charles Grier Sellers, Jr., "The Travail of Slavery" in Sellers, ed., The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill, 1960), 40-7 1; and Freehling, Prelude to Civil War, 49. For a summary of the literature on guilt and slavery, see Gaines M. Foster, "Guilt Over Slavery: A Historiographical Analysis," Journal of Southern History, LVI (November 1990), 665-94; and Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990), 174-81.

Is Thomas Cooper, Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy (Columbia, S.C., 1826); Cooper, Two Essays: #1. On the Foundation of Civil Government. #2. On the Constitution of the United States (Columbia, S.C., 1826); and [Thomas Cooper], "Slavery," Southern Literary Journal, I (November 1835), 189..




empty. Cooper invited southerners to "look at the operatives in the factory system of England, and among the manufactories generally .... To talk of these people bettering their condition, who are condemned for life to at least twice the labor of our slaves, and to the workhouse when they can work no longer" was to preach a hollow, meaningless creed. "Nor will any reasonable man," he continued, "who has had an opportunity of comparing the condition of the lower classes in England and Ireland generally, with that of the slaves on a southern plantation, hesitate... to acknowledge that the necessaries of life" were "dealt out in far more liberal abundance to our slaves, than ... can be earned in Europe by twice the labor a planter exacts." Northern advocates of free labor, declared Cooper, distorted the facts to condemn slavery while they left their own sins unexamined. An honest analysis would force them to conclude that "slavery is a better system for the black population in the South, than the falsely and fraudu- lently called free-labor system ... for the wretched pauper population who drag out their miserable existence there." Accusing the North of hypocrisy, Cooper admonished his opponents, "This country of ours is a republic, and the poor have a right that their comforts should be carefully considered; and that is a bad government that neglects it. Either the greatest good for the greatest number is politically the rule of right, or the rule of right is something different." Free labor, maintained Cooper, manifestly failed to deliver what it promised. Indeed, to most of those operating within its sphere, free labor provided not progress, prosperity, and enlightenment, but misery, poverty, and a life of drudgery. In contrast, slavery, not free labor, passed the test of utility.'6

From the standpoint of utilitarianism, Cooper's economic justification for slavery depended on two elements: the efficiency and necessity of slave labor to southern agriculture and the necessity for blacks to labor as slaves. White workers, he asserted, could not toil in the unhealthful environment of the Georgia and Carolina lowcountry. Since free labor could not profitably cultivate the rich southern fields, labor had to be coerced. Cooper found blacks ideally suited to slavery because of their intellectual and temperamental differences from whites. Although he defended slavery as the proper station for the agricultural working class of the South, enslavement could be justified only by racial inferiority. The "logical outcome" of his philosophy was not to justify servitude as the natural position of the

16 Cooper, Introductory Lecture, 7 (first quotation); Faust, "Proslavery Argument in History," 12; [Cooper], "Slavery," 190-91 (second and third quotations) and 192 (fourth quotation); and [Thomas Cooper], "Distribution of Wealth," Southern Review, VIII (November 1831), 175 (fifth quotation).




working classes. For Cooper, slavery was a question of utilitarian morality, which depended absolutely on the racial inferiority of the slaves. Blacks' status as agricultural laborers made them a working class, but their race made them slaves. He claimed that whites' "sentimental" and intellectual superiority rendered them unfit for slavery, much as the parallel inferiorities of blacks made slavery congenial to their nature. To prove blacks' suitability for their condition, he appealed to the collective "knowledge" of southern whites and, especially, to science.17

Arguing from the logic of white southerners' experience, Cooper considered blacks incapable of responsible behavior. He wrote that "every Southern man conversant with negro habits and propensities" knew that "the first object of every negro, [was], not an improvement of his condition, but a life of idleness, freedom from all kind of labour and exertion." If left to themselves, blacks would revert to a state of savagery, as demonstrated by the experience of poverty-stricken Haiti. From personal observation, he reflected that blacks "do not care, or expect, or look to bettering their condition. Who that knows them, will say that the free blacks of Philadel- phia and New York, have bettered their condition?" The deficiency of "natural intellect" among blacks was demonstrated by the presence "in the northern and middle states" of "black teachers, black preachers, black physicians-[who] have had access to all the means of improving their condition, and [whose] inferiority remains manifest and undeniable-They are not superior in one thing to the slave of the south. They are not capable of much mental improvement, or of literary or scientific acquirement." The appeal to experience grew out of Cooper's strident materialism, which mandated that the morality of institutions and actions be judged on their empirically verifiable social effects rather than on an abstract ethic."8

Claiming that the experience of generations of planters supported his argument, Cooper turned to psychology. He insisted that the inability of blacks to improve their condition in freedom stemmed from temperamental differences from whites. Since blacks were less developed psychologically, they had "no sentimental wants that require supply." Blacks had "no

17 Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969; rpt. ed., Middletown, Conn., 1988; references to reprint edition), 135; and George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York and other cities, 1971; rpt. ed., Middletown, Conn., 1987; references to reprint edition), 65.

