Non-European history and cultures enchanted curious Southerners, as they did Northerners. By 1860, history for Southerners had become world history, and they took special pleasure in evidence of the ubiquity of slavery. Thomas Cobb, Georgia's legal scholar, concluded that slavery was “more universal than marriage and more permanent than liberty.” He introduced his influential book, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, with a discussion of its origins, development, and extent in ancient Egypt, India, Africa, and the Far East, and a review of the extent not merely of serfs but of slaves in medieval and early modern Europe. For Thomas Roderick Dew, the histories of Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa “conclusively mark the evidence of slavery over these boundless regions.” George Sawyer of Louisiana opened his proslavery tract, Southern Institutes, with Aristotle and other early authorities to demonstrate that the master-slave relation, in some form, provided the basis of social order.

Southerners believed that world history vindicated them as slaveholders and demonstrated that civilization itself rose on the backs of subjugated laborers.