Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 10: The martial South and the slave patrols

John Hope Franklin pointed out the effect of the everyday life of the slavery system in creating an authoritarian and martial atmosphere among planters and throughout white Southern society in Slavery and the Martial South Journal of Negro History 37:1 (Jan 1952):

The planter was forced to regard arms as a necessary adjunct to the machinery of control. The lash might be used generously or sparingly, depending on the temperament of the master and the tractability of the slave. There was always the possibility, moreover, of resorting to more deadly weapons. If the slave resisted the "mild" discipline of the lash or undertook to return blow for blow, how else could the master maintain his complete authority except through the use of, or the threat to use, the weapons whose possession was forever denied the slave?

Going about armed with knives and guns became the daily habit of many masters and overseers. And if the armed conquerors, in moments of anger, sometimes turned their weapons against each other, it was no more than was to be expected among an aggregation of armed men. The rule of tyranny by which they lived naturally fostered an independence and self-sufficiency-one is tempted to call it an individual sovereignty-that would, on occasion, burst out in all its fury in their quarrels with each other.

If the relationship between master and slave was that of a superior and a subordinate, a despot or tyrant and a powerless subject, or an armed victor and a vanquished foe, it can almost be described as a state of war. At least it is possible to recognize the martial spirit that pervaded the entire plantation atmosphere. The conduct of the master toward the slave was determined by rules and considerations not unlike those that characterized a military situation. [my emphasis]

Speculations about collective "character" are always dubious, at best.

But Franklin here is not making such an argument. He is pointing out specific patterns of behavior in Southern society that contributed to the practical consequences that ensued. And the periodic outbursts of panic over slave revolts interacted in a poisonous way with this martial state of mind:

The slave was never so completely subjugated as to allay all fears that he would make a desperate, bloody attempt to destroy the institution to which he was bound. Fear and apprehension were relative matters in the ante bellum South; but they were always present. If the slaves seemed satisfied and did not appear to be up to some deviltry, such as running away or revolting, the fears, while still present, were not easily discernible. But if there was even the slightest rumor of an uprising, the entire countryside was not only terrified, but the alarm was sounded. All whites - loyal Negroes, too - were expected to do their share to prevent death and destruction from stalking through the land and to restore the natural foe to his natural condition. [my enphasis]

Franklin connects this phenomenon directly to the formation of the slave patrols, which were a key tool for giving the nonslaveowning whites a psychological stake in the slave system:

Despite the fact that the plantation sought to be self-sufficient and succeeded in many respects, the maintenance of a stable institution of slavery was so important that owners early sought the cooperation of the entire community. This cooperation took the form of the patrol, which became an established institution in most areas of the South at an early date. There were many variations in the size and organization of the patrol. Rather typical was the South Carolina patrol that was established by law in 1690. The law set up patrol detachments of ten men under the captain of a militia company. All white men were eligible for patrol service. In 1819 all white males over eighteen were made liable for patrol duty, the non-slaveholders being excused from duty upon reaching the age of forty-five.

This kind of militarization of Southern civil government and social life meant in practice that at the start of the Civil War, the South had an initial advantage in military preparedness because more Southern men had current military training of some sort.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown gives a couple of examples of how this violent and authoritarian mentality played out in daily practice:

