In the spring of 1861, as the Confederate government began its stormy life, both Stephens and Davis acknowledged slavery’s importance to their experiment in nation-building. On March 21, in his famous “Cornerstone Speech,” Stephens observed that the new Confederate constitution “put at rest forever all the agitating question relating to our peculiar institution— African slavery as it exists among us. . . . This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution ,” Stephens averred, adding without equivocation, “Our new government is founded upon . . . , its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”Yes, these great honorable Southern white men just made stuff up to fit their postwar needs. How will we tell the children?
Shortly thereafter, Davis justified secession on the grounds that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party planned to exclude slavery from the territories, in turn rendering “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Confronted with this threat to economic “interests of such overwhelming magnitude,” added Davis, “the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”? The two men’s postwar memoirs told a different story. In A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States, a tedious two-volume work published in 1868 and 1870, Stephens did his best to push slavery into the background. He claimed that the “war had its origin in opposing principles . . . a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other. Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles, which had been in conflict, from the beginning, on divers other questions, were finally brought into actual and active collision with each other on the field of battle.” Davis took a similar tack in his two-volume memoir titled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. He asserted that the South waged war solely for the inalienable right of a people to change their government— to leave a Union into which, as sovereign states, they had entered voluntarily. “The truth remains intact and incontrovertible,” Davis stated, echoing Stephens, “that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.”?
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south
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