The debate over slavery was always, at bottom, a debate about property rights. Abolitionists were revolutionaries for their time, but not socialists: they did not demand the abolition of property as such. But they denied that any person had a legitimate right to hold property in another person.

When abolitionists denounced slavery as “theft,” they had two different kinds of robbery in mind. One was the day-by-day, year-by-year, theft of the fruits of the slave’s labor. But they were also thinking of a different, more fundamental kind of theft. Human beings own themselves, as a natural right, a right of property, abolitionists argued. So when masters claimed slaves as their own they were effectively robbing the slaves of their property in themselves.

It is easy to be misled by the slaveholder’s claim of property rights into thinking that they were defending the same thing Northerners were defending. Don’t capitalists always defend the rights of property? Of course they do. But so did feudal lords. So did tribal elders. And so did Southern slaveholders.