It was a matter of personal reputation to prove oneself a master of events to one's family and household, as well as to the world at large. For instance, when Robert E. Lee of Arlington, Virginia, discovered that two young slaves bad run away to Pennsylvania, he had them sought after and returned. An anonymous critic informed the Northern public, through the New York Tribune, that Lee had personally supervised their flogging. Lee was responsible for some sixty-three slaves, not all of whom could be usefully employed at the Arlington plantation. He sent some to eastern Virginia, particularly the rebellious ones, who would have less opportunity there to flee northward. Perhaps, as Douglas Southall Freeman claims, that was the extent of his reaction to the runaways' offense. Wesley Norris, one of the pair, gave a grim account of the whipping, however. He said that Lee bad watched the proceedings with eyes black with fury and had ordered brine poured into the wounds. Whether this and like reports are to be believed, it must be remembered that even the gentlest masters-and Lee was reputedly one of them-found occasion when there seemed to them very little choice about the use of coercion. It would not do for any slave to take flagrant advantage of a master's delicacy of conscience. To push too hard against the institution or against an owner's sense of self-esteem was to threaten the social order as it was then understood. Failure to react appropriately could be misinterpreted, not only by the compliant slaves but by the white community, too. The moral problem was itself built into the Southern ethic. One simply could not be made to look inept, powerless, or squeamish. For these reasons, in a case about which there can be no doubts, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County, Georgia, had a slave girl flogged until she revealed the name of the individual who had fathered a mulatto child she had given birth to. The gentleman in question had been the elderly clergyman's secretary, a member, temporarily, of the household. Jones was incensed at this breach of the rules regarding hospitality, and his torture of the mother to confirm his suspicions was the consequence.

This shows an integral side of what the title of Wyatt-Brown's book from which that quote is taken, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 24: Southern (white) honor

This will be a relatively short one today. This is an observation by Bertram Wyatt-Brown The South Against Itself New York Review of Books 10/10/1991 (link behind subscription), reviewing The Road to Disunion: Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 by William W. Freehling.

Wyatt-Brown is the author of book Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), which explores the kinship networks and the related honor code which was prevalent in so much of Southern society and which greatly influenced white Southerners' perceptions of abolitionism and Northern criticism.

In the NY Review article, he offers this observation:

We must understand that Southern whites thought and acted within a set of cultural standards very different from our own and also that of their contemporaries in the North. The Southerner linked his identity with his lineage, family, posterity, and community. As a result, the regional politician - and voter, too - did not easily distinguish those insults directed toward himself from those that disparaged, as he saw it, the values of his neighborhood, state, or region. The individual was merged into the whole even as he felt himself to be its representative to the world. For instance, Reuben Davis, a Mississippi congressman favoring secession, in recollection boasted that he had been "the mouthpiece of a wronged and outraged people, and their righteous indignation poured itself through me." Under these circumstances, politicians saw themselves as stout defenders of those communal values without which, they insisted, political order could not be preserved. To ignore the workings of the psychology of honor is to miss the anger and hurt pride that secession was intended in large measure to vindicate. (my emphasis)

Just to be clear so that this one isolated quotation doesn't leave a mistaken impression: Wyatt-Brown is not a Confederate apologist. And he does not offer the Southern sense of "honor" as somehow the "real cause" of the war. He recognizes that slavery was the cause. But the perceptions and reactions Southerners learned in their honor culture shaped and misshaped their perceptions of Northern opposition to slavery.

Tags: american civil war, bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: Justifications for slavery

Image frequently used on wanted posters for runaway slaves (1837)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown's The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001) includes an essay to "Modernizing Slave-Owning Rhetoric", which details the trends in the first half of the 19th century of how defenders of slavery justified the Peculiar Institution, with emphasis on how they were expressed by Southern Christian clergymen.

He sees three major trends in proslavery advocacy. One was to justify it as "crude chattel bondage". The second trend defended the institution as "familial proprietorship, in which reciprocal, parent-child obligations and affections gave meaning to those involved". And the third was to see slavery as "state racial regulation, an interposition of government between white and black".

Although Wyatt-Brown makes passing reference to the justications for slavery changing in relation to changes in the institution of slavery itself, he doesn't dwell on that aspect, which I discussed in ... Of the patriarchial, "familial" justification, he writes:

It was laregely an outgrowth of Christian evangelicalism. Contrary to the claims of slavery's apologists, slaveholding benevolence never achieved more than spotty succes. The ideal of Christian stewardship over bondspeople was established as a way to distinguish respectability [among slaveowners] from churlishness.

The latter attitude was a theological twin - or perhaps older sibling - to the pseudoscientific racism propagated by characters like Richard Colfax and Samuel George Martin.

