On February 1, 1836, James Henry Hammond – freshman congressman from South Carolina – intervened in a rancorous debate in the House of Representatives over antislavery petitions to condemn abolitionism as evidence of an ascendant radicalism that threatened the foundations of social order. The destructive principles initiated by “that terrible tragedy, the French Revolution” were now spreading across Europe and the northern states of the American Union. Slavery, he proclaimed, provided the last bulwark against catastrophe: “Sir, I do firmly believe that domestic slavery regulated as ours is produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.” Radicalism, spreading westward from New England, was undermining the constitutional and political framework of the Republic. Waxing philosophical while mincing no words, Hammond credited southern slavery with ensuring the fragile republican compromise between society and the individual.

For Hammond, a large planter who had edited a pro-nullification newspaper, and for his proslavery countrymen and countrywomen, slavery guaranteed the protection of property rights necessary for the preservation of an ordered and civilized society. In a frequently repeated southern theory, slavery unified capital and labor and thus forestalled class struggle, considered the most dangerous and corrosive of sociopolitical antagonisms. The theory had wide appeal, but it mired slavery's proponents in tension between commitment to social hierarchy and commitment to a material progress that required free labor and industrialization and opened the road to Jacobinism.