Historians have emphasized that the sense of honor was a central concern of upper-class white Southerners. The idea of being treated like a second-class citizen was anathema and could not be tolerated by an honorable southerner. The abolitionist position held that slavery was a negative or evil phenomenon that damaged the rights of white men and the prospects of republicanism. To the white South this rhetoric made Southerners second-class citizens because it trampled what they believed was their Constitutional right to take their chattel property anywhere.
