I were a slave owner, what would I think about my slaves? How would I care for them? How would I use them to create profits for my plantation?" Write down your answers. Now stop and go to the library.

The reason you should go to the library is to get some other sources which will give you context for your essay. The best essays are loaded with facts, have a strong point of view, and tell a story. You have to have context in order to tell the story, the story of your opinion. That's your strong point of view, your argument. It doesn't matter what that is. You could choose to have a strong pro-slavery view, not because you believe that, but because you want to write your essay. So, go and get some sources that will help you. The easiest things like this to digest are stories: novels, short stories, other fiction, and biographies. Find the stories of Nat Turner, the Narrative of the Life of a Slave by Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, and Magnolia Plantation by Beverly Butler. Read them to find out what life was like in the pro-slavery South and the anti-slavery North in the period leading up to the Civil War. Read Gore Vidal's novel about Lincoln, which gives great political context to all this. Read as much as you have time for, and soak in it. Let your brain get used to going inside the stories, so you feel like you were there.

When you reach that point, start writing down pro-slavery and anti-slavery points of view. For such a short essay, you will probably only need a few points on one side or the other. With all the facts and the context you've gathered, you should have enough words in your head to fill the required length no problem.

Now, about getting the words to come out of your head and onto the page. Imagine you're having an argument with me. What would you say if you had to argue in favor of slavery? Put yourself in the shoes of that plantation owner, and argue with me like your life depended on it . . . because it did to those folks. Now, put yourself in the shoes of an abolitionist and argue the other side. Write down what you would say. Just write it down. Once it's on paper, you can make it fit into your essay rubric and put it into proper essay grammar and syntax.

Lastly, I should point out that nobody would do all the reading I've suggested for a one-page essay. Even if they tried, they probably wouldn't have time. So, read all the required texts and answer the focus questions. Then, go find those contextual sources and skim them, or choose one, any one, and read as much as you can in the time you have available. Good luck!

As you have pasted in the entire assignment sheet to the question field rather than asking a specific question, I'm assuming that you are struggling to get started on your assignment and are looking for help in developing a central theme and argument and some sense of what you need to do to develop it. 

First, on choosing sides, one's obvious instinct is to argue against slavery. To most of us in the twenty-first century, slavery is abhorrent and our immediate reflex is to oppose it. You actually will learn more, though, and probably get a better grade if you go against that immediate instinct, and rather than simply dismiss the anti-slavery arguments, try to use the paper as a way to understand how basically decent and intelligent human beings could uphold slavery. Thus your thesis statement might be something on the order of: "Although the overwhelming majority of twenty-first century Americans consider not only slavery but even racial discrimination self-evidently morally abhorrent, such was not the case in the nineteenth century."

Next, you should develop an outline focused on the categories listed in your assignment sheet. Some issues you should address are:

• Paternalism: Even now, we believe that certain categories of people, including children, the mentally disabled (including people suffering certain mental illnesses, the developmentally disabled, and seniors suffering from dementia) should have their behavior restricted in certain ways because they are not capable of caring for themselves or making good life choices. Many of the pro-slavery writers make a similar argument, that slaves, like children, need to be under the power of wiser people for their own good.
• Religious: Although some evangelicals tended to be abolitionists, many people argued for slavery on Biblical grounds, including its apparent acceptance in the Pauline letters. 
• Conditions of slaves: Here, you might look at how the anti-abolitionists argued about the conditions of slave life as opposed to how African-Americans might live if they were freed. You also might look at the image of the "happy slave" as portrayed in these documents.