Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 27:

"A Slave-Coffle passing the Capitol"; a coffle is a group of people or animals chained together in a line (dated 05/21/1846; from the Library of Congress)

In yesterday's post in this series, we looked at an unsigned article from De Bow's Review in February, 1861, "The Message, the Constitution, and the Times", which was a response to a speech by Democratic President James Buchanan after the November 1860 election when the secession movement was gathering full force.

As we saw, the anonymous author claimed that slavery was not the only reason for secession. Another, he said, was that Northern whites were an inferior race themselves. He gives a further reason: those Yankees are just too democratic. In fact he claims, with some hopelessly obtuse Biblical and Latin references, that this is "still another and potent cause of the revolution which is going on", by which he means the secession of Southern slave states:

We of the South must so modify our State institutions as to remove the people farther from the direct exercise of power, to lengthen the tenure of office, and to let representatives have time and opportunity to be guided by the "sober second thought" of the masses, rather than by their hasty, capricious impulses and seditious spirit. We are glad to learn that South Carolina proposes to give more power to her government, especially to the executive. [me emphasis]

In other words, the US Constitution allowed way too much democracy to white men.

It is a characteristic of the progress of opinion in the South, that all men see the necessity of more and stronger government.

There is no danger that we shall run into monarchy. We are the most aristocratic people in the world. Pride of caste, and color, and privilege, makes every white man an aristocrat in feeling. Aristocracy is the only safeguard of liberty, the only power watchful and strong enough to exclude monarchical despotism.

At the North, the progress and tendency of opinion is to pure democracy, less government, anarchy, and agrarianism. [The latter apparently referring to small farms.] Their hatred of the South will accelerate this noxious current of opinion, and anarchy will soon wind up in military despotism. There will be as many little military despots as there are now States, for no usurper will wield means sufficient to conquer or fuse into one several States. It will be a great improvement in Northern affairs, and the sooner it comes about the better. Military despotism is far preferable to Northern democracy, agrarianism, infidelity, and free love.

Military despotism is preferable to free love?!? Yaow! Those Confederates had bigger problems than I've realized!

The reference to "military despotism" being the inevitable consequence of all that Jacksonian democracy that was going on up North is a polemic presumably making an analogy to the French Revolution and the eventual rise of Napoleon.

All of this is really another way of saying, though, that democracy of the kind developing in most of the United States was incompatible with the South's precious institution of "slavery and white supremacy".

This essay came from the months-long interlude in which a Democratic President confronted the growing secession movement. Buchanan's message, the text of which was released December 3, 1860, prior to South Carolina's secession later that month, opposed secession on principle. But he recklessly laid the blame for the crisis not on the slaveowners of the South but on the Abolitionists and the Republican Party. The anonymous writer in De Bow's Review is a partisan of secession, though, and therefore attacks Buchanan's speech. He quotes the following passage:

The most palpable violations of constitutional duty which have yet been committed, consist in the acts of the different State legislatures to defeat the execution of the fugitive slave law. ... The fugitive slave law has been carried into execution in every contested case since the commencement of the present administration; though often, it is to be regretted, with, great loss and inconvenience to the master, and with considerable expense to the government. Let us trust that the State legislatures will repeal their unconstitutional and illegal enactments. Unless (his shall be done without unnecessary delay it is impossible far any human power to save the Union!

The Fugitive Slave Law was a federal statute that overrode "states' rights" in order to defend slavery. A number of free states had passed state laws to interfere with the federal enactment. The De Bow's writer probably wasn't being unrealistic in assuming the following:

The President must mean (if he means anything) that refusal to repeal these laws is just cause of secession. That state of things that he plainly intimates would justify secession, and render it inevitable, had occurred when he wrote his message, and still continues.

One quirky part of the article is the writer's response to Buchanan's assertion in his speech that the Abolitionists should back off, because the South already lived in fear of slave insurrection:

The President thinks that the abolitionists have alarmed the women of the South; that they are afraid of slave insurrection. This is a gross and silly libel on our women, which could have only proceeded from a nerveless, apprehensive, tremulous old man. Our women are far in advance of our men in their zeal for disunion. ...

Our women are all conservative, moral, religious, and sensitively modest, and abhor the North for its infidelity, gross immorality, licentiousness, anarchy and agrarianism.

'Tis they and the clergy who lead and direct the disunion movement. [my emphasis]

Since women in the South weren't allowed to vote and political polling wasn't developed yet, it's hard to know how much truth is in that claim. It may have been some kind of posturing, implying that the wimmimfolk and the preachers were the guardians of the higher morality of the South and that the white men were just going along with their guidance. Slaveowners wives, I would note, often worried about "gross immorality" and "licentiousness" far closer to home, as well.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, slavery