Whether large-scale plantation slavery in the 1830s was actually more benevolent in its physical treatment of the slaves is a factual question that I can't address in this post. But it is important to note that the patriarchal system became part of the Southern brand ideology that defended slavery as a permanent necessity for the allegedly inferior black portion of humanity.

Wyatt-Brown notes an important aspect of the "familial" ideology as it was actually implemented: "That system required a deeper appreciation of the psychology and wants of the dependent [slave] class, yet it still mandated that those beneath were obliged to give more in love and service than those who rules." In other words, it required the master to more firmly implant the ideology of slavery into the minds and souls of the slaves themselves. He argues:

The point of stressing the evolutionary character of slave culture is not to argue that the system would have died peacefully in a gush of Victorian sentiment but for Yankee intervention and war. [A favorite Lost Cause argument] Far from it. Establishing the ideal of Christian masterhood and strengthening state controls fell short of genuine black autonomy of any kind. The evolutionary process was not toward freedom but rather toward more refined means of perpetuating black dependency, either through acts of personal benefaction or through state regulations that also ensured white rule. One could argue that in fact patriarchal slavery was more psychically damaging in fashioning the subservient personality than was chattel bondage. Under the latter formuala, there was no reason to penetrate the slave's soul in order to save it, only to extract his labor. In any case, the evolution of slavery - "the domestication of domestic slavery," as Willie Rose calls it - was the chief point of departure for Southern antebellum polemics. (my emphasis)

Wyatt-Brown goes through some of the typical Biblical arguments for and against slavery. He notes that planters generally found a religious justification for the Peculiar Institution more congenial than the more secular but full-throated defenses of slavery from the pens of advocates like George Fitzhugh. Part of the charm for slaveowners for religious positions that opposed abolition but relied on moral persuasion to modify excessive cruelty by slaveowners was no doubt the fact that such admonitions had no binding force and little evident effect in actual practice.

The third category of proslavery justification in Wyatt-Brown's essay is more vaguely defined, even by his own description. But he sees the increasing use of state regulations to enforce and defend the institution of slavery as an evolution in proslavery ideology that was cut short in its development by the Civil War.

The evolution of the institution and the increasing pressure on it from slave resistance and free-state opposition was the context in which the increased use of the state to defend slavery took place. The establishment of the Confederacy could be seen as the farthest level that this trend reached, with its expressed central purpose of defending the institution of slavery.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2008, April 14: Churches and slavery

Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural

Bertram Wyatt-Brown's work on antebellum Southern society provide valuable insights into the consciousness among slaveowners and other white Southerners. He stresses the role of kinship networks and the associated social values and practices revolving around honor.

In The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001), he devotes several essays to the role of churches and ministers in the defense of slavery and secession. Southern ministers where generally embedded in the same Southern honor consciousness as most of their parishioners. And once the secession war began, their "hopes were high because the young men who were to fight and die thought their cause honorable, unconquerable, and sacred in the eyes of God".

As occurs in most wars, God tends to back Our Side. No matter how many sides are involved in the war. In "Church, Honor and Disunionism", Wyatt-Brown describes a wide range of shadings of proslavery opinion among Southern ministers. He opens the essay with an observation that provides a good framing for the way in which social assumptions like the various ramifications of "honor" shaped Southern responses to the slavery issue:

Anger and frustration were the root emotions that drove Southerners to secede, a visceral response to a collective sense of degradation and disgrace. Years of transatlantic criticism of slaveholding and growing Northern indifference to Southern interests had been a constant source of vexation. Contrary to some historical opinion, white Southerners were alarmed not simply because they feared what Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans might do once in power. Parties were soon moved in and out of office, prudent men advised. Have patience; conservatism would yet return. Much more disturbing was the election of an antislavery president. Southern politicians and editors had long threatened that such a political victory would mean national dissolution, but slave state grievances and claims to political parity were contemptuously swept aside by Northern balloting. It was bad enough to be insulted, but to have all warnings ignored was the final blow to Southern pride. (my emphasis)

The point about the antislavery president is something to keep in mind when various neo-Confederate and other crackpot notions about Abraham Lincoln get floated in 2009, the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. Lincoln was antislavery, though his prewar political program looked to contain slavery within its then-current borders and to mitigate the damage it was doing to white democracy via such measures as the draconian Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The slaveowners were correct in perceiving Lincoln as seriously antislavery, even though they overreacted in a way that ultimately proved suicidal for their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy", as proslavery enthusiasts liked to call it.

