The search for a social theory to protect slaveholders' rights received its most coherent expression in South Carolina in the 1790s, during debates over state representation. Writing under the pseudonym of "Americanus," Timothy Ford made the explicit argument that the right to property is a natural right and equated it with the right to life. The end and purpose of civil society were to protect property. Ford and Henry William DeSaussure were among the first pro-slavery intellectuals to publicly reject the prevailing definition of equality and to identify planter interest with an expressly non-egalitarian conception of the polity. Nature itself has "instituted almost every gradation, from the confines of inferior animals to the state of superior creation." The "unavoidable conclusion is that inequality of condition is one of nature's laws." Writing under the pseudonym "Phocian," DeSaussure argued that equality as a natural condition would lead inevitably to emancipation and that "inevitable ruin would follow both to the whites and blacks, and this fine country would be deluged with blood, and desolated by fire and sword." In locating slavery within a network of unequal relations, Ford and DeSaussure were able to defend it as a positive good, and argue for its necessity for freedom and independence: Ford's argument that ,"The constant example of slavery stimulates a free man to avoid being confounded with the blacks: and seeing that in every instance of depression he is brought nearer to a par with them his efforts must invariably force him toward the opposite point," is but a short step away from the insistence of antebellum pro-slavery intellectuals that slavery was the guarantor of yeoman independence.

　　The power of the national identity notwithstanding, the South's emerging regional identity was shaped by the memory of the Revolutionary experience and by the region's increasingly distinctive culture. After the Revolution, white Southerners perhaps for the first time began to define themselves regionally in relationship to the North. Although they did not explicitly define themselves as "Southerners," a vague sense of separation is implicit in postwar Southern writing-in, for example, Ford's division of society into "the holders of slaves and those who have none." This sense of separation took on more concrete expression in the Northwest Ordinance, which established a geographical and ideological border at the Ohio River. These divisions between "holders of slaves and those who had none" would deepen in the nineteenth century, and eventually lead Southerners and Northerners to take up arms against one another.