Steven Dundas

“African slavery arose to meet the economic need of planters for laborers on their vast plantations as “the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured servants (under four to seven year contracts) was not enough to meet the demand of the plantations.” Thus began the mass importation of African slaves “from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, fully six of seven people who arrived in the Americas were African slaves.”
― Steven Dundas

“During the Civil War, racism, religion and ideology combined with differing conceptions of humanity and human rights created a perfect maelstrom for the terror of total war. British military historian and strategist J. F. C. Fuller might have described it the best: “Like the total wars of the twentieth century, it was preceded by years of violent propaganda, which, long before the war, had obliterated all sense of moderation and awakened in the contending parties the primitive spirit of tribal fanaticism.” Thus, when war came, “soldiers from both North and South marched off to fight sure that their cause was God’s cause.”
― Steven Dundas

“But slavery was more than economics: it was central to the racist worldview of whites, especially slave owners. “White Supremacy was a key tenet of the Southern Way of Life, and Southern ministers used the Lost Cause to reinforce it” in the century following the war. The South’s leading overseas propagandist Henry Hotze wrote during the war that “the negro’s place in nature is in subordination to the white race,” which he noted was due to the “intellectual inferiority” of Blacks.”
― Steven Dundas

“American slavery was characterized by massive greed and desire for profit at a terrible human cost, “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of race hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”8 The South Carolina Constitution of 1669 deemed that such a relationship between white masters and their African slaves was “necessary for society to function satisfactorily.” In all dealings with “Negro slaves,” it provided, “every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority.” Slavery took a particularly evil form in the Americas, on the plantation. European colonial plantations produced commodities for the worldwide market, and owners viewed their slaves as commodities to be bought and sold in order to increase profits.”
― Steven Dundas