medieval

I should add that Jefferson greatly admired the medieval world before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 ended Anglo-Saxon rule.

In the years following the American and French Revolutions, when calls for liberty from England and equality among citizens still echoed across the new nation, pro-slavery thinkers in the United States had little appetite for openly associating slavery and racial hierarchy with an antiquated European medieval feudal order.

While there is evidence of slaveholders associating themselves with a type of feudal lordship and associating the skin aristocracy with medieval times during the opening decades of the 1800s, such claims blossomed in the 1820s and 1830s for several reasons.

For him, "Southern society revived the genius of medieval civilization" and even surpassed it by imposing a racial hierarchy confirmed by ideas grounded in "science."

Beyond identifying and criticizing racial slavery for African Americans in medieval terms, Easton similarly condemned the displacement of Indigenous people and Mexicans.