One of the many documents reproduced there is a pamphlet with the ponderous title, The Philosophy of Secession; A Southern View, Presented in a Letter Addressed to the Hon. Mr. Perkins of Louisiana, in Criticism on the Provisional Constitution Adopted by the Southern Congress at Montgomery, Alabama by Leonidas W. Spratt, editor of the Charleston Mercury, dated February 13, 1861. My emphases in these quotes are bolded. Some of the words at the UNC site appear in red to signal misspellings, but it's not entirely clear whether the error is in the original or the Web version, though it seems to be the former. I've retained the red error markings.
He begins his pamphlet:
The South is now in the formation of a Slave Republic. This, perhaps, is not admitted generally. There are many contented to believe that the South as a geographical section is in mere assertion of its independence; that, it is instinct with no especial truth--pregnant of no distinct social nature; that for some unaccountable reason the two sections have become opposed to each other; that for reasons equally insufficient, there is disagreement between the peoples that direct them; and that from no overrulling necessity, no impossibility of co-existence, but as mere matter of policy, it has been considered best for the South to strike out for herself and establish an independance of her own. This, I fear, is an inadequate conception of the controversy.Spratt was not presenting a quirky or dissenting view. He was a supporter of secession. And he states straightforwardly in the first line of this publication what he saw to be the purpose of secession and the civil war its supporter knew was almost certain to follow: the defense of the Peculiar Institution of slavery.
Spartt gives a frank statement of what he saw as the key differences between the societies of the North and the South:
But the real contest is between the two forms of society which have become established, the one at the North and the other at the South. ... The one is a society composed of one race, the other of two races. The one is bound together but by the two great social relations of husband and wife and parent and child; the other by the three relations of husband and wife, and parent and child, and master and slave. The one embodies in its political structure the principle that equality is the right of man; the other that it is the right of equals only. The one embodying the principle that equality is the right of man, expands upon the horizontal plane of pure democracy; the other, embodying the principle that it is not the right of man, but of equals only, has taken to itself the rounded form of a social aristocracy. In the one there is hireling labor, in the other slave labor; in the one, therefore, in theory at least, labor is voluntary; in the other involuntary; in the labor of the one there is the elective franchise, in the other there is not; and, as labor is always in excess of direction, in the one the power of government is only with the lower classes; in the other the upper. In the one, therefore, the reins of government come from the heels, in the other from the head of the society; in the one it is guided by the worst, in the other by the best, intelligence; in the one it is from those who have the least, in the other from those who have the greatest, stake in the continuance of existing order. In the one the pauper laborer has the power to rise and appropriate by law the goods protected by the State--when pressure comes, as come it must, there will be the motive to exert it--and thus the ship of State turns bottom upwards. In the other there is no pauper labor with power of rising; the ship of State has the ballast of a disfranchised class: there is no possibility of political upheaval, therefore, and it is reasonably certain that, so steadied, it will sail erect and onward to an indefinitely distant period.Slavery was at the core of Southern society and Confederate ideology. Spratt here illustrates that the values of democratic and equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were seen by the slaveholders and their supporters to be hostile to their cherised institution of human bondage:
The principal [sic] that races are unequal, and that among unequals inequality is right, would have been destructive to the form of pure democracy at the North. The principle that all men are equal and equally right, would have been destructive of slavery at the South. Each required the element suited to its social nature. Each must strive to make the government expressive of its social nature. The natural expansion of the one must become encroachment on the other, and so the contest was inevitable. Seward and Lincoln, in theory at least, whatever be their aim, are right. I realized the fact and so declared the conflict irrepressible years before either ventured to advance that proposition.It worthwhile to note the causes for Southern secession elaborated in these two paragraphs. Or, rather, the one cause:
