Thornton Stringfellow’s Slavery: Its Origin, Nature and History (1861) describes the Negroes as the “descendants of Ham, the beastly and degraded son of Noah.”56 Most southern intellectuals, however, rejected the use of the curse of Ham, but rather argued that slavery was justified since the Bible itself recognized slavery in both the Old and New Testaments. But in opposition to the Genoveses’ de-emphasis of the curse of Ham among southerners, Stephen Haynes identifies at least fifty primary documents