Illinois Republican Congressman Owen Lovejoy (1964)
Republican Congressman Owen Lovejoy, whose brother Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered by an anti-abolitionist mob, spoke on the "Fanaticism of the Democratic Party" in a speech of Feb. 21, 1859, as printed in the Congressional Globe. He points out in the opening paragraph that the ideology of slavery had developed from a "necessary evil" justification to a positive good justification:
Within the last five lustrums [25 years], a strange fanaticism has made its appearance in this country - a fanaticism at once monstrous and malign. Twenty-five years ago [1835], by universal sentiment of the country, slavery was deemed a moral, social, and political evil; a wrong to the slave, an injury to the owner, a blight on the soil, a detriment to all the best interests of the communities or States where it was found, and, in its reflex influence, a reproach and damage to the whole country. By many, it may be, this evil was considered incurable, but still an evil. But within the period indicated, a different sentiment has sprung up. This fanaticism deems slavery not an evil, but a blessing.We can certainly question how seriously slaveowners themselves ever believed that the Peculiar Institution was "an injury to the owner" or any of the rest. But some of them clearly did; George Washington and Thomas Jefferson come to mind. But in terms of the official ideology used to justify slavery, that was the prevailing claim until the early 19th century, the "universal sentiment" as far as public ideology and respectable opinion.
Of course, whether even a staunch Abolitionist like Owen Lovejoy in 1859 assumed that such attitudes had been "universal" among African-Americans either free or slave is an open question. If he did, he was surely wrong in that assumption. More likely, he considered "universal sentiment of the country" to refer to sentiment among white Americans, maybe even just among male whites. But I say that to frame the historical situation more clearly, not to denigrate someone like Lovejoy who despite the limitations of his assumptions - limitations which were nearly "universal" among American whites - opposed slavery.
The "necessary evil" justification never completely disappeared. Even in 1859, in Upper South and Border states like Virginia or Kentucky that justification was still preferred among the "better classes" of white people. The prevailing ideology among slave states by then, though, was the positive-good position. This went hand-in-hand with the development of pseudo-scientific racism, which held blacks to be an inferior type of human to white people, even a different species in some version. In an earlier post this month, we saw the crackpot extremes which this could go, with the claim that even Northern whites were a different and inferior race to Southern whites.
Southerners looking for offenses to the delicate sensibilities of their "Southern honor" could find material in this speech of Lovejoy's, which in this case he applied to the national Democratic Party:
The spirit of this fanaticism has taken possession of the Democratic party, and worked therein a wonderful and almost incredible transformation; for since the Ages drew up the reins and started on their journey, I do not suppose they have witnessed such a stupendous lie as the Democratic party now is. I speak of the organization, without any reference to the individuals who composed he party. "From the sole of the foot even unto the head, there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment" - unmedicated and unbandaged, it drops with its fetid putrescence.Some latter-day apologists for slavery have pointed to rhetorical flourishes such as this as evidence of the lack of statesmanship on "both sides" prior to the Civil War. Those making such an argument, however, seem to inevitably blame the critics of slavery more than anyone else for such alleged excesses.
A contemporary observation: Watching how the torture issue is being debated among our leading politicians and our wrecked national press here in 2009, I only wish we had a few Members of Congress who felt themselves driven to such alleged excesses in denouncing the evil of torture. When a much later Illinois Member of Congress, Sen. David Durbin, actually did so by recalling the tortures practiced by Hitler Germany, he bizarrely came back soon after and tearfully apologized for doing so, apparently under the impression that Holocaust survivors would take offense at a Senator speaking out against torture. The leaders prior to the Civil War aren't the only ones finding it difficult to do the right thing when faced with "putrefying sores" in national policy.
Lovejoy was addressing in particular a message of pro-slavery Democratic President James Buchanan, the country's worst President prior to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, in which he advocated seizing additional territories from Mexico and elsewhere:
Why, then, does the Executive urge the acquisition of more of the Mexican domain? It is that slavery and disunion, twin-born of darkness, may have a rail-car in which to ride. This is openly avowed, in the other end of the Capitol [the Senate]. What is that part of the message relating to Kansas, but the querulous last word of an old man, whose pro-slavery policy had been condemned by the country? ...Yes, it certainly appears that the political leaders in 1859 thought that slavery was the key problem at the core of the sectional division that was soon to lead to secession and civil war.
Read over the whole message, and you will find its entire texture to be slavery. Every topic is discussed with reference to its bearing on the subject of slavery. And yet the Democrats, with an impudence that challenges our admiration for its sublimity, turn to us, and say, "Do not agitate the subject." Do not keep up this sectional strife! To agitate, to legislate, to make treaties, to annex territory, to purchase empires, for slavery, is all right; but to do anything against slavery is wrong and sectional.
And here is another phase of this fanatical spirit, which has taken up its dwelling-place in the Democratic party. It identifies slavery with the nation, and especially with the South.
Now, I am reckoned as ultra and extreme as most on this subject, and yet no one has ever heard me say anything against the South. It is only against slavery that I have spoken, and I propose to assail that only in those modes justified by the Constitution; yet I am sectional, and Republicans are sectional [according to their opponents]. When they only seek to prevent the extension of a system which is under the ban of the civilized world, they are charged with being sectional. In Illinois, we have supped full of this horror. And what is the proof? Oh, we have no delegates from slave States to attend our [Republican Party] national nominating conventions! Why have we none? Mark! because, if delegates attend these conventions they are mobbed and driven into exile. What if we, in the free States, should say to the Democrats, "if you attend the Charleston convention we will hang you," and thus keep them all at home, and then reproach them with being a sectional party, because only the slave States were represented? "Well, you have no votes in the slave States; your principles do not circulate with us at all; you dare not even proclaim your doctrines among us."
And why do not our principles circulate in the slave States? They used to, for they are the principles of Washington and Franklin and other founders of the Republic. The reason why our principles do not circulate in the slave States is, that this despotism has, like another napoleon, crushed out the freedom of speech and of the press. Allow us free access to the minds of the non-slaveholders of the South, and in one year we would have more Republican votes, in proportion, in the slave States, than there are Democratic votes in the free States. "Your principles do not circulate down here," boasts the slavery propagandist. [my emphasis in bold]
This is yet one more reminder of to what an extreme degree that the slave system came more and more to restrict the freedom of white citizens, both in the slave states themselves and increasingly even in the free states. This wasn't a coincidence. It was part and parcel of the slave system. It contradicted democracy at its heart. And its persistence was inevitably destroying democracy where it existed. In earlier years, the Whig Party had competed with the Democratic Party nationally. By 1859, the Republican Party was being excluded from the slave states by force and violence. Already, even in the context of a democracy for free white men only, the slave states were already in blatant violation of the Constitutional guarantee of a republican form of government in each state. But intervening by the federal government to guarantee freedom for the Republican Party to campaign there was never an immediate issue, because slavery itself had so come to overwhelm all sectional issues that such a consideration was yet another part of the slavery issue. And the national Democrats would have had to offer some support for such an action, and there was no such support, because the Democrats nationally were dominated by the Slave Power.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, owen lovejoy, slavery
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