In the 1820s, 1830, and 1840s, the Second Great Awakening helped to inspire a reformist impulse across the nation. As History in the Making points...

As you have pasted in the entire assignment sheet to the question field rather than asking a specific question, I'm assuming that you are struggling to get started on your assignment and are looking for help in developing a central theme and argument and some sense of what you need to do to develop it. 

First, on choosing sides, one's obvious instinct is to argue against slavery. To most of us in the twenty-first century,...

As you have pasted in the entire assignment sheet to the question field rather than asking a specific question, I'm assuming that you are struggling to get started on your assignment and are looking for help in developing a central theme and argument and some sense of what you need to do to develop it. 

First, on choosing sides, one's obvious instinct is to argue against slavery. To most of us in the twenty-first century, slavery is abhorrent and our immediate reflex is to oppose it. You actually will learn more, though, and probably get a better grade if you go against that immediate instinct, and rather than simply dismiss the anti-slavery arguments, try to use the paper as a way to understand how basically decent and intelligent human beings could uphold slavery. Thus your thesis statement might be something on the order of: "Although the overwhelming majority of twenty-first century Americans consider not only slavery but even racial discrimination self-evidently morally abhorrent, such was not the case in the nineteenth century."

Next, you should develop an outline focused on the categories listed in your assignment sheet. Some issues you should address are:

• Paternalism: Even now, we believe that certain categories of people, including children, the mentally disabled (including people suffering certain mental illnesses, the developmentally disabled, and seniors suffering from dementia) should have their behavior restricted in certain ways because they are not capable of caring for themselves or making good life choices. Many of the pro-slavery writers make a similar argument, that slaves, like children, need to be under the power of wiser people for their own good.


• Religious: Although some evangelicals tended to be abolitionists, many people argued for slavery on Biblical grounds, including its apparent acceptance in the Pauline letters. 


• Conditions of slaves: Here, you might look at how the anti-abolitionists argued about the conditions of slave life as opposed to how African-Americans might live if they were freed. You also might look at the image of the "happy slave" as portrayed in these documents.