Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 14: Southern white racial views of themselves during the Civil War

James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow (1820-1867), editor of DeBow's Review, thought Southern whites were racially superior to Northern whites

James McPherson in his The Historian Who Saw Through America New York Review of Books 12/04/08 issue; accessed 11/15/08 (link behind subscription) took a look at two recently-released books by the late historian George Fredrickson.

In the course of his review, McPherson brings up an important but often-overlooked point about Southern racial attitudes prior to and during the Civil War. Southern whites came increasingly to view themselves as a separate and superior race to Northern whites. He quotes from a piece in what he calls "the leading magazine for Southern writers", Southern Literary Messenger of June 1861, which defined the Civil War then under way as:

... a contest of race ... between the North and the South. ... The people of the Northern States are more immediately descended of the English Puritans [who] constituted, as a class, the common people of England ... and are directly descended of the ancient Britons and Saxons. ... The Southern States were settled and governed ... by ... persons belonging to ... that stock recognized as Cavaliers ... directly descended from the Norman Barons of William the Conqueror, a race distinguished, in its earliest history, for its warlike and fearless character, a race, in all time since, renowned for its gallantry, its chivalry, its honor, its gentleness, and its intellect. ... The Southern people come of that race.

These ideas were also promoted by the very influential De Bow's Review, a very influential journal among the slaveholders and their spokesmen, and in the popular press.

McPherson writes that Union views were influenced by what he calls civic nationalism: "The United States was founded on a concept of civic nationalism whereby people of different ethnic groups are equal citizens pledging allegiance to the same flag." At first, of course, this primarily meant different white European ethnic groups being theoretically equal, though even that wasn't entirely the case in practice. He writes of the Union response to this kind of slaveowners' racial theories:

The Norman-Cavalier thesis of Southern ethnicity was nonsense, of course, and recognized as such by many contemporaries. Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, a quintessential "Yankee," blamed the Civil War on "the diseased imagination" of Southerners

who...fancied themselves cavaliers.... They came ultimately to believe themselves a superior and better race, knights of blood and spirit. Only a war could wipe out this arrogance and folly.

The political scientist Francis Lieber ridiculed Southern claims of Norman descent. "Races are very often invented from ignorance, or for evil purposes," wrote Lieber in 1881 in a passage that seems strikingly modern. "The rebels told us and each other again and again that they were a race totally different from the race of the North." This "pitiful attempt," Lieber declared, consisted of nothing more than "arbitrary maxims, vague conceits, or metaphorical expressions."

Abraham Lincoln's thoughts on the Southern effort to create a separate ethnic identity for themselves are not on record. But he was surely the most eloquent spokesman for American civic nationalism. The issue of the Civil War, he said in 1861, "embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy...can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity." At Gettysburg in 1863, Lincoln argued that this "great civil war" was a test of whether a nation founded on charters of civic nationalism - the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — would "long endure" or "perish from the earth." [my emphasis]