As debates focused on slavery in the abstract, it became more difficult to ameliorate or slowly abolish slavery. Kentucky Baptist pastor and gradual emancipationist James Pendleton was exasperated by this overtheorizing. “Pro-slavery men,” he said in 1849, “most ridiculously transfer their idea of the innocence of slavery in the abstract to slavery in the concrete. Because they can conceive of circumstances in which a master may hold a slave without doing wrong, they infer that there is nothing wrong in the system of slavery in Kentucky.” The abuses, proslavery advocates argued, were
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