Arguments used by the Southerners to justify slavery include the economy, social status, and the right to own property. In 1832, Thomas Dew, a professor at William and Mary college, stated, “It is, in truth, the slave labor in Virginia which gives value to her soil and her [properties]; take away this, and you pull down the . . . whole system.” Thomas Dew meant that the South’s whole economic system is centered around slavery, and without it, the whole Southern economy would collapse. J.D.B Debow, the editor of DeBow’s Review, a popular Southern magazine, proclaimed in 1860, “The non-slaveholder of the South preserves the status of the white man, and is not regarded as an inferior or a dependent. He is not told that the Declaration of Independence,
