die out on its own. However, as technological advances like the cotton gin made the south the world’s leading producer of cotton, the rhetoric around slavery changed, and pro-slavery advocates began to claim that slavery was inherent in the divine order, with whites having a Christian duty to wield dominance over the mentally inferior black race. Those who supported slavery, southerners in particular, took deep offense to the abolitionists’ assertion that slavery was a sin according to the theology of the Christian religion. In the nineteenth century, abolitionism had a