The defense of slavery evolved over time. And during the 1850s, there was a difference in tone between the prevailing defense of slavery in the Deep South and that in Upper South states like Virginia. The Deep South version tended to be a more full-throated defense of the Peculiar Institution, while Upper South apologists tended to defend it as a tragic necessity, or a necessary evil that would fade away sometime in the distant future.

Some of the differences in types of Southern ministers' defenses of slavery no doubt reflect that regional distinction, though Wyatt-Brown doesn't stress that aspect in this particular essay. What he does argue is that while Southern churches defended slavery, there were restraining influences on the manner in which Christian leaders could do so. But even when Southern clergymen tried to put a cloak of religious validation on slavery by admonishing masters to be responsible and treat their slaves humanely, there is little evidence that such advice did much to restrain the abuses that were inherently a part of the slavery system. Wyatt-Brown writes:

The Southern clergy might convert thousands of slaves through their earnest mission enterprise, but they could hardly boast of success in the state legislatures. For all the talk of an evangelical "special-interest" agenda, to borrow Carwardine's phrase, their lobbying, timid and sporadic, had produced not a single law that protected slave families, encouraged manumissions, or authorized even the most rudimentary forms of slave education. They felt much more at home complaining of tavern licensing, gambling, and other legal matters that posed little or no sectional peril. No wonder the clergy feared disunion; the prospect of still greater isolation from their Northern church allies was scarcely welcome. (my emphasis)

He sees three major factors at work in curbing the enthusiasm of Southern ministers for making all-out defenses of slavery:

• They paid attention to framing their proslavery arguments to maintain some persuasiveness with potentially sympathetic Northerners, with particular attention to religious antislavery arguments.

• They tended to be reluctant to embrace nullification or secession arguments because they were influenced by a conservative, Whig tradition that viewed such radical innovation (radically reactionary innovations, in this case) as inherently dubious and dangerous.

• For many of them, their own sense of Southern honor leaned toward remaining loyal to the Union.

In regard to the need to frame arguments to appeal to potentially pro-Southern arguments in the free states, Wyatt-Brown observes, "A solemn message of slavery as concomitant of all-too-human sin was perhaps theologically preferable - but not very inspirational, especially when compared with the Manichaean simplicity and self-confidence of abolitionist immediatism". Though supportive of slavery, such defenses didn't heat the blood the way the more militant "fire-eater" defenders of slavery would have preferred.

It's important not to look at the 1850s anachronistically in the sense of projecting what we know about the later course of events back into that time. Though there were Southern hotheads who threatened secession at every sign of regional tension, the Southern Slave Power controlled the national government throughout the 1850s, with successive Presidents becoming ever more sympathetic to the slaveowners. Most discussion of secession in the 1850s came from abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, though no mass demand for secession emerged in the North, and most abolitionists opposed Garrison's secessionist talk. So support for secession as such was not a priority for proslavery Southern ministers prior to Lincoln's election in November 1860.

Wyatt-Brown also reminds us not to assume pervasive religiosity in the antebellum South. He points out:

Part of the Southern clergy's polemical hesitancy might well have stemmed from the numerical weakness of the slave state church system. Powerful men - meaning most politicians — paid lip service to the Kingdom of Christ on Earth, but, by and large, most were absorbed in more worldly excitements than the pious emotions of the revival. In addition, there were over twice as many clergymen in New York than in all thirteen slave states put together, and the same number as preached in all the South served the single state of Pennsylvania. To put it another way, in the North, out of 187 inhabitants one was a minister, and in the South, the ratio was 1 to 329.