Nor is indignation at such leaders becoming the statesmen of the South. The tendency of social action was against us. The speaker to be heard must speak against slavery; the preacher to retan his charge, must preach against slavery; the author to be read, must write against slavery; the candidate, to attain office, must pledge himself against slavery; the office-holder, to continue, must redeem the pledges of the candidate. They did not originate the policy, but they pandered to it; they did not start the current, but they floated on it; and were as powerless as drift-wood to control its course. The great tendency to social conflict pre-existed; it was in the heart of the North--it was in the very structure of Northern society. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that such society should disaffirm a society in contradiction of it. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that it should approve of acts against it. In possession of power, it flowed to political action on the South, as fluids flow to lower levels. The acts of individuals were unimportant. If I had possessed the power to change the mind of every Republican in Congress, I would not have been at pains to do so. They would have fallen before an indignant constituency, and men would have been sent to their places whose minds could never change. Nor in fact, have they been without their use. As the conflict was irrepressible, as they were urged on by an inexorable power, it was important we should know it. Our own political leaders refused to realize the fact. The zealots of the North alone could force the recognition; and I am bound to own that Giddings, and Greely, and Seward, and Lincoln, parasites as they are, panderers to popular taste as they are, the instruments, and the mere instruments, of aggression, have done more to rouse us to the vindication of our rights than the bravest and the best among us.The following offers a hint of the liklihood that the Confederacy would have been willing to phase out slavery in any foreseeable future:
Such, then, was the nature of this contest. It was inevitable. It was inaugurated with the government. It began at the beginning, and almost at the start the chances of the game were turned against us. If the foreign slave trade had never been suppressed, slave society must have triumphed. It extended to the limits of New England.
That government [the American federal government], from the very necessities of their nature they are forced to use against us. Slavery was within its grasp, and forced to the option of extinction in the Union or of independance out, it dares to strike, and it assents its claim to nationality and its right to recognition among the leading social systems of the world.There is more in the pamphlet along these lines. The main point of his argument is to oppose any ambiguity in the laws of the Confederacy then being formed about the goal of preserving slavery; he even opposes the exclusion of the international slave trade. Those measures might have increased the chances that Border States would joing the rebellion and that foreign powers such as England would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation.
Such, then being the nature of the contest, this Union has been disrupted in the effort of slave society to emancipate itself [from the Union]; and the momentous question now to be determined is, shall that effort be successful? That the Republic of the South shall sustain her independance, there is little question. The form of our society is too pregnant of intellectual resources and military strength to be subdued, if, in its products, it did not hold the bonds of amity and peace upon all the leading nations of the world. But in the independance of the South is there surely the emancipation of domestic slavery? [i.e., the abolition of slavery] That is greatly to be doubted. Our property in slaves will be established. If it has stood in a government more than half of which has been pledged to its destruction, it will surely stand in a government every member of which will be pledged to its defence. But will it be established as a normal institution or society, and stand the sole exclusive social system of the South? That is the impending question, and the fact is yet to be recorded. That it will so stand somewhere at the South I do not entertain the slightest question. It may be overlooked or disregarded now. It has been the vital agent of this great controversy. It has energized the arm of every man who acts a part in this great drama. We may shrink from recognition of the fact; we may decline to admit the source of our authority; refuse to slavery an invitation to the table which she herself has so bountifully spread; but not for that will it remain powerless or unhonored. It may be abandoned by Virginia, Maryland, Missouri; South Carolina herself may refuse to espouse it. The hireling laborer from the North and Europe may drive it from the seaboard, As the South shall become the centre of her own trade, the metropolis of her own commerce, the pauper population of the world will pour upon us. It may replace our slaves upon the seaboard, as it has replaced them in the Northern States; but concentrated in the States upon the Gulf it will make its stand, condensed to the point at which the labor of the slave transcends the want of agriculture, it will flow to other objects; it will lay its grant grasp upon still other departments of industry; its every step will be exclusive; it will be unquestioned lord of each domain on which it enters. With that perfect economy of resources, that just application of power, that concentration of forces, that security of order which results to slavery from the permanent direction of its best intelligence, there is no other form of human labor that can stand against it, and it will build itself a home and erect for itself, at some point within the present limits of the Southern States, a structure of imperial power and grandeur--a glorious Confedracy of States that will stand aloft and serene for ages amid the anarchy of democracies that will reel around it.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south
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