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What I’m Reading Now 11

Posted April 18, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: National

What I’m Reading Now are notes on my current non-immigration reading.

What I’m Reading Now: The Possessed by Elif Batuman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009)
What I Just Finished Reading: Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew, published by University of Virginia Press (2001).

The declaration of April as Confederate History Month by Virginia’s governor saw a lot of neo-Confederates on the news shows claiming that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Some said that it was a sort of early Tea Party movement, fighting for a strict adherence to the Constitution and local control.

Professor Charles Dew is a Southerner who grew up calling the conflict The War of Northern Aggression. When he became a historian he delved deeply into the records of the Confederacy to see what Southern whites said were their reasons for leaving the Union before the first shot was fired.

Dew writes that “the secessionists of 1860-61 certainly talked much more openly about slavery than present day neo-Confederates seem willing to do. There are clear, unambiguous references to slavery in many of the officials records.”

Dew points to a speech by the newly elected Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens in which he bragged that the new Confederate Constitution had “put at rest forever all questions relating to…the proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization”. Stephens boldly claimed that when the Founding Fathers had said that slavery was evil, that their “ideas were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error…Our new [Confederacy] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea. 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.”

Confederate President Jeff Davis told the Confederate Congress that war was necessary because the North had engaged in a “persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of owners of slaves.” He went on to say that slavery was a system that allowed a “superior race” to turn “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized…laborers”.

In a blog I wrote when the Virginia controversy first flared, I discussed the many references to the defense of slavery in the secession declarations issued by states as they broke with the United States.

Professor Dew mines another trove of evidence. He looked at speeches and official letters sent by “secession commissioners” to slave states that had not yet declared their independence. These commissioners were ambassadors sent by states like Alabama to slave states sitting on the fence like Virginia and Kentucky. The commissioners would explain why their states left the Union and why the undecided state should do the same. Dew finds their words particularly useful because they were white Southerners speaking to other white Southerners about leaving the Union, without the need to worry about what a worldwide audience would think.

Let’s listen to some of what the secession commissioners tell us about the reasons for the Civil War.

Mississippi’s William Harris told Georgia’s General Assembly that his state left because Northerners “have demanded…equality between the white and negro races under our constitution, equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage,...equality in the rights of matrimony. The cry has been…that slavery must cease.”

Harris gave them a history lesson:

“Our fathers made this government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not entitled to be associated with the white men upon terms of…equality.”

He told his listeners that Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile, than to see them subjected to the depredation of civil, political, and social equality with the negro race.”

The Alabama commissioners to North Carolina said that under Lincoln, white “children…will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth or submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality [with former slaves].

South Carolina’s commissioner to Texas warned that state’s leaders that Lincoln’s “policy was the abolition of slavery…and the elevation of our own slaves to an equality with ourselves and our children.”

Alabama’s commissioner to Delaware told that state’s governor that “Lincoln sought the establishment of an equality of the races.”

The Mississippi commissioner to Maryland, Alexander Handy, warned that “The first act of the black Republican party will be to exclude slavery from the territories…that moment…the safety of the rights of the South will be gone.”

Alabama’s commissioner to Kentucky struck a common note of sexual hysteria, saying that Lincoln would free the slaves, consigning Southerner’s “wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.” He also warned the Kentucky governor that there would soon be “abolitionist postmasters in every town”!

Henry Benning of Georgia explained the reason his state succeeded to Virginians: “What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession?...It was a conviction that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery.” He concluded that if the South stayed in the Union “We will be exterminated…and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks.”

John Smith Preston spoke to the Virginia State Convention and said that his state, South Carolina, had seceded because the “Northern States have assailed the institution of African slavery”, arguing that “the South cannot exist without African slavery.”

It should be noted that all of the speeches of the commissioners were delivered before Lincoln had even taken office!

After the defeat of the Confederacy, several of the secession commissioner would claim that the South had fought to defend the United States Constitution, and not to protect slavery. When modern neo-Confederates adopt this discredited line, they repeat an easily disproved lie.

Real respect for the history of the Civil War requires that the causes of that war be taught to our children in an unvarnished fashion.

What I’m Reading Now are occasional blogs that I post when I start a new book. They are not always immigration related. Here are some other notes I’ve written on books I’ve finished since September 2009:

11. Apostles of Disunion by Charles Dew

10. The Renaissance At War by Thomas Arnold

9. Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America by Allen Guelzo

8. Lincoln: Speeches and Wriitings 1832-1858 by Abraham Lincoln

7. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan

6. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

5. Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand

4. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel

3. The Third Reich at War by Richard J. Evans

2. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

1. A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam

Tags : neo-confederates, what i'm reading now