Dabney not only believed that slavery was morally acceptable; he viewed it as a positive for the African: “Was it nothing, that this [black] race, morally inferior, should be brought into close relations to a nobler race?”19 Dabney accepted the myth of the moral and intellectual inferiority of enslaved blacks, believing that if they were left to their own devices, they would only tend toward “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, [and] waste.” In Dabney’s theology, it was only through contact with the “nobler race” of white people in a master-slave relationship that there was hope of elevating
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