Today's quote from Edward Sebesta's Confederate Heritage Month page is from Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate State of America. This quote is doubly interesting because it's from a speech he made in the US Senate where he represented Mississippi in 1850. But he also repeated it will approval in his memoirs of 1881.
It gives an idea of how the defenders of slavery typically spoke about the Southern cause before the war (emphasis in red are Sebesta's; those in bold are mine):
... They see that the slaves in their present condition in the South are comfortable and happy; they see them advancing in intelligence; they see the kindest relations existing between them and their masters; they see them provided for in age and sickness, in infancy and in disability; they see them in useful employment, restrained from the vicious indulgences to which their inferior nature inclines them; they see our penitentiaries never filled, and our poor-houses usually empty. let them turn to the other hand, and they see the same race in a state of freedom in the North; but instead of the comfort and kindness they receive at the South, instead of being happy and useful, they are, with few exceptions, miserable, degraded, filling the penitentiaries and poor-houses, objects of scorn, excluded in some places from the schools, and deprived of many other privileges and benefits which attach to the white men among whom they live. And yet, they insist that elsewhere an institution which has proved beneficial to this race shall be abolished, that it may be substituted by a state of things which is fraught with so many evils to the race which they claim to be the object of the solicitude! Do they find in the history of St. Domingo, and in the present condition of Jamaica, under the recent experiments which have been made upon the institution of slavery in the liberation of the blacks, before God, in his wisdom designed it should be done -- do they there find anything to stimulate them to further exertions in the cause of abolition?
The paternalistic fakery about slavery still appears in neo-Confederate writing. Contrary to being cared for in old age, many slaves were compelled to work in some form until their deaths. Death often came long before old age, because a real doctor was rarely provided even for sick slaves. It was also a common practice to manumit (free) slaves when they became too old to do any work. Then they were left to fend for themselves in "freedom."
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