Statistics and the peculiar institution

More fabulous American history: reading at work today about 19th century perceptions of insanity and the 1840 census. The census purportedly showed that free blacks in the North, and the Irish, were disproportionately insane. These census figures were seized upon by Southerners to argue that blacks were inherently uncivilized and incapable of coping with freedom. Slavery was just what they needed to keep them happy and healthy--the numbers proved it so those yankee abolitionists could go eat a big shit sandwich and shut the fuck up. The tenor of Southern pro-slavery arguments changed over the years: from the defense of an unfortunate but supposedly necessary social institution to the championing of a system ordained by God and nature (which is not to imply that those were mutually exclusive in southern theology).