Interestingly enough, the Southern clergy were more reluctant as a group than the Northern clergy to focus on political projects in defense of their side in the slavery debate. Which is what Wyatt-Brown's second point about constraints on the Southern clergy's proslavery advocacy is about. They were influenced by a Whig tradition that was very suspicious of clerical intervention in politics.

His third constraint on the Southern clergy is the fact that their conception of honor tended to make them lean toward staying in the Union. However, after the so-called Great Compromise of 1850, this would have become an urgent, immediate issue only in 1860. And since they were generally swept up in the same war fever and Confederate patriotism as the slaveowners who were the leaders of their society, we can be suspicious of how strongly the pull of honor toward American patriotism was for Southern clergy. After all, it had been three decades or so in the Deep South since any kind of open political debate about the future of slavery had been possible among whites. Clergymen in the South in 1860 had learned not to associate themselves with free-state positions when it came to slavery.

The Episcopal bishop of Tennessee, James Otey, argued after Lincoln's election for restraint and prudence. Wyatt-Brown writes that although the honor tradition of the South was accepted and sanctioned by the clergy, the need top promote "moral improvement was bound to require clergymen to stress the need for humility, penitence, and other signs of godly behavior in the face of human pride, hallmark of honor".

Otey expressed this concern by saying of the secessionists that they were claiming "they can whip all creation - Cotton will make them 'princes and rulers in all lands'! Depend upon it, this is the pride that goes before a fall. ... The day of vengeance I verily believe is near at hand". But even Otey adhered to the Confederate cause after the secessionists' firing on Ft. Sumter.

When war began, Southern clergy pretty much unanimously decided that God supported the Confederate cause:

If biblical quotation did not fill the space reserved for honorable sentiment, the Confederate preacher could always turn to traditional sensibilities about manhood and glory. Warning that shame, the polar opposite of honor, was even a greater threat than death itself, a Presbyterian paper in 1862 preached that "Defeat will be the death to us, and worse than death it will be INFAMY." Even the antipolitical Methodists took up the cry. The Georgia Methodist Conference in 1863 declared that giving up the fight would be "a disgrace to our manhood, a surrender of principles, a sin against our dependents and children." In advocating secession in his impassioned address in New Orleans in November 1860, Benjamin Palmer pledged that "not till the last man has fallen behind the last rampart" shall the South yield its noble standard. If the new Confederacy were supinely to abandon the cause, she would transmit a shameful "curse as an heirloom to posterity." Likewise, Thomas Smyth of South Carolina urged a martial boldness to protect "the undefiled purity and honor of our wives and daughters; unpillaged property; unravaged fields, uninjured harvests; uncontaminated servants; all - every thing that is sacred to honor and to happiness" were "involved in this contest." Samuel Henderson, an Alabama Baptists editor, similary argued that his state "owest it to her own honor ... to secede from the Union."

And so the Southern Christian soldiers marched to kill and die in defense of their sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: More on John Brown

Black and white Union sailors serving together

Last year, I devoted a number of posts to the career of the still-controversial John Brown. And I'm still interested to read various views of his actions and impact.

I'm about half-way through William Freehling's new The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007). While Freehling is one of my favorite sources on the antebellum era, he didn't get Brown quite right. Like the reviewer I discussed in yesterday's post, he gives a distorted and misleading version of the Pottawatomie killings of 1854. I looked at those in several posts last year, beginning with this one of 04/14/06, so I won't belabor it here.

