O'Reilly's booklet also presents quotes by a Gen. Mitchell of Kentucky that gives another view of this strange but common understanding. From Mitchell's speech:
I wanted also to say a word to you in regard to the unfortunate negro question. I think I may call it unfortunate, because I suppose we all feel that but for this there would have been no war and we should none of us have been wearing uniforms.In addition to showing the anti-black anti-slavery combination of attitudes, that passage also reminds us that war brings out the very worst in some people. That kind of blowhard bloodthirsty rhetoric wasn't created by the Republicans and the neocons during the Iraq War.
I feel that I may speak about this question, for I was born in Kentucky, and I have given to the matter as close attention as it is in my power to give. I am convinced that we must destroy slavery, or slavery will conquer us.
... At the North, if you hesitate about resorting to all means to put an end to the war, you are regarded as pro-slavery and disloyal.
There remains only the alternative I speak of. We must destroy slavery or it will conquer us. I accept the issue. I believe that all the hopes of humanity for a thousand years to come are involved in this struggle. Rather than that this Government should be overthrown, I am ready not only to see slavery exterminated, but also have every negro in these Southern States destroyed - and more, I am ready to see every white man in these rebel States destroyed also. [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]
Also, an exceptionally high estimate of the importance of the United States in the world is evident in his claim that "all the hopes of humanity for a thousand years to come" were riding on the outcome of the war.
But there's also another point here that was a common perception that is often missed in accounts of the Civil War. It's unlikely in the extreme, virtually unthinkable, that the Confederate states would have been content to be allowed to leave the Union in peace. If the free states were increasingly unwilling to return fugitive slaves when they were part of the same Union as the slave states and were obligated by national law to do so, they would be even less likely to do so as part of a separate nation. The threat to the South's "peculiar institution" would have weighed even more heavily on the already-overheated minds of the slaveowners and their supporters. The idea of seizing more territory from the United States would almost certainly have become a priority, though they would likely have gone after Cuba and maybe more of Mexico first. And since the then-western states were critically dependent on the Mississippi River for commercial traffic and the Confederate nation would have controlled the port of New Orleans, that would have been another source of conflict and also a pull for other of the United States to join the Confederate States of America.
So the Union fear that "slavery will conquer us" was not at all just war propaganda. It was a genuine threat. A threat that Gen. Robert E. Lee made more tangible when he temporarily held Union territory in Pennsylvania and started rounding up African-Americans as slaves.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery
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