Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who propagated the idea that there were in fact many kind slave owners who provided a good life for their enslaved workers. Phillips’s assertion was built on the premise that chattel slavery was a largely benevolent system designed to uplift, protect, and civilize an inferior African race. In his 1918 book, American Negro Slavery, Phillips wrote, “On the whole the plantations were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented.”
