Address of Thomas Ruffin: Delivered Before the State Agricultural Society of North Carolina, October 18, 1855

Address of Thomas Ruffin: Delivered Before the State Agricultural Society of North Carolina, October 18, 1855

In 1855, one year after being elected president of the North Carolina Agricultural Society, Thomas Ruffin gave an address where he covered issues involving agriculture but spent a major portion talking about slavery. Ruffin said that slavery was a good for society because blacks had inherited traits that allowed them to withstand heat that a white could not. Ruffin also mentions that if the black population were set free, they would fall victim to their own destruction much like "our native savages". Another positive Ruffin notes is that slavery introduced blacks to Christianity. Ruffin finishes his speech by saying that the abolitionist do not understand what slavery is about and the benefits that it brings to society.

Ruffin, Thomas

Thomas Ruffin, Address of Thomas Ruffin: Delivered Before the State Agricultural Society of North Carolina, October 18, 1855 , in The Papers of Thomas Ruffin, vol. 4, ed. J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton Printing Co., 1920), 323-337.

1855-10-18

Cooper, Blake

Document

Speech

... My purpose now, however, is merely to maintain that slavery here is favorable to the interests of agriculture in point of economy and profit, and not unwholesome to the moral and social condition of each race. In support of the first part of the proposition, a decisive argument is furnished by the fact that the value of the productions of slave labor in this country exceeds those of similar productions, nay, of all other agricultural productions, of an equal number of men in any other country, as far as they can be ascertained. With blacks by the constitutions inherited from their African ancestors, can labor, without detriment, under degrees of heat, moisture, and exposure, which are found to be fatal to the whites, whose systems are better adapted to different conditions of the atmosphere...