Frank Owsley (1890-1956)
The third of the 12 essays in the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, was by Frank Lawrence Owsley, "The Irrespressible Conflict." The book consisted of essays by 12 different Southern writers arguing in various ways for the virtues of Southern agricultural societies.
Owsley's essay provides a raw, dishonest and openly racist view of the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction which was fundamental to Southern conservatism:
... after the military surrender at Appomatox there ensured a peace unique in history. There was no generosity. For ten years the South, alrelady ruined by the loss of nearly $2,000,000,000 invested in slaves, with its lands worthless, its cattle and stock gone, its houses burned, was turned over to the three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism. These half-savage blacks were armed. Their passions were roused against their former masters by savage political leaders like Thaddeus Stevens, who advocated the confiscation of all Southern lands for the benefit of the negroes, and the extermination, if need be, of the Southern white population; and like Charles Sumner, whose cdhief regret hade been that his skin was not black. Not only were the blacks armed; they were upheld and incited by garrisons of Northern soldiers, by Freedman's Bureau officials, and by Northern ministers of the gospel, and at length they were given the ballot while their former masters were disarmed and, to a large extent, disfranchised. For ten years ex-slaves, led by carpetbaggers and scalawags, continued the pillages of war, combing the South for anything left by the invading armies, levying taxes, selling empires of plantations under the auction hammer, drogooning the Southern populartion, and visiting upon them the ultimate humiliations.This is a telling of history worth of Glenn Beck. Picking out parts that weren't dishonest would be a real challenge. It is true that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery without compensation to the owners was an expropriation of property without compensation and therfore liquidated large amounts of Southern planters' capital. Prior to the Civil War, the planters had the possibility of compensated emancipation of their slaves. But say that the slaveowners of the future Confederacy were uninterested in such a solution would be putting it extremely mildly.
Sad to say, some such version of Reconstruction eventually became the predominant historical view of the period, even in non-Southern universities. It is even reflected to a significant degree in John Kennedy's book, Profiles in Courage (1955). Because, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once lamented, that was the version of history he had been taught in the Harvard history department.
Owsley's essay elaborates on the importance of having this Lost Cause pseudohistory taught, especially to Southerners. He expressed it in this maudlin way:
But a people cannot live under condemnation and upon the philosophy of their conquerors. Either they must ultimately come to scorn the condemnation and the philosophy of those who thrust these things upon them, or their soul should and will perish.Evidently, for Owsley the "soul" of the white South depended on pretending that grand lie about the recent past was actually true. He contributes to that in his essay by elaborating his own pseudohistory of the American South and slavery.
And, in a point essential to the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative, denying that slavery had anything to do with causing the Civil War. How bizarre that claim is gets an illustration as Owsley relates the coming of the Civil War and the various slavery-related controversies that were part of the process.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
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