Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 25:

Slave auction in Richmond(from The Illustrated London News 09/27/1856)

Our planter journal Southern Agriculturist in its June 1936 number ran an excerpt from a book by James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States, with his initials erroneously shown as J.R. In the excerpt, Paulding makes a proslavery argument, "Of the Right of Property in Slaves". He straightforwardly bases his argument for property in human beings on the right of conquest:

Nine tenths, if not the whole of the property of the world is founded, not on purchase, but conquest. ... The United States were once the property of the Indian tribes, and though a considerable portion was fairly purchased, by far the largest was obtained by conquest alone.

That construction, "The United States were", was standard grammatical usage in American English prior to the Civil War. Since then, "the United States" has been treated as a singular subject.

The rest of this particular excerpt is devoted to legalistic chatter about the Constitutional right of states to make their own laws on slavery, including whether it was allowed or not. No one seriously disputed that the Constitution was so written. It was a way of restating as a Constitutional issue the policy issue at stake of whether slavery should be allowed and, more immediately, whether slavery should be restricted in new territories, whether free states and their citizens should be required to hunt down escaped slaves on behalf of their masters and whether the slave trade should be allowed in the District of Columbia.

In particular, Paulding directs this argument at the emerging movement among abolitionist activists, mostly women, to send petitions to Congress asking for various anti-slavery actions, in particular the banning of the slave trade in the Capital. If the leaders and political servants of the Slave Power had been someone other than who they were, they might have themselves pushed to ban the slave trade in the District, because there the sale of human being as property was paraded in the faces of diplomatic visitors from all over the world.

This excerpt by Susan Zaeske from her book Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (2003) describes the movement:

From 1831 to 1863 women publicly expressed their opinion about slavery by affixing approximately 3 million signatures to petitions aimed at Congress. The addition of women's names beginning in 1835 swelled to a flood what was previously a trickle of memorials submitted almost exclusively by men. Women's efforts enabled abolitionists to send enough petitions to Congress to provoke debate over the question of slavery, a feat petitioning by men alone had failed to accomplish. Sparking discussion of slavery proved to be a crucial victory for the abolitionist movement, for as William Freehling has observed, the debates prompted by antislavery petitions in the 1830s were "the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy." Deluged with petitions, in June 1836 the House of Representatives passed a rule immediately tabling all memorials on the subject of slavery. The rule proved a "godsend" to the struggling antislavery movement, for it linked the popular right of petition with the unpopular cause of immediate abolitionism. Petitioning was intended not only to pressure congressmen but also to rectify public opinion with regard to the sinfulness of slavery. By gathering signatures in family and female social networks as well as through soliciting door-to-door, women discussed the issue of slavery with people who would never go to hear an abolitionist lecturer and who could not read abolitionist tracts. [my emphasis]

James Kirke Paulding

This was one of the signs that became more and more blatant as time went on that the existence of slavery in the South meant very real limitation on the freedom and democracy in other states, as well. Paulding addressed it with a disingenuous Constitutional argument:

The petitions for the abolition of slavery, every year presented to Congress, signed by people who neither see nor feel its consequences, whatever they may be, we consider an abuse of a constitutional right.

This was a defense of the kind of stupidly self-destructive action that the proslavery Representatives took with their gag rule on the petitions. And he justified it on the grounds that:

The civil institutions of a State, so long as they are not repugnant to the fundamental principles of the general government, as declared in the Constitution, are beyond the reach of the other States, who possess no right whatever to interfere with them. ... That which does not either immediately or remotely affect our right, our interests, our prosperity, or our happiness, by some outward and visible agency which all men distinctly comprehend, can be no "grievance;" it therefore requires no "redress" in regard to us, and consequently no petition on our part.

Such considerations of course, applied not at all to the question of slavery in the territories or in the District of Columbia.

A major marketing hook for Paulding's book is that he was a Northerner who traveled South to learn about the institution of slavery, which he discovered to be rather marvelous. It's always beneficial to have someone from the Other Side, a convert or a defector, making your case for you: the Yankee supporting the South's Peculiar Institution, the Iraqi defector alerting the naive Americans to the urgent dangers of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction", the Jewish writer endorsing anti-Semitic fabrications.

The Southern Agriculturist in the same issue included an unsigned review of Slavery in the United States with a variety of quotations. Not having examined the entire book, I don't know how representative the book is of its contents. But the review highlights Paulding's argument that any attempt to interfere with the noble institution of slavery would bring on the horror of horrors in the mind of the white South, slave revolts, or "servile insurrection", as it was typically called. And if the review and accompanying quotations are any indication, Paulding's book was a maudlin, vapid defense of human bondage.