18 Cooper, Two Essays, 42; [Cooper], "Slavery," 192; and T[homas] C[ooper], "Coloured Marriages," Carolina Law Journal, I (July 1830), 100. "Coloured Marriages," originally entitled "Mixed Marriages," appeared in the Charleston Mercury on October 29,1823. Fredrickson, in The Black Image in the White Mind, notes that "while the inferiority of the Negro was undoubtedly a common assumption ... open assertions of permanent inferiority were exceedingly rare" before 1830 (p. 43).




thought for the morrow: they are under none of the heart rending anxieties that accompany the white man's poverty." Moreover, he continued, family attachments "among the blacks, are greatly overrated ... as if they were all well educated sentimental whites." Abolitionists who protested the divi- sions of slave families by sale did not recognize "the very slight bonds of concubinage among the black race" that rendered their separation less painful. Abolitionists' attachment to ideals, and thus to racial equality, blinded them to the "facts" of black inferiority that simple, unprejudiced observation demonstrated. Cooper's utilitarian justification supposedly depended on facts and practical effects, since human happiness was the single ethical standard. 19

Appealing again to "fact," that is, what he took to be observation and experience, Cooper asserted that "a population of free blacks, is the most idle, debauched, thievish and insolent that we have ever witnessed in the United States. This is testified by hourly observation, as well as by the state of the jails ... and the continual complaints against [a] coloured population." Like other proslavery thinkers, he described "a duality ... of Negro character" by which blacks were both helpless, irresponsible children and potentially violent savages. The beneficent influence of slavery, Cooper concluded, could ameliorate the most barbarous aspects of the slaves' natures but could not alter their natural inferiority to whites. Utility could be promoted, but only within the bounds set by the "facts"-by nature.20

Cooper could thus confidently assert that blacks were inferior to whites and thus temperamentally suited for slavery. As a learned doctor and a scientist, however, he appealed to new sciences in order to prove the natural inferiority of blacks. An early convert to ethnology and "organology," Cooper defended the ability of science to discern natural differences between races. Like a growing number of medical practitioners, he believed that a study of the "anatomical structure," especially the facial angle and skull size, of human beings could reveal natural hierarchies of racial superiority. Cooper accepted the validity of "a great number of accurate observations respecting the connection between some tendency or capac- ity, and a particular fonn of the scull [sic]." More assuredly, he "considered it as ascertained that the intellectual faculties, and what we call talents, depend greatly on the anterior part of the brain, from the coronal suture to the os fronts, and the general expanding of the forehead." Appealing "to the more accurate observations of the Phrenologists and Organoligists

19 [Cooper], "Slavery," 192 (first two quotations) and 190 (remaining quotations); and Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 58.

20 Cooper, Two Essays, 45 (quotations); and Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 53.




[sic]," he challenged "any man [to] draw an imaginary line on a black's head from the centre of one ear to the centre of the other, and he will find the mass of brains behind in the black, and before in the white. Take the facial angle of 70 and 75 degrees in the black, and 85 in the generality of whites." Cooper, using his materialist philosophy combined with his scientific training, found in ethnology an especially congenial discipline for collect- ing facts to discredit what he deemed the irresponsible ideals of antislavery advocates and to demonstrate the utility of African bondage.21

