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It was the mission of the Confederacy, ordinary whites were told, to carry out God’s design for an inferior and dependent race. Slaveholders claimed that owning slaves always entailed a duty and a burden — a duty and burden that defined the moral superiority of the South. And this duty and burden was respected by millions of nonslaveholding whites, who were prepared to defend it with their lives. That, perhaps, was the ultimate meaning of a “slave society.
