Life & Wisdom Quote by John Sergeant Wise

The most chilling thing here is the grammar of inevitability. Wise doesn’t say wealthy men chose to expand slavery; he says they were compelled, as if human bondage were a logistical problem like excess inventory. That passive, managerial voice is doing ideological work: it converts a moral atrocity into a kind of market pressure, flattening violence into economics and turning plantation growth into an almost natural outcome of “having so many slaves.”

The line also performs a quiet act of social normalization. “Several of those in our neighborhood” frames mass enslavement as a familiar local detail, the way someone might mention prosperous farms down the road. It’s a neighborly aside that launders complicity through intimacy: these aren’t monsters, just respectable men making practical decisions. The euphemism “employ them” is especially corrosive. It borrows the language of wage labor to disguise coercion, suggesting opportunity where there was ownership, discipline, and terror.

Context matters: Wise was a Virginian writing after the Civil War, part of a generation that helped shape the Lost Cause mood music. The sentence fits that project neatly. It invites readers to see slavery as an economic system that simply expanded under its own weight, rather than a deliberate, defended regime of extraction. The real subtext is exculpatory: if expansion was “compelled,” then nobody is responsible. That’s the trick - turning choice into fate so history can feel less like a crime and more like a “necessity.”