The "proofs" provided by phrenology convinced Cooper that blacks were an inferior race. Like a significant number of other scientists, he addressed the question of the unity of the human race, although he scarcely sought to vindicate the biblical account of creation, which he repudiated yearly in lectures to seniors at South Carolina College and also in print. Cooper was unwilling to admit that blacks were a separate species from whites. Rather, he thought they were an inferior kind of human being. Cooper agreed with his friend Dr. Charles Caldwell of the University of Pennsylvania, who vigorously promulgated the view that blacks' inferiority stemmed from nature, not from environment. "The blacks may be of the same species," Cooper admitted, "for the mixed progeny will breed. But they are an inferior variety of the animal, man." Privately he wrote, "I do not say the blacks are a distinct species: but I have not the slightest doubt of their being an inferior variety of the human species; and not capable of the same improvement as the whites." Inherent inferiority meant that blacks' requirements for intellectual and sentimental happiness were less demand- ing than whites'. Southern masters could profitably supply slaves with the requirements for their happiness and thus satisfy their greatest good. This same standard guaranteed that whites' best interests could be advanced only under freedom because their greater mental and emotional needs could not be satisfied within slavery, which was too constricting for the white intellect. In further contrast to whites, free blacks could not be depended upon to improve their condition. Indeed, Cooper found that blacks' condition actually deteriorated outside of bondage. Slavery thus protected blacks from their own self-destructive tendencies and advanced their best interests by providing security, discipline, and sustenance. Science demonstrated

21 Larry R. Morrison, "'Nearer to the Bmute Creation': The Scientific Defense of American Slavery Before 1830," Southern Studies, XIX (Fall 1980), 236; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 4; Thomas Cooper, "On Phrenology, Craniology, Organology," Southern Literary Journal, I (November 1835), 402 (first quotation); [Thomas Cooper], "Gall on the Functions of the Brain," Southern Review, I (Febmuary 1828), 158 (second quotation); and [Cooper], "Slavery," 192 (third quotation).




that slavery was a manifestly moral institution, one consistent with Bentham's moral equation, because it elevated the status of both races.22

As Drew Faust suggests, the proslavery argument reveals the values of the society that it defended. Cooper's frequent and incisive criticisms of northern institutions display his vision of the superior society. In these writings he advanced "a sectionalized interpretation of the abolition crisis threatening to emerge in the South." Cooper believed that the South best represented the ideas of utilitarianism in action. He tried to demonstrate the superiority of a philosophy, which was putatively based on an unsentimental study of facts, unobscured and unburdened by ideals, that protected the greatest good of all members of the society.23

Turning to natural rights philosophy, Cooper incisively criticized the metaphysical basis of antislavery thought. In common with proslavery thinkers and conservatives across America, he advocated an empirical basis for social analysis in order to combat the "dangerous abstractions of abolitionism and other ill-supported theories of social reform." Since Yankee philosophy was not grounded in the certainties of empirical observation, its conclusions were unreliable and irrelevant to the everyday world. The discrepancies between the ideals of free society and its realities, between what industrial, democratic capitalism promised and what it deliv- ered, and the inability of antislavery advocates to come to honest terms with these inconsistencies, revealed to Cooper a damning flaw in northern antislavery philosophy. He took it upon himself to defeat the abolitionists on their own moral ground by demonstrating that slavery was consistent with the most modern and progressive ethical systems.24

Ironically, Cooper's attempt to defend southern institutions on Benthamite grounds diminished his credibility as an objective social critic. Utilitarian- ism could have provided him with genuine critical insight into the problems of both the North and the South. But it served Cooper primarily as a polemical device, not as an instrument of social analysis. Bentham's thought gave him the critical faculties with which to expose effectively the contradictions of free labor ideology. His proslavery partisanship, how-

22 J. Marion Sims, The Story of My Life (New York, 1894), 83; Thomas Cooper, On the Connection Between Geology and the Penitateuch ... (Boston, 1837); on the debate over the unity of the human species, see William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific A ttitudes Toward Race inAmerica, 1815-59 (Chicago, 1960), esp. 19-20; [Cooper], "Slavery," 192 (first quotation); and Cooper to Mahlon Dickerson, March 16, 1826, in "Letters of Dr. Thomas Cooper, 1825-1832," American Historical Review, VI (July 1901), 729 (second quotation).

23 Faust, "Proslavery Argument in History," 1; and Tise, Proslavery, 334 (quotation). 24 Drew Gilpin Faust, "A Southern Stewardship: The Intellectual and the Proslavery Argu-

ment," American Quarterly, XXXI (Spring 1979), 72.




ever, prevented him from aggressively applying Benthamism to southern problems. Like other southern intellectuals, Cooper regarded the proslavery argument as "an evangelical act, a defense of morality and truth, a 'sacred duty"' through which he could confront what he considered to be naive, sentimental, hypocritical, and ultimately destructive social ideas. By at- tacking free, industrial society, and repudiating the republican doctrines that undergirded that society, he attempted to provide for the South "a plausible social philosophy" based on utilitarianism.25

