at this point in the crisis, the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons. Yet the chivalry, thanks to Edmund Ruffin, James Hammond, and others, had persuaded themselves of a different reality: Slavery was a positive good; it was endorsed by the
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