Freehling admits to having changed his view over time on the plausibility of Brown's Harpers Ferry mission, specifically in relation to the possibility of attracting local slaves to his fight in Harpers Ferry itself. Freehling's current judgment of the outcome seems reasonable to me:

There transpired one of the most stupendous scenes in American history. In the dark night, Brown's freedom fighters easily captured Harpers Ferry's federal armory, arsenal, and engine house. They sliced the telegraph wires. They halted a train. They dispatched messengers to a nearby plantation, Lewis Washington's (a great-grandnephew of George Washington's), there to alert slaves to spread the invasion. No other first strike has ever been better planned or carried out (which is only to say that John Brown here perfected his lifelong specialty).

No other following tactics have ever been botched so badly (which is only to say that John Brown here succumbed to his lifelong flaw). ...

Where Brown and his men needed to transport Harpers Ferry's potentially highly consequential firearms to the nooks and crannies of the mountains in a great big hurry, the raider stayed in Harpers Ferry's death trap. While whites gathered to hurl themselves at the furious old man, their prey jailed himself inside the most innocuous corner of his caputred fortress, the engine house. There, the self-imprisoned raider found no food.

The night after Brown struck, U.S. Marines arrived, led by Robert E. Lee. The next day, Lee's assaulters fed Brown's hungry raiders stell for breakfast.

Freehling also gives a good account of the subsequent slave-insurrection panic that spread through the South.

I also want to mention an essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown that makes the best case I've seen for John Brown having suffered from depression, "'A Volcano Beneath a Mountain of Snow': John Brown and the Problem of Interpretation" in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, Paul Finkelman, ed., (1995).

"Psychohistory" is always tricky, and a lot of it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's especially tricky in the case of someone like John Brown whose enemies often tried to portray him as a fanatical lunatic. Wyatt-Brown manages to talk about Brown's personal psychology without getting too far out ahead of the available evidence and also without reducing his politics or his religion to a personal quirk. Or, worse, to a personal pathology. He writes:

If Brown's composure under fire at the engine house and his later serenity as he faced the prospect of the gallows testified to his religious strength of character, it also bespeaks his melancholy satisfaction in ending a life of inner rage and darkest mood. He had contemplated his own death for many years, and the issue was now settled. Without having to encounter the moral dilemma of self-destruction, long considered an offense against God's will, Brown could face the terminus of his life with devout tranquility. Thus he entered the most creative period of his antislavery career, fulfilling the role of martyr with almost artistic perfection. ... When asked by by his captors who had sent him, he replied, "It was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you please to ascribe to it." The sentiment was almost jocular, but one wonders if Brown himself did not feel that he was inspired by both supernatural elements — an amalgamation of the Manichean division that seemed to have empowered him to create the tumult he wished for. ...

Brown's self-possession as he faced death was perhaps the most significant manifestation of the melancholy state of mind with which he had so long contended.

In conclusion, Wyatt-Brown describes John Brown as "a singular, complex, and nigenious agitator" who "profoundly touched the life of a nation". And he observes how "the very depth of Brown's dispondency helped to shape his own creative vocation as a martyr who aspired to free a nation from a moral yoke and a race from its hideous bondage."

I think Brown would be proud to be remembered that way.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, john brown, william freehling

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 2: The Christian beauty of slavery

Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes about the role of religion in the evolving proslavery ideology of the Southern slaveholders and their apologists in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (2001). Looking at the desire of Southern ideologues to provide a rationale for modernizing while holding on to their "peculiar institution" of slavery, he writes:

The basis of this [intellectual] enterprise lay in the evolutionary nature of the institution itself. Slavery changed as society changed. In a crude way, the historian may trace a progression from the beginning to the end of slavery. Three ways existed whereby masters could perceive the system: first, as crude chattel bondage, wherein slaves were more or less beasts of burden to meet the possessors' needs and whims; second, as familial proprietorship, in which reciprocal, parent-child obligations and affections gave meaning to those involved. That system required a deeper appreciation of the psychology and wants of the dependent class, yet it still mandated that those beneath were obliged to give more in love and service than those who ruled. Finally, the institution could be characterized as state racial regulation, an interposition of government between white and black. Under that relationship limits could be set on proprietary powers and there could be a strictly denned set of racial boundaries. None of these perspectives was ever exclusive to one era or another. Roughly speaking, however, "chattel bondage" was rather characteristic of colonial thralldom. Slaves were part of the household and its possessions, but they were not often regarded as intimate family members, even if the number extended no farther than the kitchen and parlor of the big house and seldom included the ordinary slaves in the quarters. Stage two, the familial concept, became more prominent in early national years. It was largely an outgrowth of Christian evangelicalism. Contrary to the claims of slavery's apologists, slaveholding benevolence never achieved more than spotty success. The ideal of Christian stewardship over bonds-people was established as a way to distinguish respectability from churlishness. Stage three, state racial interposition, based on the growing use of civil bureaucracies and legal professionalization, had made only limited progress by 1861.