His chief difficulty with the idea of inalienable rights was that they were abstract and therefore unprovable by scientific methods. Natural inequality and the justice of slavery were established by historical precedent. "It will be time enough to argue" that slavery is inconsistent with inalienable rights, Cooper declared, whenn the enumeration of the rights of man, is distinctly made, and distinctly placed on irrefragable pretension. If the known laws of human nature have any thing to do with the rights of man, then it is a known law of human nature, from the very commencement of historical records ... that the black race has been inferior to, and held in bondage by the white race. Inferiority of animal caste, is the great and universal basis and defence of subjugation." Humankind's natural state of inequality was plain to anyone who was not mesmerized by metaphysical abstractions. Americans, Cooper maintained, "talk a great deal of nonsense about the rights of man. We say that every man is born free, and equal to every other man. Nothing can be more untrue: no human being ever was, now is, or ever will be born free. Where is the freedom of an infant in swaddling clothes? No two men were ever born equal to each other, or ever will be. If nature has ordained inferiority, that inferiority will tell its own story through life; and such is the fact." It was, he insisted, precisely this irrational allegiance to abstraction that blinded slavery's opponents to the natural inferiority of blacks. They did not see that morality was a practical matter, one determined by social effects. As a result, reformers could not possibly understand how slavery could promote morality.26

Although Cooper denied the existence of rights in the abstract, he denied neither their practical existence nor their efficacy. Society, he declared, apportioned rights according to the conditions of its existence. "We deny that all men are created equal," Cooper maintained. "We deny that any two men that ever lived were created equal in any one assignable circumstance. We deny that any human creature has any unalienable rights. We deny that

25 Faust, Sacred Circle, 115 26 [Cooper], "Slavery," 189.




there are any natural rights, any rights independent of social contract. We assert that all rights, of whatever description, and without any exception, are the creatures of society, and of society alone." Society, awarding and restricting privileges according to expedience, was the true repository of rights; there was no abstract, metaphysical "bank" of rights existing outside the purview of humankind. Society had to apportion rights because only it could fairly judge when expedience required or allowed them to be granted. When sentimentally hallowed as the inalienable possessions of humankind, rights obstructed the true business of society-advancing the greatest good of its members.27

Cooper wrote to Hammond in 1836 that Cooper's endorsement of this modem and in some ways quite liberal philosophy could classify him as a radical. His position in America, however, determined that he would apply his radical philosophy to the defense of conservative institutions. Although Cooper repudiated the doctrines of inalienable rights and natural human equality, his conservative social ideas emerged from a modem, liberal, utilitarian philosophy. Thus Cooper defended the benefits of slavery for blacks not on the basis of planter paternalism, but on planter self-interest. In his mind, social institutions were validated not by their inherent liberalism or conservatism, but by their contribution to the good of society. No one ideal of society existed. Each community had its own particular combina- tion of "facts" that rendered dependence on an ideal of social construction useless, if not handful. Historical precedent and empirical observation suggested to observers those institutions that promoted the greatest good of the greatest number of a community's members. His explication of the role of slavery to the South rested not on an abstract definition of servitude but on slavery's particular relation to the South's economic and social needs.28

The stature of Cooper's thought was not, of course, equal to Bentham's. As a southern partisan, Cooper innovatingly applied Bentham's ideas to the particular problems of the sectional crisis, but in the process the South Carolinian revealed no particular critical originality. His practical, materialist mind instinctively recognized Benthamism's congeniality with his own thoughts, and, as a political activist, he creatively discerned its polemical potential. Cooper was too much a partisan, and not enough of a philosopher, to appreciate the genuine critical potential of utilitarianism. But by demonstrating that a modern, progressive philosophy could be used effectively to defend slavery, he challenged the popular notion that the

27 [Cooper], "Agrarian and Education Systems," 22. 28 Cooper to James Henry Hammond, March 20, 1836, Vol. 6, Hammond Papers.




South was doomed to evolve as a conservative anachronism. His utilitarian defense of the peculiar institution suggests that slavery did not relegate the South to perpetual intellectual stagnation. Moreover, the vitality and inno- vation that marked Cooper's writings further undermine the myth of southern anti-intellectualism. While his secular, materialist ideas were exceptional for a southerner, and his utilitarianism had little, if any, influence on the proslavery argument, Cooper's writings help dismiss the notion that the South was antebellum America's intellectual backwater.



Documents

Slavery & Utilitarianism: Thomas Cooper and the Mind of the Old South