Politics & Power Quote by Stephen Ambrose

A slave system can only run on a lie big enough to feel like common sense. Ambrose’s line strips away the romance and euphemism that often cling to American slavery and pins it to its necessary psychological engine: you don’t just own someone and then happen to think less of them. You have to think less of them, constantly, to keep the whole arrangement from collapsing under the weight of everyday human recognition.

The intent is prosecutorial in its simplicity. Ambrose isn’t debating motives or parsing individual “kind masters.” He’s arguing that slavery demanded an ideology - not as a side effect, but as infrastructure. “In every way” matters here: it signals totalizing dehumanization, the kind that doesn’t stop at labor capacity or legal status but spreads into intellect, morality, family life, sexuality, even spirituality. That absolutism is what turns exploitation into a worldview, giving perpetrators a script to read from whenever reality threatens to intrude.

The subtext is about self-protection. If the enslaved are fully human equals, then the slaveholder becomes fully culpable - not merely harsh, but monstrous. So inferiority becomes a moral anesthetic, a story that lets violence masquerade as order and theft as stewardship.

Contextually, Ambrose writes from late-20th-century historical consensus shaped by civil rights scholarship: slavery wasn’t an “original sin” corrected by progress so much as a central institution that manufactured modern American racism. The line is less a description of private prejudice than a diagnosis of a system that trained people to believe what it required.