The turgid prose in the following passage the reviewer takes from Paulding shows what a large role projection played in the slaveowners' view of the world, in this case imagining raging fanaticism in the free states. Yes, there were some antislavery fanatics, but to reverse a popular witty saying, just because some people are after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid. The white South lived in exaggerated fear of slave revolts, and slaveowners faced a bizarre psychological dilemma of pretending at one level that their slaves were loyal and docile and on the other living with daily signs that reality was something else. And as public debate over anything touching slavery became increasingly restricted in the South from the early 1830s on, it became even easier for defenders of slavery to buy into such projective fantasies of menacing evil as Paulding paints here:

Fanaticism, when assuming the garb of universal philanthropy, is equally opposed to all patriotism, and all the social relations of life. It has no fireside, no home, no centre. The equal lover of "the entire human race," such as Mr. Garrison and his associates, is in effect a traitor to his country, a bad citizen, a coldhearted friend, a worthless husband, and an unnatural father, if he acts up to his principles. He is false to his native land, to the nearest and dearest ties and duties, moral, social, and political, for he stands ready to sacrafice [sic] them all for the benefit of strangers, aliens, and enemies. He will not light for his country, for all countries are alike to him; he will not devote his time, his talents, his labours, and affections to the happiness of his wife, his children, and his household friends, for he equally loves the whole family of mankind, and leaves them to the fostering care of the "entire human race," while he wanders away to the uttermost parts of the earth to overturn the social relations of nations, and establish a universal brotherhood, he scorns the sordid interchange of reciprocal duties, and disinterestedly devotes himself to those who are equally beyond the reach of benefiting by or returning his good offices. [my emphasis]

Aside from William Lloyd Garrison, Paulding in that excerpt doesn't name any of the four or five Abolitionists in the whole country that might actually have fit his description.

His heart is never at home. The centripetal force never operates on him. He is for ever receding from the centre to the circumference, and his sphere of action is the whole universe. Nothing less than the great human family can awaken his sympathies. Wives, children, relations, friends, and country, are not half so near and dear to him as the negroes of Africa, or the Indians of Polynesia; and as to all the little insignificant ties and associations that form the cement of families, neighbourhoods, and communities, the solace of human life, they are as burnt flax, scorching, smoking, and finally consuming in the fiery furnace of red-hot fanaticism. Nothing will content him but the sacrifice of his country to a world, or a dogma.

"Hence, beyond all question, arises that gradual decay of real piety and practical religion which, notwithstanding all the cant and pretence of the age, cannot but be palatable to every calm observer. We seem to be exporting so much of our zeal and religion to distant countries, that there is scarcely enough left for our own consumption; and like the old woman whom Rhadamanthus beckoned to the left hand, claim the rewards of Heaven, not on the score of our own reformation, but the pains we take to reform others. Such is fanaticism, which, setting itself above the restraints of law, and the supervision of earthly tribunals, arrogates the sanction of Heaven for all its excesses, and is consequently as deaf to argument as it is blind to the dictates of common sense. It neither reasons nor listens to reason. ... Their sincerity, even if conceded, is no apology for madness. [my emphasis]

You get the drift.

An interesting historical/literary sideline to Paulding's book is a dispute as to whether Edgar Allan Poe wrote a review of it that appeared unsigned in the April 1836 Southern Literary Messenger, which Poe edited. (See The Authorship of the "Paulding-Drayton Review" by Joseph Ridgely PSA Newsletter Fall 1992; Bernard Rosenthal, Poe, Slavery, and the Southern Literary Messenger: A Reexamination Poe Studies Dec 1974).

I'll refrain from taking a position on whether Poe himself wrote the piece, though I would assume that since he edited the magazine, he presumably didn't find the sentiment expressed there terribly disreputable (but even that could be a big assumption). The review also covered another volume with the sober title, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists by H. Manly.

Regardless of authorship, this review is also concerns about what the reviewer perceives as some malign and mysterious tendency of humanity in which, "men are always passing, with fearful rapidity, between the extremes of fanaticism and irreligion." The writer especially fears such contemporary attacks being directed against the sober and moderate institution of "Domestic Slavery (the basis of all our institutions)." But he faults the Yankee Paulding for having an insufficient appreciate of the deep loyalty of slaves to their masters, "and the master's reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependant."

The reviewer also invokes the image of the loving master bestowing "assiduous care" to elderly slaves which "prolongs the life of the aged and decrepid [sic] negro, who has been for years, a burthen?" Actually, in the real world, most slave didn't live long enough to become old and decrepit. And if they did, when they were finally too old and feeble to work, the master would not infrequently give his elderly and infirm slaves the gift of freedom, so that he would no longer have to waste his money feeding them.

Maybe even a proslavery Yankee like Paulding wasn't gullible enough to buy that load of swill.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery