More importantly, it gave them the connections to help them on their way toward success in the two realms that mattered most to the white aristocracy—politics and planting, with achievement in the latter counted in the number of enslaved people you owned and the array of fine possessions displayed in your home. If a student had any qualms about slavery, he found them eased at every turn, particularly in his senior year, when graduating students attended lectures in “moral philosophy” that taught them “to delight in the possession and exercise of power,” affirmed the rightness of the existing
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