For April 2 the Okaloosa NAACP site provides excerpts from a notorious speech of March 21, 1861, by Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, describing the basis of the Confederate revolt:
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the instituion would be evanescent and pass away.
As mentioned in the April 1 installment, this opinion was still reflected by Robert E. Lee in 1856, but by then it had become an empty excuse for slavery. And most defenders of the "peculiar institution" by then were characterizing it as Stephens did in this speech:
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundation are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause] This, our newer Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
After the Civil War, former secessionists, including Stephens, often had very different explanations of what the Lost Cause had meant. Their speeches and actions before and during the war tell a different story.
The complete text of the speech can be found here: Cornerstone Speech. (The quotes above are from this text; punctuation and spelling have slight differences in the Okaloosa NAACP's text.)
2 comments:
I was away last week and am just getting caught up reading journals. I'm glad you posted this. I recently watched Ken Burns' Civil War for the first time, and they mentioned Stephen's speech. I was horrified! It seems to be forgotten here in the south that the organizers of the Confederacy were such racists!
The postwar Lost Cause ideology in the South deliberately rewrote the history of the war, and that became incorporated into generations of Southern politics, folklore and formal history writing. PBS' Reconstruction site has some very good material about the postwar period. And the war itself generates much more interest than the *pre*war period, which is what you really have to look at to understanding the political developments that led to war. - Bruce
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