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Document 4a - Historian Eric Foner was interviewed for a documentary special entitled "Africans in America". Below is an excerpt of this interview.
Q: What is the relationship between slavery and westward expansion?
A: … The westward expansion carried slavery down into the Southwest, into Mississippi, Alabama, crossing the Mississippi River into Louisiana. Finally, by the 1840’s, it was pouring into Texas…. Now in the Southwest, West, and South, slave owners insisted that slavery was absolutely essential to that story of progress. Without slavery, you could not have civilization, they said. Slavery freed the upper class from the need to do manual labor, freed them from actually settling and creating civilization, freed them from working on the land, to worry about economic day-to-day realities…. and therefore gave them the time and the intellectual ability to devote themselves to the arts and literature and mechanical advantages and inventions of all kinds. So that it was slavery itself which made the progress of civilization possible.…Therefore, in order to settle the Southwest and Western territories, slavery would be a necessary institution.
4a. According to Eric Foner, suggest ONE reason Southern slave owners supported the expansion of slavery into the west.
One reason for the expansion of slavery to the west was to promote the colonization of that land and therefore to promote civilization.
Explanation:
According to Erick Foner's response, slavery allowed whites to create American civilization, according to their own thoughts. This is because, according to the scruocratic thought, if slaves took care of heavy work, whites would promote art, science and literature, which are the factors they believed were the shapers of civilization. thus, by supporting the expansion of slavery to the west, the colonizers believed that they were taking civilization to these lands.
