Edward Sebesta's April 21 entry sheds more light on the racial attitudes of those who reverence the sacred Confederacy. It cites a 1925 article from the Confederate Veteran saying what a mistake it was to give African-Americans the vote. Without, of course, noting that they were being systematically denied that vote in most of the South in 1925. And he declares, "The true solution of the negro problem lies in rectifying the original mistake by returning the negroes to their homeland of Africa." Aka, ethnic cleansing in today's terms.
In a continued attempt to add a little value of my own, I'm looking at another Jefferson Davis speech, this one in the Senate on February 29, 1860, the year before secession. The speech gives a good look at the constant sense of threat under which slaveowners functioned (Davis was himself a slaveowner) at that time. Although the opposition to slavery in the North was real and growing, the Slave Power's perception of the threat was exaggerated far beyond the immediate reality.
There's a lot of blather in this speech about constitutional rights; but one doesn't have to look very hard to see that the only constitutional right being defended that that of holding property in other human beings:
Negro slavery exists in the South, and by the existence of negro slavery, the white man is raised to the dignity of a freeman and an equal. Nowhere else will you find every white man superior to menial service. Nowhere else will you find every white man recognized so far as an equal as never to be excluded from any man's haouse [sic] or any man's table. Your own menial who blacks your boots, drives your carriage, who wears your livery, and is your own in every sense of the word, is not your equal; and such is society wherever negro slavery is not the substratum on which the white race is elevated to its true dignity.
It's worth noting that Davis, as did most slaveowners at this time, defends slavery as a positive good, not as a tragic necessity to civilize the poor Africans or some other such sentimental hogwash.
Not to imply that this statement wasn't itself hogwash. Slavery did not make "every white man" equal. In fact, the extremes of wealth were huge between the small planter class and the vast majority of the white population. But this was the ideology of the Slave Power at the time, and it certainly had some persuasive power, especially since Abolitionist sentiments had long been brutally and actively suppressed even among whites in the South. You may not be a planter, the Jefferson Davises could say to white farmers and workers. But look, you're at least better off than the slaves!
Davis proceeds in the speech to make the claim, which everyone knew was a bad joke, that laws in the slave states protected slaves against abuse by their masters. He offers this description of why slavery is a permanently required institution:
The condition of slavery with us is, in a word, Mr. President, nothing but the form of civil government instituted for a class of people not fit to govern themselves. It is exactly what in every State exists in some form or other. It is just that kind of control which is extended in every northern State over its convicts, its lunatics, its minors, its apprentices. It is but a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves. We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority.
This dogma, among other things, allows little room for free blacks of any kind. Because every person of African descent working and prospering to any degree as a free human being was a living witness that this doctrine was false.After all, says the soon-to-be-President of the Confederacy, God himself has put a stamp of inferiority on that entire "race of men" - and there's no reason to think he meant to exclude the women of the same race from that comment.
And, proving once again that pointing to the mote in the other person's eye (to use a King James Bible phrase) is the easiest kind of political polemics, Davis expresses his deep concern for the poor and oppressed of the North (whose sincerity was about thatof Dick Cheney's as he agonized over the human rights of Iraqi under Saddam):
I seek not, sir, to inquire into the policy and propriety of the institutions of other States; I assume not to judge of their fitness; it belongs to the community to judge, and I know not under what difficulties they mayhave been driven to what I cannot approve; but never, sir, in all my life, have I seen anything that so appealed to every feeling of humanity and manliness, as the suffering of the poor children imprisoned in your juvenile penitentiaries--imprisoned before they were old enough to know the nature of crime--there held to such punishment as we never inflict save upon those of mature years. I arraign you not for this: I know not what your crowded population and increasing wants may demand; I know not how far it may be the necessary result of crime which follows in the footsteps of misery; I know not how far the parents have become degraded, and how far the children have become outcast, and how far it may have devolved on the State to take charge of them; but, I thank my God, that in the state of society where I reside, we have no scenes so revolting as these.
Davis cited the Scripture to which I just referred as well, referring to Northern critics of slavery: "Very intent in looking into the distance for the mote in your brother's eye, is it to be wondered that we turn back and point to the beam in your own?" Pointing to "beams" in the eye of the North would be a popular sport among Southern defenders of segregation and Jim Crow laws for decades after the Civil War.
Cynical though it was, this is one of the more intriguing aspects of the North-South controversies before the war, the way each side made a point of detailing the social failings of the other. One main reason that Richard Hofstadter labelled John Calhoun "the Karl Marx of the master class" is that Calhoun at one point tried to build a coalition that would unite Northern urban workers (Jacksonian Democrats) with the Southern planters against the Northern representatives of capital. In John C. Calhoun (1963), Richard Current called attention to some similarities between Calhoun and Davis. Calling Calhoun the grandfather of the Confederacy, he described his influence on one of its direct parents:
The next in the line was to be Jefferson Davis [i.e., the line of"ancestry" of the Confederacy]. He was one of a group of senators who accompanied Calhoun's body from Washington to its burial place in Charleston. "Then he [Davis] had been the most adored Southerner among the living," one of Davis' biographers has written, "and South Carolina had helped to drape the mantle of her illustrious son [Calhoun] around his shoulders." But Davis did not keep the mantle on, or at least he did not, for the time being, display its secessionist lining. During the 1850s he reenacted a phase of Calhoun's earlier career. Like Calhoun, he was a great Secretary of War (1853-57) and used the office to promote transportation improvements. Like Calhoun, he hoped to become President of the United States, and he devoted himself not to secession but to sectional unity within the national union. He was later to emerge as a leader of the movement for the secession and confederation of the South.
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