Positive Good = As slavery continues to expand, slavery supporters stop apologizing for it as a necessary evil and start defending it as a good in and of itself; this is around the time of John Calhoun and feeds into the Civil War. Scientific racism begins to really develop to defend slavery. Southerners begin to not only defend the peculiar institution but actually promote it as a superior and more humane form of social organization. This accompanies waves of expansion; I'm not an anti-Texas faggot like most academics today are, but this does overlap with the story of Texas, the Mexican-American War and the filibuster expeditions against Mexico, Nicaragua and Cuba. At this point the South also begins to become a pariah internationally, it sort of isolates itself intellectually in a manner somewhat like South Africa and Rhodesia under apartheid.