Talk:Slavery as a positive good in the United States

Feedback from New Page Review process
I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: An interesting, well-written article..

Cwmhiraeth (talk) 07:46, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Anti-Democratic message?
(Just to put it out there, I'm pretty left-leaning so I do have some bias.) I do not wish to deny that Southern Democrats, along with quite a few northern ones, supported slavery, but this article seems to blame the Democrats as a party perhaps a bit excessively, especially the last section. Given that a popular conservative talking point is to bring up how Southern Democrats were responsible for much of Southern white supremacy in order to attack the party as a whole(despite these ideas not being that relevant to today's party), it does not seem that odd that a user like User:DoomedToRepeatHistory might want to hint at this argument via this article. A sentence which particularly jumped out at me was "the Democratic-dominated Confederacy;" while most of the Confederate leaders came from the Democratic Party (especially since the Whigs were gone and the Republicans were explicitly anti-slavery), the Confederacy itself didn't seem to have developed political parties. Also, the article seems to draw an implicit connection between slavery and socialism, or at least the slaveowners' opposition to Northern industrial capitalism. While all the factors listed in this article certainly existed, the way they are presented seems quite biased. --Alexschmidt711 (talk) 17:27, 19 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you for writing that down, I'm seeing that frequently through a lot of Articles dealing with slavery.
 * Calling southern slave owners Democrats feels designed to be pejorative. Alacard (talk) 09:32, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Title is ambiguous while RS contradicts it as a mainstream view
This article refers to views only held by certain people during the 18th and 19th centuries...It seems to simply refer to a quote by John C. Calhoun. "In 1837, Calhoun famously took to the floor of the Senate to declare that slavery was a "positive good." He became the champion of the states' rights debate which intensified in the decades before the Civil War."

So is this somehow the WP:COMMONNAME?

"Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War..."

And? Slavery was not commonly held as a "positive good" among many Americans at that time, so why is the title presenting the United States as represented by the views of very particular Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals? Also see Abolitionism in the United States.

Historian Steven Mintz wrote... "Despite clear evidence that slavery was profitable, abolitionists--and many people who were not abolitionists--felt strongly that slavery degraded labor, inhibited urbanization and mechanization, thwarted industrialization, and stifled progress, and associated slavery with economic backwardness, inefficiency, indebtedness, and economic and social stagnation. When the North waged war on slavery, it was not because it had overcome racism; rather, it was because Northerners in increasing numbers identified their society with progress and viewed slavery as an intolerable obstacle to innovation, moral improvement, free labor, and commercial and economic growth." gilder lehrman institute of American history

A better title would be something like "The Southern Argument for Slavery before the Civil War". Currently, the title may violate WP:POVTITLE, especially if it is a descriptive title that was created by Wikipedia editors.

If this article is only about the views of "Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals" that defended slavery from the 18th to 19th centuries, the title needs to reflect that. DN (talk) 02:03, 13 July 2023 (UTC)