In the context of plantation slavery in the antebellum U.S. South, slaveowning planters developed a rhetorical defense of slavery as a benevolent, paternalistic institution based on the ancient Roman model of the "pater familias". Some planters employed the concept as a legal protectionary measure, instructing renters to whom they “hired out” their enslaved laborers to “treat” them “as good "pater familias",” in an effort to stymie abusive practices. Others used the concept to rationalize planter rule, claiming themselves sovereigns of their households who provided for all constituent members, and demanding their loyalty and labor in return. Drawing on the Roman precedent in this way, these planters claimed that their enslaved laborers were their “dependents,” who ultimately benefitted from the paternalistic ordering of the household. Southern newspapers and print media repeatedly promoted this idea in order to square the intrinsic brutality that defined the institution of slavery with the democratic ideals the nation was supposedly founded on, often developing this paternalistic ideology to irrational heights and ignoring the contradictions that it masked. This paternalistic ideology persisted after the legal abolition of slavery, as white employers and political leaders in the South attempted to maintain a hierarchical socioeconomic class status over formerly enslaved persons, as well as women and poor laborers, whom they viewed as “dependents,” thereby expanding the Roman household model of "pater familias" to the level of broader society.