Monday, January 19, 2004

Racism in the Antebellum South (Pt. 2 of 9)

(Cont. from Part 1) Certainly even the most isolated among white Southerners were aware of common argument like those made by William Harris, Mississippi's secession "commissioner," when he addressed the Georgia legislature in Dec. 1860, urging them to join Mississippi and South Carolina in armed rebellion against the American government:

Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political or social equality.

But racism and support for slavery were not the same thing. With varying degrees of intensity, most white Northerners would have agree with the white supremacist sentiments Harris expressed. But there was no doubt for Harris that slavery was the core of the secessionist cause:

Mississippi is firmly convinced that there is but one alternative (emphasis in original):

This new union with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes, without slavery; or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us. ...

[Mississippi] had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race. (Speech reproduced in full in Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion (2001) and also on p. 14 of the Appendix at this link)

(Cont. in Part 3)

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