With few exceptions, Southerners pronounced themselves simultaneously progressive and conservative. They envisioned a cycle of flowering and decadence in an upward spiral of progression of human freedom, which would, in turn, propel historical progress. Slaveholders believed that men of good will should desire to extend freedom as far as possible, while recognizing that many peoples lacked the capacity to live free; that the freest societies in world history were based on slavery; and that freedom could be sustained only through subjugation of all laboring classes. Thus, they resolved to sustain a southern slave society even in a hostile world.

As dedicated republicans Southerners supported freedom of speech in principle; as slaveholders they weighed freedom of speech against their sense of the exigencies of social stability. In consequence, the South came increasingly to condemn “free society.” In 1825 Whitemarsh Seabrook rallied the South by calling upon Congress to censor the press and to refuse to discuss slavery. Almost all prominent Southerners denounced the reception of abolitionist petitions as a threat to the social and political order. They stood solidly behind the Gag Rule – “the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy,” as William Freehling aptly calls it – which by seeming to suppress basic political freedoms split southern slaveholders from their conservative northern allies.