Sketchy though this description is, it helps to explain the point from which proslavery vindicators departed and points in the direction to which they were heading.

In addition to the evolution over time of which Wyatt-Brown speaks, there was also an inter-regional difference within the slaveholding South in the favored argument for slavery, which in part accounts for the fact he notes, "None of these perspectives was ever exclusive to one era or another."

The original justification for slavery in the US involved the idea that slavery represented an historically transitory state for backward peoples from Africa. By the time of the Civil War, the Lower South states tended to justify slavery as a permanent institution, based on the racial inferiority of blacks. The paternalistic explanation that Wyatt-Brown describes as a post-colonial development influenced by evangelical Christianity by the time of the Civil War was still used by many Upper South apologists for slavery in states like Missouri, Kentucky and Virginia.

But as he explains in the passage quoted above, the more explicitly race-based justification was becoming more dominant by the time of the Civil War. And, sadly, the white ministers of the Christian gospel were all too willing to provide white Christian slaveowners religious alibis for holding their dark-skinned fellow Christians as property in perpetuity.


Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, civil war, confederate heritage month 2007, neo-confederate, slavery, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2004, April 10: "States' rights" to slavery

Today's offering from Edward Sebesta's site is a quote from Jefferson Davis in a message to the Confederate Congress (presumably in 1861) justifying secession. I'll only quote a brief portion here. But the statement is notable because even though he uses the classical "states rights" arguments of John Calhoun, his concern is as clear as Calhoun's. The only "states right" that truly interested either of them was the right to hold property in other human beings. Davis:

When the several States delegated certain powers to the United States Congress, a large portion of the laboring population consisted of African slaves imported into the colonies by the mother country. In twelve out of the thirteen States negro slavery existed, and the right of property in slaves was protected by law. This property was recognized in the Constitution, and provision was made against its loss by the escape of the slave. ...

In the interest of adding perspective, I'll provide another quote that gives a picture of how completely pseudohistorical it is for the neo-Confederates to argue that slavery "had nothing to do with the Civil War" or a similar argument. (Neo-Confederates aren't the only ones who think that, because the Lost Cause version of the war was taught in Southern history books for generations.)

This is from Bertram Wyatt-Brown's The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace and War, 1760s-1880s (2001). He describes an incident in the secession convention in South Carolina, Calhoun's home state and always the most hardline of the Fire-Eater hotbeds (my emphasis):

In 1860-61, the lower South separated from the Union out of a sense of almost uncontrollable outrage. To be sure, slavery was the root cause of sectional conflict. When the South Carolina secession convention met in November 1860, fire-eater congressman Lawrence Keitt insisted that the rationale should center solely on the issues of slavery. That was, he said, "the great central point from which we are now proceeding." Other fire-eaters sought to add a wider agenda. Robert Barnwell Rhett and Maxcey Gregg, two stalwart secessionists, protested that singling out just one grievance "dishonored the memory of South Carolinians" who had opposed the Tariff of Abominations [in their losing contest with President Andrew Jackson], various internal improvement bills, and the second Bank of the United States. Keitt replied that these were no reasons for leaving the Union. Only slavery was. The dissenters were defeated. (p. 177) [my emphasis]

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2004, jefferson davis, lost cause, slavery