In the decades before the American Civil War, many slaveholders defended slavery through politics, religion, and economics. Few did so more effectively than Thomas Roderick Dew. A professor at the College of William & Mary and later its president, Dew became one of the South’s most influential pro slavery thinkers. His writings helped convince many Virginians that slavery was not only necessary but beneficial.
Thomas Roderick Dew was born in 1802 in Virginia. He later became a professor of history, political law, and economics at the College of William & Mary, one of the most established institutions in the United States. By 1836, he had risen to become its president, placing him at the center of Virginia’s intellectual and political life at a moment when slavery was being fiercely debated.
Although Dew wrote about economics and politics, he achieved lasting notoriety because of his defense of slavery. His most influential work, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832, was published in the aftermath of a major slave uprising that shook Virginia and forced many white residents to reconsider the future of slavery.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
In August 1831, Nat Turner led the most famous slave rebellion in American history. The uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, resulted in the deaths of dozens of white residents before being suppressed. The rebellion terrified slaveholders throughout the South and sparked intense debate within Virginia’s political establishment.
For a brief moment, it appeared possible that Virginia might begin moving toward gradual emancipation. Some legislators argued that slavery was harmful to the state’s development and posed a continuing security threat. Others supported colonization schemes that would remove freed Africans from the United States and send them to Africa.
Dew entered this debate as a strong defender of slavery. He rejected emancipation entirely and argued that slavery was not only economically beneficial but also necessary for maintaining order in Southern society.
In 1832, Dew published Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. The work was intended to evaluate the arguments made during the legislative discussions, but in reality it became one of the strongest intellectual defenses of slavery ever written in the antebellum South.
Dew argued that emancipation would be disastrous. He claimed that slavery was economically efficient, socially necessary, and impossible to eliminate without causing widespread instability. He insisted that Black and white people could not live together as equals and predicted violence if enslaved Africans were freed. He also maintained that slavery was consistent with the natural order of society and argued that attempts to abolish it would lead to economic decline.
Many Virginians embraced Dew’s arguments. Historians have noted that his book helped bring an end to serious discussions of statewide emancipation. What had briefly seemed possible after Nat Turner’s rebellion quickly faded, and Virginia remained a slave state until the Civil War.
Virginia Slavery and the System of Forced Reproduction
To understand Dew’s defense of Virginia’s slave economy, it is necessary to understand how slavery reproduced itself. By the early nineteenth century, the United States had banned the transatlantic slave trade. As a result, the enslaved population grew internally through births.
Under American slave law, the condition of a child followed the mother. This meant that every child born to an enslaved woman automatically became enslaved and was legally treated as the property of the mother’s enslaver. In economic terms, childbirth itself became a mechanism for generating wealth.
This reality created strong financial incentives for enslavers to control reproduction. Enslaved African women had no legal rights over their own bodies, so pregnancy was not a matter of choice. Sexual violence was widespread and unchecked, and reproduction often happened through coercion rather than consent.
In some plantation, enslavers encouraged early childbearing among enslaved girls, sometimes in their mid to late teens, because increasing the enslaved population meant increasing future wealth. Enslaved children could later be used as labor or sold.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this era was the practice of “stockmen trade”, the renting out of strong, healthy enslaved African men to other plantations for the sole purpose of impregnating enslaved women.
These men were selected for their physical attributes, height, strength, endurance, and often referred to as “studs,” a term borrowed from animal breeding. Plantation owners would pay to use these men to impregnate enslaved women on their properties, with the goal of producing “valuable” offspring who could be sold at high prices in the market.
These men had no choice in the matter. They were forced into sexual servitude, stripped of the right to love, to marry, or to form lasting family bonds. The women, likewise, had no autonomy. Both were treated as human livestock, their most personal relationships reduced to a breeding program.
The resulting children were often sold southward by traders to meet the growing demand for labor on cotton plantations, with many separated from their parents, further sustaining the slave system in America.
This internal trade, estimated by historians to have displaced over one million enslaved Africans between 1790 and 1860, became one of the most profitable industries in the American South, with Virginia at its center.
The system Dew defended depended on this legal and economic framework. It allowed population growth among enslaved Africans to be transformed into market supply, particularly for the expanding cotton plantations of the Deep South. While Dew focused on economics, the system itself was built on coercion, forced labor, and the denial of a peoples humanity.
Thomas Roderick Dew died in 1846, but his intellectual influence endured long after his death. His writings helped persuade many Southerners that slavery was not merely acceptable but economically indispensable. In Virginia, that argument carried particular significance because the state had become a major supplier of enslaved labor to the expanding cotton frontier of the Deep South.
Yet the wealth Dew defended rested on a system that treated human beings as property, reduced families to commercial assets, and turned the birth of enslaved children into a source of profit. By providing an intellectual justification for that system, Dew became one of the most influential defenders of slavery in American history.
Today, he is remembered not for his contributions to economics or education, but for helping to legitimize one of the most brutal institutions ever established in the United States.
Sources:
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/dew-thomas-r-1802-1846/
https://academic.oup.com/book/12116/chapter-abstract/161497795?redirectedFrom=fulltext
