Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 26:

The Underground Railroad

Here in the last week of these "heritage" posts, we return to a couple of themes touched on earlier: the notion of Northern white racial inferiority and Democratic President James Buchanan.

An unsigned article in De Bow's Review of February 1861 responds to James Buchanan's Presidential message, the text of which was released publicly on December 3, 1860. South Carolina declared secession on December 20, and other slave states quickly followed suit in early 1861. It's not clear at exactly what point the editorial was written, but it was clearly during the time that actual rebellion was breaking out with states seceding from the Union. It's called "The Message, The Constitution, and the Times".

This writer purports to see other reasons for the secession movement than slavery, one of which he describes as follows:

It is a gross mistake to suppose that abolition alone is the cause of dissension between North and South. The Cavaliers, Jacobites, and Huguenots who settled the South, naturally hate, contemn, and despise the Puritans who settled the North. The former are master races, the latter, a slave race, the descendants of the Saxon serfs. The former are Mediterranean races, descendants of the Romans; for Cavaliers and Jacobites are of Norman descent, and the Normans were of Roman descent, and so were the Huguenots. The Saxons and Angles, the ancestors of the Yankees, came from the cold and marshy regions of the North; where man is little more than a cold-blooded, amphibious biped. [my emphasis]

One has to wonder what the writer may have foreseen as the future prospects of Northern whites, who he describes as "a slave race".

Curiously enough, I've never noticed Lost Cause advocates pointing back to this consideration as an alternative cause for the Civil War besides African-American slavery. But the Lost Cause assumed a reconciliation between Northern whites and Southern whites based on the disfranchisement of black citizens in the South. So it might not have been considered politic to argue that it wasn't slavery that caused the war, it was the fact that Southern whites were disgusted to be in a Union with Northern whites, who they considered to be "a slave race ... little more than a cold-blooded, amphibious biped".

Our writer returns to the theme later in the essay in making a prediction that would prove to be ill-fated:

Our enemies, the stupid, sensual, ignorant masses of the North, who are foolish as they are depraved, could not read the signs of the times, did not dream of disunion, but rushed on as heedlessly as a greedy drove of hungry hogs at the call of their owners. They were promised plunder, and find a famine; promised "bread, and were given a stone." Our enemies are starving and disorganized. The cold, naked, hungry, masses, are at war with their leaders. They are mute, paralyzed, panic-stricken, and have no plan of action for the future. Winter has set in, which will aggravate their sufferings, and prevent any raid into or invasion of the South. They who deluded them must take care of them. The public lands will neither feed nor clothe them; they cannot plunder the South, and are cut off by their own wicked folly from the trade of the South, which alone could relieve and sustain them. [my emphasis]

Aside from the antiquarian interest of the polemics, this may also reflect Southern arrogance in seriously underestimating their enemies, at least in the case of this anonymous author. That passage also reflects the over-confident idea that the North was critically dependent on the South and so could not mount any effective military resistance to the rebellion. These assumptions proved to be faulty. He continues directly, describing the Buchanan administration. Under the Constitutional provisions of the time, the new administration didn't take office until March:

The Federal government is bankrupt, and divided in its counsels; besides, it has no sympathy with the Republicans, and will not make war on the South, and if it attempted it, has neither money nor army with which to carry on the war. Our enemies can do nothing until after the 4th of March next [Lincoln's inauguration], and by that time we shall have set our house in order, and will bid them defiance. Providence has ordered all things for our good; given to us concord, wisdom, and foresight, and stricken Sodom and Gomorrah at the North with folly and blindness. [my emphasis]

The Good Lord apparently didn't favor the Confederate cause as much as the writer had hoped. But that paragraph wasn't entirely off-base. The Buchanan administration had seemed in the early weeks after the 1861 election to actually encourage secession. And afterwards, he was, shall we say, less than vigorous in opposing it.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery